"Dissonance" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... very fellow I looked for. I will send him a challenge immediately. This is, said Pantagruel, a strange and monstrous sort of man, if I may call him a man. You put me in mind of the form and looks of Amodunt and Dissonance. How were they made? said Friar John. May I be peeled like a raw onion if ever I heard a word of them. I'll tell you what I read of them in some ancient apologues, ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... uncivilized nations have uniformly adored, under various names, a God of which themselves were the model: revengeful, blood-thirsty, groveling and capricious. The idol of a savage is a demon that delights in carnage. The steam of slaughter, the dissonance of groans, the flames of a desolated land, are the offerings which he deems acceptable, and his innumerable votaries throughout the world have made it a point of duty to worship him to his taste. The Phoenicians, the Druids and the Mexicans have immolated hundreds at the ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley as a Philosopher and Reformer • Charles Sotheran
... W. Scott, Robert Peel and Lord Byron had no ear for music, and neither vocal nor instrumental music gave them the slightest pleasure. To the poet Rogers it gave actual discomfort. Even the harmonious Pope preferred the harsh dissonance of a street organ to ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... on the hillside, serene in the afterglow of its one hundred and eighty-four years. The spotless white walls, the green blinds, the graceful Colonial spire, are meetly set in an environment which strikes no note of dissonance. On either side are quaint, narrow streets, lined with decent door-yards and houses almost as old as the church. Within the cool interior the cottagers, and representatives of a native aristocracy—direct descendants of the English of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, who ...
— Prince or Chauffeur? - A Story of Newport • Lawrence Perry
... spoken of the Mahabharata as a treatise on Artha, on Dharma, and on Kama. Those who have listened to his history can never bear to listen to others, as, indeed, they who have listened to the sweet voice of the male Kokila can never hear the dissonance of the crow's cawing. As the formation of the three worlds proceedeth from the five elements, so do the inspirations of all poets proceed from this excellent composition. O ye Brahman, as the four kinds of creatures (viviparous, oviparous, born of hot moisture and vegetables) are dependent ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... and drunken passions wove 45 A dance more wild than e'er was maniac's dream! Ye storms, that round the dawning East assembled, The Sun was rising, though ye hid his light!' And when, to soothe my soul, that hoped and trembled, The dissonance ceased, and all seemed calm and bright; 50 When France her front deep-scarr'd and gory Concealed with clustering wreaths of glory; When, insupportably advancing, Her arm made mockery of the warrior's ramp; While timid looks of fury glancing, 55 Domestic treason, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... it is thought the shock given by the accident, and this murderous attack impaired his intellectual force, for when he again resumed his duties under President Johnson, he supported the President's reconstruction policy, becoming at dissonance with the party he had so satisfactorily served, until now. At the close of his official term in March, 1867, he retired from public life, and soon made an extended tour through California, Oregon and Alaska; the latter having been acquired during his secretaryship, and mainly ...
— Hidden Treasures - Why Some Succeed While Others Fail • Harry A. Lewis
... the uninitiated it is, I suppose, a tiresome, bewildering uproar. And yet every component, every note of this great harmony, has a special meaning for the engineer; moreover, the smallest dissonance is detected at once, even though he be almost ready to doze. So finely attuned to the music does the ear become that the dropping of a hammer in the stokehold, the rattling of a chain on deck, the rocking of a barrel in the stores, makes one jump. ...
— An Ocean Tramp • William McFee
... St. Cow's began ringing for Ritualistic morning-service, with a sound as of some incontinently rambling dun spinster of the lacteal herd—now near at hand in cracked dissonance, as the wind blows hither; now afar, in tinkling distance, as the wind blows hence—MONTGOMERY PENDRAGON was several miles away from Bumsteadville upon his walking-match, with head already bumped like ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 22, August 27, 1870 • Various
... worthy poet in Plato alone of all the ancients, has been celebrated by a chorus of the greatest writers of the renovated world; and the music has penetrated the caverns of society, and its echoes still drown the dissonance of arms and superstition. At successive intervals, Ariosto, Tasso, Shakespeare, Spenser, Calderon, Rousseau, and the great writers of our own age, have celebrated the dominion of love, planting, as it were, trophies in the human mind of that sublimest victory over sensuality and force. The true ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... burst a tornado of terrific sound, filling with horror the quiet noontide. The roaring and yelling of lion, tiger, and leopard, the laughter of hyena, the howling of jackal, and the snarling of bear, mingled in hideous dissonance with the cries of monkeys and parrots; while certain strange gurgles made Clare's heart, lover of animals though he was, quiver, and his blood creep. The same instant, however, he woke to the sense that he might do something: he ran ...
— A Rough Shaking • George MacDonald
... great affairs of my life, and whether my affliction came from my parents or my affianced bride. You thereby wished to admonish me that these momentous affairs and relations of my life, not having lost their harmony, my grief was, perhaps, but a passing dissonance, and that it really might not be worth while to give way to despair on account of it. I am sure, madame, I have understood you: was not this the ...
— NAPOLEON AND BLUCHER • L. Muhlbach
... into the court, where he saw some figures standing. As soon as the light shone from the window, the carol was resumed, and the familiar tones were louder and harsher, but he loved them, with all their rudeness and dissonance, and throwing up the window, called the singers by name, asking why they stood out in the snow, instead of coming ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... more mobile than the lower. Environment can do little, comparatively, in the direction of inducing variation in the body of a child: but how plastic is its mind! How infinitely sensitive is its soul! How infallibly can it be turned to music or to dissonance by the moral harmony or discord of its outward lot! How decisively indeed are we not all formed and moulded, made or unmade, by external circumstance! Might we not ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... which does result from an apprehension in the same subject, as stated above (Q. 26, A. 1). Now, with regard to the natural appetite, it is evident, that just as each thing is naturally attuned and adapted to that which is suitable to it, wherein consists natural love; so has it a natural dissonance from that which opposes and destroys it; and this is natural hatred. So, therefore, in the animal appetite, or in the intellectual appetite, love is a certain harmony of the appetite with that which ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I-II (Pars Prima Secundae) - From the Complete American Edition • Saint Thomas Aquinas
... into a yapping, growling, barking, yelling discord. A sudden silence cuts the tumult short, until once more the unknown misery, (or is it the secret joy), of the canine heart bursts out in long-drawn dissonance. ...
— Out-of-Doors in the Holy Land - Impressions of Travel in Body and Spirit • Henry Van Dyke
... persuaded that he has leaped down Dover cliff but has been miraculously preserved. Imagine this incident transferred to Othello, and you realise how completely the two tragedies differ in dramatic atmosphere. In Othello it would be a shocking or a ludicrous dissonance, but it is in harmony with the spirit of King Lear. And not only is this so, but, contrary to expectation, it is not, if properly acted, in the least absurd on the stage. The imagination and the feelings have been worked upon with such effect by the description of ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... companionable, far from it; but moods truly meet, to part in violent dissonance; or to move parallel in happy harmonic intervals; or, more poignant and more satisfying still, to pass gradually along some great succession of alien chords—common contemplation, say, of a world grievous or pleasant ...
— Hortus Vitae - Essays on the Gardening of Life • Violet Paget, AKA Vernon Lee
... so earnestly about my welfare; hold open still the hospitable door for me. Truly Concord, which I have sought out on the Map, seems worthy of its name: no dissonance comes to me from that side; but grief itself has acquired a harmony: in joy or grief a voice says to me, Behold there is one that loves thee; in thy loneliness, in thy darkness, see how a hospitable candle shines from far over seas, how a friendly heart ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, - 1834-1872, Vol. I • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... conception of strife between good and evil as interpreting the significance of existence arose that dissonance which lies at the root of nearly all his most characteristic works—that sense of want, that failure to find final satisfaction which may be only too readily detected. For the conflict within himself he knew no real mediatory: he was baffled to discover ...
— Weird Tales, Vol. II. • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... these seeming contradictions Cannot our firm faith diminish In the oneness of the gods, If in things of higher import They know naught of dissonance. Take man's wondrous frame, for instance, Surely that majestic structure ...
— The Wonder-Working Magician • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... in the yelling dissonance descending crescendo from floor to floor. Then an avalanche of children and dogs poured down the hall-stairs in pursuit of a rumpled and bored cat, tumbling with yelps and cheers and thuds among the thick rugs ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers
... dissonance and pain That mortals must endure, Are changed in thine immortal strain ...
— The Poems of Henry Van Dyke • Henry Van Dyke
... poem Sangen (Poetry), which was primarily a protest against the gloomy and morbid view of poetry entertained by the Swedish Romanticists (the so-called Phosphorists). Tegner here declares that the poet "with heavenly joy embraces life," that "he knows no weak lament" (at its misery), "no dissonance which is not dissolved" (in harmony). His temple stands in light and flame; and at its base a fountain gurgles, a draught from which is an elixir of strength and a panacea ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... wrath, spleen, and despair, Rank, Beauty, Taste, Fashion, and Fancy were there, And the multitudes round such attractions preferr'd To a gambolling beast or a chattering bird. Now Envy first enter'd the fair feather'd race, And invective and dissonance rung round the place; Their pleasure, their pride, and contentment were o'er, And Discord presided where ...
— The Peacock 'At Home' AND The Butterfly's Ball AND The Fancy Fair • Catherine Ann Dorset
... discordant notes, and don't find out the mistake till they come to the finale; with occasionally a psalm crooned by worthy sexagenarians, guiltless alike of ear and voice, but who, seeming to think it a duty to add their mite to the inexpressible dissonance, perform the same to the unmixed ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... he evoked from that pampered instrument she did laugh aloud. It was not a piano tuner's arpeggio but a curiously teasing mixed dissonance she couldn't begin to identify. She thought she heard him say, "My God!" but couldn't be sure. He repeated his chord pianissimo and held it down, reached up and echoed it in the upper half of the keyboard; then struck, hard, two octaves in ...
— Mary Wollaston • Henry Kitchell Webster
... beautiful things; but Tschaikowsky, in his piano music, is too complaining and morbid, as a rule, though he is occasionally in a more cheerful mood. It seems as though music has said all it can say along consonant lines, and regular rhythms. We must look for its advancement in the realm of Dissonance; not only in this but in the way of variety in Rhythm. How these modern composers vary their rhythms, sometimes three or four different ones going at once! It is the unexpected which attracts us in musical and literary art, as well as in other things: we don't want to know what is coming next; ...
— Piano Mastery - Talks with Master Pianists and Teachers • Harriette Brower
... Slayback crying. On the contrary, she was inclined to laughter. A little too inclined to a high and brittle sort of dissonance over which she ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... the religion of science.—Again, the New Theology is the religion of science. It is the denial that there is, or ever has been, or ever can be, any dissonance between science and religion; it is the recognition that upon the foundations laid by modern science a vaster and nobler fabric of faith is rising than that world has ever before known. Science is supplying the facts ...
— The New Theology • R. J. Campbell
... the roaring dissonance of an elevated train; on either side of her phantom shapes swarmed—figures which moved everywhere around her, now illumined by shop windows, now silhouetted against them. And always through the deafening confusion in ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers
... the feast they dance, And sing to the notes of a rude bassoon, And never a pause or a dissonance In the merry dance or the merry tune. Brown-bosomed and fair as the rising moon, When she peeps o'er the hills of the dewy east, Wiwst sings at the Virgins Feast; And bright is the light in her luminous eyes; They glow like the ...
— Legends of the Northwest • Hanford Lennox Gordon
... that bore her on was too deep to let these things hurt her; she looked down and saw the soreness and humiliation of them pictorially, at the bottom, gliding smoothly over. They brought no stereotype to her smile, no dissonance to what she found to say. When at last she and Arnold sat down together her standpoint was still superior, and she herself was so aloof from it all that she could talk about it without bitterness, divorcing the personal pang from a social manifestation of some dramatic value. In offering ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... latent there, for his praise and thanksgiving ascended, without voice or instrument, essential harmony, to the ear that hears thought, and the heart that vibrates to every chord of feeling in the hearts it has created. Ah! what is it we send up thither, where our thoughts are either a dissonance or a sweetness and a grace? Alone in the dusky church, the curate's ascended like a song of the angels, for his heart was all a thanksgiving—not for any perfected gift, but for many a lovely hope. He knelt down by the organ and worshipped the God ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald
... guile or loud resentment, But calm contentment, fresh and fruitful cheer; Not here loud force or dissonance distressful, But music melting blissful ...
— A Celtic Psaltery • Alfred Perceval Graves
... cleaves yon ether clear Notes from the unattempted Sphere He scatters to the enchanted ear Of earth's dim throng, Whose dissonance doth more endear The ...
— The Poems of William Watson • William Watson
... with the microscope of criticism, and employ their whole attention upon minute elegance, or faults scarcely visible to common observation. The dissonance of a syllable, the recurrence of the same sound, the repetition of a particle, the smallest deviation from propriety, the slightest defect in construction or arrangement, swell before their eyes into enormities. As they discern with great exactness, ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson - Volume IV [The Rambler and The Adventurer] • Samuel Johnson
... appeared to approve of his occasional violence, which not only threatened to crack the strings of the instrument, but the tympanums of those who were near, who longed to escape, and leave the princess to enjoy the dissonance alone, little thinking that the discord was raised that their souls' harmony might be undisturbed by the presence of others, and that the jarring of the strings was more than repaid to the princess, by the subsequent ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Captain Frederick Marryat
... it be suited to the work in hand or not, because they can command no other. In the case of certain designers, of course, the individuality of their work is strong enough to bind both lettering and design so closely together that they can never seem at dissonance; but, speaking generally, the adherance to the use of but [207] one type of letter can be but narrowing. The beginner is urged, therefore, to practice the use of many styles, even at the expense of gaining an immediate mastery over no one form. He will find himself amply repaid ...
— Letters and Lettering - A Treatise With 200 Examples • Frank Chouteau Brown
... spy, curiously in dissonance with his ostentatiously rough dress, and probably with his usual demeanour, received such a check from the inscrutability of Carton,—who was a mystery to wiser and honester men than he,—that it faltered here and failed him. While he ...
— A Tale of Two Cities - A Story of the French Revolution • Charles Dickens
... and angers me (when my way takes me into our surface or elevated cars or into ferry boats and local trains) is the utter dissonance between the outfit of most of the women I meet and their position and occupation. So universal is this, that it might almost be laid down as an axiom, that the American woman, no matter in what walk of ...
— Worldly Ways and Byways • Eliot Gregory
... Otto,—We have all drunk to Otto Thostrup's health. I raised the glass, and drank the health. The friendship's dissonance YOU has dissolved itself into a harmonious THOU, and thou thyself hast given the accord. All at home speak of thee; even the Kammerjunker's Mamsell chose lately thee, and not her work-box, as a subject of conversation. The evening as thou drovest over the Jutland heaths ...
— O. T. - A Danish Romance • Hans Christian Andersen
... his presence. He gave the impression of an eminent personage whose "soul was like a star and dwelt apart". Withal he was a pattern of the homely virtues; an affectionate husband and father and a loyal friend. There was no dissonance between his life and his poetry. On hearing of his ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... a moment, when, by magic, every little dissonance in all the town seemed blended into a harmony of silence, as it might be the very death of self ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... and austere control? Methinks my life is a twice-written scroll Scrawled over on some boyish holiday With idle songs for pipe and virelai, Which do but mar the secret of the whole. Surely there was a time I might have trod The sunlit heights, and from life's dissonance Struck one clear chord to reach the ears of God. Is that time dead? Lo, with a little rod I did but touch the honey of romance, And must I lose ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... do not know another man in all the world to whom I can speak with clear hope of getting adequate response from him. Truly Concord seems worthy of the name: no dissonance comes to me from that side. Ah me! I feel as if in the wide world there were still but this one voice that responded intelligently to my own: as if the rest were all hearsays ... echoes: as if this alone were true and alive. My blessings on ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... entitled Ein' Feste Burg, universally regarded as the best, jars upon our ears; yet there is something in it like the sound of Alpine avalanches, or the first murmur of earthquakes, in the very vastness of which dissonance a higher unison is revealed to us. Luther wrote this song in times of blackest threatenings, which, however, could in no sense become a time of despair. In these tones, rugged and broken as they are, do we hear the accents of that summoned man, who answered his friends' warning not ...
— The Hymns of Martin Luther • Martin Luther
... an abyss of misery—a vault of darkness peopled by demons. He is already cut off from among the living, by the doom of inevitable fate, and while we pity him we fear him. His coming seems attended with monstrous shapes; he diffuses dissonance; his voice is a cry of anguish or a wail of desolation; his existence is a tempest; there can be no relief for him save death, and the death that ends him comes like the blessing of tears to the ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... that passage in Nathaniel's song where a triumphant ascending scale in G rings out. She faltered and played D-flat instead of D-natural, the first dissonance that night—would it had been the last! Quickly she turned on the music-stool and on him, and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, April 18, 1917 • Various
... of it, sounding the universal alarm. And Civilisation merely stared at the scarlet flood—gawked stupidly and unstirring—while the far clamour of massacre throughout Russia grew suddenly to a crashing discord in Berlin, shaking the whole world with brazen dissonance. ...
— The Crimson Tide • Robert W. Chambers
... five-language style: "You tog! don't I know better as yourself vaat it pest for you to sing? If you vill not sing all de song vaat I give you, I vill not pay you ein stiver." Among the anecdotes told of Handel's passion is one growing out of the composer's peculiar sensitiveness to discords. The dissonance of the tuning-up period of an orchestra is disagreeable to the most patient. Handel, being peculiarly sensitive to this unfortunate necessity, always arranged that it should take place before the ...
— The Great German Composers • George T. Ferris
... sea of tone," being particularly fond of those suspensions and inversions in which the intervals of the second clash passionately, strongly compelling resolution. For all his gracefulness and lyricism, he makes a sturdy and constant use of dissonance; in his song "Herbstgefuehl" the dissonance is ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... there must be such a harmony in a gilding wheat-field. Wheat is good; even its husk is good; beauty and order and service have come to it. There is dissonance from chaos; the song clears as the order begins. Order should have a Capital too. All rising life is a putting of surfaces and deeps in Order. The word Cosmos means Order.... Wheat has come far, and one does well to be alone for a time in a golden ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort
... many began following the eyes of the few, until a brief lull settled down on the dissonance, and everyone was staring at the girl who stood inside the door, dressed as a man, but holding their gaze with the lodestone ...
— A Pagan of the Hills • Charles Neville Buck
... for enjoyment. Still the insufficiency of the palpable and appreciable is paramount; still the everlasting dolor interposes: the appetite is satiated, the aroma palls upon the nostrils, the nerves are affected by irritability, the harmony merges into dissonance; even the beautiful becomes so far an abomination that man is 'mad for the sight of his eyes that he did see.' Such is the sterile and repulsive penalty of the searcher after happiness. Happiness! O delusive phantom of humanity, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... with dangers compassed round, And solitude; yet not alone, while thou Visitest my slumbers nightly, or when morn Purples the east: still govern thou my song, Urania, and fit audience find, though few. But drive far off the barbarous dissonance Of Bacchus and his revellers, the race Of that wild rout that tore the Thracian bard In Rhodope, where woods and rocks had ears To rapture, till the savage clamour drowned Both harp and voice; nor could the Muse defend Her son. ...
— Paradise Lost • John Milton
... disagreeable roughness of tone, and this we call discord. In other words, any tones which do not produce beats are harmonious, or harmony is the absence of discord. In the words of Helmholtz, consonance is a continuous, dissonance an intermittent, tone-sensation. ...
— The Psychology of Beauty • Ethel D. Puffer
... necessary for the understanding of this. We must start with the fact that, theoretically, all dissonances must be introduced and concluded, which we cannot explain here, but this leading up to and away from have for their purpose softening the harshness of the dissonance which was greatly feared in bygone times. Take if you please, the simple key of C natural. Do is the keynote, sol is the dominant. Place on this dominant two-thirds—si-re—and you have the perfect dominant chord. Add a third fa and you have the ...
— Musical Memories • Camille Saint-Saens
... has those inadequacies, those incompetences of expression, which are so oddly characteristic of its author; and his elaborate simplicity, though more at home here than in some other places, occasionally gives a dissonance. But it is a great poem—one by itself, one which finds and keeps its own place in the foreordained gallery or museum, with which every true lover of poetry is provided, though he inherits it by degrees. No one, I suppose, will deny its pathos; I should be sorry for any one who ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... by the National Lutheran Council and held in Chicago, March 11 to 13, 1919, adopted a number of statements on reconciliation, absolution, the means of grace, justification, faith, conversion and election. However, these declarations, though, as far as they go, apparently not in dissonance with the Lutheran confessions, cover neither all the doctrines controverted in our Church, nor all of the disputed points involved in the doctrines dealt with at Chicago. With respect to lodgism the Conference resolved: "We promise each other that ...
— American Lutheranism - Volume 2: The United Lutheran Church (General Synod, General - Council, United Synod in the South) • Friedrich Bente
... words of prayer, Or to articulate the stern command, And one, in most supreme authority, Declaimed a ponderous regal ordinance, But heard a sea of unfamiliar sounds, Confused and desultory turbulence, and dissonance of harsh, discordant tones, Instead of due attention and applause; Nor were his words and usual forms of speech Respected by the idle, wondering craft, Which lately comprehended ...
— Mountain idylls, and Other Poems • Alfred Castner King
... think; no anger, as though a mourner resented the gayety around him; but, rather, a deep and melancholy wonder at the chasm that has now revealed itself between our life and nature. What does the breach mean?—the incurable dissonance and alienation? Are we greater than nature, or less? Is the opposition final, the prophecy of man's ultimate and hopeless defeat at the hands of nature?—or is it, in the Hegelian sense, the mere development of a necessary conflict, leading to a profounder ...
— The Testing of Diana Mallory • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... without precisely knowing why, or, at least, without troubling to put the reason into words. But the events of the past few days had, imperceptibly, wrought a change in their relations. An impalpable veil had come between them, a subtle dissonance in point of view. They were pledged, as it ...
— Affairs of State • Burton E. Stevenson
... detraction. She remembered, too, that she had often reproached herself for her irrational prejudice against the man,—that she was forever finding something false and sinister in the face that every one else said was eminently handsome, and ugly dissonance in the voice that all Hendrik praised for its music. Was he on both sides of that card?—Ah, well! it might be just nothing, after all; the poor lady might be ill, or vexed past endurance at home; or ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... impartial eye on the church tower and the guillotine. Up springs the blithesome morn. In yon gardens the birds renew their familiar song. The fishes are sporting through the freshening waters of the Seine. The gladness of divine nature, the roar and dissonance of mortal life, awake again: the trader unbars his windows; the flower-girls troop gayly to their haunts; busy feet are tramping to the daily drudgeries that revolutions which strike down kings and kaisars, leave the same Cain's heritage to the boor; the wagons groan and reel to the mart; Tyranny, ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... mutter of the basses. The celesta, an instrument with keyboard and bell tone, contributes fascinating effects, and the xylophone is used;—utterances that are lascivious as well as others that are macabre. Dissonance runs riot and frequently carries the imagination away completely captive. The score is unquestionably the greatest triumph of reflection and ingenuity of contrivance that the literature of music can show. ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... are not we?" he goes on, in a low voice—"most miserable! and it seems to me that every day we grow more so, that every day there is a greater dissonance between us! For my part, I have given up the hope that we can ever be happier! I have wondered that I should have entertained it. But, at least, we might ...
— Nancy - A Novel • Rhoda Broughton
... pleased at any other time; but it sounded like the symphonies of angels to them now. O, what divine strains! But the melody was all in their own hearts. The screeching wheels of a dirt cart would have failed to strike a dissonance upon their ears; for all nature rolled on in linked harmony to them; they fancied they were very near heaven, and so they were; they thought they could not be much happier if they were really there, and it is doubtful if ...
— Eventide - A Series of Tales and Poems • Effie Afton
... irreparable regret seizes the wildly-throbbing human heart, even in the midst of the incomparable splendor of external nature. This contrast is sustained by a fusion of tones, a softening of gloomy hues, which prevent the intrusion of aught rude or brusque that might awaken a dissonance in the touching impression produced, which, while saddening joy, soothes and softens ...
— Life of Chopin • Franz Liszt
... Love should teach Time, in his own gray style, 55 All that thou art. Art thou not void of guile, A lovely soul formed to be blessed and bless? A well of sealed and secret happiness, Whose waters like blithe light and music are, Vanquishing dissonance and gloom? A Star 60 Which moves not in the moving heavens, alone? A Smile amid dark frowns? a gentle tone Amid rude voices? a beloved light? A Solitude, a Refuge, a Delight? A Lute, which those whom Love has taught to play 65 Make ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... Then, from dissonance and incoherence, the music merged into Gounod's Ave Maria. And, from swaying, Hade began to walk. To and fro, urged by the melody, his feet strayed. Now he was in full view, between the half-open curtains. Now, he ...
— Black Caesar's Clan • Albert Payson Terhune
... dominated Europe so long. That system was the outcome of a conception of the universe which set man apart from the remainder of nature, placed him in a category of his own, and pretended that he was both the center and the object of creation. For it called man the consonance and nature the dissonance. The octave and the fifth, the bases of the system, are of course, to be found only in the human voice. They are, roughly, the difference between the average male and the average female voice, and the difference between the average soprano and alto. It is upon those intervals that the ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... the smell of orchard blossoms blown through the open window, of the odour of the pomegranate in the hedge; but his eyes were fascinated by the crouching passion of the figure before him and the dissonance of the low, unhuman voice. There was no pause in the broken, turgid torrent, which was like a muddy flood pouring over the ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... the diseased commonwealth, which Menenius has already set forth—that notion of parts and partiality, and dissonance and dissolution, which is a radical idea in the play, and runs into its minutest points of phraseology, breaks out at ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... a work of surpassing beauty; but there is a dissonance between music and libretto which gives the impression of something lacking; there is not the harmony which we expect in a work of this kind. Wagner has taught us better on these points. The music ...
— Beethoven • George Alexander Fischer
... Intemperate rage a wordy war began; But bold Telemachus assumed the man. "Instant (he cried) your female discord end, Ye deedless boasters! and the song attend; Obey that sweet compulsion, nor profane With dissonance the smooth melodious strain. Pacific now prolong the jovial feast; But when the dawn reveals the rosy east, I, to the peers assembled, shall propose The firm resolve, I here in few disclose; No longer live ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer, translated by Alexander Pope
... that bright May morning! All about Sweet influences of earth, and air, and sky, Harmoniously accordant. I alone, The troubled spirit that had driven me forth, In dissonance with that fair frame of things So blissfully serene. God had not yet Let fall the weight of chastening that makes dumb The murmuring lip, and stills the rebel heart, Ending all earthly interests, and I call'd (O ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... between her and the light, and the unmistakable expression of annoyance and impatience which was passed over it was spared her. There was, however, still enough dissonance in his manner to affect her quick feminine sense, and when she drew nearer to him it was ...
— Snow-Bound at Eagle's • Bret Harte
... enough compared to two fiddles playing in concert: if the one can sound no higher than Tweedle-dum, and the other no lower than Tweedle-dee, there never can be any thing but a perpetual jarring discord and dissonance betwixt them. In the same manner the difference in religious sentiments would have been a great allay in the ...
— Critical Remarks on Sir Charles Grandison, Clarissa, and Pamela (1754) • Anonymous
... the young magicians, To the dames and to their daughters, To the maidens, silver-tinselled, To the singers of Wainola. When the young men touched the harp-strings, Then arose the notes of discord; When the aged played upon it, Dissonance their only music. Spake ...
— National Epics • Kate Milner Rabb
... Joseph that Jesus was meditating whether he should confide all he saw and heard to his disciples. He waited, tremulous with expectation, watching the thin scrannel throat out of which rose a voice to which the ear became attuned quickly and was gratified as by a welcome dissonance. It rose up among the silence of the pines, and the delight of listening to it, Joseph thought, was so near to intoxication that he would have pressed forward if he had not remembered suddenly that he was a new-comer into the community; one who might at any moment be driven out of it because ...
— The Brook Kerith - A Syrian story • George Moore
... working man, comparatively uneducated, should have evoked the tumultuous applause of a brilliant assembly of intelligent ladies and gentlemen. It was indeed something extraordinary. Some said that he declaimed like Talma or Rachel, nor was there any note of dissonance in his reception. The enthusiasm was general and unanimous amongst the magistrates, clergy, scientific men, artists, physicians, ship-owners, men of business, and working people. They all joined in the applause when Jasmin had concluded ...
— Jasmin: Barber, Poet, Philanthropist • Samuel Smiles
... caught from his fellows? Dick talked about "herd madness," and here was he, at one with his own herd. He piped in verse because a few could sing, he—but what was the use hammering along on the old dissonance: youth, age, age, youth. And yet they needn't be dissonant. They weren't always. There was Nan! But as to Dick, he was simply Dick, a good substratum of his father, Anthony Powell, in him, a man who had had long views on trade ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... Sisters preserve me from another such experience! I was walking in the Park in the evening, and the first warm odours of spring floating up from the earth troubled me with a feeling of vague unrest. Some jarring dissonance between the death in my heart and the new promise of life all about me ran along my nerves and set them palpitating harshly. Then I came upon a pair of lovers lingering in the shadow of a tree, holding to each other with outstretched hands. As I ...
— The Jessica Letters: An Editor's Romance • Paul Elmer More
... Swift, was the treatise of Martinus Scriblerus, Peri Bathous, or the Art of Sinking in Poetry. The exquisite wit and humour of this piece, which was almost wholly Pope's, enraged the Dunces to madness; and the mongrel pack opened in full cry, with barbarous dissonance, against their supposed whipper-in. Never was there such a senseless yell: for the philosophical treatise "On the Profund" overflows with amenity and good-nature. Pope is all the while at play—diverting ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... exception. It is not my purpose to dwell here on the great and unchanging demands of the human soul which make His sovereignty a necessity of our well-being alike as citizens, and as individuals of His world. Unless the Lord is King, all must be confusion, dissonance, and disaster. The supreme fact in human life after all is, that our God is "the creator, preserver, and ...
— Our Master • Bramwell Booth
... he once more took up the narrative; "a girl in a tennis skirt with a gay scarf about her waist—quite dead in a second. The clothes still fluttered on the line. You see," he ended, "nothing instructive, tragic—only a crude dissonance." ...
— Wild Oranges • Joseph Hergesheimer
... good? While God's unfinished opus Multitudinous harmony obeys, Evil is a dissonance not a discord, Soon to be ...
— Behind the Arras - A Book of the Unseen • Bliss Carman
... From ev'ry palace bursts a mingled clamour, The dreadful dissonance of barb'rous triumph, Shrieks of affright, and waitings of distress. Oft when the cries of violated beauty Arose to heav'n, and pierc'd my bleeding breast, I felt thy pains, ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... voice, that nature had made up of dissonance and horror, into the most gentle and soothing accent of which it was capable, and hanging over his couch, "wherefore this sorrow? What is it that has seemed to mar a happiness so enviable? Art thou not possessed"—"Talk not to me of possessions," exclaimed Roderic, ...
— Imogen - A Pastoral Romance • William Godwin
... from behind in all parts of the field, the whole dingy-gray mass broke from the "common time" step into that "dog-trot" known in the tactics of the present day as the "double-quick." At the same moment they broke into those shrieks of horrible dissonance, remarked in the fight of the morning, rising even above the din of the opening artillery, and more resembling the whoops of the copper-skinned warriors of the renegade Albert Pike, than soldiers of what is called a Christian nation, led on ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... Probably, however, they will gradually lose both the virtues and the defects of their semi-barbarism. The centuries as they pass will ripen these sons of the north, and they will enter into the concert of peoples in some other capacity than as a menace or a dissonance. They have only to transform their hardiness into strength, their cunning into grace, their Muscovitism into humanity, to win love instead of inspiring ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... he said, sighing. "But after all, it is no fault of ours. There was a dissonance in our married life from the start, and for that reason there never could be any genuine harmony between us. This dissonance—well, at the present hour I may confess it to you, too—this dissonance simply was the fact that I never ...
— LOUISA OF PRUSSIA AND HER TIMES • Louise Muhlbach
... shrill penetrating tone, like the wildly weeping voice of Rachel; tragical, painful, gone quite to falsetto and above pitch; but with a melody in its dissonance like the singing of the stars. ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVIII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Seven-Years War Rises to a Height.—1757-1759. • Thomas Carlyle
... and began Wrapt in a pleasing fit of melancholy To meditate my rural minstrelsie, Till fancy had her fill, but ere a close The wonted roar was up amidst the Woods, And fill'd the Air with barbarous dissonance, 550 At which I ceas' t, and listen'd them a while, Till an unusuall stop of sudden silence Gave respit to the drowsie frighted steeds That draw the litter of close-curtain'd sleep. At last a soft and solemn breathing sound Rose like a steam of rich distill'd Perfumes, And stole upon the Air, ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... evidently shown that he had no objection to be the member of any society which would enrol his name among them. He obtained his medical degree from no honourable source; and another title, which he affected, he mysteriously contracted into barbaric dissonance. Hill entitled himself— ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... Of the manner in which we judge of the Propriety or Impropriety of the Affections of other Men, by their concord or dissonance ...
— An Essay on the History of Civil Society, Eighth Edition • Adam Ferguson, L.L.D.
... that intense yearning look in his usually guarded, irresponsive countenance. A painfully humiliating sense of her own personal incompetence to arouse the feeling, so legibly printed on her lover's features, jarred upon Leo's heart like a twanging dissonance breaking the harmonious flow of minor chords; but a noble pity strangled this jealous thrill, and she ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... and strange, that it is very difficult to subject them to the rules of grammar, to represent them by syllables, or to find in the alphabet letters which correspond to them." It is however remarkable, that, although he complains of the dissonance of the German language, he never ...
— The Life of Hugo Grotius • Charles Butler
... absorb the non-luminous rays of the earth. This incompetence of the vapour to absorb luminous rays is shared by water and ice—in fact, by all really transparent substances. Their transparency is due to their inability to absorb luminous rays. The molecules of such substances are in dissonance with luminous waves; and hence such waves pass through transparent bodies without disturbing the molecular rest. A purely luminous beam, however intense may be its heat, is sensibly incompetent to melt ice. We can, for example, converge a powerful luminous beam upon a ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... lover's death. A crowd of worshipers followed her through woods and thickets, mingling their shouts with the shrill sound of flutes, with the dull beat of tambourines, with the rattling of castanets and the dissonance of brass cymbals. Intoxicated with shouting and with uproar of the instruments, excited by their impetuous advance, breathless and panting, they surrendered to the raptures of a sacred enthusiasm. Catullus has left us a dramatic description ...
— The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism • Franz Cumont
... and diffuses with white with peculiar loveliness. It is discordant when standing with orange only, requiring to be joined or accompanied by their proper contrast, to resolve or harmonize the dissonance. In landscapes, &c., abounding with hues allied to green, a red object properly placed as regards light, shade, or distance, conduces wonderfully to the life, beauty, harmony, and connexion of the colouring. Red is, indeed, the chief ...
— Field's Chromatography - or Treatise on Colours and Pigments as Used by Artists • George Field
... disturbing like the presage of a storm. As they traversed a region of hotels and apartment houses, Frank and Bertha noted many open windows; men and women staring out half dreamily. They passed a livery stable, out of which there came a weird uncanny dissonance of ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman
... with its bow-windows looking on to a clump of old trees powdered with snow, Christophe would find Colette sitting at her piano, repeating the same passage over and over again, delighting her ear with mellifluous dissonance. ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... at the spot, where, crouched around their camp- fire, La Salle and his companions kept their vigil. The howlings of the wolves filled the frosty air with a fierce and dreary dissonance. More deadly foes were not far off, for before nightfall they had seen fresh Indian tracks. The cold, however, forced them to make a fire; and while some tried to rest around it, the others stood on the watch. ...
— France and England in North America, a Series of Historical Narratives, Part Third • Francis Parkman
... away from the piano. Her elbow, falling upon the keys, made a harsh dissonance. "Isabel, my dear!" she cried. ...
— Old Rose and Silver • Myrtle Reed
... heard in one loud din: The monkey-mimics rush discordant in; 'Twas chattering, grinning, mouthing, jabbering all, And noise and Norton, brangling and Breval,[322] Dennis and dissonance, and captious art, And snip-snap short, and interruption smart, 240 And demonstration thin, and theses thick, And major, minor, and conclusion quick. 'Hold' (cried the queen) 'a cat-call each shall win; ...
— Poetical Works of Pope, Vol. II • Alexander Pope
... and that sleep will come with the blessed morning. But he has forgotten the birds, who at the first streak of gray in the east have assembled in the trees near his chamber-window, and keep up for an hour the most rasping dissonance,—an orchestra in which each artist is tuning his instrument, setting it in a different key and to play a different tune: each bird recalls a different tune, and none sings "Annie Laurie,"—to pervert Bayard ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... find the inmost places in her heart. Taste and temperament may be akin, position and purpose in full accord, and yet the vital touch may be lacking. Sometimes, in the after-years, it may be found by two who seek for it patiently together, but too often dissonance ...
— The Spinster Book • Myrtle Reed
... offers him a bottle, he drinks of it. "Sire, do not fear," says one of his Grenadiers. "Fear?" answers Louis: "feel then," putting the man's hand on his heart. So stands Majesty in Red woollen Cap; black Sansculottism weltering round him, far and wide, aimless, with in-articulate dissonance, with cries of "Veto! ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... and as his footsteps sounded on the stair she felt as if she were doomed and hearing her own death-knell. What had she done? What would he do now? She stood there a dissonance of despair, and when the lower door clicked moved her hand out of the ...
— Jennie Gerhardt - A Novel • Theodore Dreiser
... The low moaning of women sounded in the room. Somebody moved a foot, scraping it in rude dissonance across the floor. A girl's voice broke out in sudden sobbing, which was as quickly stifled, with sharp catching of ...
— The Bondboy • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... implied in an article attributed to him, and not without cause, which ushered into public notice the first number of a new quarterly periodical, "The Foreign and Colonial Quarterly Review," in January last, and was generally accepted as a programme of ministerial faith and action. Our points of dissonance are, however, few; but, as involving questions of principle, whilst we are generally at one on matters of detail, we hold them to be of some importance. This, however, is not the occasion proper for urging them, when engaged on ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various
... avail ourselves of the hearty co-operation of our allies, and to secure and invigorate that co-operation by the firmness and vigour of our own conduct. The honourable gentleman then comes back upon me, and presses me upon the supposed dissonance between our views and those of our allies. But surely there may allowably exist in the minds of different men different means of arriving at the same security. This difference may, without breaking the ties of effective union, exist even in this house; how much more then ...
— The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - 1838 • James Gillman
... that you everywhere in America stir up the question of international copyright, and thereby awaken huge dissonance where all else were triumphant unison for you. I am asked my opinion of the matter, and requested to write it down ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... gnats that cloud the dewy lawn, Or flitting flies that light the sparkling corn; Or pirate hawks that haunt Rome's lawless sky, Or the fell fevers Pontine plains supply; The locust legions count; or say as soon What hoarse Cicadae stun the sultry noon With ringing dissonance; what flow'rets fair In early spring inebriate the air: Or count the gems in every dazzling shower That Roman rockets detonating pour, Dropping their liquid light o'er Hadrian's glowing tower: Or tell what crowds on Easter-day repair To see ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 367, May 1846 • Various
... a sudden change in the weather, there is a fearful charge made by the coughing brigade. They open their mouths wide, and make the arches ring with the racket. They begin with a faint "Ahem!" and gradually rise and fall through all the scale of dissonance, as much as to say: "Hear, all ye good people! I have a cold! I have a bad cold! I have an awful bad cold! Hear how it racks me, tears me, torments me. It seems as if my diaphragm must be split. I took this awful ...
— Around The Tea-Table • T. De Witt Talmage
... paramount importance is a consideration of the horoscope of the parties. Were the boy and girl born under astrological conditions which harmonize; or does her horoscope so conflict with his that their dissonance would bring evil and misery to the family? In the latter case, a marriage will be impossible, even though all other conditions are ...
— India, Its Life and Thought • John P. Jones
... dissonances, peculiar and unusual combinations of air vibrations, but these are never long dwelt on, and must always be resolved into the full and satisfactory harmony, of which the beauty is enhanced by the momentary lapse into strangeness. Dissonance is never the prevailing idea, and above all, never the final, closing one; it must always bear a certain relation to the key in which it is used, and the musical composition must be ended by the fullest and most satisfactory chord, or suggestion ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, Issue 2, February, 1864 • Various
... of melody, Such as his highest muse had ne'er attained, Float in the air, while in the distance rang, Harsh and discordant, jarring with those tones, The gallop of his frightened horse's hoofs, Clattering in sudden freedom down the pass. A voice that made all music dissonance Then thrilled through heart and flesh of that prone knight, Triumphantly: "The gods need but appear, And their usurped thrones are theirs again!" Then tenderly: "Sweet knight, I pray thee, rise; Worship me not, for I desire thy love. Look on me, follow me, for I am fain Of thy fair, ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... perfectly acquainted with the manner of Horace. Among the several discouragements which attended his attempt in that kind, he mentions one peculiar to the language and nature of the English versification, which would appear in the translation of one of Persius's Satires: The difficulty and dissonance whereof, says he, shall make good my assertion; besides the plain experience thereof in the Satires of Ariosto; save which, and one base French satire, I could never attain the view of any for my direction. Yet we may pay him almost the same compliment ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume I. • Theophilus Cibber
... autumn leaves! This frightful human uproar cannot succeed in troubling the majestic serenity of Nature! There are moments when man seems to go beyond anything that could be imagined; but a soul that is prepared can soon perceive the harmony which overlooks and reconciles all this dissonance. Do not think that I remain insensible to the agony of scenes that we behold all too often: villages wiped out by the artillery that is hurled upon them; smoke by day, light by night; the misery of a flying population under shell-fire. Each instant brings some shock straight to one's heart. ...
— Letters of a Soldier - 1914-1915 • Anonymous
... of to-day are pale, Shall clang of armorers riveting our mail Rise in harsh dissonance where now the song In surging music sweeps the land along? No, Brothers, no! The Providence on high Stretches above us like the arching sky; As o'er the world that broad empyrean field, So o'er the ...
— A Wreath of Virginia Bay Leaves • James Barron Hope
... superfluous to recite, and are vsuall with rude rimers who obserue not precisely the rules of [prosodie] neuerthelesse in all such cases (if necessitie constrained) it is somewhat more tolerable to help the rime by false orthographie, than to leaue an unpleasant dissonance to the eare, by keeping trewe orthographie and loosing the rime, as for example it is better to rime [Dore] with [Restore] then in his truer orthographie, which is [Doore] and to this word [Desire] to say [Fier] then fyre though it be otherwise better written fire. For since the ...
— The Arte of English Poesie • George Puttenham
... savage scream he fell prone on the ground, his limbs twisted in acute agony,—his features hideously contorted,—his hands beating the air wildly, as though in contention with some invisible foe, ..while in strange and terrible dissonance with his tortured cries, Lysia's laughter, musically mellow, broke out in little quick peals, like the laughter of ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli |
