"Symphony" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... screaming cockatoo, and a capuchin monkey that grimaced a welcome. Through the folding-doors which opened into an adjoining room came the melancholy tones of a harmonium; and M. Cambray recognized a favorite air—Beethoven's symphony, "Les adieux, l'absence, et le retour." He paused a ...
— The Nameless Castle • Maurus Jokai
... a sweet glance at Sir Robert, who immediately led her to the piano-forte, followed by the Scottish merchant of the Baltic, whither the noble symphony of "The Douglas," "hound and horn," soon gathered the rest of the company. The remainder of the evening passed away delightfully in the awakened harmony. Mrs. Montresor joined Lady Albina in some touching Italian duets; Pembroke ...
— Thaddeus of Warsaw • Jane Porter
... and that of his "Samson" are the same; there is no dissimilarity between Haydn's symphonies and the "Creation"; Mozart's symphonies and his masses (though the masses are a little breezier, on the whole); Schubert's symphonies or songs and his masses or "The Song of Miriam"; Beethoven's Ninth Symphony and the great Mass ...
— Purcell • John F. Runciman
... tell upon the heart, with a deep moral and pathetic impression. But it is, in truth, nearly as conspicuous in the greater part of her productions; where we scarcely meet with any striking sentiment that is not ushered in by some such symphony of external nature—and scarcely a lovely picture that does not serve as an appropriate foreground to some deep or lofty emotion. We may illustrate this proposition, we think, by the following exquisite lines, on a palm-tree ...
— The Young Lady's Mentor - A Guide to the Formation of Character. In a Series of Letters to Her Unknown Friends • A Lady
... through a long and gloomy vista. We weep, or shudder, we draw a long sigh of despair, and feel that it could not have been otherwise. But in the opera, Othello is a ruffian, without excuse for his crime. We have suddenly a beautiful woman running distracted about the stage to a symphony—and a very noisy symphony—of violins, and butchered before our eyes ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 332, September 20, 1828 • Various
... the ground stood the Government Building, with a ready-made look out of keeping with the other architecture. Critics declared it the only discordant note in the symphony, Looking from the Illinois Building across the North pond, one saw the Art Palace, of pure Ionic style, perfectly proportioned, restful to view, contesting with the Administration Building for the architectural laurels of the Fair. South of the Illinois Building rose the Woman's Building, and next ...
— Official Views Of The World's Columbian Exposition • C. D. Arnold
... 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
... young but excellent composer is working at a symphony for my unhappy prodigal: I know it will be masterly. So soon as it is finished, I shall take the liberty of offering ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... hand!—let me decay Like the expiring lamp, unseen, away, And softly go to slumber with the dead. And if 'tis true what holy men have said, That strains angelic oft foretell the day Of death to those good men who fall thy prey, O let the aerial music round my bed, Dissolving sad in dying symphony, Whisper the solemn warning in mine ear; That I may bid my weeping friends good-by Ere I depart upon my journey drear: And, smiling faintly on the painful past, Compose my decent ...
— The Poetical Works of Henry Kirke White - With a Memoir by Sir Harris Nicolas • Henry Kirke White
... see that it is so obvious. This suit is a kind of Bridal Symphony, composed at Cologne when I got the telegram telling me of Svava's engagement. Just think of it! At Cologne—not ten hours' journey from Paris! But I could not wait ten hours; I had risen too much in my own estimation in view of my approaching ...
— Three Comedies • Bjornstjerne M. Bjornson
... human ears, —If ye have power to touch our senses so— And let your silver-chime Move in melodious time, And let the base of heaven's deep organ blow; And with your ninefold harmony Make up full consort to the angelic symphony. ...
— The Hundred Best English Poems • Various
... whole orchestra in himself," said Tommy enthusiastically, "and is the only living creature that I know of who can tackle a whole symphony without the aid of a ...
— Mrs. Raffles - Being the Adventures of an Amateur Crackswoman • John Kendrick Bangs
... suffusing: grief dispersed, And strength and pleasure beamed upon his brow. Then pointed she before him: first arose To his astonished and delighted view The sacred isle that shrines the queen of love. It stood so near him, so acute each sense, That not the symphony of lutes alone, Or coo serene or billing strife of doves, But murmurs, whispers, nay the very sighs Which he himself had uttered once, he heard. Next, but long after and far off, appear The cloud-like cliffs and ...
— Gebir • Walter Savage Landor
... for you," 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 Fifth String, The Conspirators • John Philip Sousa
... life is never one of rigid asceticism any more than it is one of voluptuous self-indulgence; it is an equilibrium of forces, a vital harmony, a constant symphony, in the performance of which all capabilities in all phases of expression are called into vital but never into hysterical activity. The true peace is so heroic that it only follows crucifixion of all that was once regarded as essential ...
— The Missionary • George Griffith
... sometimes labeled Vox Humana!), the crowing of a cock, the call of the cuckoo, the song of the nightingale, and the twitter of the canary, the ends of these pipes being bent over and inserted in water, just as the player blows into a glass of water through a quill in a toy symphony. Then there was the Hummel, a device which caused two of the largest pipes in the organ to sound at once and awake those who snored during the sermon! Finally there was the Fuchsschwanz. A stop-knob bearing the inscription, "Noli me tangere" (touch me not), was attached to the console. As ...
— The Recent Revolution in Organ Building - Being an Account of Modern Developments • George Laing Miller
... moves all hearts, as now thy form unrolls, Our dead seem shrouded in thy folds, stirred by the breath of souls! The color-bearer, young as Hope, and still a charming boy, In rhythm to the beating hearts and symphony of joy, Sways gently, as he bears it on, the emblem of a land Whose sons will in united ranks all enemies withstand. The young lieutenant, on whose face the standard's shadow falls, Knows well it makes him pass admired between those human ...
— Poems • John L. Stoddard
... talk gently, act frankly; to listen to stars and birds, to babes and sages with open heart; to bear all cheerfully, do all bravely, await occasions, hurry never; in a word, to let the spiritual, unbidden and unconscious, grow up through the common—this is to be my symphony." ...
— The Madcap of the School • Angela Brazil
... still greater efforts by their well timed ejaculations. There not only would the quaint melody of the negro "spirituals" swell instead of the more sophisticated airs of the hymn book, but every successful sermon would be a symphony and every prayer a ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... 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 Between the ...
— The Poets and Poetry of Cecil County, Maryland • Various
... 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 was he ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... intelligible to our dull ear—the Waterloo and Lisbon earthquakes, the Revolutions and the Warring Religions, all the glory and shame, the wild loves and bitter hatreds of humanity—even Birth and Death—but minor notes in the Grand Symphony, the Harmony of Infinitude, the little man who has undertaken the management of the microphone, without suspecting its significance, distracts us with the unwished for and utterly useless information that the Voice coming from beyond ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... played and heard a great deal of music,' she said, 'and of every symphony, every sonata, every nocturne I have a separate and distinct picture, an impression of shape and colour, of a figure, a group, a landscape, so that each of my favourite compositions has a name corresponding to the picture;—for instance, ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... reached the priest's house Beni-Mora was astir with a pleasant bustle of life. The military note pealed through its symphony. Spahis were galloping along the white roads. Tirailleurs went by bearing despatches. Zouaves stood under the palms, staring calmly at the morning, their sunburned hands loosely clasped upon muskets whose butts rested in the sand. But Domini scarcely noticed ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... echoed over the cemetery as he was approaching the end of his discourse. "The six feet of earth" was repeated again and again, like the refrain upon which a good composer will hang a whole symphony; and each time it seemed to make a deeper impression. The account in the evening papers might perhaps be slightly exaggerated, when it said that not an eye was dry; but certain is it that many wept, and not only women, but men also. Some even of the merchants, ...
— Garman and Worse - A Norwegian Novel • Alexander Lange Kielland
... low call of a wood-dove sounds from far away. A cricket shrieks, and stops suddenly, as if shocked at the discordant sound of its own voice. Far off in the hills I can hear the rushing of the wind, like a deep chord that unites in a sacred symphony with the golden sun and the glittering water to voice the infinite joy of living ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser
... she was music in herself, A symphony of joyousness. She sang, she sang from finger tips, From every tremble of her dress. I saw sweet haunting harmony, An ecstasy, an ecstasy, In that strange curling of her lips, That happy curling of her lips. And quivering with melody Those eyes I ...
— General William Booth enters into Heaven and other Poems • Vachel Lindsay
... bed at Royston, and we had stolen together down the moonlit passages with the lilt of that wicked music vibrating on the still summer air. Poor Constance! She was in her grave now; yet her troubles at least were over, but here, as by some bitter irony, instead of carol or sweet symphony, it was the Gagliarda that woke me from ...
— The Lost Stradivarius • John Meade Falkner
... 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 to the sight-seer whose jaded faculties ...
— A Bird-Lover in the West • Olive Thorne Miller
... brought to a successful conclusion when Helen, hanging head downward by one foot from a trapeze, balances lighted lamp on the other foot and plays Beethoven's Fifth Symphony on ...
— A Parody Outline of History • Donald Ogden Stewart
... know nothing of Beethoven's symphony in C, they are not familiar with the melodies of Rossini, Madame Grisi has never in her terrible finale "Qual cor tradisti" made them weep, nor has the orchestra of Monsieur Jullien made them deaf. But what are these splendid wonders of the ...
— Le Morvan, [A District of France,] Its Wild Sports, Vineyards and Forests; with Legends, Antiquities, Rural and Local Sketches • Henri de Crignelle
... got many colors in hit," said the boy, slowly, indicating with a sweep of his hand the symphony about them, "but somehow what there is is jest about the right ones. Hit whispers ter a feller, the same as a mammy whispers ter her baby." He paused, then eagerly asked: "Stranger, kin you look at the sky an' the mountings an' ...
— The Call of the Cumberlands • Charles Neville Buck
... into shapes befitting his triumph: castles rose and fell; faces grew, smiled, and faded away smiling; roses and lilies and palms glowed ruby red, turned to silver, and paled into spiritual gray. The silence of the night seemed resonant with a very symphony of joy. Still Sally and Raby slept on. The boy's sweet face took each hour a more healthful tint; and, as Doctor Eben watched the blessed change, he said ...
— Hetty's Strange History • Anonymous
... spend the minutes, pleasantly enough, in a world of turbid and 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 as a means to the emotions of life and reading into it the ideas of life. I have ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... change, he knew no more—change, with inscrutable veiled face, approaching noiseless. With the feeling, came the vision of a concert room, the rich hues of instruments, the silent audience, and the loud voice of the symphony. 'Destiny knocking at the door,' he thought; drew a stave on the plaster, and wrote in the famous phrase from the Fifth Symphony. 'So,' thought he, 'they will know that I loved music and had classical tastes. They? He, I suppose: the unknown, kindred spirit that shall come some ...
— The Ebb-Tide - A Trio And Quartette • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... treachery; and meanness, and numberless desires that had tortured her. She hated no one now; a twilight dimness was settling upon her thoughts, and, of all earthly noises, Emma heard none but the intermittent lamentations of this poor heart, sweet and indistinct like the echo of a symphony dying away. ...
— Madame Bovary • Gustave Flaubert
... 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 Court of the Empress Josephine • Imbert de Saint-Amand
... verse), vers-echos, fine literary joustings, discussions between the casuists. This salon had its talkers and speakers, those who tyrannized over the audience and those who charmed it, those who shot off fireworks and those who prepared them, those who had made a symphony of conversation and those who made of it a monologue and had no flashes of silence. They did not follow fashion there—they rather made it; in art and literature as in toilets, smallness follows the fashion, pretension exaggerates it, taste makes ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme
... hundred times; but abruptly it stopped, as if on a signal. For an instant there was a silence of waiting and suspense, which roused interest and piqued curiosity. Then there began a delicate symphony which could mean nothing but spring in a forest, and on that the curtain went up. The prophecy of the music was fulfilled, for the scene was a woodland in April, with young leaves a-flicker and blossoms in birth, the light song of the flutes and violins being the song ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... by Mrs. Howe in her ninetieth year and read by her in Symphony Hall, Boston, on the centenary of the martyred President's birthday, February ...
— The Poets' Lincoln - Tributes in Verse to the Martyred President • Various
... wilderness of a sea that has sighed till it can sigh no longer. Or it may be heard at some Methodist Camp Meeting upon a Welsh hillside, but in the churches it is gone for ever. If I were a musician I would take it as the subject for the adagio in a Wesleyan symphony. ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... "naturally precedes the development of any fine perception of differences in 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
... make of it in America. It is extremely interesting; and I always think that your Theory of the Intuitive versus the Analytical and Philosophical applies to the other Arts as well as that of the Drama. Mozart couldn't tell how he made a Tune; even a whole Symphony, he said, unrolled itself out of a leading idea by no logical process. Keats said that no Poetry was worth [anything] unless it came spontaneously as Leaves to a Tree, etc. {79} I have no faith in your Works of Art done on Theory and Principle, ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald to Fanny Kemble (1871-1883) • Edward FitzGerald
... night at my dance I didn't know that father was to be concertmeister in the symphony orchestra. It is a great honor and we are all very happy over it. He kept it to himself until the last minute, because he knew that if he told me, I would insist on going back to New York with him for his opening concert. But I'm going with him just the same. I shall ...
— Marjorie Dean - High School Sophomore • Pauline Lester
... the robes of Burne Jones' 'Vivien.' Next season the star of ceramics and bric-a-brac was in the ascendant, and I ran the gamut of Satsuma, Kyoto, de la Robbia, Limoge and Gubbio; of niello, and millchori glass, of Queen Anne brass and Japanese bronze; while my snuff boxes and my 'symphony in fans' graced all the loan exhibitions. Soon after, a celebrated scientist from England who had bowled over all the pins set up by his predecessors, lectured in our Bojotia; and fired with zeal for truth, I swept aside all my costly idealistic rubbish into a 'doomed pyramid of ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... the Symphony Club rehearsal this afternoon and report it. You've just ten minutes to get there," and Patty ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1907 to 1908 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... hopes that had run riot in his brain, for months past, seemed to have been summed up and made clear to him, in one supreme phrase of it, a great phrase in C major, in the concluding movement of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. First sounded by the shrill sweet winds, it had suddenly been given out by the strings, in magnificent unison, and had mounted up and on, to the jubilant trilling of the little flutes. There was such a courageous sincerity in this theme, such undauntable resolve; it expressed more ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... Bum is playing the lovely symphony in G minor from Beethoven's "Songs Without Music." The grand chords fill the room with exquisite harmony. He plays the extremely difficult passages in the obligato home run in a masterly manner, and when he finishes with that grand te deum with ...
— Rolling Stones • O. Henry
... could not understand the music, he could read books about it; he read a whole library—criticism of music, analysis of music, histories of music, composers of music; and so gradually he learned the difference between a sarabande and a symphony, and began to get some idea of what he went out for to hear. At first, at the concerts, all he could think of was to crane his neck and recognize the different instruments; he heard whole symphonies, while doing nothing but watching for the "movements," and making sure he hadn't skipped ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... you hear but one sound; and to you the result of all these various noises, each of which would have no meaning alone, is music composed by some great artist whom you do not see. It is no longer a flute, a double-bass, or a violin which you hoar; it is a symphony of Beethoven's, an oratorio of Haydn's, or Mozart's overture ...
— The History of a Mouthful of Bread - And its effect on the organization of men and animals • Jean Mace
... of the Light Universe, in a unity that is not now the unity of negation and undifferentiation—an Abyss that swallows up all that is in it,—but a unity of many wills united in a spirit of concord and love, many persons formed by holy desire into one unbroken symphony as harps ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... were—or, perhaps, had been—two distinct, opposed processes of thought, two different personalities, a fact still admirably illustrated by his private interest in the doll, in Cytherea. Much younger he had been fond of music, of opera and then symphony concerts, and his university years had been devoted to a wide indiscriminate reading: sitting until morning with college men of poetic tendencies, he had discussed the intricacies of conduct in the light of beauty rather than prudence. This followed him shyly into the world, the offices of the ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... perfection is the climax of Hellas. One feels in attempting to make about Hellas any statement in bald prose, the same sense of baffled incompetence that a modest mind experiences in attempting to describe music. One reads what the critics have written about Beethoven's Heroic Symphony, to close the page wondering that men with ears should have dared to write it. The insistent rhythm beats in your blood, the absorbing melodies obsess your brain, and you turn away realising that emotion, when it can find a channel of sense, ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford
... buffers as they hitch up suddenly again, sounds a regular obbligato accompaniment—the scream of the steam whistle, and the thundering whish and whirr of the train through a deep cutting or tunnel, or over a bridge with water below, coming in occasionally as a sort of symphony to the main air? ...
— She and I, Volume 2 - A Love Story. A Life History. • John Conroy Hutcheson
... trade wind, now hung limp and motionless, as if they had suffered from a long tropical drought instead of merely a few hours' cessation of the brave, cool breeze, which for nine months out of twelve for ever made symphony in ...
— John Frewen, South Sea Whaler - 1904 • Louis Becke
... limit to the power of sustaining a given conscious process while new features appear in the same field; nor is there any fixed limit to the power of recovering, under changed circumstances, a process that was formerly suspended. A whole symphony might be felt at once, if the musician's power of sustained or cumulative hearing could stretch so far. As we all survey two notes and their interval in one sensation (actual experience being always transitive and pregnant, and its terms ideal), ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... litigious. But of the other truths of life it is a fact that with the heart man believes. We approach wheat with scales, we measure silk with a yardstick; we test the painting with taste and imagination, and the symphony with the sense of melody; motives and actions are tested by conscience; we approach the stars with a telescope, while purity of heart is the glass by which we see God. The scales that are useful in the laboratory ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis
... time was rendered 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 railroad stations in Boston were visited ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume VI • Various
... had often heard the Scottish exiles croon with tears at his 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 ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... season began, it is clearly indicated that this conciliatory attitude will only last so long as the main German fleet continues to skulk behind the defences of Kiel. If there is any aggressive movement, then let it be understood that TSCHAIKOWSKI'S Pathetique Symphony will be worn threadbare by nightly repetition sooner than that we should have any truck with BRAHMS, WAGNER ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, September 2nd, 1914 • Various
... first four notes of the opening movement, Beethoven said, some time after he had finished the Fifth Symphony: "So pocht das Shicksal an die Pforte" ("Thus Fate Knocks at the Door"); and between that opening knock, and the tremendous rush and sweep of the Finale, the emotions which come into play in the great ...
— Fate Knocks at the Door - A Novel • Will Levington Comfort
... responded Tubby, with a bitter shrug. "But it's about as much use as a mouth organ in a symphony orchestra would be. Better get on the ...
— The Boy Scouts of the Eagle Patrol • Howard Payson
... composers, we find not the slightest evidence of their having been inspired by any outward agencies. Not till the art stood upon its own independent foundations does it appear that any musicians ever thought of turning such natural sounds to account; and—though with Beethoven's exquisite Pastoral Symphony ringing in our ears, with its plaintive clarionet cuckoo to contradict our words—we should say that no compositions could be of a high class in which such sounds were conspicuous.—Murray's Reading for ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 462 - Volume 18, New Series, November 6, 1852 • Various
... best for all seasons, but autumn offers some charming variations. The brilliant scarlet berries of the mountain ash or red thorn mingled with the deep, rich green of feathery asparagus, make a delicious color symphony most appropriate ...
— Vaughan's Vegetable Cook Book (4th edition) - How to Cook and Use Rarer Vegetables and Herbs • Anonymous
... harpings heard, not in full symphony as those by which the spheres are tutored; but, as loudest instruments on earth speak oftentimes, muffled; so to accommodate their sound the better to the weak ears of the imperfect-born. And, with the noise of those subdued soundings, the Angelet sprang forth, fluttering its rudiments of pinions—but ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... other songs, and the playing is like exquisite singing. It fills the mind with pictures, with persons, with scenes, and with that unspeakable content which only such music can give to the lovers of music. "What on earth is it all about?" said the Senator at the Symphony Concert, "and why do people come here?" The Hottentot would have asked the same question if he had heard the Senator ...
— From the Easy Chair, vol. 1 • George William Curtis
... to give what it has not. The finest hospitality is that which welcomes you to the fireside and permits you to look upon the picture of a home-life so little disturbed by your coming that you are at once made to feel yourself a part of the little symphony—the rare bit of color just needed to complete the harmonic combination. With this flattering fact impressed upon your glowing memory you will hardly be able to recall the material adjuncts of the occasion. It is a sign ...
— Etiquette • Agnes H. Morton
... Leonardo's pictures, thanks to the same photograph, and everybody's pictures, films of paper, countless spirits of themselves, pass around the world to every home in Christendom. The printing press made literature a democracy, and machinery is making all the arts democracies. The symphony piano, an invention for making vast numbers of people who can play only a few very poor things play very poorly a great many good ones, is a consummate instance both of the limitation and the value of our contemporary ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... plunging the nations 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 ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... beyond them the high-flying airplanes, darting like swallows in the shrapnel puffs of anti-air-craft fire. The roar of motors that are being tested, is punctuated by the staccato barking of machine guns, and at intervals the hollow whistling sound of a fast plane diving to earth is added to this symphony of war notes. ...
— Flying for France • James R. McConnell
... pictures and to miniatures, both of which are interesting. In the first are more Duerers, and that alone would make it a desirable resort. Here is a "Virgin and Child"—No. 851—very naive and homely, and the beautiful portrait of his father—No. 766—-a symphony of brown and green. Less attractive works from the same hand are the "Apostle Philip"—No. 777—and "S. Giacomo Maggiore," an old man very coarsely painted by comparison with the artist's father. Here also is a very beautiful portrait of Richard Southwell, by Holbein, with the peacock-green ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... makes more impression than all the others that are correctly played in an entire symphony, so does a discordant incident stand out and dominate a hundred others that are above criticism, ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... Matthew Arnold Three Shadows Dante Gabriel Rossetti Since we Parted Edward Robert Bulwer Lytton A Match Algernon Charles Swinburne A Ballad of Life Algernon Charles Swinburne A Leave-Taking Algernon Charles Swinburne A Lyric Algernon Charles Swinburne Maureen John Todhunter A Love Symphony Arthur O'Shaughnessy Love on the Mountain Thomas Boyd Kate Temple's Song Mortimer Collins My Queen Unknown "Darling, Tell me Yes" John Godfrey Saxe "Do I Love Thee" John Godfrey Saxe "O World, be Nobler" Laurence Binyon "In the ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 2 (of 4) • Various
... this matter is not, as good critics of painting and music often affirm, different from the other arts; in all of them the content is one thing with the form. What Beethoven meant by his symphony, or Turner by his picture, was not something which you can name, but the picture and the symphony. Meaning they have, but what meaning can be said in no language but their own: and we know this, though some strange delusion makes us think the meaning has ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... strongest fortifications of reinforced concrete, our military authorities promptly acquired. Must we be ashamed of this instrument of destruction and take from the lips of the "cultured world" the wry reproach that from "Faust" and the Ninth Symphony we have sunk our national pride to the 42-centimeter guns? No! Only firm will and determination to achieve, that is to say, German power, distinguishes the host of warriors now embattled on the five huge fields of blood from the race of the poets and thinkers. Their brains, too, yearn ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... me. Because I could walk into Hampton Court Palace and the National Gallery (on free days) and enjoy Mantegna and Michael Angelo whilst millionaires were yawning miserably over inept gluttonies; because I could suffer more by hearing a movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony taken at a wrong tempo than a duchess by losing a diamond necklace, I was indifferent to the repulsive fact that if I had fallen in love with the duchess I did not possess a morning suit in which I could reasonably have expected ...
— The Irrational Knot - Being the Second Novel of His Nonage • George Bernard Shaw
... that neighbors have been saying. Let the lungs be worn out by staying indoors without fresh air, and the needle be threaded with nerves exhausted. After one week's household annoyances, he would conclude that Wall street is heaven and the clatter of the Stock Exchange rich as Beethoven's symphony. ...
— Around The Tea-Table • T. De Witt Talmage
... to their facility. Musicians, for instance, often become intoxicated by their own sweet sounds, and are lured on to unseemliness, making much discord in life's symphony. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... kaleidoscopic thing: a momentary aspect of racial expression. In a thousand years it becomes unintelligible; we are modifying ours every day, upon laws whose nature can be guessed. Yet ultimately all is a symphony and ordered progression, with regular rhythms recurring; it only seems a chaos, and unmusical, because we hear no more than the fragment of ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... we now pass to instrumental, we may have a specimen of musical oratory in any fine military symphony or march: while the poetry of music seems to have attained its consummation in Beethoven's Overture to Egmont, so wonderful in its mixed expression ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... musicians, in order to keep together, agreed at length to follow the slight indications of time which the concertmeister (first violin-player) gave them; and not to attend to Beethoven's conducting-stick. Moreover, it should be observed, that conducting a symphony, an overture, or any other composition whose movements remain continual, vary little, and contain few nice gradations, is child's play in comparison with conducting an opera, or like work, where there are recitatives, airs, and numerous orchestral designs ...
— The Orchestral Conductor - Theory of His Art • Hector Berlioz
... enough, but crammed with copied loot of khedive and of czar. The seven-branch candlestick so biblical and supplicating of arms. An urn, shaped like Rebecca's, of brass, all beaten over with little pocks. Things—cups, trays, knockers, ikons, gargoyles, bowls, and teapots. A symphony of bells in graduated sizes. Jardinieres with fat sides. A pot-bellied samovar. A swinging-lamp for the dead, star-shaped. Against the door, an octave of tubular chimes, prisms of voiceless ...
— Humoresque - A Laugh On Life With A Tear Behind It • Fannie Hurst
... knowledge, it is absolutely proved that man is descended from some rough-hewn Ape? Of the two transformations, Favier's strikes me as the more credible. A painter of my acquaintance, a brother of the great composer Felicien David (Felicien Cesar David (1810-1876). His chief work was the choral symphony "Le Desert":—Translator's Note.), favoured me one day with his reflections on the ...
— More Hunting Wasps • J. Henri Fabre
... the rugged islands lie, Fir-crowned and grim; and further in the view Some shadows seeming swung 'twixt cloud and sky, Are countless shores, a symphony ...
— Flint and Feather • E. Pauline Johnson
... Dutchman' Liszt, Spontini, Marschner, etc. 'Tannhauser' Franck, Schumann, Semper, Gutzkow, Auerbach 'Lohengrin' (Libretto) Ninth Symphony Spohr, Gluck, Hiller, Devrient Official Position. Studies in Historical Literature 'Rienzi' at Berlin Relations with the Management, Mother's Death, etc. Growing Sympathy with Political Events, Bakunin The May Insurrection Flight: Weimar, Zurich, Paris, ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... appears to me always as a prelude consonant with those varying modes of anguish which each day I have to realise, nay more, to necessitate them even; as though my life, whatever it had seemed to myself and others, had all the while been a real symphony of sorrow, passing through its rhythmically linked movements to its certain resolution, with that inevitableness that in Art characterises the treatment of every great theme.... I spoke of your conduct to me on three successive days three years ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 2 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... crystall sphears;{34} Once bless our humane ears (If ye have power to touch our senses so), And let your silver chime Move in melodious time, And let the base of Heav'ns deep organ blow, And with your ninefold harmony Make up full consort{35} to th' angelike symphony. ...
— Six Centuries of English Poetry - Tennyson to Chaucer • James Baldwin
... of human nature should, in short, begin at the top, rather than at the bottom; just as, if one had to choose what phase of a symphony one would choose in order to get an idea of its perfection, one would take some culminating moment rather than the first few notes simply because they were the first. To be accurate, one could not do justice to the symphony except by studying it as a whole, and similarly one should study ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... 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 ...
— The Smart Set - Correspondence & Conversations • Clyde Fitch
... work, and saw that it was good. He had created a gem. The Old Town was a symphony in emerald ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... using a large medium, dividing it into several main parts, and subdividing these parts into short movements in various veins and forms, this was rendered possible. I do not wish to press the musical analogies too closely. I am aware that the word symphony, as a musical term, has a very definite meaning, and I am aware that it is only with considerable license that I use the term for such poems as Senlin or Forslin, which have three and five parts respectively, and do not in any orthodox way develop their themes. ...
— Contemporary American Literature - Bibliographies and Study Outlines • John Matthews Manly and Edith Rickert
... very exact in the use of its terms, when it has to work at such a disadvantage. Since we can never speak of a book with our eye on the object, never handle a book—the real book, which is to the volume as the symphony to the score—our phrases find nothing to check them, immediately and unmistakably, while they are formed. Of a novel, for instance, that I seem to know well, that I recall as an old acquaintance, I may confidently begin to express an opinion; but when, having expressed it, I ...
— The Craft of Fiction • Percy Lubbock
... and above the din they heard the clear, delicate notes of a bird's song—just as though the throbbing motors, the whizzing shells and the frightened wailing of the women were nothing but the harmonies devised by the divine composer of some military-pastoral symphony to sustain the slender ...
— General Bramble • Andre Maurois
... Denas sang the blessed affirmation, the organ pealed out its noble symphony, and men and women lifted wet faces heavenward, until to the last ...
— A Singer from the Sea • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... officers and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff took their orders from Mr. Tannenwald, who was, according to the New York Times, "the Administration's composer, orchestrator and conductor of the most important legislative symphony of the ...
— The Invisible Government • Dan Smoot
... thought 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 ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... necessary precaution if what he saw should really be a wild creature and at liberty; but the instant he stirred, a deep growl was uttered, such as the Count had never heard, but which might be compared to the sound of a thousand monsters at once; and, as the symphony, was heard the clash of iron chains, and the springing of a monstrous creature towards the bedside, which appeared, however, to be withheld by some fastening from attaining the end of its bound. The roars which it uttered now ran thick on each other. They were most tremendous, and must have ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... release of my soul. I was yet a 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 then an understanding of heaven, and I burst into tears. Ah! the meaning of these ...
— The Home • Fredrika Bremer
... low, confused twittering of bird-notes which had infused the solemn silence with a vague hint of life, strident sounds grew dominant—a crow calling to his mate from tree to tree—a short, sharp symphony of swallows—a cock announcing ...
— The Royal Pawn of Venice - A Romance of Cyprus • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... former. The higher the level on which a being stands the clearer the expression of its individuality. The most general forces of nature, which constitute the raw mass, play the fundamental bass in the world-symphony, the higher stages of inorganic nature, with the vegetable and animal worlds, the harmonious middle parts, and man the guiding treble, the significant melody. With the human brain the world as idea is given at a stroke; in this organ the will has kindled a torch ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... combination, and a contrast is afforded by the silvery gray bark of stray aspens. A still softer and more beautiful shade of silver gray is seen in the big hornet's nest of last year which still hangs suspended from a low sugar maple. On all of these the sunlight plays and makes a wondrous color symphony. "Truly the light is sweet and a pleasant thing it is for the eyes to behold the sun." To be sure, this colorful arrangement of the stems and twigs is not brilliant, like the flaming vermilion blossoms of the Lobelia cardinalis ...
— Some Winter Days in Iowa • Frederick John Lazell
... a term in music to indicate quick or lively time, coming between andante and presto; it is frequently modified by the addition of qualifying words. It is also used of a separate piece of music, or of a movement in a sonata, symphony, &c. ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... sweeping comes, Like myriad lyres that peal through Heaven's domes. But, oh! how sad and sweet the notes now come! Like music of the spheres that softly hum; It rises, falls, with measured melody, With saddest notes and mournful symphony. From all the universe sad notes repeat With doleful strains of woe transcendent, sweet; Hush! hear the song! my throbbing heart be still! The songs of gods ...
— Babylonian and Assyrian Literature • Anonymous
... 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, ...
— Lucile • Owen Meredith
... you hear. When Theodore Thomas said "Nothing so awakens interest in music as helping to make it," he hit the nail on the head. "After playing all this music I want to go to concerts next winter. I'd like to hear how the 'Fifth Symphony' sounds on the orchestra," said my little girl after the pianola had been in the house only a week. "All this music?" Yes indeed. More than she could have become familiar with in six months' concert-going and instruction. And we always had ...
— The Pianolist - A Guide for Pianola Players • Gustav Kobb
... may come when a German street-band will be recognized as a powerful tonic; a cornet solo will take the place of a blister; a symphony or a sonata may be recommended instead of morphine; the moxa will give way to Wagner, and opium to Brahms. A prolonged shake by a singer will drive out chills and fever, according to the theory of Hahnemann. Cots at symphony concerts may yet command ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... in all houses of its class and period, a thing of gilt frames, high mirrors and stiff furniture—was softened by heaps of cushions, low stools and soothing arm-chairs, while Miss Felicia's own particular room was so veritable a symphony in chintz, white paint and old mahogany, with cubby-holes crammed with knickknacks, its walls hung with rare etchings; pots of flowers everywhere and the shelves and mantels crowded with photographs ...
— Peter - A Novel of Which He is Not the Hero • F. Hopkinson Smith
... example is not likely to be lost on his brother composers. Indeed it is asserted on credible authority that Mr. GRANVILLE BANTOCK, who has completely forsworn all Oriental and exotic subjects, is engaged on a gigantic symphony, with choral interludes, entitled "Yorkshire Pudding;" and that Mr. JOSEF HOLBROOKE is collaborating with Lord HOWARD DE WALDEN in a romantic historical opera in fifteen Acts called ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, February 4, 1920 • Various
... the strings pierce through it, the Spear motive follows, and then, full of heavy pain, "Drink ye all of this," followed by the famous Grail motive—an old chorale also used by Mendelssohn in the Reformation Symphony. Then comes the noble Faith and ...
— Parsifal - Story and Analysis of Wagner's Great Opera • H. R. Haweis
... never have fitted any other text, but we should say the same of the Gloria if we did not possess the church cantata, Halt im Gedaechtniss. The Gloria begins with a triumphant polyphonic chorus accompanied by a spirited symphony for strings. At the words "et in terra pax" the time changes, and two flutes softly accompany a single solemn melody in the altos. At the "laudamus te" the material of the beginning returns, and is interrupted again by the calm slow movement, this ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... was too massive, too ornate for a betrothal ring; still he moved uneasily and set the cup down untasted. His eyes returned to her face, questioning, doubting. He was like a musician surprised to detect in a beautiful symphony the first ...
— The Rim of the Desert • Ada Woodruff Anderson
... stay out of sports—too dangerous; entertainment—didn't lend itself too well to the group approach; and music—they had never developed or used sound, and we agreed not to go into it. As I figured it, music in the soul may be very beautiful; but a full-size symphony in a ...
— Inside John Barth • William W. Stuart
... with immense ceiling-high windows, looks out on a united altar of grass, ocean, sky-a symphony in emerald, opal, sapphire. A mantle over the hall's huge fireplace holds the framed likeness of Lahiri Mahasaya, smiling his blessing over this far ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... island in a gorgeous sea of petals, there are roses, almonds, oranges, vines, pomegranates, and a hundred rivals whose names are unknown to the present historian, marching joyfully and triumphantly through the seasons, as the symphony moves through changes ...
— The Golden Fleece • Julian Hawthorne
... they spoke of a new symphony composed by a daring young Frenchman, who had striven to reproduce vices in notes and to summon up visions of things damnable by harmonic progressions which frequently defied the laws of harmony. Levillier gently condemned him for putting a great art ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... of Lincoln. It moved me like a symphony. But I did not believe it to be true. This government was not conceived in liberty. It was not dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. We were not engaged in a strife which tested whether this government so conceived ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters
... Armonica—there were you to be found of course seated in black velvet waistcoat (for I hope you remember these are dress concerts) on one of the benches, grumbling at most of the music. You had a long symphony of Beethoven's in B flat—I forget how it goes, but doubtless there was much good in it. The overture to Egmont is also a fine thing. The Atlas (which is the best weekly critic of Music and all other things that I know of) gives great [Greek text] to the ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... throwing up its shoots, the cherry-trees white with blooms, the lilacs and roses perfuming the air; but never again was he to sit beneath the vine-clad arbor as he had sat in former years, listening to Nature's symphony rehearsed by singing birds; never again was he to see the coming of ecstatic life in bud and blossom. He must bid farewell forever to all the enchanting scenes, pull up by the roots, as it were, all cherished things. ...
— Daughters of the Revolution and Their Times - 1769 - 1776 A Historical Romance • Charles Carleton Coffin
... smoke puff and dull red flare, struck the one jarring note in a symphony blown otherwise on great nature's organ-pipes; but to Thomas Jefferson the furnace was as much a part of the immutable scheme as the hills or the forests or the creek which furnished the motive power for its air-blast. More, it stood ...
— The Quickening • Francis Lynde
... himself, 'it is true. You seem to have knit all things in a piece for me. Things are not separate; they are all in a symphony. They go moving on and on. You are ...
— The Trespasser • D.H. Lawrence
... your Queen, the ROSE, for that is the name I give her.' Then taking a crown in her hand, that had been made on purpose in heaven, she placed it on the head of the new-made majesty; while to complete the ceremony, the attending gods sung joyful Io Paeans, amidst a symphony of flutes, harps, and all other tuneful instruments, with which the air resounded, while Flora and her bright celestial train ...
— On the Portraits of English Authors on Gardening, • Samuel Felton
... SYMPHONY, an elaborate orchestral composition consisting usually of four contrasted and related movements; began to take distinctive shape in the 17th century, and was for long merely a form of overture to operas, &c., but as its possibilities were perceived was elevated into an independent ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... of nerves. It would have been better to have known only the simple life, the life of these Arabs! Now they were singing about the camp fires. Queer were the intervals, impossible of notation, but the rhythms might be gathered... a symphony, a defined scheme.... The monotony of the chant hushed his thoughts, and the sleep into which he fell must have been ...
— Sister Teresa • George Moore
... play time, 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 ...
— Vignettes of San Francisco • Almira Bailey
... us several days to run Bouchalka down, but when we did find him Cressida promptly busied herself in his behalf. She sang his "Sarka" with the Metropolitan Opera orchestra at a Sunday night concert, she got him a position with the Symphony Orchestra, and persuaded the conservative Hempfstangle Quartette to play one of his chamber compositions from manuscript. She aroused the interest of a publisher in his work, and introduced him to people ...
— Youth and the Bright Medusa • Willa Cather
... transcending it, so the Ultimate Reality, they think, inhabits yet inconceivably exceeds all that they know to be—as the soul of the musician controls and exceeds not merely each note of the flowing melody, but also the whole of that symphony in which these cadences must play their part. That invulnerable spark of vivid life, that "inward light" which these men find at their own centres when they seek for it, is for them an earnest of the Uncreated ...
— Practical Mysticism - A Little Book for Normal People • Evelyn Underhill
... thing than the foregoing. Tolstoi is even more helpless to himself and to us. For he eliminates further. From his definition of art we may learn little more than that a kick in the back is a work of art, and Beethoven's 9th Symphony is not. Experiences are passed on from one man to another. Abel knew that. And now we know it. But where is the bridge placed?—at the end of the road or only at the end of our vision? Is it all a bridge?—or is there no bridge because there is no gulf? Suppose that a composer ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... Dubourdieu. "I have tried to see Hiclar, and get him to compose a symphony for it; I wish that while viewing my picture the public should hear music a la Beethoven to develop its ideas and bring them within range of the intellect by two arts. Ah! if the government would only lend me one of the galleries ...
— Unconscious Comedians • Honore de Balzac
... was silent—everything. But up in the heights soughed the everlasting song, the voice of the air, the distant, toneless humming which is never silent. I listened so long to this ceaseless faint murmur that it began to bewilder me; it was surely a symphony from the rolling spheres above. Stars that intone ...
— Hunger • Knut Hamsun
... of 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 in bed, to avoid ...
— The Enormous Room • Edward Estlin Cummings
... wife seconded this wise resolve; and without further parley it was put into effect, and proclaimed to be successful by a symphony of snores. For this is the excellence of having other people's cares to carry (with the carriage well paid), that they sit very lightly on the springs of sleep. That well-balanced vehicle rolls on smoothly, without jerk, or jar, or kick, so long as ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... you the top part is never easiest? Who do you suppose is going to keep this symphony together—you ...
— The Grim Smile of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... chase the oblivious fool who stands and smiles. The buildings slant and sway like monstrous searchlights, But never touch him. And the mad piano Comes up to him, puts down its angry head, Runs out a friendly tongue and licks his hand, And lows a symphony. ...
— Toward the Gulf • Edgar Lee Masters
... account of the musical examinations described by my father in his 'Recollections." Mr. Herbert speaks strongly of his love of music, and adds, "What gave him the greatest delight was some grand symphony or overture of Mozart's or Beethoven's, with their full harmonies.' On one occasion Herbert remembers "accompanying him to the afternoon service at King's, when we heard a very beautiful anthem. At the end of one of the parts, which was exceedingly ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... during a space that would best be represented by a musical rest—a silence in the midst of a symphony. Then her clear ...
— The Wrong Woman • Charles D. Stewart
... moment, I remembered, there were women listening to symphony music in Carnegie Hall, and women sitting in willow-rockers at Long Beach contentedly listening to the sea-waves. There were women driving through Central Park, soft and lovely with early spring, or motoring up to the Clairemont for supper and watching ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer
... the influence of agitating passions was never 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 ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... 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 ...
— Chopin and Other Musical Essays • Henry T. Finck
... there is a capital place to watch all this and feel the glorious thrill of the sea,—to look down the sloping deck into the black billows, with here and there a white patch of foam, and while the organ-harp overhead is sounding its magnificent symphony. It is but wood and iron and hemp and canvas that is doing all this, with some thirty poor, broken-down, dissipated wretches, who, being fit for nothing else, of course are fit for the fo'castle of a Liverpool ...
— The Atlantic Monthly , Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858 • Various
... is a general rule by means of which the musician can obtain the symphony from the score, and which makes it possible to derive the symphony from the groove on the gramophone record, and, using the first rule, to derive the score again. That is what constitutes the inner similarity between these things which seem to be constructed in ...
— Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus • Ludwig Wittgenstein
... seem to notice anything; but after going some four or five hundred yards, he turned his head, while executing a symphony with his whip, and saw that ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas |
