"Dulcimer" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... first time to the inner meaning of the chapter in his Venetian Life that Howells labels Comincia far Caldo, the season when repose takes you to her inner heart and you learn her secrets, when at last you know why it was an Abyssinian maid who played upon her dulcimer, at last you recognize in Xanadu the land where you ...
— Nights - Rome, Venice, in the Aesthetic Eighties; London, Paris, in the Fighting Nineties • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... festivities went on around him. Warm glances of love caressed his face, still cold with the touch of the grave; and a friend's warm hand patted his bluish, heavy hand. And the music played joyous tunes mingled of the sounds of the tympanum, the pipe, the zither and the dulcimer. It was as if bees were humming, locusts buzzing and birds singing over the happy home of Mary ...
— Best Russian Short Stories • Various
... Sibthorpe’s ministrations (whose perversions and reversions between Romanism and Anglicanism were, at the least, remarkable), this gallery reverberated with the inspiring strains of the fiddle, the trombone, the hautboy, the clarionet (“harp, sackbut, psaltery, and dulcimer”), and other kinds of music, to the hearty enjoyment of all. This massive screen was the gift of a member of the collegiate body, one Robert de Whalley, in 1528. Little survives of the original choir but some stalls ...
— Records of Woodhall Spa and Neighbourhood - Historical, Anecdotal, Physiographical, and Archaeological, with Other Matter • J. Conway Walter
... indorsed this Allen boy, and gave lengthy accounts of his manifestations. The arrangements for his exhibition were very simple. A dulcimer, guitar, bell, and small drum being placed on a sofa or several chairs set against the wall, a clothes-horse was set in front of them and covered with a blanket, which came to the floor. To obtain "manifestations," a person was required to take off his coat and sit with his back ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum
... 'minions thou hast seen His proudest temples sink into decay, Grim desolation and desuetude; The silent hush succeed the plaintive hymn, The anthem cease to swell in rhythmic praise, Or vaulted dome re-echo with the sound Of pipe, of organ, harp and dulcimer; The voice of sacerdotal eloquence Become as silent as the unborn thought; The fragrant perfume of the frankincense, The scent of swinging censor and of myrrh, Supplanted by foul odors of decay; The sacred flame extinguished and forgot, Its votaries and congregations fled; The forms ...
— Mountain idylls, and Other Poems • Alfred Castner King
... Fanning the faint and purple bloom that clings To the great twilight where our dreams are stored. Freedom was what the waters would afford That yet obeyed the white moon's whisperings, And freedom leapt and listened in the strings Of dulcimer and lute ...
— Miscellany of Poetry - 1919 • Various
... to see Mrs. Came's new lamp lighted for the first time, to examine her last drawn-in rug (a wonderful achievement produced entirely from dyed flannel petticoats), and to hear the doctor's wife play "Oft in the Still Night," on the dulcimer. ...
— New Chronicles of Rebecca • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... begun and never finished; scraps of poems, chips of poems, paving the floor with intentions never carried out. One cannot help remembering Coleridge with his incomplete "Christabel," and his "Abyssinian Maid," and her dulcimer which she never got a tune out of. We all know there was good reason why Coleridge should have been infirm of purpose. But when we look at that great unfinished picture over which Allston labored with the hopeless ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... dome of pleasure Floated midway on the waves; Where was heard the mingled measure From the fountain and the caves. It was a miracle of rare device, A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice! A damsel with a dulcimer In a vision once I saw: It was an Abyssinian maid, And on her dulcimer she played, Singing of Mount Abora. Could I revive within me Her symphony and song, To such a deep delight 'twould win me, That with music loud and ...
— Lyra Heroica - A Book of Verse for Boys • Various
... A dulcimer player gains his elastic blow by the free movement of the wrist. To gain a similarly elastic blow mechanically in his first action, Cristofori cut a notch in the butt of his hammer from which the escapement lever, "linguetta mobile" as he called it—"hopper," as we call it—being ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 385, May 19, 1883 • Various
... musicians intended to garner at the propylaea the first fruits of the liberality which had here not yet spent itself. There were a girl harpist with repulsive, staring eyes; an old invalid with a wooden leg, who, on a dreadful, evidently home-made instrument, half dulcimer, half barrel-organ, was endeavoring by means of analogy to arouse the pity of the public for his painful injury; a lame, deformed boy, forming with his violin one single, indistinguishable mass, was playing endless waltzes with all the hectic violence ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... structure of the Ancient lyre, whose music is said to have produced such wonderful effects. This instrument was composed of an hollow frame, over which several strings were thrown, probably in some such manner as we see them in an harp, or a dulcimer. They did not so much resemble the viol, as the neck of that instrument gives it peculiar advantages, of which the Ancients seem to have been wholly ignorant. The Musician stood with a short bow in his right hand, and a couple of small thimbles upon the fingers of his left: with these he ...
— An Essay on the Lyric Poetry of the Ancients • John Ogilvie
... old days there was a young man—just a boy he was—the son of a rich merchant who had lost all his money and died. So Sadko was very poor. He had not a kopeck in the world, except what the people gave him when he played his dulcimer for their dancing. He had blue eyes and curling hair, and he was strong, and would have been merry; but it is dull work playing for other folk to dance, and Sadko dared not dance with any young girl, for he had no money to marry ...
— Old Peter's Russian Tales • Arthur Ransome
... was harmless enough—a red and white maid, plump as a partridge in the end of harvest. She was forever humming at songs, singing little choruses, and inventing of new melodies, all tunefully and prettily enough. And she would bring her dulcimer to the window and play them over, nodding her head to the ...
— Red Axe • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... 590 Author and end of all things, and from work Now resting, bless'd and hallowd the Seav'nth day, As resting on that day from all his work, But not in silence holy kept; the Harp Had work and rested not, the solemn Pipe, And Dulcimer, all Organs of sweet stop, All sounds on Fret by String or Golden Wire Temper'd soft Tunings, intermixt with Voice Choral or Unison: of incense Clouds Fuming from Golden Censers hid the Mount. 600 Creation and the Six dayes acts they ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... sport is Oriental. He believes his women-folk should not be too patent. Somewhere behind grilles or flower-ornamented fire escapes they await him. There, no doubt, they tread on rugs from Teheran and are diverted by the bulbul and play upon the dulcimer and feed upon sweetmeats. But away from his home the sport is an integer. He does not, as men of other races in Manhattan do, become the convoy in his unoccupied hours of fluttering laces and high heels ...
— The Voice of the City • O. Henry
... effect, proclaiming and notifying the character, without putting the fair supporter to any disagreeable expense of Hebrew or Chaldee. The silver bells alone would 'bear the bell' from every competitor in the room; and she might besides carry a cymbal—a dulcimer—or ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v2 • Thomas de Quincey
... Caroline liked to hear her sing. Her voice, even in speaking, was sweet and silver clear; in song it was almost divine. Neither flute nor dulcimer has tones so pure. But the tone was secondary, compared to the expression which trembled through—a tender vibration from a ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... Yonder stood an inlaid cabinet, surmounted by a crystal mirror and some wonders of Murano glass. There was a picture by Mantegna, some costly cameos and delicate enamels, an abundance of books, a dulcimer which a fair-haired page was examining with inquisitive eyes, and by a window on the right stood a very handsome harp that Guidobaldo had ...
— Love-at-Arms • Raphael Sabatini
... and merry, sit behind musical instruments, of so great variety as to recall the "cornet, flute, sackbut, harp, psaltery, and dulcimer" of Scripture. The "head wife" of the premier, earnestly engaged in creaming her lips, reclines apart on a dais, attended ...
— The English Governess At The Siamese Court • Anna Harriette Leonowens
... water, even Locherbriggflow, on the night of the Midsummer fair of Dumfries. Ay, ay, who can doubt the truth of that? Have not the godly inhabitants of Almsfieldtown and Tinwaldkirk seen the sweet youth riding at midnight, in the midst of the unhallowed troop, to the sound of flute and of dulcimer, and though meikle they prayed, naebody tried to ...
— Folk-Lore and Legends - Scotland • Anonymous
... the melody of thy viols;" while, Puritan-fashion, they ignored the other half of the verse, "Take thou away from me the noise of thy songs." Disparaging comparisons were made with Nebuchadnezzar's idolatrous concert of cornet, flute, dulcimer, sackbut, and psaltery; and the ministers, from their overwhelming store of Biblical knowledge, hurled text after text ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... sun-burned faces will I hope suggest that they have wandered from village to village in some country of our dreams, can describe place and weather, and at moments action, and accompany it all by drum and gong or flute and dulcimer. Instead of the players working themselves into a violence of passion indecorous in our sitting-room, the music, the beauty of form and voice all come to ...
— Certain Noble Plays of Japan • Ezra Pound
... to give a concert in, and pasted up written advertisements of his performance in various parts of the town. He sent free tickets to the preacher and schoolmaster, and the landlord's family went in for nothing. Nobody else came, though he played on the flute and harmonium, besides the dulcimer, and sang Lilly Dale, and Roll on, Silver Moon, so touchingly that the landlady wiped her eyes at their mere memory. As he had no money to pay stage-fare further, and the flute and harmonium—a small bellows organ without legs—were easier to ...
— Old Caravan Days • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... makes you so fond of Lithuania! Here are we, Father Missail and I, a sinner, when we fled from the monastery, then we cared for nothing. Was it Lithuania, was it Russia, was it fiddle, was it dulcimer? All the same for us, if only there was wine. That's the ...
— Boris Godunov - A Drama in Verse • Alexander Pushkin
... which may be seen and heard outside public-houses to this very day, i.e., a small hollow chest, with the strings stretched across it. An instrument of this kind could be played with the fingers, like a harp, or with a plectrum, like a zither, or with two little knob-sticks, like the dulcimer. Mersennus (b. 1588) also identifies the ...
— Shakespeare and Music - With Illustrations from the Music of the 16th and 17th centuries • Edward W. Naylor
... played by means of a plectrum, which was a small piece of metal, wood, or bone. The psaltery or nebel (which was of course derived from the Egyptian nabla, just as the kinnor probably was in some mysterious manner derived from the Chinese kin) was a kind of dulcimer or zither, an oblong box with strings which were struck by small hammers. The timbrel corresponds to our modern tambourine. The schofar and keren were horns. The former was the well-known ram's horn which is still blown on the occasion of ...
— Critical & Historical Essays - Lectures delivered at Columbia University • Edward MacDowell
... fire-place, then to bed, and up again to the stable and the field—week in, week out, with, in many cases, not a penny to spend from year's end to year's end; hearing no music and seeing no {192} brightness excepting the fiddle and the dulcimer, and the dance and the shows at the neighbouring "statty" (statute fair) at Michaelmas once a year. His master had absolute control of his life and actions, and sometimes would enforce it with the whip-stock. But now the farm lad has ...
— Fragments of Two Centuries - Glimpses of Country Life when George III. was King • Alfred Kingston
... Our priests were not afraid of sackbut and psaltery, dulcimer and trumpet, in the house of the Lord; for they knew who had given them the cunning to make them. Our prophets were not afraid of calling for music, when they wished to prophesy, and letting it soften and raise their souls, and open and quicken them till they saw into the inner harmony of things, ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... forward in the evolution of the stringed instrument was made during the Middle Ages when the psaltery became popular. It consisted of a box with strings across it, and records for us the first attempt at a sounding board. This was followed by the dulcimer, which closely resembled it but was somewhat larger. A plectrum was used to play ...
— How the Piano Came to Be • Ellye Howell Glover
... most musical sounds in nature proceeds from the crow. All the crow tribe, from the blue jay up, are capable of certain low ventriloquial notes that have peculiar cadence and charm. I often hear the crow indulging in his in winter, and am reminded of the sound of the dulcimer. The bird stretches up and exerts himself like a cock in the act of crowing, and gives forth a peculiarly clear, vitreous sound that is sure to arrest and reward your attention. This is no doubt the song the fox begged to be favored with, as in delivering it the crow must ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs |
