"Symphony" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Miniato, which gives such poignant pleasure in the work of a very different, but very great, sculptor, Desiderio. The marvel (for it is a marvel) of his great monument in Santa Croce, depends not on anatomic forms, but on the exquisite variety and vivacity of surface arrangement; the word symphony (so often misapplied) fitting exactly this complex structure of minute melodies and harmonies of rhythms and ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... the whole forest seemed to burst forth in one grand chorus of song. Wonderful! wonderful! It seemed as if the very trees, as if every grass-blade, as if the bushes, the very sky above, and the earth beneath, had part in this wonderful symphony. Then, as I have listened as it went on and on, I have thought. What a study in the matter of song! If we could but learn from the birds. If we could but open ourselves to the same powers and allow them to pour forth in us, what singers, ...
— In Tune with the Infinite - or, Fullness of Peace, Power, and Plenty • Ralph Waldo Trine
... of ideas, the Russian evoked the image of his compatriot, Michael Bakounine, another revolutionist, the father of anarchy, weeping with emotion at a concert after hearing the symphony with Beethoven chorals directed by a young friend of his, named Richard Wagner. "When our revolution comes," he cried, clasping the hand of the master, "whatever else may perish, this must be saved ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... Society lately offered a prize for the best symphony. Eighty-three have been offered, of which one only seems to be ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... breath of heavily-scented flowers mingles with the pungent sweetness of clove and nutmeg. An avenue of dadap trees skirts the shore, with varied foliage of amber and carmine. The dark figures sauntering in the shade, and clad in rose-colour, azure, or orange, add deeper notes to the symphony of colour, only marred by the white-washed Dutch conventicle, like an emphatic protest against Nature's response to her Creator. Ruined arches and pillars of white Portuguese houses, standing in a wilderness of verdure amid tumbled heaps ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... stored up during the scorching hours of noon; the short scrub that clothed them was redolent of that peculiar Calabrian odour which haunts one like a melody—an odour of dried cistus and other aromatic plants, balsamic by day, almost overpowering at this hour. To aid and diversify the symphony of perfume, I lit a cigar, and then gave myself up to contemplation of the heavenly bodies. We passed a solitary man, walking swiftly with bowed head. What ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... list of white-fruited shrubs. If this is planted in front of evergreens the purity of its color is brought out charmingly. Group it with the red-barked Willow, the Alder, or the Berberry, and you secure a contrast that makes the effect strikingly delightful—a symphony in green, scarlet, and white. If to this combination you add the blue of a winter sky or the glow of a winter sunset, who can say there is not plenty of color ...
— Amateur Gardencraft - A Book for the Home-Maker and Garden Lover • Eben E. Rexford
... chuckled the old man, raising the lid to see if the water had boiled sufficiently. "Do you know I think a dinner horn and a singing kettle beat a symphony all hollow for real down-right melody," and he lifted the ...
— The Fifth String, The Conspirators • John Philip Sousa
... towns, it has been largely from among those who are seriously interested in a literary drama that the audiences have been drawn. It was such people as do not habitually go to the theatre, but that are to be found at revivals of old English comedy and Ibsen plays and symphony concerts, that made up the audiences of the Irish Players in America, whether in Boston or in Philadelphia or Chicago. These audiences approximated to the Dublin audiences only in the fact that they were constant in attendance at all the plays of the repertoire. ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... thank God, suffer from the melancholy of a cellar: my solitude is gay with light and verdure; I attend, whenever I please, the fields' high festival, the Thrushes' concert, the Crickets' symphony; and yet my friendly commerce with the Spider is marked by an even greater devotion than the young typesetter's. I admit her to the intimacy of my study, I make room for her among my books, I set her in the sun on my window-ledge, I visit her assiduously at ...
— The Life of the Spider • J. Henri Fabre
... Deryck, because other people were teaching me love-lessons, and I did not want to learn them apart from Michael. I stayed with Jane Dalmain and her blind husband, before they went back to Gleneesh. You remember? They were in town for the production of his symphony. I saw that ideal wedded life, and I realised something of what a perfect mating of souls could mean. And then—well, there were others; people who did not understand how wholly I am Michael's; nothing actually wrong; but not so fresh and youthful as Billy's innocent ...
— The Mistress of Shenstone • Florence L. Barclay
... with the absinthe or ver- mouth of the last musical comedy. The drama, like the symphony, does not teach or prove anything. Analysts with their problems, and teachers with their systems, are soon as old-fashioned as the pharmacopœia of Galen, — look at Ibsen and the Germans — but the best plays of Ben Jonson and Molière can no more go out of ...
— The Tinker's Wedding • J. M. Synge
... could scarcely be more beautiful; and the pinky-purple blossoms of the alamo shimmering in a rosy mist against dark cypress trees, or mingling with the white lace of hawthorn was a colour-symphony of Spring. ...
— The Car of Destiny • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... will hear the song of peace as in the 'Pastoral Symphony,' but happy already he who has foreknowledge of it amid the tumult! And what does it matter in the end that this magnificent prophecy is fulfilled in the absence of the prophet! He who has guessed this has gleaned great joy upon earth. We can leave ...
— Letters of a Soldier - 1914-1915 • Anonymous
... and planned and hoped and feared and desired and dreamed, as we tossed and turned to and fro upon such watchful, still nights. In the stillness, the tide upon one side of the Island replied to the dash on the other side in unbroken symphony, and Moses began to remember all the stories gossips had told him of how he had floated ashore there, like a fragment of tropical seaweed borne landward by a great gale. He positively wondered at himself that he had never thought of it more, and the more ...
— The Pearl of Orr's Island - A Story of the Coast of Maine • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... sight, yet, seen by their blest Lord, They mingled with the glowing mass, and when in high church tower The bell was hung and daily rung, all people felt its power. Its booming tones were soft and sweet, and echoed o'er their hills In a grand symphony of praise, subduing all their wills, And calling forth from old and young a burst of rapturous praise. Their gifts, though small, were not despised; God turned them into lays. This world is one great smelting pot in which life's ore is cast, And from it ...
— Gleams of Sunshine - Optimistic Poems • Joseph Horatio Chant
... inferior feeling. At such times, were the grossest pieces of onomatopoeic representation—the song of a bird, the galloping of horses, the cries of children, or the laughing of demons—to be introduced into the symphony, I should not be offended. Very likely I should be pleased; they would afford new points of departure for new trains of romantic feeling or heroic thought. I know very well what has happened. I have been using ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... lyrical as distinguished from an epical or dramatic poet. The unity of his work is derived from the effect of light and atmosphere, the inbreathed soul of tremulous and throbbing life, which bathes and liquefies the whole. It was enough for him to produce a gleeful symphony by the play of light and colour, by the animation of his figures, and by the intoxicating beauty of his forms. His angels are genii disimprisoned from the chalices of flowers, houris of an erotic Paradise, ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... steam past ever-varying scenes of loveliness whose component parts are ever the same, yet the effect ever different. Doubtless it is wrong to call it a symphony, yet I know no other word to describe the scenery of the Ogowe. It is as full of life and beauty and passion as any symphony Beethoven ever wrote: the parts changing, interweaving, and returning. There are leit motifs ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... events, and its pathos is as poignant as if it had happened within our own knowledge. In its way, it is as finely imaginative as Mr. Pyle's wonderfully spiritualized and moralized conception of the other world which he has realized on such terms as he alone can command; or as Mrs. Wynne's symphony of thrills and shudders, which will not have died out of the nerves of any one acquainted with it before. Mr. Millet's sketch is of a quality akin to that of Mr. McVickar's slighter but not less impressive fantasy: both ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various
... Enid," he said the next morning at breakfast. "I want to give you a ticket to the Symphony Orchestra next Friday night. Will ...
— Quin • Alice Hegan Rice
... Languedoc from Rousillon, and, placing herself opposite to a small grated window, which, like the wood-tops beneath, and the waves lower still, gleamed with the red glow of the west, she touched the chords of her lute in solemn symphony, and then accompanied it with her voice, in one of the simple and affecting airs, to which, in happier days, Valancourt had often listened in rapture, and which she now adapted ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... Chorus and symphony as above. Here the TAILOR walks round, accompanied by the SQUIRE'S SON. This form is observed after each subsequent introduction, all ...
— Ancient Poems, Ballads and Songs of England • Robert Bell
... of course, just the moment for him. The multitude, shaken out of its usual symphony-concert calm, quivered with an excitement that was not suppressed. A dozen times it had sprung to its feet to cheer and wave and hurrah, as one person. When this man of culture and voice and power, as well as a dark skin, began, and uttered the names of Stearns and of Andrew, feeling ...
— Up From Slavery: An Autobiography • Booker T. Washington
... notice, monsieur, in Beethoven's Symphony in A, that knell which ever and ever comes back and beats upon your heart? Yes, I see very well, you feel as I do, music is a communion—Beethoven, ah, me! how sad and sweet it is to be two to understand him ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... that fill the chambers of the sea. She floated forth with the serene grace of a frail bubble ascending through the still atmosphere of a June day. The perfect roundness of her limbs formed suave and enchanting curves. It was like listening to the most spiritual symphony of Beethoven the divine, to watch the harmonious flow of lines. This, indeed, was a pleasure cheaply purchased at any price. What cared I, if I had waded to the portal of this wonder through another's blood? I would have given my own to enjoy one ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... looked mellow and beautiful; the Japanese garden was a symphony of green plush sod and brilliant color—the Bougainvillaea almost smothering the little summerhouse and a mocking-bird who must be a grandson of the one of her betrothal night was singing his giddy heart out. Kada was waiting ...
— Play the Game! • Ruth Comfort Mitchell
... the tribute of an unutterable awe. If that be religion, I profess myself as religious as Mr. Wells. I am even willing to join him in some outward, ceremonial expression of that sentiment, if he can suggest one that shall not be ridiculously inadequate. What about kneeling through the C Minor Symphony? That seems to me about as near as we can get. Or I will go with him to Primrose Hill some fine morning (like the Persian Ambassador fabled by Charles Lamb) and worship the Sun, chanting to him William ...
— God and Mr. Wells - A Critical Examination of 'God the Invisible King' • William Archer
... hear the tumult of music from these various artists of the air, it seems as if the symphony never could be analyzed into its different instruments. But with time and patience it is not so difficult; nor can we really enjoy the performance, so long as it is only a confused chorus to our ears. It is not merely the highest form of animal language, but, in ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... and Nevil Butt, had just given their rather electrifying performance, one playing the compositions of the other, and then both singing Faure together, and a small band of Green Bulgarians were now playing strenuously a symphony of Richard Strauss, when Cecil and Mrs Raymond appeared together. Lord Selsey received her as if she had been an old friend. When they shook hands they felt at once, after one glance at Cecil and then at each other, that they were more ...
— Love's Shadow • Ada Leverson
... Moreover, his poetry is for the most part lacking in delicacy and fine shading; scarcely a score of his lyrics are of the highest order. He gives us often the blaring music of a military band or the loud, swelling volume of an organ, but very seldom the softer tones of a violin or symphony. ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... my head or my ear. I am not for forcing my tastes or no-tastes on other people. Let every man enjoy himself in his own way, while he does not annoy others. I would not deprive you of your enjoyment of a brilliant symphony, and I hope you would not deprive me of my enjoyment of ...
— Gryll Grange • Thomas Love Peacock
... is the impression M. Fabre most commonly conveys. In this book it is rather the cheerful aspect of summer, those upland valleys of the Cevennes presenting then a symphony in red, so to call it—as in a land of cherries and goldfinches; and he has a genial power certainly of making you really feel the sun on the backs of the two boys out early for a long ramble, of old peasants resting themselves a little, with spare ...
— Essays from 'The Guardian' • Walter Horatio Pater
... attractive and delightful in many ways. There could be no doubt that his love for Beethoven was genuine, but that which was in Frank Palmer was not that of which the sonatas and symphonies of the master are the voice. He went into raptures over the slow movement in the C minor Symphony, but no C minor slow movement was discernible in ...
— Clara Hopgood • Mark Rutherford
... that exceeding glory pales before the greater glory of having written the Cantiones Sacrae and the D minor Mass. In its way the D minor Mass is as noble and complete an achievement as the St. Matthew Passion or the "Messiah," the Choral symphony of Beethoven or the G minor symphony of Mozart, "Tristan" or the "Nibelung's Ring." It is splendidly planned; it is perfectly beautiful; and from the first page to the last it is charged with ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman
... the first-tier box presented to her husband with the accustomed heavy courtesy of the Societe Harmonique. She went early to the hall that she might hear the entire music-making of the evening—Van Kuyp's tone-poem, Sordello, was on the programme between a Weber overture and a Beethoven symphony, an unusual honour for a young American composer. If she had gone late, it would have seemed an affectation, she reasoned. Her husband kept within doors; she could tell him all. And then, was ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... be notes in that great symphony Whose cadence circles through the rhythmic spheres, And all the live world's throbbing heart shall be One with our heart; the stealthy, creeping years Have lost their terrors now; we shall not die— The universe ...
— The Book-Bills of Narcissus - An Account Rendered by Richard Le Gallienne • Le Gallienne, Richard
... 26, 1900) was well sustained by the singers and attended by many hundreds of citizens and visitors. Eight Christmas Carols and an anthem were sung, the concluding Carol being "The First Nowell"; and the organist (Mr. J. B. Lott, Mus. Bac., Oxon) played the Pastoral Symphony from Sullivan's "Light of the World," Mendelssohn's March ("Cornelius"), the Pastoral Symphony from Handel's "Messiah," and other exquisite voluntaries. From the anthem, E. H. Sears's ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson
... America where scientists find cures for diseases from diabetes to Alzheimer's to AIDS; an America where every child can stretch a hand across a keyboard and reach every book ever written, every painting ever painted, every symphony ever composed; where government provides opportunity and citizens honor the responsibility to give something back to their communities; an America which leads the world to new heights of ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... lingering at the accustom'd place That minstrel ply'd his art, Though its soft symphony of words Convulsed with pain the broken chords Within ...
— Gifts of Genius - A Miscellany of Prose and Poetry by American Authors • Various
... these elements within a single view. It is not necessary to such perfection that the evil should ever be viewed in isolation. The idealist employs the analogy of the drama or the picture whose very significance requires the balance of opposing forces; or the analogy of the symphony in which a higher musical quality is realized through the resolution of discord into harmony. But none of these unities requires any element whatsoever that does not partake of its beauty. It is quite irrelevant to the ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... to her. The earth, water and light, fruits and flowers, to her were not merely physical phenomena to be turned to use and then left aside. They were necessary to her in the attainment of her ideal of perfection, as every note is necessary to the completeness of the symphony. India intuitively felt that the essential fact of this world has a vital meaning for us; we have to be fully alive to it and establish a conscious relation with it, not merely impelled by scientific curiosity or greed of material advantage, but ...
— Sadhana - The Realisation of Life • Rabindranath Tagore
... this affairs had ripened to a quick conclusion. In drives along the boulevards, in walks through the moonlit woods, at dinners, concerts, dances—these two mingled their dreams for their home in Normandy. The only discord in this summer symphony was ...
— In the Claws of the German Eagle • Albert Rhys Williams
... one long-sweeping symphony From times remote Till now, of human tenderness, shall we Supply one note, Small and untraced, yet that will ever be Somewhere afloat Amid the spheres, as part of sick ...
— Satires of Circumstance, Lyrics and Reveries, with - Miscellaneous Pieces • Thomas Hardy
... little child when, for the first time, I was seized upon by this longing, without at that time comprehending it. There was a little concert in the house of my parents; the harp, piano, horn, and clarionette, were played by four distinguished artists. In one part of the symphony the instruments united in an indescribably sweet and joyous melody, in the feeling of which my childish soul was seized upon by a strong delight, and at the same time by a deep melancholy. It seemed to me as if I had ...
— The Home • Fredrika Bremer
... Napoleon. Before dinner he was presented with a table-service of silver-gilt by the city of Paris. Then he took his seat, with the Empress, on a platform beneath a canopy, and the meal began. During dinner, a band, hidden behind green foliage, played a symphony of Haydn's, and then was sung a cantata full of flattery for the ...
— The Court of the Empress Josephine • Imbert de Saint-Amand
... better still, from their point of view, float downstream to found new colonies afar. When the beautiful jewelweed - a conspicuous sufferer - is hung about with dodder, one must be grateful for at least such symphony of yellows. ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... lead the way toward opera. Orchestral music was more remote from opera. If Claude set some wonderful poem, and a man like Jacob Crayford heard the setting, he might see a talent for opera in it. But he could scarcely see that in a violin concerto, a quartet for strings, or a symphony. So she argued. And she searched anxiously for words which might be set dramatically, descriptively. She dared not assail Claude yet with a libretto for opera. She felt sure he would say he had ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... culpably tolerant, not to say proud. The arts were rising, socially, in that generation, and Elliot was actually excused from an examination in ethics for the purpose of attending a concert by the Boston Symphony Society. ...
— The Strange Cases of Dr. Stanchon • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... pauses made by the other musicians. Thus, the hair-bird (Fringilla Socialis) has a sharp and trilling note, without any modulation, and not at all melodious, when heard alone; but in the morning it is the chief harmonizer of the whole chorus, and serves, more than any other voice, to give unity and symphony to the multitude of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... transmutation into life the ideal is injured and dwarfed. Just as the poet's vision is transcendently more beautiful than the song he writes upon the page; as the artist's dream is a glorious-creation, but his picture is only a photograph thereof; as the musician's song or symphony is but an echo of the ethereal music he heard in his soul, so every purpose and ideal is marred in the effort to give ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... The "symphony in yellow and red," which "H. H." calls this wonderland, grows upon the sojourner in some mysterious way, till by the time he has seen the waxing and waning of one moon he is an enthusiast. It is charming alike ...
— A Bird-Lover in the West • Olive Thorne Miller
... in a style that cannot fail to stimulate the reader, if also a student of music, to strive to find for himself the underlying meanings of the compositions of the great composers. It contains, besides, a vast amount of information about the symphony, its evolution and structure, with sketches of the composers, and a detailed technical description of a few symphonic models. It meets a recognized want of ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding
... musicians, Emily heard, without knowing his project, the gay song of gondolieri approaching, as they sat on the stern of the boat, and saw the tremulous gleam of the moon-light wave, which their oars disturbed. Presently she heard the sound of instruments, and then a full symphony swelled on the air, and, the boats meeting, the gondolieri hailed each other. The count then explaining himself, the party removed into his gondola, which was embellished with all that ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... by Governor Walsh and the favorable opinions of the Governors of equal suffrage States were published at length in the Boston papers by the Men's League. At the last moment mass meetings were held in Boston at Symphony Hall and in the largest halls of many other cities. A symbolical and picturesque flag-raising took place on Boston Common. A last-minute circular was sent to each of the State's 600,000 registered voters. The day before the vote the ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume VI • Various
... a man who at one time thoroughly enjoys converse with his friends, at another the hearing of a symphony; at another the eating of his meals; at another the reading of a book; at another the earning of money, and so on. As an appreciative realization, each of these is an intrinsic value. It occupies a particular place in life; it serves its own end, which cannot be supplied ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... Knowledge The Blinded Bird "The wind blew words" The Faded Face The Riddle The Duel At Mayfair Lodgings To my Father's Violin The Statue of Liberty The Background and the Figure The Change Sitting on the Bridge The Young Churchwarden "I travel as a phantom now" Lines to a Movement in Mozart's E-flat Symphony "In the seventies" The Pedigree This Heart. A Woman's Dream Where they lived The Occultation Life laughs Onward The Peace-offering "Something tapped" The Wound A Merrymaking in Question "I said and sang her excellence" A January Night. 1879 A Kiss The ...
— Moments of Vision • Thomas Hardy
... them practically unfit for the jostling and ugliness of life, and they record their unfitness at considerable length. The bold and awful poetry of Job's complaint produces too many flimsy imitators; for there is always something consolatory in grandeur, but the symphony transposed for the piano becomes hysterically sad. This literature of woe, as Whitman calls it, this Maladie de Rene, as we like to call it in Europe, is in many ways a most humiliating and sickly phenomenon. Young gentlemen with three or four hundred ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the moment. He noted an undercurrent of rejoicing and triumphant cheeriness in the tone of the stream as it plashed among the pebbles on its precipitous bed that suggested to his mind some bars of a symphony which he determined to compose as soon as he got home again to ...
— What's Bred In the Bone • Grant Allen
... from wind, wave, or bird, the rapt mind in strange and pleasing wonder contemplating the new and charming harmonies,—then it was that man received his first impressions, and took his first lessons in delightful symphony. ...
— Music and Some Highly Musical People • James M. Trotter
... London have I been since my last Letter: and have seen the Old Masters; and finished them off by such a Symphony as was worthy of the best of them, two Acts of Mozart's 'Cosi.' You wrote me that you had 'assisted' at that also: the Singing, as you know, was inferior: but the Music itself! Between the Acts a Man sang a song of Verdi's: which was a strange ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald in Two Volumes - Vol. II • Edward FitzGerald
... commune all round with the invisible Power that walk'd the dim world by Himself at that hour. But their language he had not yet learn'd—in despite Of the much he HAD learn'd—or forgotten it quite, With its once native accents. Alas! what had he To add to that deep-toned sublime symphony Of thanksgiving?... A fiery finger was still Scorching into his heart some dread sentence. His will, Like a wind that is put to no purpose, was wild At its work of destruction within him. The child Of an infidel age, he had been his own god, His ...
— Lucile • Owen Meredith
... a musical evening would consist of the conversation or paper upon a certain musical form, such as the opera, symphony, or perhaps dance music, being illustrated and varied by the performance of examples of those forms. The organized musical clubs could here be of the greatest service in taking charge of the ...
— A Library Primer • John Cotton Dana
... pant eager for the goal. Old Norbury starts, and, with the seventh-form boys, In weeds of Greek the church-yard's peace annoys, With classic Weston, Charley Coote and Tew, In dismal dance about the mournful yew. But first in notes Sicilian placed on high, Bates sounds the soft precluding symphony; And in sad cadence, as the bands condense, The curfew tolls ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 9, Saturday, December 29, 1849 • Various
... indifferent, stood beside him, in silent attention, as if watching the progress of the work. He observed more than once the man's hard features, as if by the force of association, prepare to accompany the sound of the saw and hammer with his usual symphony of a rude tune, hummed or whistled,and as often a slight twitch of convulsive expression showed, that ere the sound was uttered, a cause for suppressing it rushed upon his mind. At length, when he had patched a considerable rent, and was beginning to mend another, his feelings appeared altogether ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... there is a fellow in a green canoe, and the muscles of his body play into the movement of the waves until he and his green canoe and the white capped waves are all one motif of the whole symphony. Men play around the yacht club like a lot of school boys, and now—"Shoot," they push a long slim racer into the water. Dainty white yachts go dipping to the waves and seem like lovely young girls in among ...
— Vignettes of San Francisco • Almira Bailey
... occupants of the little gray house to share it with her. Soon afterward Mr. Stevens, Constance's foster-father, whose name she still bore and refused to change, had accepted a position as first violin in a symphony orchestra and had gone to fulfill his destiny in the world of music which he loved. Uncle John Roland and little Charlie, once puny and crippled, but now strong and rosy, had, with Constance, come into the lonely old woman's household at a time when she most needed them, and, in her contrition ...
— Marjorie Dean - High School Sophomore • Pauline Lester
... with white hair and the mustaches of a Viking, displaying a leonine countenance out of which gazed a pair of eyes that seemed to have been made tragical by some profound chagrin. In his youth, a student in Paris, he had written some scores of songs, half a dozen sonatas, and a symphony. These efforts, though technically brilliant, had soon passed into oblivion. After a long while, during which nobody had heard a sound from him, Brantome had popped up in the United States to begin his critical career. Now he was courted not only in artistic circles but also in the fashionable ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman
... sound is discord, for such enchantment as it begets cannot be made articulate. Its influence steals into the senses and lifts the spirit up. To defile or despoil such beauty would be to desecrate a shrine. But the sordid man sees in this symphony of color nothing else than a promise of fruit. His response is wholly physical, not spiritual at all. His spiritual sense seems atrophied and he can do nothing but estimate the bushels of fruit. He feels no respect for the beauty before him and it is ...
— The Reconstructed School • Francis B. Pearson
... were bright with revelry, The beakers red with wassail; And music's grandest symphony Rung thro' the ancient castle; And she, the brightest of the throng, With wedding-veil and roses, Seemed like the beauty of a song ...
— The Poets and Poetry of Cecil County, Maryland • Various
... abhorrence of musical warfare and his avoidance of the larger and more imposing forms of the opera, symphony, and oratorio, there were other causes which retarded the recognition of his transcendent genius. The unprecedented originality of his style, and the distinct national coloring of his compositions, did not meet with a sympathetic appreciation in ...
— Chopin and Other Musical Essays • Henry T. Finck
... see yet; and I don't like to ask, it gives the musical people who really know the chance to be so superior, and they are conceited enough as it is, goodness knows. Anyone would think it was a disgrace not to have been lullabyed to sleep when a baby by a symphony orchestra! I'm sure it isn't my fault if I don't know which is Schumann and which is Schubert; and what's the difference? (Between you and me I don't care. Of course I adore music, but it's like a great many other things—you mustn't ...
— The Smart Set - Correspondence & Conversations • Clyde Fitch
... that this world is a creation; that in its centre there is a living idea which reveals itself in an eternal symphony, played on innumerable instruments, all keeping perfect time. We know that this great world-verse, that runs from sky to sky, is not made for the mere enumeration of facts—it is not "Thirty days hath September"—it has its direct revelation in our delight. That delight ...
— Creative Unity • Rabindranath Tagore
... never saw the sea Save in my dreams. There it was vast and lone, Splendid in power, breaking against the stone Walls of the world in thunder symphony. ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... important and so occupied—she whose whole time lately had been vacant and idle—so willing to admire her new possessions, so openly elated with their superiority, and not insensible to the fact that all these prominent obtrusive cares were but little superfluous notes of the great symphony upon which she had entered, and whose infinitely deeper, fuller, higher tones she would ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... painting were cultivated—the former being, as now, a necessary part of female education. Of a festival given by the young ladies of a place called La Cote, near Quebec, in 1764, it is promised in the programme that "the orchestra and symphony will be composed of instruments of all kinds." It may interest some ladies to know that among the dances at the same entertainment are mentioned 'l'Harlequinade,' 'La Chinoise,' and 'La Matelote Hollandaise'—some relation, perhaps, ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... charming little bay of Glaucus, into which we entered on the 26th of September, in the first steam-boat that ever disturbed its beautiful waters. You can't put down in prose that delicious episode of natural poetry; it ought to be done in a symphony, full of sweet melodies and swelling harmonies; or sung in a strain of clear crystal iambics, such as Milnes knows how to write. A mere map, drawn in words, gives the mind no notion of that exquisite nature. What do mountains become in type, or rivers in Mr. Vizetelly's ...
— Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo • William Makepeace Thackeray
... dry pod, tick, tick, tick, Tick, tick, tick, like mites in a quarrel— Faint iambics that the full breeze wakens— But the pine tree makes a symphony thereof. Triolets, villanelles, rondels, rondeaus, Ballades by the score with the same old thought: The snows and the roses of yesterday are vanished; And what is love but a rose that fades? Life all around me here in the village: Tragedy, comedy, valor and truth, Courage, constancy, heroism, ...
— Spoon River Anthology • Edgar Lee Masters
... a resemblance between The Captive and the C-minor symphony; I wonder if any one else would have thought of it. It is not merely the opening—it is the whole content of the thing—the struggle of a prisoned spirit. I would call The Captive a symphony, and print the C-minor themes in it, only it would seem ...
— The Journal of Arthur Stirling - "The Valley of the Shadow" • Upton Sinclair
... when we now and then discharge ourselves in a symphony of laughter; which may not improperly be called the chorus ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... were all dead, especially Miss Child," snarled the last of the five, a symphony in black and all conceivable shades of blue. Because of this combination, the Miss Child in question had named ...
— Winnie Childs - The Shop Girl • C. N. Williamson
... crystal spheres! Once bless our human ears, If ye have power to touch our senses so; And let your silver chime Move in melodious time; And let the bass of heaven's deep organ blow; And with your ninefold harmony Make up full concert to the angelic symphony. ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... like a symphony, weaving together requiem, cradle-song, battle-march, and psalm, to a consummation of tender and majestic peace. As the recurrent theme which governs the whole may ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam
... happiness; neither is pleasure. Pleasure is temporary, happiness is continuous; pleasure is a note, happiness is a symphony; pleasure may exist when conscience utters protests; happiness,—never. Pleasure may have its dregs and its lees; but none can be found in ...
— The Majesty of Calmness • William George Jordan
... have accused Handel and Beethoven of not being simple, I have always said, 'Is Gothic architecture simple?' A cathedral expresses one idea, but it is indefinitely varied and elaborated in its parts; so is a symphony or quartett of Beethoven." ...
— Loss and Gain - The Story of a Convert • John Henry Newman
... of entranced delight, she was awakened by the sound of music immediately under her window. It was a lute touched by a masterly hand. After a wild and melancholy symphony, a voice of more than magic expression swelled into an air so pathetic and tender, that it seemed to breathe the very soul of love. The chords of the lute were struck in low and sweet accompaniment. Julia listened, and distinguished the ...
— A Sicilian Romance • Ann Radcliffe
... passed. He was dressed in Victorian livery, complete to knee-breeches and lace, and Malone thought this was rather odd for the classless Russian society. But the doorman was only the opening note of a great symphony. ...
— Supermind • Gordon Randall Garrett
... just high enough without being too high. The South Downs are very good, and by making believe very much I have sometimes been half able to fancy when upon them that I might be on the Monte Generoso, but they are only good as a quartet is good if one cannot get a symphony. ...
— Alps and Sanctuaries of Piedmont and the Canton Ticino • Samuel Butler
... Carlos, in the opera of "The Duenna," he was disappointed with the measure of applause bestowed upon his efforts, and complained that the obbligato cadenza—which Mr. Parke had time out of mind played on the oboe in the symphony of the song, "Had I a heart for falsehood framed"—interfered with the effect of his singing, and that the applause which was obtained by the cadenza deprived him of his encore. Accordingly he requested that the cadenza ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... laughter. Anne is to be found in the rose garden with clipping-shears and a basket. Hilda is a capable person; there is no ignoring her militant character; the battles of Saxon kings ring still in her blood. Marjorie has scribbled verses in secret, and Celia is the quietest auditor at the symphony. And you may have observed that there is no button on Elizabeth's foil; you do well not to clash wits with her. Do you say that these ascriptions are not square with your experience? Then verily there must have been a sad mixing of infant candidates for the font in your parish. Shirley, ...
— The Port of Missing Men • Meredith Nicholson
... unaffected respect; and to be treated with respect by a man is the greatest delight for a boy. It was the golden time of 'retrograding transcendentalism,' as the hard-heads called the Anglo-Catholic symphony. He seemed to me then an apostle of unworldly ardor, bridling ...
— The Grand Old Man • Richard B. Cook
... whereon no shadow falls, And straightway melting it distils away, Like a fire-wasted taper: thus was I, Without a sigh or tear, or ever these Did sing, that with the chiming of heav'n's sphere, Still in their warbling chime: but when the strain Of dulcet symphony, express'd for me Their soft compassion, more than could the words "Virgin, why so consum'st him?" then the ice, Congeal'd about my bosom, turn'd itself To spirit and water, and with anguish forth Gush'd through the lips and eyelids from the heart. Upon the chariot's right edge still she stood, ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... into confused and deadly conflict, arousing antagonisms in established orders, unleashing cupidities and passions which had lurked within the breasts of manifold adventurers. The fifteenth century closed to a solemn symphony. After the middle of the sixteenth, discord sounded from every quarter of the Occidental world. Italy lay trampled on and dying. Spain reared her dragon's crest of menacing ambition and remorseless fanaticism. France was torn by factions and devoured by vicious ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... said Schaunard, who suspected signs of mental alienation, "I'll play the allegro of my symphony on 'The Influence of Blue in the Arts.'" So saying, he approached ...
— Bohemians of the Latin Quarter • Henry Murger
... nature; but he possessed a something more than a mere smattering of other odd crafts. He was familiar with precious gems, marbles he knew and cameos; he could point out the weakness in a drawing, the false effort in a symphony; he was something of mutual interest to every man and ...
— A Splendid Hazard • Harold MacGrath
... that would best be represented by a musical rest—a silence in the midst of a symphony. Then her clear eyes ...
— The Wrong Woman • Charles D. Stewart
... very anxious to exhibit her maternal affection by embracing the innocent creature who performed the daughter's part. Every caress was received with loud acclamations of laughter by the sympathizing audience. At its conclusion (while the music was performing a symphony as if ever so many birds were warbling) the whole house was unanimous for an encore: and applause and bouquets without end were showered upon the Nightingale of the evening. Lord Steyne's voice of applause was loudest of ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... music!" he recklessly exclaimed aloud. "Then music shall be heard, though its symphony be rung upon ...
— The Red Rover • James Fenimore Cooper
... father's house, or sing with too much boisterousness at the dinners of the St. Andrew's Club, for which the Leith frigates had made special provision of the Scottish wine. Anon the fingers strayed upon an Italian symphony full of languors and of sun, and once at least a dance gave ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... symphony from the sound of his daughters' voices, Madigan fed his dog, his cat, and his favorite canary, and with his head upon one hand, in token of his abiding disgust with the human, daughterful world, ate ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson
... the rising glow, then stretched himself. Unconsciously he was asking of limbs and muscles as to their fitness; as he drew in deep breaths of the soft air and let the tautened sinews relax again there was no alien note in the symphony of his being—all felt as sound and strong as ever; now he was standing the twinge did not bother him—he told himself that in every inch of him he was still the man he was. Yet he knew he no longer felt the twang of some divine-strung ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... pitch, of time-quality, or of tonality. Almost, if not all, Indian songs," he adds, "are as strictly developed out of modified repetitions of a motive as are the movements of a Mozart or a Beethoven symphony." "In all primitive music," asserts Alice C. Fletcher,[91] "rhythm is strongly developed. The pulsations of the drum and the sharp crash of the rattles are thrown against each other and against the voice, so that it would ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 4 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... other's ken; and nowhere was my thanksgiving more fervent than in the deep cleft threaded by the beck; for here the shrewd yet gentle wind passed completely overhead, and the silence was purged of oppression by the ceaseless symphony of clear ...
— Dead Men Tell No Tales • E. W. Hornung
... mechanism were to find worthy reception were shaped in his own marvellous structure. The organ of hearing was finished by its Divine Builder while yet the morning stars sang together, and the voices of the young creation joined in their first choral symphony. We have seen how the mechanism of the artificial organ takes on the likeness of life; we shall attempt to describe the living organ in common language by the aid of such images as our ordinary dwellings furnish us. The unscientific reader need not ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863 • Various
... entered, securing her attention. She had heard the birds before without recognizing consciousness, as is so often true of our own condition in regard to the familiar sounds of nature. It was now almost as if she had received another sense, so strong, sweet, and cheering was the symphony. Robins, song-sparrows, blackbirds, seemed to have gathered in the trees nearby, to give her a jubilant welcome; but she soon found that the music shaded off to distant, dreamlike notes, and remembered that it was a morning chorus of a hemisphere. This universality did not render the melody ...
— He Fell in Love with His Wife • Edward P. Roe
... south of the Serchio are diligently pruned, and lack the generous luxuriance of the north), and against the silver background the sentinel cypresses stood black, like sharp music notes striking abruptly into a vague symphony; and among the mulberry gardens and the olives and the cypresses white roads climbed and spiralled up to little cresting cities that took the rosy dawn. Tuscany emerging out of the dim mystery of night had a splendid clarity, an unblurred ...
— The Lee Shore • Rose Macaulay
... sewing and singing, while a baby rolling on the floor in a state of perfect ecstasy, was keeping up a sort of crowing duet with her. She seemed delighted to see these ladies, who belong to the Junta, and led us into a large hall where a score of nurses and babies were performing a symphony of singing, hushing, crying, lullabying, and other nursery music. All along the room were little green painted beds, and both nurses and babies looked clean and healthy. The ——-s knew every baby and ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca
... day. The panorama before me is of a grandiose splendor; it is a symphony of mountains, a cantata of ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the river, in a sheltered little coulee, there was a group of great bull pines. Sometimes she had gone there and leaned against a tree trunk, and had shut her eyes and listened to the vast symphony which the wind and the water played together. She forgot that she had come to see a picture which she had helped to create. She held her eyes shut and listened; and that horror of high walls and iron bars that had haunted her for days, and the aged, broken man who was her father, dimmed and ...
— Jean of the Lazy A • B. M. Bower
... hear the most beautiful of all these confessions: and for once let us indulge ourselves with the whole. The themes that make up Milton's great symphony ought in truth always to be given unbroken, if only that were possible. Indeed, there is a sense in which it may be said that nothing less than the whole poem can do justice to a design so majestic as that of Paradise Lost. But in any case it is certain that no fragment ...
— Milton • John Bailey
... incredible fidelity, and after the lapse of years, demands only a command of mechanical skill, and an abnormal condition of the power of memory; but to play secondo to music never heard or seen implies the comprehension of the full drift of the symphony in its current,—a capacity to create, in short. Yet such attempts as Tom has made to dictate music for publication do not sustain any such inference. They are only a few light marches, gallops, etc., simple and plaintive ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 61, November, 1862 • Various
... Freischutz, said of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony: "The extravagances of genius have reached the limit; Beethoven is now ripe for an asylum." Of the opening phrase, on a reiterated "e," the Abbe Stadler said to his neighbour, when first he heard it: "Always that miserable ...
— Concerning the Spiritual in Art • Wassily Kandinsky
... of a life which was so filled with the Holy Ghost that this Man became the symbol of the Most High, the sacrament of His Being and Presence, the sacred shrine of Deity. As when the long-drawn travail of instrumentation labors through the opening movements of the ninth symphony, with a strain too fine for any voicing save by man, there bursts at length upon the tumultuous storm of sound the clear, high, song of joy from human lips; so from the mounting efforts of a nation's insufficient utterance there rises at last a voice, which takes up every groaning of ...
— The Right and Wrong Uses of the Bible • R. Heber Newton
... while any one can sing Der Erlkonig in three minutes. Are short compositions better than long ones? Answer: Love me and the World is Mine is a short song (although it seldom sounds so) while Schubert's C major Symphony is called the "symphony of heavenly length." ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... experience, a constant repetition of nerve-shocks, under which the "centers" must ultimately give way. But to the two Americans, fresh from the mining camps of the West, and attuned to any pitch that Nature might strike in her marvelous symphony, the experience was one to be taken in the same spirit as all else that pertained to their romantic calling. Rosendo and his men accepted the day's stint of toil and danger with dull stolidity. Carmen threw herself upon her thought, and saw in her shifting environment only the human mind's interpretation ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... And the effort to learn about useful things seems natural and logical to me too, but not to learn about merely agreeable things. To learn medicine and mechanics is logical; but to learn to look at a picture or to hear a symphony is ...
— Caesar or Nothing • Pio Baroja Baroja
... our country has made in material civilization have been conditioned in part by this type of genius. Creative genius must always compel our admiration and our respect. It may create a world epic, a matchless symphony of tones or pigments, a scientific theory of tremendous grasp and limitless scope; or it may create a vast industrial system, a commercial enterprise of gigantic proportions, a powerful organization of capital. Genius is pretty much the same wherever we find it, and everywhere ...
— Craftsmanship in Teaching • William Chandler Bagley
... window, crossed one leg over the other, remembered that her snug suit-skirt wasn't built for that attitude, uncrossed them again, and caught the delighted and understanding eye of the fat traveling man, who was a symphony in brown—brown suit, brown oxfords, brown scarf, brown bat, brown-bordered handkerchief just peeping over the edge of his pocket. He looked like a ...
— Roast Beef, Medium • Edna Ferber
... pastry-cook's stall, where a continued feu-de-joie of ginger-pop was kept up during the whole afternoon and evening. In short, the scene was one of complete al fresco enjoyment; how could it be otherwise? The flowers delighted the eye; Mr. Godfrey's well-trained band (to wit, Beethoven's symphony in C minor, with all the fiddle passages beautifully executed upon clarionets!) charmed the ear; and the edibles and drinkables aforesaid the palate. Under such a press of agreeables, the Surrey Zoological Gardens well deserve the name ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... the torch grunted, and (after pausing a second at B.'s bed to inspect a picture of perfect innocence) banged out through the door which whanged to behind him and another planton, of whose presence I had been hitherto unaware. A perfect symphony of "Bonne nuits" "Dormez biens" and other affectionate admonitions greeted the exeunt of the authorities. They were advised by various parts of the room in divers tongues to dream of their wives, to be careful of themselves ...
— The Enormous Room • Edward Estlin Cummings
... its love-note dies; And beauty fades in the air, To make the master-symphony immortal, And find new life and ...
— The New Morning - Poems • Alfred Noyes
... of Death as the deliverer, the revealer, and the mystagogue, through whom the soul of man is reunited to the spirit of the universe, returns; and on this solemn note the poem closes. The symphony of exultation which had greeted the passage of Adonais into the eternal world, is here subdued to a graver key, as befits the mood of one whom mystery and mourning still oppress on earth. Yet even in the somewhat less than jubilant conclusion we feel that highest of all Shelley's qualities—the ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... a distinctness beyond that of human articulation. The stillness of his solitude was only broken by the rustling of the night-breeze among the laurustines, and yet in the ears of Cagliostro there was the utterance as of unsubstantial lips—the sense as of a divine symphony—"the thunder, and the music, and the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... had lain upon my writing-table the entire summer, and it was my habit whenever I laid down my pen for a moment to take up one book or the other, and glance at a page of Ehlert's criticisms upon opera, symphony, or song, or Madame de Stael's profound essays ...
— The Story of a Summer - Or, Journal Leaves from Chappaqua • Cecilia Cleveland
... darker and darker. Everywhere, in a great circle, the country is lighted up by camp fires which send their flames toward heaven in a cloud of smoke. These little red spots throw everywhere a fiery glow over the snow, and down upon this wonderful color symphony the moon pours its weak, ghostlike light through a curtain of clouds so that people seem to float away as in a dream. In the foggy twilight three battalions march to the front.... The noise of the gunfire penetrates to us in separate, ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume II (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... spare you to me a little, for as a spirit my every thought is known; or perhaps after the resurrection, when I, too, can leave this planet, we shall all soar through space together, and we can study the stars as of old." "Your voice is a symphony, sweetest Violet, and I love to hear your words. Ah, would you could once more return to earth, or that I were an ethereal spirit, that we might commune face to face! I would follow you from one end of Shadowland to the other. Of what use is life to ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds • J. J. Astor |
