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Crescendo   Listen
noun
Crescendo  n.  (Mus.)
(a)
A gradual increase in the strength and fullness of tone with which a passage is performed.
(b)
A passage to be performed with constantly increasing volume of tone.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Crescendo" Quotes from Famous Books



... and of his pale consort, in whom the passionate pleading of the Thracian bard stirs long-forgotten memories of spring and of the plains of Enna, Orfeo's song receives adequate expression. It is closely imitated from the corresponding passage in Ovid, but the lyrical perfection and passionate crescendo of the stanzas are Poliziano's own. Addressing Pluto, Orfeo discovers ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg

... ministry came to a close, there was throughout the entire city a growing crescendo of acclaim, which found fervent expression in words like these: "He was our best friend for years." Deeper than the affection which drew forth such recognition was his profound faith in the Father-God of all mankind. ...
— Frank H. Nelson of Cincinnati • Warren C. Herrick

... dexterously manoeuvred by small, yellow, naked men, with long hair piled up on their heads in feminine fashion. Gradually, as we advanced farther up the green channel, the perfumes became more penetrating, and the monotonous chirp of the cicalas swelled out like an orchestral crescendo. Above us, against the luminous sky, sharply delineated between the mountains, a kind of hawk hovered, screaming out, with a deep, human voice, "Ha! Ha! Ha!" its melancholy call prolonged ...
— Madame Chrysantheme Complete • Pierre Loti

... with 'body,' with a large and timely idea back of it, with sound principles under it, and with a good crescendo of dramatic ...
— The Uncrowned King • Harold Bell Wright

... things, Domini thought, were filled with a sense of climax. She felt as if the room, all the inanimate objects, and all the animate figures in it, were instruments of an orchestra, and as if each individual instrument was contributing to a slow and great, and irresistible crescendo. The stranger took his part with the rest, but against his will, and as if under some ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens

... temerity of speculation; for be it remembered the days of the theories of woman's equality with man had not yet dawned. "Sure, sir, I can speak when I am spoken to. I understand the English language; and"—her voice rising into a liquid crescendo of delight—"I can wear my gray sergedusoy sack made over my carnation taffeta bodice and cashmere petticoat, all pranked out with bows of black velvet, most genteel, and my hat of quilled primrose sarcenet, grandfather. I'd take ...
— The Frontiersmen • Charles Egbert Craddock

... note would do it. One more note—no more, no less—at the end of the crescendo could tie the symphony together and end it. But which one? I've tried them all, and ...
— I Like Martian Music • Charles E. Fritch

... broke out, rose in crescendo with bursts of shrill voices (they yelled, barked, stamped, repeated "Charbovari! Charbovari"), then died away into single notes, growing quieter only with great difficulty, and now and again suddenly recommencing along the line of a form whence rose here and there, like ...
— Madame Bovary • Gustave Flaubert

... There the pines are straight and reach their heads far into the sky, each a many-wired harp to the winds that come down from the high divide. Their music is never still; now a low, ominous rush, soft but mighty, swelling as it nears, the rush of a winged host, rising swiftly to one fearsome crescendo until the listener cowers instinctively as if under the tread of many feet; then dying away to mutter threats in the distance, and to come again more fiercely; or, it may be, to come with a gentler sweep, as if pacified, even yearning, ...
— The Lions of the Lord - A Tale of the Old West • Harry Leon Wilson

... the field pieces as the gunners drew the levers home. There were four sharp reports, four flashes of flame and smoke, the crescendo moan of tons of flying steel—and the church tower, the bells, and the German officers came crashing ...
— The Log of a Noncombatant • Horace Green

... for outside there was a crescendo of noise—shouting, cries of pain, an unidentifiable hissing. Ashe darted into the room, taking cover by the body. Then he came back, the fellow's gun in his hand, and with a jerk of his head summoned the other two. He motioned them on in a direction ...
— The Time Traders • Andre Norton

... played his own compositions very capriciously, yet he adhered, on the whole, strictly to the beat and only at times, but seldom, accelerated the tempo a trifle. Occasionally he would retard the tempo in a crescendo, which produced a very beautiful and striking effect. While playing he would give a passage, now in the right hand, now in the left, a beautiful expression which was simply inimitable; but it was rarely indeed that he added a ...
— Beethoven: the Man and the Artist - As Revealed in his own Words • Ludwig van Beethoven

... startled. He sat up with a jump. A great gust of wind broke down upon the vessel. It came with a shriek that rose in a fierce crescendo. His startled eyes were riveted upon a new development in the sky. An inky cloud bank was sweeping down upon them out of the north-east, and the wind seemed to roar its way out of its ...
— The Man in the Twilight • Ridgwell Cullum

... purpose, this long while, in Heaven and on Earth. But it is not in the power of reward or punishment to bend her female will in the essential point: 'Divorce, your Highness? When I am found guilty, yes. Till then, never, your Highness, never, never,' in steadv CRESCENDO tone:—so that his Highness is glad to escape again, and drop the subject. On which the Serene Lady again falls silent. Gravenitz, in fact, hopes always to be wedded with the right, nay were it only with the left hand: and this Serene ...
— History of Friedrich II of Prussia V 7 • Thomas Carlyle

... in the first days of October I found the summer still in almost unmenaced possession, and ever since, till within a day or two, the weight of its hand has been sensible. Properly enough, as the city of flowers, Florence mingles the elements most artfully in the spring—during the divine crescendo of March and April, the weeks when six months of steady shiver have still not shaken New York and Boston free of the long Polar reach. But the very quality of the decline of the year as we at present here feel it suits peculiarly the mood in which an undiscourageable gatherer of the sense ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James

... attention to her evident terror of the kitchen regions. Then I went to bed. The men were still in the billiard-room when I finally dozed off, and the last thing I remember was the howl of a dog in front of the house. It wailed a crescendo of woe that trailed off hopefully, only to break out afresh from a new point of ...
— The Circular Staircase • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... minutes passed—minutes for me full of silent expectation, while the moonlight grew a little stronger, a few more silver rays slipped down upon the ruins. I turned toward the east. And then came that curious crescendo of color and of light which, in Egypt, succeeds the diminuendo of color and of light that is the prelude to the pause before the afterglow. Everything seemed to be in subtle movement, heaving as a breast heaves with the breath; swelling slightly, as if ...
— The Spell of Egypt • Robert Hichens

... roared without intermission. It rose and fell, that was all. From a truculent piano it leapt to a titanic crescendo only to find relief again in a fierce growling dissatisfaction. It seemed less of an elemental war than a physical attack upon a shuddering earth. The electric fires rifting the darkness of this out-world night were ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum

... sudden angry roar, muffled, distant, he thought in the voice of Alden. It was stifled, cut off ere it had come to full crescendo, in a very significant manner. Silence, then, fell about him, the chill silence ...
— The Sins of Severac Bablon • Sax Rohmer

... give the matter a moment's thought you'll see that memory is the highest faculty of the human mind. What becomes of all your reading, all your observation, your experience, study, investigations, discussions—in a rushing crescendo—if you ...
— An Adventure With A Genius • Alleyne Ireland

... the air was filled with a deep musical, melancholy sound, which appeared to come from the hill north of the village, where the meeting-house stood. It lasted, perhaps, five seconds, beginning with a long crescendo, and quivering into silence by an equally prolonged diminuendo. It was certainly an astonishing sound but none of the family appeared in the least agitated, Elnathan ...
— The Duke of Stockbridge • Edward Bellamy

... before, but he reached it often after that, and always with an ever-increasing mastery and confidence. In Venice, in Rome, in Athens, through the Holy Land, his retrospection becomes a stately epic symphony, a processional crescendo that swings ever higher until it reaches that sublime strain, the ageless contemplation of the Sphinx. We cannot forego a paragraph ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine

... primroses and larks and light-hearted passers-by whom I would never see again. In the distance a barrel organ became more and more distinct and as I drew nearer and the noise grew louder, I wanted to dance and sing. It was in tune with my mood. A symbol of the crescendo of living. ...
— Balloons • Elizabeth Bibesco

... Extract de Peps," or "Double Stout Peps con doppio movimento sempre crescendo al fffff," which latter we shall live to witness at the performance of ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 1 • Francis Hueffer (translator)

... for accelerating or retarding the time and for making the tone loud or soft, but when to whip up the time or to slow down, when to use the sustaining or the soft lever or when to swell through a crescendo from pianissimo to fortissimo—all that is left to your own taste, judgment and discretion. There is, indeed, among the improvements introduced in the pianola a contrivance, of which more hereafter, by which complete directions are given for the interpretation ...
— The Pianolist - A Guide for Pianola Players • Gustav Kobb

... theatrical about its position and stage properties, its one high-curtained window and balcony, with a sort of pole or flag-staff; for the place is official or rather municipal. Round it swelled the crowd, with its songs and poems and passionate rhetoric in a kind of crescendo, and then suddenly the curtain of the window rose like the curtain of the theatre, and we saw on that high balcony the red fez and the tall figure of the ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton

... were to mask emotion, they joined hands and trudged silently back up the bank with filling eyes and chins a-quiver until they gained the rear of the house. Here they sat down all forlorn, and began to weep bitterly and in an ascending crescendo. ...
— The Barrier • Rex Beach

... up and down beside the track until a speck of blinking light rose out of the white wilderness. It grew rapidly larger, until they could make out a trail of smoke behind it, and the roar of wheels rose in a long crescendo. Then a bell commenced to toll, and the blaze of a big lamp beat into their faces as the great locomotive came clanking ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss

... devilish thing, its long, undulating, rippling movements, the gloss of its beautiful flanks, the vivid, palpitating scarlet of the glistening tongue which hung from the jet-black muzzle. And all the time that deep, threatening growl was rising and rising in an unbroken crescendo. I knew that the crisis was ...
— Tales of Terror and Mystery • Arthur Conan Doyle

... not have found a less happy name. Despite lyrical interludes, it is as far removed from the nature and form of Poetry as it is from Drama. It is a succession of pictures of life, given with the utmost detail, having no connection with each other, and absolutely no crescendo, no movement, no approach to a climax. The only thread that holds the work together is the person of the travelling promoter, Chichikov, whose visits to various communities give the author the opportunity he desired. After one has grasped the plan of the book, the purpose of Chichikov's mission, ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps

... be content never to hear a better prima donna if one were secured against never hearing a worse. In her was first remarked here, among vocalists of distinction, that trembling of the voice when it is pressed in a crescendo, which has since become so common as greatly to mar our enjoyment of vocal music. This great fault, unknown before the appearance of Verdi, is attributed by some musical critics to the influence of his vociferous and strident style. It may be so; but that which follows is not ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel

... was growing quicker and louder, working up gradually but surely into a breathless crescendo that meant the end of the dance. It whirled them dizzily about. The sleepy spell of the dance broke in this final crash of noise, and as it broke a ...
— The Wishing Moon • Louise Elizabeth Dutton

... and the two lines of priests circle about, finally stopping in front of the kisi, facing one another; then rises the "wo, wo, wo, wo," the guttural chant. The Hopis have been for many years a peaceful people, but this monotonous chant, rising occasionally into a swelling crescendo howl sends delightful cold shivers down the backs of the visitors, and even Elijah Clifford says he wouldn't want to meet that howl unexpectedly around the corner. Then the priests file past the kisi one by one, stoop by the opening and receive from the old warrior priest sitting within, a ...
— The High Calling • Charles M. Sheldon

... has always seemed the high-water mark of Hugo's lyrical achievement as well as the most human of his utterances, one might pass on to masterpieces of another inspiration: to the luxurious and charming graces of Sara la Baigneuse; to the superb crescendo and diminuendo of les Djinns; to 'Si vous n'avez rien a me dire,' that daintiest of songlets; to the ringing rhymes and gallant spirit of the Pas d'Armes ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley

... York, Durham, and Edinburgh, and on the 15th of September she sails for home. We have merely named the names, for it is impossible to convey an idea of the delight and importance of this trip, "a crescendo of enjoyment," as she herself calls it. Long after, in strange, dark hours of suffering, these pictures of travel arose before her, vivid and tragic even in their hold and ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. II. (of II.), Jewish Poems: Translations • Emma Lazarus

... pleasure, contains a spur. Vice is like an Autocrat, and let a single harsh fold in a rose-leaf irritate it, it forgets a thousand charming bygone flatteries. With Vice a man's course must always be crescendo!—and forever. ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac

... sentence was lost in a crescendo bellow of sound. Seaton, still at the controls, shut off the noise, studied his meters carefully, and turned around to ...
— Skylark Three • Edward Elmer Smith

... pieces in the Charles-Twelfth Wars, Stralsund Sieges: money seemed necessary to the Duke, and the Ritters were very scarce of it. Add, on both sides, pride and want of sense, with mutual anger going on CRESCENDO; and we have the sad phenomenon now visible: A Duke fled to Dantzig, anarchic Ritters none the better for his going; Duke perhaps threatening to return, and much flurrying his poor interim Brother, and stirring up the Anarchies:—in brief, Mecklenburg become a house on fire, ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. VI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle

... "he is truly rather rich and very intelligent; so much so that some would even say that he was the friend of Madame Le Maitre." Her voice had a crescendo of vehemence ...
— The Mermaid - A Love Tale • Lily Dougall

... been no smoke, but there came a long crescendo hoot, rising into a shrill wail. The shell hummed over the soldiers like a great bee, and sloshed into soft earth behind them. Then another—and yet another—and yet another. But there was no time ...
— The Great Boer War • Arthur Conan Doyle

... advice. But it was of no use; when he had struggled on for half an hour, he sprang up, realising how monstrous it was that he should be sitting there, drilling his fingers, getting the right notes of a turn, the specific shade of a crescendo, when, not very far away, Louise perhaps lay dying. Again he felt keenly the contrariness of life; and all the labour which those around him were expending on the cult of hand and voice and car, seemed ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson

... movement continued in a vertiginous crescendo. Spaniardism culminated in Bourbonism, and this, again, reached its climax in the closing years of the eighteenth century, when the conditions of south Italy baffled description. I have already (p. 212) given the formidable number of its ecclesiastics; the number of saints was commensurate, ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas

... looked at the dazzling girl in white as if they expected an entirely different person. The murmur of pleasure, the indefinable stir of human emotion, the solemn mystical words at the altar that were making two one, the triumphant peal of music when they ceased, and the quick crescendo of rising congratulation—all these things were present then, as now. And then, as now, all these things failed to conceal from sensitive minds that odour of human sacrifice, not to be disguised with the scent of bridal flowers—that ...
— The Maid of Maiden Lane • Amelia E. Barr

... shrubs in either garden afforded us additional protection. Thus entrenched, we had stood an hour, watching a pair of lighted bow-windows with vague shadows flitting continually across the blinds, and listening to the drawing of corks, the clink of glasses, and a gradual crescendo of coarse voices within. Our luck seemed to have deserted us: the owner of the purple diamonds was dining at home and dining at undue length. I thought it was a dinner-party. Raffles differed; in the end he proved right. Wheels grated ...
— The Amateur Cracksman • E. W. Hornung

... monkeys commence their screeching and chattering and soon after the owls and other night birds take their turn, making the now dense darkness more terrible with their harsh, sinister cries. Little by little as the night deepens, bellows, roars and howls resound upon every part in a slow crescendo until they are fused into a general and appalling uproar which could not be more awful if the gates of Hell were ...
— My Friends the Savages - Notes and Observations of a Perak settler (Malay Peninsula) • Giovanni Battista Cerruti

... spoke, Gwynplaine, in a crescendo of stupor, remembered the past. Memory is a gulf that a word can move to its lowest depths. Gwynplaine knew all the words pronounced by Barkilphedro. They were written in the last lines of the two scrolls which lined the ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo

... Kitty's voice rose in a crescendo of incredulity. "But he was crazy about her! Has been, all through the war. Why, I thought there was ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler

... crescendo they danced with increasing hysteria. Some shrieked and fell to the ice groaning, their bodies twisting in convulsions. Others laughed madly—laughed at the dreadful horrors with which the dead would smite Annadoah. Losing all control ...
— The Eternal Maiden • T. Everett Harre

... tellus | & quod tegit omnia, caelum, Unus erat toto | Naturae vultus in orbe, Quem dixere Chaos | rudis indigestaque moles; Nec quicquam, nisi pondus, iners; | congestaque eodem Non bene junctarum | discordia semina rerum. Nullus adhuc mundo | praebebat lumina Titan; Nec nova crescendo | reparabat cornua Phoebe, Nec circumfuso | pendebat ...
— Letters Concerning Poetical Translations - And Virgil's and Milton's Arts of Verse, &c. • William Benson

... made at once: I button my clothes tightly, so as to afford the Bees the least possible opportunity, and I enter the heart of the swarm. A few blows of the mattock, which arouse a far from reassuring crescendo in the humming of the Anthophorae, soon place me in possession of a lump of earth; and I beat a hasty retreat, greatly astonished to find myself still safe and sound and unpursued. But the lump of earth which ...
— The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles • Jean Henri Fabre

... never still for a moment; they would drive me mad,' returned Phoebe, in the hollow tones that seemed natural to her. 'Flowers are better; but what have I to do with flowers? Doctor,' her voice rising into a shrill crescendo, 'you must give me something to send me to sleep, or I shall go mad. I think, think, think, until my head is in a ...
— Uncle Max • Rosa Nouchette Carey

... low moan off toward a ridge which loomed faintly in the heavy mist. When the swift crescendo had reached its climax, the missiles zipped just overhead, as if piercing an invisible curtain. A battery on the hill was crashing with such tumult that it was as if the guns had quarrelled and had fallen pell-mell ...
— The Little Regiment - And Other Episodes of the American Civil War • Stephen Crane

... first one voice, then a crescendo, as if two or three clamored together; then one voice again. (It was impossible, so far, to ...
— None Other Gods • Robert Hugh Benson

... plastic expression which characterizes the lyric actors of our day is a real profanation of scenic musical art. Not only are singers allowed to walk and gesticulate on the stage without paying any attention to the time, but also no shade of expression, dynamic or motor, of the orchestra—crescendo, decrescendo, accelerando, rallentando—finds in their gestures adequate realization. By this I mean the kind of wholly instinctive transformation of sound movements into bodily movements such ...
— The Eurhythmics of Jaques-Dalcroze • Emile Jaques-Dalcroze

... swamp-forest visibly thins away from these shores into wastes of reedy morass where, even of breathless nights, the quaggy soil trembles to a sound like thunder of breakers on a coast: the storm-roar of billions of reptile voices chanting in cadence,—rhythmically surging in stupendous crescendo and diminuendo,—a monstrous and appalling chorus ...
— Chita: A Memory of Last Island • Lafcadio Hearn

... this, I say, to the Music of that grand last Scene in Fidelio: Sullivan & Co. supplying the introductory Recitative; beginning dreamily, and increasing, crescendo, up to where the Poet begins to 'feel the truth and Stir of Day'; till Beethoven's pompous March should begin, and the Chorus, with 'Arthur is come, etc.'; the chief Voices raising the words aloft (as they do in ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald in Two Volumes - Vol. II • Edward FitzGerald

... for the Tories. What we like best of all is when the fighting is so level that the Election progresses as breathlessly as a good University boat race. Failing that, we like to see one side swamping the other, like a great flood, the stream rising daily higher and higher, with a crescendo roar, till the vanquished are swept away in a thunderous mountain of waters. So for a full moon the waters rage, the noise of battle roars, till our suppressed fighting instincts have been deluded into repose and satisfaction, till the champing war-horses have been quieted by being allowed to snort ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill

... our chiefs stepped forward, and explained the reason of his people's visit in comparatively calm tones. An opposing chief replied to him, and gradually a heated altercation arose, the abuse rising on a crescendo scale for ten or fifteen minutes. These two then retired, and another couple of champion abusers stepped forward to "discuss" the matter. This kind of thing went on for a considerable time, the abuse being of the most appalling description, and ...
— The Adventures of Louis de Rougemont - as told by Himself • Louis de Rougemont

... the story. It is truly wonderful how differently the same words can be trimmed up and handed out, and I like the crescendoes and diminuendoes and shades of feeling which give emphasis and expression, as my music teacher says I must be careful of when playing. There is never going to be any crescendo or diminuendo business about Billy's love-making, and I might as well make up my mind to that in the beginning. It's going to be pure staccato with him—short and quick and soon over. But it will last forever, Billy's will. He isn't going to stand for foolishness about it when he starts, ...
— Kitty Canary • Kate Langley Bosher

... gaining the victory when the whole orchestra, above the chord in D sevenths, was seized by the waltz melody, those melancholy sister-strains were taken up by the violins, and fled, dirge-like, to their unknown abodes. Just before the jubilant crescendo of the finale, a bassoon solo held one of them fast on its distant, ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann

... voice somewhere among the trees, the sound rising weirdly to a subdued crescendo, clinging there until one's flesh went creepy, and then ...
— Good Indian • B. M. Bower

... resemblance," said one writer, "to any instrument, except we could imagine the tone of musical glasses to be magnified in volume to the same gradation of power." She could ascend at will—though she was ignorant of the rules of art—from the smallest perceptible sound to the loudest and most magnificent crescendo, exactly as she pleased. One of her favorite caprices of ornament was to imitate the swell and fall of a bell, making her tones sweep through the air with the most delicious undulation, and, using her voice at pleasure, she would shower her graces in an absolutely wasteful profusion. Her greatest ...
— Great Singers, First Series - Faustina Bordoni To Henrietta Sontag • George T. Ferris

... that Report of his; green Vengeance, in the shape of Robespierre, watching nigh. Behold, however, Saint-Just has read but few sentences, when interruption rises, rapid crescendo; when Tallien starts to his feet, and Billaud, and this man starts and that,—and Tallien, a second time, with his: "Citoyens, at the Jacobins last night, I trembled for the Republic. I said to myself, if the Convention dare not strike the Tyrant, ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle

... forgetfulness. At one moment it was night and at another it was morning. We were awakened by the voice of the pavement, that sound which Whitman calls "the loud, proud, restive bass of the streets," and again I leaned forth to listen to the widespread crescendo roar of the deepening traffic. The air being cool and clear, the pedestrians stepped out with brisker, braver movement, and we, too, rose eager to meet the day at ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland

... ever! Why should I go on earning money, money, money? Yes, I know! They come to hear me, they crowd the house, they pay, they clap their hands when I sing the mad scene in Lucia, or Juliet's waltz song, or the crescendo trills in the Huguenots! But I am ...
— Fair Margaret - A Portrait • Francis Marion Crawford

... went to the door. As she shut it behind her she could hear Mrs. Wladek's voice, rising to a crescendo of threats and abuse, and Mr. Fredericksohn's calm, scholarly attempts to stem the tide. She ...
— Hex • Laurence Mark Janifer (AKA Larry M. Harris)

... and several Lani came down the corridor, running in disciplined formation. Steel clanged on steel as they turned the corner and moments later the whine of servos came faintly to their ears. From somewhere deep in the pile a rising crescendo of generators under full battle load sent out vibrations that could be sensed rather than heard. A klaxon squawked briefly. There was another clash of metal, and a harsh voice boomed through the corridors. "Fourteen seconds. ...
— The Lani People • J. F. Bone

... woman who is weary of lovers and knows not what to turn her mind to, hesitating between the convent and the ball-room. Ah, the beautiful lament—how well Mildred played it!—followed by the slight crescendo, and then the return of the soul upon itself, bewailing its weakness, confessing its follies in elegant, lovely language, seemingly speaking in a casual way, yet saying such profound things, profound even as Bach. The form is ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore

... yellow dust rises in thick clouds and buries the picture in a glaring fog. This moving, struggling mass, that fights for the right of way along the road, is within easy distance of the shells. Those from their own guns pass over them with a shrill crescendo, those from the enemy burst among them at rare intervals, or sink impotently in the soft soil. And a dozen Tommies rush to dig them out as keepsakes. Up at the front, brown and yellow regiments are lying crouched behind brown and yellow rocks and stones. As far as you ...
— Notes of a War Correspondent • Richard Harding Davis

... instead of its being a smash that opened a way to better things, it might have been a smash without a recovery. It is part of my business to understand economics, and from that point of view the century before Holsten was just a hundred years' crescendo of waste. Only the extreme individualism of that period, only its utter want of any collective understanding or purpose can explain that waste. Mankind used up material—insanely. They had got through three-quarters of all ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells

... would have been a relief, said Jack, to find the scenery less beautiful, so as to have a diminuendo and a crescendo—the crescendo to be our goal of that day, the Water Gap. But it would keep on being so lovely, we could scarcely say when it was just good, when better, or when best. We had a gray road, glossy as a beaver's back, to travel ...
— The Lightning Conductor Discovers America • C. N. (Charles Norris) Williamson and A. M. (Alice Muriel)

... maintained in the vegetable world, it is clear enough that a common plant or tree is not an individual in the sense that a horse or man, or any one of the higher animals, is—that it is an individual only in the sense that a branching zoophyte or mass of coral is. Solvitur crescendo: the tree and the branch equally demonstrate that they are not individuals, by being divided with impunity and advantage, with no loss of life, but much increase. It looks odd enough to see a writer like Mr. Sisley reproducing the old hypothesis ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray

... coffee sitting somewhere. He'd done that once, and the stuff had boiled out all over everywhere when he pulled the air out of the little room. Nope, no coffee. No obstacles to turning on the pump. He thumbed the button, and the pumps started to whine. The whine built up to a crescendo, then began to die away until finally it could only be felt through the walls or ...
— Anchorite • Randall Garrett

... shot Mr. Fenley!" Farrow could only repeat each word in a crescendo of amazement. Being a singer, he understood the use of a crescendo, and gave full scope ...
— The Strange Case of Mortimer Fenley • Louis Tracy

... hearing, carrying refreshments and little charcoal stoves. The signal for the next act is a deafening clicking noise made by one of the stage hands on two sticks, which gradually rises to a shattering crescendo as the curtain is drawn aside. It must be understood that the theatre that I am describing was set apart for national drama. In others there are topical farces and laughter is continuous; but I did not visit any. On board ship, however, ...
— Roving East and Roving West • E.V. Lucas

... the roofs collapsing, like a toy structure of cards. Still the roar of it swelled on the ear; yet, strange to say, the roar seemed to have nothing to do with the collapse, which went on piecemeal, steadily, like a game. The crescendo was drowned in a sharper roar and a crash close behind her—a crash that seemed the end of all things. . . . The house! She had not thought of the house. Turning, she faced a cloud of dust, and above it saw, before the dust stung her eyes, half-blinding her, that the whole front ...
— Lady Good-for-Nothing • A. T. Quiller-Couch

... all spoon!' At this moment, from merely designating single objects by names learnt through imitation, the child's consciousness had awakened to connective thinking. That this achievement was a cause of inner satisfaction could be heard in the joyful crescendo with which these ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs

... you, Miss Ross?' she cried in a subdued crescendo. 'Whatever will father say when he knows it is you? There's a deal happened, Miss Ross, and I am in a shake still when I think of the turn he gave me only the other night. I heard the knock, and opened the door, as ...
— Lover or Friend • Rosa Nouchette Carey

... not until the great crescendo of the man's storm of grief had passed that Nan bethought herself of the need in which he stood. Nor was that need apparent until his whole note had changed to a moody bitterness with which he regarded the future. Then she ...
— The Forfeit • Ridgwell Cullum

... has sooth'd me to sleep. I rode through a piece of woods for a hundred rods the other evening, and heard the katydids by myriads—very curious for once; but I like better my single neighbor on the tree. Let me say more about the song of the locust, even to repetition; a long, chromatic, tremulous crescendo, like a brass disk whirling round and round, emitting wave after wave of notes, beginning with a certain moderate beat or measure, rapidly increasing in speed and emphasis, reaching a point of great energy and significance, and then quickly and gracefully dropping ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman

... the clang of a bell peals out, the rumble of a wagon is heard, and the street cars begin their clatter and clang. All this comes floating up to you on the still morning air, until an ever-increasing crescendo of sounds is borne in upon you, telling that the town has awakened from its nap, stretched itself like a drowsy giant, and is ready once more to grapple with ...
— Byways Around San Francisco Bay • William E. Hutchinson

... moment the sky was lit up by all manner of S.O.S. lights and the innumerable flashes from our guns, which were now showing their maximum strength for the first time. They belched forth concentrated death, the roar reached such a deafening crescendo that conversation was entirely out of the question—indeed it was impossible to hear one's own voice. However, the scene was truly impressive, and the grandeur was ...
— Three years in France with the Guns: - Being Episodes in the life of a Field Battery • C. A. Rose

... taking the opening scene a little too slow," he said. "I shall call the director's attention to that. But that crescendo is well done; yes, that is most effective. The shawl—observe the beautiful lines into which the shawl falls as she waves it. That is wonderful—a very impressive entry. Ah, but they should not cross the stage yet; it is more effective if they remain longer there. Brangane ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson

... of all who have heard it,—of myself, as well,—and is written right into the voice of Adamberger. One can see the reeling and trembling, one can see the heaving breast which is illustrated by a crescendo; one hears the lispings and sighs expressed by the muted violins with flute in unison. The Janizary chorus is, as such, all that could be asked, short and jolly, written ...
— Mozart: The Man and the Artist, as Revealed in his own Words • Friedrich Kerst and Henry Edward Krehbiel

... know, but he gave them hell at Belmont and at Graspan, and they say they are fighting again to-day at Modder River. Major Erasmus is very down-hearted about it. But the ordinary burghers hear nothing but lies; all lies, I tell you. (Crescendo) Look at the lies that have been told about us! Barbarians! savages! every name your papers have called us, but you know better than that now; you know how well we have treated you since you have been a prisoner; and look at the way your people ...
— London to Ladysmith via Pretoria • Winston Spencer Churchill

... notes he voiced the beautiful plea for aid in the hour of man's supreme need, which finds expression in the first two lines. Then, with his bow gripping the strings in a great sweeping crescendo, he poured forth in full strong chords the triumphant faith ...
— The Sky Pilot in No Man's Land • Ralph Connor

... will never do!" and began angrily to tear up one of the music sheets, when suddenly he stopped and raised his head and listened intently. Such a lovely melody, so soft and clear, rising and falling in the sweetest cadences, now growing louder and louder in a wild, passionate crescendo, and ...
— Standard Selections • Various

... them to be no cowards' breed, it would be a monstrous indictment to maintain that their childlessness is mostly due to the use of contraceptives. If all these results arose from the practice of birth control, it would imply a crescendo of general national selfishness unparalleled in the history of humanity. No, it is not possible to give Neo-Malthusians credit, even for all the evil they ...
— Birth Control • Halliday G. Sutherland

... light that stretched rapidly and steadily all across the heavens until it formed an arch that stood there stationary. And from that motionless arch, the only motionless manifestation that whole night, there came a gradual superb crescendo of light that lit the wide, white river basin from mountain top to mountain top and threw the shadows of the dogs and the sled sharper and blacker upon the snow,—and in the very moment of its climax was gone again utterly while yet the exclamations of wonder were on our lips. It ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck

... with the white hair paused to pour himself out another glass of wine; and his voice, losing the dreamy note of reminiscence, sharpened to a more rapid utterance—a crescendo for which I ...
— The Tale Of Mr. Peter Brown - Chelsea Justice - From "The New Decameron", Volume III. • V. Sackville West

... absence of bird voices,—so silent the fields and groves and orchards were, compared with what she had been used to at home. The most noticeable midsummer sound everywhere was the shrill, brassy crescendo of the locust. ...
— The Writings of John Burroughs • John Burroughs

... behind it, of course. It was the worst beating that Peter had ever had, and that was something, but its occurrence marked more than a mere crescendo of pain, and that evening stood for some new resolution that he did not rightly understand yet—something that was in its beginning the mere planting of a seed. But he had certainly met the affair ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole

... climax in this book; justifying Taine's satiric remark that "these phrases should be accompanied by a mandolin." The moral tag is infallibly supplied, as in all Richardson's tales—though perhaps here with an effect of crescendo. We are still long years from that conception of art which holds that a beautiful thing may be allowed to speak for itself and need not be moraled down our throats like a physician's prescription. Yet Fielding had already, as we shall ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton

... troops is very curious. The whole mass of performers seem to wait upon his will as the spirits did on Prospero. At the spreading of his arms, the music dies away to the most faintly-whispered murmurs. A crescendo or musical climax works gradually up step by step, and bar by bar, until it explodes in a perfect crash of vocal and instrumental tempest. The extraordinary choral effects produced in the performance of the Huguenots almost bewildered ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 436 - Volume 17, New Series, May 8, 1852 • Various

... could be thirsty as a drunkard's throat, he drank his fill of the 'cello's deep, full-membered chord. The air was heavy with the resonance of marching feet, ghostly feet marching and marching down upon him in slow, inexorable crescendo as the tides ebbed later among the sedges on the marsh and the moon grew big. And above the pulse of the march he seemed to hear ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various

... Two long, haggard years of the war had dragged by, to a wailing crescendo of misery, famine, disease, and madness. We had been hurled up and down an invisible line of death, bending and pressing it back and forth like a horde of ants at ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1915 - And the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various

... hillside. He was a field service man, and we went back to his machine and sat on it and talked music—music that seemed to be the only reality there in the midst of death, and the spirit that was moving men in the moonlight to forget death for something more real than death. And so it came about that the crescendo of our ...
— The Martial Adventures of Henry and Me • William Allen White

... sailed slowly up the river, and each as it passed twisted its head to peer up at the spectator. Presently the drake who led them touched bottom, and his red-gold webs appeared. Then he paddled ashore, lifted up his voice, waggled his tail, and with a crescendo of quacking conducted his harem into the farmyard. One lone Muscovy duck, perchance emulating the holy men of old in their self-communion, or else constrained by circumstance to a solitary life, appeared ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts

... beneath the gallery of cartoons. He began calmly enough when I entered, speaking in a low, almost gentle tone, helping himself to snuff between sentences, but gradually working up into a quite artistic crescendo. ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore

... the camel's back, if it is proper so to speak of a middle-aged, delicate-featured lady, delightfully gowned and coiffed and manicured. Mrs. Gower's grief waxed crescendo. Whereupon her husband, with no manifest change of expression beyond an unpleasant narrowing of his eyes, heaved his short, flesh-burdened body out of the chair ...
— Poor Man's Rock • Bertrand W. Sinclair

... briskly, tapping the pavement with his malacca. The sneaking figure of the informer was swallowed up in the fog. But not a dozen paces had the Chief Inspector gone when he was arrested by a frenzied scream, rising, hollowly, in a dreadful, muffled crescendo. Words reached him. ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer

... earth lay cold And bare beneath the wintry sky; While grey clouds scurried madly to the west, And hid the chill young moon from mortal sight. Deep, dying groans the aged year breathed forth, In soughing winds that wailed a requiem sad In dull crescendo through the mournful air. ...
— Violets and Other Tales • Alice Ruth Moore

... rolling wheels, the reverberations from the blast walls, a crescendo of sound, and they were free of earth. An accelerating, effortless flight, a faint tremor as they passed the sonic barrier, then ...
— The Mighty Dead • William Campbell Gault

... a crescendo climax. Then there came another sound, a single resonant note like that given when a string of a bass viol is violently plucked—and the tinkling melody abruptly died. Immediately following the resonant twang some object was ejected from the midst of the thicket on the dune's ...
— Devil Crystals of Arret • Hal K. Wells

... a small escort towards the river and hospitals. An officer was despatched with the news to the Sirdar, and on the instant both cannonade and fusillade broke out again behind the ridge, and grew in a crashing crescendo until the whole landscape seemed to vibrate with the sound of explosions. The second phase of the battle ...
— The River War • Winston S. Churchill

... defeat the electric cars, gigantic insects of the dawn, began to howl and the trains on the elevated railway thundered by. The city's voice, which never ceases, but which had sunk to a sleepy murmur, suddenly awoke, and with clattering, snarling crescendo roar announced the coming of the tides of toilers. "I am facing the day," he said to himself, "and the papers containing the contemptuous judgments of my critics are being delivered in millions to my fellow-citizens. This thing I have ...
— The Light of the Star - A Novel • Hamlin Garland

... assumed a rather deafening and complex character. Tim, thinking slightly of David's vocalization, was impelled to supersede that feeble buzz by a spirited commencement of "Three Merry Mowers," but David was not to be put down so easily, and showed himself capable of a copious crescendo, which was rendering it doubtful whether the rose would not predominate over the mowers, when old Kester, with an entirely unmoved and immovable aspect, suddenly set up a quavering treble—as if he had been an alarum, and the time was come for him ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot

... two themes much in the thought of men, typifies the spirit of the age. The one motiv is loud at the beginning of the Reformation but almost dies away before the end of the century; the other, beginning at the same time, rises slowly into a crescendo culminating far beyond the boundaries of the age. The first theme was the Prodigal Son, treated by no less than twenty-seven German dramatists, not counting several in other languages. To the Protestant, the Younger Son represented faith, the ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith

... great distinguishing charms of Corot's trees. When they have been painted from this mass point of view, a suggestion of a few leaves here and a bough there may be indicated, coming sharply against the sky, but you will find this basis of tone music, this crescendo and diminuendo throughout all his later work (see illustration, page 215 [Transcribers Note: ...
— The Practice and Science Of Drawing • Harold Speed

... dock an insistent siren blared a crescendo and diminuendo blast of sound, and two minutes remained. In every stateroom and in every lounge and saloon speakers sounded ...
— Spacehounds of IPC • Edward Elmer Smith

... said Mrs. Dinks, with a crescendo affection and triumph. While she was yet embracing him, his father, the unemployed statesman, the Honorable Budlong ...
— Trumps • George William Curtis

... times over that great overthrow, and half a dozen crimson flying-machines danced for a moment like great midges in the sunlight before they swept on after their fellows. The rest of the fight had already gone over the island, a wild crescendo of shots and yells and smashing uproar. It was hidden from Bert now by the trees of the island, and forgotten by him in the nearer spectacle of the huge advance of the defeated German airship. Something fell with a mighty smashing and splintering ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells

... from the Iowa shrieked its warning in a shrill crescendo, a flutter of flags painted their message against the sky. "The enemy's ships are coming out," they signalled, and the ranks of white-clad figures which the moment before stood motionless on the decks, broke into thousands of separate beings who flung themselves, panting, down the hatchways, ...
— Ranson's Folly • Richard Harding Davis

... produces a crescendo astounding to them both, for there has never been a noise so wonderful as this in all their experience. Then to Judy a very strange thing happens. She pauses for breath, but the noise goes on. "This is amazing—how do ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, February 11, 1920 • Various

... of developments, in the terseness of impressive summaries, in the overpowering directness of unexpected arguments, in the multiplicity of literary achievements, in the execution of those passages of bravura, portraits, descriptions, comparisons, creations, wherein, as in a musical crescendo, the same idea, varied by a series of yet more animated expressions, attains to or surpasses, at the last note, all that is possible of energy and of brilliancy. Finally, he has that which is wanting in La Bruyere; his passages are linked together; he is not a writer of pages but of books; ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine

... to the sad point where each was growing tired of the other. The crescendo of love's young dream had passed. Each was sub-consciously realizing that while the springtime of their romance had been full of glorious days the summer was destined to be damp and showery. Daniel was beginning to find faults in Jennie that ...
— The Mermaid of Druid Lake and Other Stories • Charles Weathers Bump

... side to side of them, and outstretched themselves between them with a foot and a hand upon each bar; they raised their bodies, thus supported, like an arch; they slackened them and flung themselves (with a crescendo of decorous delirium) from side to side again, and over; alighting on their feet in a curtseying posture and with the left arm extended in a little perfunctory gesture of demonstration to the audience, as much as to say, "There you are, and ...
— The Combined Maze • May Sinclair

... appearance of the conductor. The next moment he raised his baton and the celli began to sigh the mournful phrase which ushers in the symphony. Milton leaned back luxuriously as the woodwind commenced the next phrase; and then, while the introduction ended with a sweeping crescendo and the tempo suddenly increased, Elkan sat up and his eyes became fixed on the trombone and ...
— Elkan Lubliner, American • Montague Glass

... Slight pause. Tum tum twiddle—vigorous crescendo—TUM. This is unusual! A stranger? A new piece for La Belle Dame Sans Merci? Her wonted reckless dash deserts her. She is, as it were, exploring a new region, and advances with mischievous coyness, with an affectation of a faltering heart, with hesitating steps. My imagination is stimulated ...
— Select Conversations with an Uncle • H. G. Wells

... his wishes. While the general applause was sounding, Klesmer gave a more valued testimony, audible to her only—"Good, good—the crescendo better than before." But her chief anxiety was to know that she had satisfied Mr. Deronda: any failure on her part this evening would have pained her as an especial injury to him. Of course all her prospects were due to what he had done for her; still, this occasion ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot

... chateau had once been fortified, but now the remains of the fortifications are made into terraces, planted with roses and honeysuckles. Here we heard, for the first time in our lives, the nightingale's song; a gurgling warble, with an occasional crescendo, a ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe

... slipped on my clothes and buckled my gold belt around my waist. The fire was humming away in a steady crescendo, punctuated by confused shouts of many men. Light flickered redly through the cracks of the loosely constructed hotel building. I found Johnny awaiting ...
— Gold • Stewart White

... In an insensible crescendo the thought grew in him: Why should he never attain anything of that which he most longed for—intimate and cordial intercourse and friendliness which should answer to the warmth pent up within him? ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors • Various

... tell stories which had no auditors, and repeatedly asked questions to which no answer was made. Only the loud voice of wassail could be heard, a voice made up of a hundred confused clamors, which rose and grew like a crescendo of Rossini's. Insidious toasts, ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac

... class expressed its appreciation in a prolonged and uproarious laugh. It was a stupendous laugh. It had fine crescendo and diminuendo passages, and only died hard, after a chain of intermittent "Ha-ha's." Then it had a glorious resurrection, but faded at last into the distance, a few stray "Ha-ha's" from Pennybet bringing ...
— Tell England - A Study in a Generation • Ernest Raymond

... skill is acquired in the use of the voice by the repetition of effort. The only necessity is for the singer to have a clear mental conception of the effects to be obtained, and to listen attentively to the voice. With each repetition of an exercise, whether on sustained tones, scale passages, crescendo and diminuendo, or whatever else, the voice responds more smoothly and accurately to the mental demand. Each time the student practises the exercise he listens to the tones and notes how they differ from ...
— The Psychology of Singing - A Rational Method of Voice Culture Based on a Scientific Analysis of All Systems, Ancient and Modern • David C. Taylor

... then broke, sharply, impatiently, crescendo, as the passion of the music mounted up and up. And now as it settled into its rhythm his hands ...
— Anne Severn and the Fieldings • May Sinclair

... and its surrounding ocean of life—ah, that is beyond me! but the sun will dry up, too, and its ocean of life no doubt be drawn to other greater suns. For everything seems to go on more or less in the same way, only crescendo, everywhere and forever. ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al

... voices of young ladies inviting people in the stalls to take tea or coffee or to buy chocolates, and the occupants of the pit to refresh themselves with "ginger-beer, lemonade, bottled ale or stout," a phrase to which they give a species of rhythmical crescendo. ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"

... without the slightest dread, apparently. For an instant the two stood nose to nose, Black Bart a picture of snarling danger and Satan with curiously pricking ears and bright eyes. The growling rose towards a crescendo, a terrible sound; then a lean hand shot out with that speed which Joan could never comprehend—and which always made her think, rather breathlessly, of the strike of a snake. The fingers settled around the muzzle ...
— The Seventh Man • Max Brand

... and the very acme and high-tide of that season of mirth and revel. For the theory of Carnival observance is, that the life of it, unlike that of most other things and beings, is intensified with a constantly crescendo movement up to the last minutes of its existence. And there now remained but an hour before midnight on the Tuesday preceding the first day of Lent, Ash Wednesday—Dies Cinerum!—that sad and sober morrow which has brought with it "sermons and soda-water" ...
— A Siren • Thomas Adolphus Trollope

... elusive nature of the music gave it more than half its magic. It would die away as the wind declined, or come in passionate crescendo. For long it seemed to Montaiglon—and yet it was too short—the night was rich with these incongruous but delightful strains. Now the player breathed some soft, slow, melancholy measure of the manner Count Victor had often heard the Scottish exiles croon with tears at his father's house, ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro

... was deaf to all other sounds while the wren sang. And as it dwelt on the last note of its phrase, a cicada took it up on the exact tone, and blended the two final notes into a slow vibration, beginning gently and rising with the crescendo of which only an insect, and especially a cicada, is master. Here was the eternal, hypnotic tom-tom rhythm of the East, grafted upon supreme Western opera. For a time my changed clearing became merely a sounding box for the most thrilling of jungle songs. I ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe

... bigger, the wind was stronger. Even on calm nights there was always a breeze when one had passed the Giuseppone going towards Ischia, and beyond the island there was sometimes quite a lively sea. What would it be to-night? Her heart cried out for a crescendo. Within her, at that moment, was a desire like the motorist's for speed. More! more! More wind! More sea! ...
— A Spirit in Prison • Robert Hichens

... day Betty's small feet had carried her on numberless errands for young and old, and as the season advanced she would be busier still. This Betty well knew, for she was old enough to remember other summers, several of them, each bringing an advancing crescendo of work. But oh, the happy days! For Betty lived in a world all her own, wherein her play was as real as her work, and labor was turned by her imaginative little mind into new forms of play, and although night often found her weary—too tired to ...
— The Eye of Dread • Payne Erskine

... Albret, in a crescendo outburst. "Silence! I will not be gainsaid! You have made your choice! You are no longer a ...
— Conjuror's House - A Romance of the Free Forest • Stewart Edward White

... came also the far-off mutter of the footsteps that night had stolen from her; an inverted repetition of the same sounds in a steady crescendo that rang like music in her ears—a sound ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver

... a clear lake. The king's long account of his fruitless quest for truth would be tiresome if it were not of such great historic interest and the same may be said of the Buddha's enumeration of superstitious and reprehensible practices, but from this point onwards his discourse is a magnificent crescendo of thought and language, never halting and illustrated by metaphors of great effect and beauty. Equally forcible and surely resting on some tradition of the Buddha's own words is the solemn fervour which often marks the suttas of the Majjhima such as the descriptions of his struggle for ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot

... and whenever they were strong enough to wake up the black water the murmur alongside ran through my very heart in a delicate crescendo of delight and died away swiftly. I was bitterly tired. The very stars seemed weary of waiting for daybreak. It came at last with a mother-of-pearl sheen at the zenith, such as I had never seen before in the tropics, unglowing, almost gray, with a ...
— The Shadow-Line - A Confession • Joseph Conrad

... [<] Crescendo hairpin [x] small cross [] 45 degree downstroke [/] 45 degree upstroke [/] large circumflex shape [O|] a circle bisected by a vertical line protruding both ways [Gamma] The Greek capital gamma [mid-dot] a dot at ...
— Critical & Historical Essays - Lectures delivered at Columbia University • Edward MacDowell

... done it unto one of the least of these His Brethern, you have done it unto Him! (The ANGEL stands with one hand uplifted, as the music rises in a great crescendo of triumph. HOLGER, quite overcome, drops his face in his hands and as the climax of the singing is reached, the whole tableau is held for a moment, then blotted out ...
— Why the Chimes Rang: A Play in One Act • Elizabeth Apthorp McFadden

... unmistakable as the snarling, snapping, furious bark of Cacafuego, who belonged to the Bachelor Enciso. The two hated each other at sight, months ago. Now they were having it out. The man with the whip evidently came on the scene, for there was a final crescendo of barks, yelps and ...
— Days of the Discoverers • L. Lamprey

... said Hannay, "is the best man I know. You've married, dear lady, my dearest and most intimate friend. He's a saint—a Bayard." He flung the name at her defiantly, and with a gesture he emphasised the crescendo of his thought. "A preux chevalier, sans peur" said Mr. Hannay, "et ...
— The Helpmate • May Sinclair

... bearing them on. Louder they throbbed in a steady crescendo, to carry the three rigid figures a step at a time up the pathway ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, June, 1930 • Various

... she lay down on her bed. She could hear the low rumble of the minister's voice for some time; then it ceased. She heard the chairs pushed back; then the minister's wife's voice in the gracious crescendo of parting; then the closing of the front door. Shortly afterward she heard a door open, and another voice, which she recognized as Mrs. Maxwell's. The voice talked on and on; once in a while she heard her mother's in brief reply. It grew dark; presently she heard heavy shuffling steps ...
— Jane Field - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

... night had put an end to the struggle. A sputter of rifles would break out now and then, followed perhaps by a spiritless hurrah. Occasionally a shell from a far-away battery would come pitching down somewhere near, with a whir crescendo, or flit above our heads with a whisper like that made by the wings of a night bird, to smother itself in the river. But there was no more fighting. The gunboats, however, blazed away at set intervals all ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce • Ambrose Bierce

... the whole people of Florence gathered round him,[2] met and attained, as it were, to single consciousness in him. He then no longer restrained the impulse of his oratory, but became the mouthpiece of God, the interpreter to themselves of all that host. In a fiery crescendo, never flagging, never losing firmness of grasp or lucidity of vision, he ascended the altar steps of prophecy, and, standing like Moses on the mount between the thunders of God and the tabernacles of the plain, fulminated period after period of impassioned eloquence. The walls of the ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds

... "rags" ('cenci')—he was tempted from his airy flights to throw himself for once into the portrayal of reality. There was no need now to dip "his pen in earthquake and eclipse"; clothed in plain and natural language, the action unfolded itself in a crescendo of horror; but from the ease with which he wrote—it cost him relatively the least time and pains of all his works—it would be rash to infer that he could have constructed an equally good tragedy on any other subject than the injured Beatrice and the combination, which Count ...
— Shelley • Sydney Waterlow

... one of horror. A screech-owl had just sent its dreadful note in melancholy waves out upon the still night air. It started low, almost pianissimo, rose with a hideous crescendo to fortissimo, and then died away like the wail of a lost soul. It came from just ahead of them and to the right. Alice's horse shied and danced nervously. Prudence's horse stood stock still. Then, as no further sound came, they started ...
— The Hound From The North • Ridgwell Cullum

... suddenly as it had done on the evening of the wreck. It rose even as the day darkened, and in a moment it was rushing through the trees screaming in a constantly rising crescendo. The rain was coming, and against that ...
— Harrigan • Max Brand



Words linked to "Crescendo" :   volume, loudness, increasing, increase, intensity, swell



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