"Minor key" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... you 'phone don't ask for me Enquiring how a Flossie should be won - There isn't any Rule Book, are you on? And Queenie can't be coaxed by recipee. Some girls like hard-luck music, minor key, Some like the Gas-car Gussie act, hot ton, Others are simply fierce for Jolly John Who loves to make ...
— The Love Sonnets of a Car Conductor • Wallace Irwin
... a strange disguise, And I marked it not, but lay In a lazy dream, with drowsy eyes, Till the summer slipped away, And a chill wind sang in a minor key: "Where is the rose that ...
— Riley Love-Lyrics • James Whitcomb Riley
... New Hope, no more the minor key, No more the songs of exile long and lone; Thy tears henceforth be tears of memory. Sing, with the joy the joyless would have known Who for this visioned happiness so ...
— A Treasury of War Poetry - British and American Poems of the World War 1914-1917 • Edited, with Introduction and Notes, by George Herbert Clarke
... rising tide of devotion brought forth the most influential of the products of all the mystics, the Imitation of Christ by Thomas a Kempis. [Sidenote: Thomas a Kempis, c. 1380-1471] Written in a plaintive minor key of {33} resignation and pessimism, it sets forth with much artless eloquence the ideal of making one's personal life approach that of Christ. Humility, self-restraint, asceticism, patience, solitude, love of Jesus, prayer, ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... was followed by Janet's Repentance. These stories appeared under the pen name of George Eliot, which she never relinquished. Gathered into book form under the title Scenes From Clerical Life, these stories in a minor key made a profound impression on Charles Dickens, who divined they were the work of a woman ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... serves as a stately introduction to the stupendous fugued chorus which follows ("I will sing unto the Lord, for He hath triumphed gloriously; the Horse and his Rider hath He thrown into the Sea"). It is followed by a duet for two sopranos ("The Lord is my Strength and my Song") in the minor key,—an intricate but melodious number, usually omitted. Once more the chorus resumes with a brief announcement, "He is my God," followed by a fugued movement in the old church style ("And I will exalt Him"). Next follows the great duet for two basses, "The Lord is a Man of War,"—a piece of superb ...
— The Standard Oratorios - Their Stories, Their Music, And Their Composers • George P. Upton
... sunrise and sunset, and has for his heritage the high brave temper of the warrior, with the melancholy of the poet. The dweller on tawny sands, where the waves beat lazily on summer afternoons and where wild winds howl in storm, is of like necessity capricious and melancholy. The minor key, in which Poe thought all true poetry is written, is struck in these his earlier novels. Let the day be ever so beautiful, the air ever so clear, the shadows give back a sensitive, luminous darkness ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... carried the missing melodies in which he sought to improvise his warm affection. The absurdity of the proceeding was manifest, but it needed yet another point of emphasis. There was a grand wedding in Venice in 1595, at which the music consisted of madrigals, all in slow time and minor key. The contradiction between the doleful music and the festive occasion was too plain to be ignored, and led, presently, to the invention of a totally different style of song of which later there ...
— A Popular History of the Art of Music - From the Earliest Times Until the Present • W. S. B. Mathews
... mind me, now that she is dead, When nothing warned us of the dark decree, I crooned, to lull her, in a minor key, Such fancies as first came into my head. I crooned them low, beside her little bed; And the refrain was somehow "Come with me, And we will wander by the purple sea;" I crooned it, and—God help me!—felt no dread. O Purple Sea, beyond the stress of storms, Where never ripple breaks ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various
... brushes, spoke in a sad minor key, and seemed crushed and weary. The flash died from his face and he looked older again. Joan, the mistress of the situation, found it wholly bitter. She was bewildered, for affairs had proceeded with such rapidity. He had declared frankly that he loved her, and yet had stopped there. To ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... is the keynote of the old melancholy Indian music; the bass, whose undertone accompanies, with a kind of monotonous solemnity, all the treble variations in the minor key. The world is unreal, a delusion and a snare; sense is deception, happiness a dream; nothing has true being, is absolute, but virtue, the sole reality; that which most emphatically IS,[4] attainable only through ...
— Bubbles of the Foam • Unknown
... uncombed all the pale pink worsted, and then made the loveliest mittens with it you can imagine. These the Crabs, having resumed and screwed on their claws, placed cheerfully upon their wrists, and walked away rapidly on their hind-legs, warbling songs with a silvery voice and in a minor key. ...
— Nonsense Books • Edward Lear
... was weedy, his beard was long, And weedy and long was he, And I heard this wight on the shore recite, In a singular minor key: ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... silently endured, always upon her. And this resulted in an atmosphere of seriousness and responsibility which inevitably reacted on the boy, making him sober beyond his years, tempering his natural vivacity with watchfulness, and pitching even his laughter in a minor key. ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... but monotonous and mournful, voice was filling the air with the information that a train was about to depart for Albany, Saratoga, Troy, Boston, New York, and the East. When he came to the words "the East," his voice dropped to a sad minor key, as if the man despaired of the fate of those who took their departure in that direction. Every now and then a brazen gong sounded sharply; and one of the negroes who sat in a row on a bench along the marble-paneled ...
— In the Midst of Alarms • Robert Barr
... elusive quality of Chopin's theme. This is cruelly pedantic. The prelude arrests one in ecstasy; the fixed period of contemplation of the saint or the hypnotized sets in, and the awakening is almost painful. Chopin, adopting the relative minor key as a pendant to the picture in B flat, thrills the nerves by a bold dissonance in the next prelude, No. 22. Again, concise paragraphs filled with the smoke of revolt and conflict The impetuosity of this largely moulded piece in G minor, its daring harmonics,—read ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... great latitude in this endeavor, and schools and systems arrogate too much when they seek to define its limitations. Absolute truth to nature is impossible in art, which is constrained to lie to the eye in order to satisfy the mind, and continually transposes the harmonies of earth and sky into the minor key. Fuller offended the senses often, but he touched that nerve-centre in the heart, without which impressions are not truly recognized. He won liking, rather than startled men into it, and his art, instead of approaching, retired ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume I. No. VI. June, 1884 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... of all things," replied Titus, who entertained a very favorable opinion of Jack's vocal powers, and was by no means an indifferent performer; "only let it be in a minor key." ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... equal to the better part of the whole entertainment; and if they don't so see him, they are disappointed. Why was Mr. GRUNDY's happy translation of Les Oiseaux peculiarly successful? because it was a light, fresh, and pretty piece, wherein the occasional phrase in a minor key was so artistically introduced as to be a relish to our enjoyment of the humour of the characters and of the situations; but all this would have gone for comparatively little had it not been for the excellence of Mr. HARE's rendering of the first-rate part of Goldfinch, which did not consist ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, March 21, 1891 • Various
... a pound, because, as he pretends, the farmers exhausted their supply of cattle in feeding the army for so long a time, and now find it more profitable to raise their lambs, and keep and shear their sheep, than to kill them. To which he adds a note in the minor key concerning the price of gold, and the increased expenses of living, which he has himself to meet, and drives us in despair to the pitiless merchant of whom we buy our dry-goods. He evidently expects ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... intoxicated with his sense of success, essayed a bit of improvisation considerably more important than the first. This time he ceased absolutely to follow Rubinstein's harmony, and, retaining simply the melody, changed, however, to a minor key, he produced an odd, rhythmical little series of syncopations so rich, so strange, and withal so unlawful that when, omitting the conventional cadenza, he plunged into a coda of his own, Rubinstein flew furiously to the piano and would ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... avoid them, and keep them merely as a pensive colour in our own vivid memories of Saratoga. If we made them have a good time, and sent them on their way rejoicing, I confess that I should feel myself distinctly a loser. As it is, they're a strain of melancholy poetry in my life, of music in the minor key. I shall always associate their pathos with this hot summer weather, and I shall think of them whenever the thermometer registers eighty-nine. Don't you see the advantage of that? I believe I can ultimately get some literature out of them. If I can think ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... the men he wanted were out of reach, so he asked none at all, but five women. Four of these he would have grouped into a sentence as "the most interesting women in New York," and the fifth was a romantic novelty in a minor key, sort of "in the ...
— Fate Knocks at the Door - A Novel • Will Levington Comfort
... celebrate, in a minor key, indefinite and melancholy symbols of fancy, is a snare than which none more dangerous can be placed in the path of a feeble foot. But Poe was not feeble, and he was protected, and permanent value was secured for his poetry, by the possession ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... aged Christians struck up a sweet Wesleyan melody; and that, too, was in the same soft minor key that Fred had heard singing through the gas-burner. They finished the little hymn, and the woman scraped some corn from a cob into the corn-popper. In a few minutes, she had filled a large bowl ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various
... olive-backed thrush, but its song is totally different. The moment I heard it I said, "There is a new bird, a new thrush," for the quality of all thrush songs is the same. A moment more, and I knew it was Bicknell's thrush. The song is in a minor key, finer, more attenuated, and more under the breath than that of any other thrush. It seemed as if the bird was blowing in a delicate, slender, golden tube, so fine and yet so flute-like and resonant the song appeared. At times it was like a musical whisper of ...
— In the Catskills • John Burroughs
... particularly accentuated in the demeanour of the royal family. I did not conceal from Lipinsky, the leader of the orchestra, my regret at the mistake I had made in the arrangement of that day's programme, as Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, also in a minor key, was to follow this minor symphony. With a merry twinkle in his eyes the eccentric Pole comforted me by exclaiming: 'Oh, let us play only the first two movements of the Symphony in C minor, then no one will know whether we have played Mendelssohn in the major or the minor key.' Fortunately before ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... life, however festive, that does not involve the near presence of a possible tragedy. When the concert of life is playing the gayest and airiest music, it requires only the change of a little flat or sharp to modulate into the minor key. ...
— Betty's Bright Idea; Deacon Pitkin's Farm; and The First Christmas - of New England • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... music changed, and ran into a plaintive strain, in a minor key. Then it was that all the former witchery of her voice came over me; then it was that she seemed to sing from the heart and to the heart. Her fingers moved about the chords as if they scarcely touched them. Her whole manner and appearance changed; ...
— The Crayon Papers • Washington Irving
... flaming coldly overhead, or the stars leaping in the frost dance, and the land numb and frozen under its pall of snow, this song of the huskies might have been the defiance of life, only it was pitched in minor key, with long-drawn wailings and half-sobs, and was more the pleading of life, the articulate travail of existence. It was an old song, old as the breed itself—one of the first songs of the younger world in a day when songs were sad. It ...
— The Call of the Wild • Jack London
... forgotten cattle trail— Through valleys still and silent even now, Save when the yellow-breasted desert lark Cries shrill and lonely from a dead mesquite, In quivering notes set in a minor key; The endless round of sunny days, of starry nights, The desert's blank immutability. The coyote's howl is heard at dark from some Low-lying hill; companioned by the loafer wolf They yelp in concert to the far off stars, Or gnaw the bleached bones in savage rage That lie unburied by the grass-grown ...
— Songs of the Cattle Trail and Cow Camp • Various
... although the subject is one in itself almost incapable of color, and although, in order to increase the wildness of the impression, all brilliant local color has been refused even where it might easily have been introduced, as in the figures; yet in the low minor key which has been chosen, the melodies of color have been elaborated to the utmost possible pitch, so as to become a leading, instead of a subordinate, element in the composition; the subdued warm hues of the ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... length; "that's true. I've been down in spirit for weeks; some of ye know the cause. I am better now, but not quite serene. I want you fellows of the choir to strike up a tune; and what with that and this brew of Stannidge's, I am in hopes of getting altogether out of my minor key." ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy
... hemidemisemiquaver; sustained note, drone, burden. tonic; key note, leading note, fundamental note; supertonic[obs3], mediant[obs3], dominant; submediant[obs3], subdominant[obs3]; octave, tetrachord[obs3]; major key, minor key, major scale, minor scale, major mode, minor mode; passage, phrase. concord, harmony; emmeleia[obs3]; unison, unisonance[obs3]; chime, homophony; euphony, euphonism[obs3]; tonality; consonance; consent; part. [Science of harmony] harmony, harmonics; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... sensitive to every note of the soul's music, yet impressed with the sober consciousness which comes of self-study and experience. A woman, one would have said, who could act as nobly as she could speak, yet who would prefer both to live and to express herself in a minor key. And Egremont was not unlike her in some essential points. The turn for irony was more pronounced on his features, yet he had the eyes of an idealist. He, too, would choose restraint in preference to outbreak of emotion: he too could be forcible if occasion of sufficient pressure ...
— Thyrza • George Gissing
... the woods began to grow darker around us, we saw a bird, about as large as a robin, with a black crescent on his breast. His song was very different from that of the robin, and consisted of five or six notes, regularly descending in minor key. It thrilled me to hear it in the solitary woods: it was like the wail of an ...
— Life at Puget Sound: With Sketches of Travel in Washington Territory, British Columbia, Oregon and California • Caroline C. Leighton
... a fine reader. His voice had that minor key which touches the chords of tenderness and feeling—that voice so sweet at the fireside, so adapted to poetry and all deep and earnest thoughts. He did not read on like a machine, without pausing to make ...
— Helen and Arthur - or, Miss Thusa's Spinning Wheel • Caroline Lee Hentz
... now with her long braids of golden hair, the graceful sweep of her blue-feathered wings that matched the blue of her eyes, her red lips parted in song—but whatever it was, Mercer thought he had never heard so sweet a voice. She sang a weird little song. It was in a minor key, with curious cadences that died away and ended nowhere—the folk song of a different race, a different planet, yet vibrant with the ever unsatisfied longing of ...
— The Fire People • Ray Cummings
... were on the reef, one living, the other dead; one clasping his arms around the tender neck and naked bosom of the other, striving to warm her into life, when his own vitality was being each moment sucked from him by the icy breath of the storm. Here and there a terrible wailing minor key would tremble through the chords like the shriek of sea-birds, or the warning of advancing death. While the man played I could scarce restrain myself. It seemed to be Blokeeta whom I listened to, and on whom I gazed. That wondrous ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery - Riddle Stories • Various
... humiliated Emperor. Up speaks one suffering with a deadly hurt to the other: "Friend, when I am dead, bury me in my native France, with my cross of honor on my breast, and my musket in my hand, and lay my good sword by my side." Until this time the melody has been a slow and dirge-like stave in the minor key. The old soldier declares his belief that he will rise again from the clods when he hears the victorious tramp of his Emperor's squadrons passing over his grave, and the minor breaks into a weird setting of the ...
— Great Italian and French Composers • George T. Ferris
... by what the missionaries are now teaching in the name of Christianity. I'll tell you all about it some day. Now tell me, why are you unhappy? Why is your life pitched in such a minor key? Perhaps, together, we can change it ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... upon his emotions, and this effect determines for him the symbolic value of the color. In the same way sounds are symbolic in that they affect the emotions apart from associated "thoughts." Even with a person who has no technical knowledge of music, the effect of the minor key is unmistakably different from the major. The tones and modulations of the voice, quite apart from the words uttered, have an emotional value and significance. Everything, line, form, gesture, movement, color, sound, all the material world, is expressive. All objective forms ...
— The Enjoyment of Art • Carleton Noyes
... be greatly carried away by music, which had upon them quite an intoxicating effect. There were certain high notes and chords in a minor key which had a great attraction for them, and which constantly recurred in their melodies and their lengthy ululations. Some of the notes had undoubtedly been suggested by the song of local birds and by sounds of wild animals. ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... hooked on; when, it was hoisted up to the davits slowly, the men hauling in a sort of spiritless way, as if saddened by the painful episode, while even the boatswain's pipe seemed to whistle in a subdued tone in the minor key! ...
— Crown and Anchor - Under the Pen'ant • John Conroy Hutcheson
... for. He was a tall, gaunt, sallow man of about thirty, with small gray eyes, a fine, falsetto voice, pitched in the minor key, and his speech the rude dialect of the mountains. His face had as many expressions as could be found in a regiment, and he seemed a strange combination of cunning, simplicity, undaunted courage, and undoubting ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... folk-songs, certain shanties—originally, no doubt, in a mode—were, by the insertion of leading notes, converted into the minor key. There was also the tendency on the part of the modern sailor to turn his minor key into a major one. I sometimes find sailors singing in the major, nowadays, tunes which the very old men of my boyhood used to sing in the minor. A case in ...
— The Shanty Book, Part I, Sailor Shanties • Richard Runciman Terry
... of this great meeting — Eloquent sermon of the Rev. Anna Howard Shaw on the Heavenly Vision; release of woman from bondage of centuries, crucifixion of reformers, the visions of all ages — Miss Anthony opens the Council — Mrs. Stanton's address; psalms of women's lives in a minor key, sympathy as a civil agent powerless until coined into law, women have been mere echoes of men — Council demands all employments shall be open to women, equal pay for equal work, a single standard of ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... nothing that a Christian man may not reach, in the way of victory over his worse self, and ejection of his most deeply-rooted faults, if only he will be true to Jesus, and use the gifts that are given to him. There are many of us whose daily life is pitched in a minor key; whose whole landscape is grey and monotonous and sunless; who feel as if yesterday must set the tune for to-day, and as if, because we have been beaten and baffled so often, it is useless to try again. But remember that the field on which the Stone of Help was erected, to commemorate ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... gentlemen agreed (in the minor key) with the general opinion. "Sir Patrick's views are certainly extreme, Smith?" "I think, Jones, it's desirable to hear Mr. ...
— Man and Wife • Wilkie Collins
... dwell in the slums. The sobbing rain, the sad, low murmur of the wind under the eaves and through the narrow alleys, the cheerless frowning sky above, were in perfect harmony with the pathetic drama of life I was witnessing. Everything seemed pitched in a minor key, save now and then there swelled forth splendid notes of manly heroism and womanly courage, as boldly contrasting with the dead level of life as do the full rich notes of Wagner's grandest strains with the plaintive melody of a simple ballad sung by a shepherd lad. I was accompanied in this instance ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 19, June, 1891 • Various
... festivity to Bacchus wed; Others with stiff Egyptian tread, And straight black hair hanging in glossy braid, They danced, unnoted, and exhausted fled. * * * * * Still floated from beneath the acacia-tree The droning Eastern music's minor key. ...
— Poems of West & East • Vita Sackville-West
... fantastic Henley. Replace the fair ladies and the startling "blazers" with veiled houris and their lords clad in all colours of the rainbow; for one immortal "Squash" put hundreds of "squashes," all playing upon weird instruments, or singing in "a singular minor key"; let the smell of outlandish cookery be wafted to you from the "family" boats and from the bivouacs on the shore; let a constant uproar fall upon your ears as when the Hall defeats Third Trinity by half a length; and, finally, ...
— A Holiday in the Happy Valley with Pen and Pencil • T. R. Swinburne
... Bible is wrong. The fact is that the "blessed book," instead of being woman's best friend, is her worst enemy. The Tenth Commandment makes her domestic property, and Paul winds up by telling her that her sole duty is to play second fiddle in a minor key. ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (First Series) • George W. Foote
... more happy, although their songs, full of deep feeling, and not without a vein of romance are, like those of all Sclavs, plaintive and in the minor key. The men sing of the daring exploits of their Cossack forefathers, who were not free-booters like the old Cossacks of the Volga, but courageous men engaged in a life-and-death struggle with nomadic hordes, and later with internal enemies, Poles and rebels. ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various
... some time to come, and certainly no harm had happened to her yet. The sound grew and grew, and came nearer and nearer. But although it was song, she could distinguish no vowel-melody in it, nothing but a tone-melody, a crooning, as it were, ever upon one vowel in a minor key. It came quite near at length, and yet even then had something of the far away sound left in it. It was like the wind of a summer night inside a great church bell in a deserted tower. It came close, and ceased suddenly, as if, like a lark, the angel ceased to sing the moment ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... humor carried her serenely through this rather irritating visit, but the totally different train of thought which it evoked assisted her to recover her ordinary mental tone. It was, however, touched by a minor key of sadness, of humility (save when roused by any moving cause to indignation), which gave the charm of soft pensiveness ...
— A Crooked Path - A Novel • Mrs. Alexander
... else is the genius of the Christian Religion so poignantly revealed than in the Parable of the Prodigal Son, which begins in the minor key and gradually rises to the major, until it culminates in a great merry-making, to the surprise of the Elder Son, who thinks the majesty of the moral law will be compromised by the music and dancing, and has to be reminded that ...
— Painted Windows - Studies in Religious Personality • Harold Begbie
... raised himself quite perpendicular, in a vain endeavor to look into the boat, and invented a whine in the minor key, which tells on dogs: it set Ponto off in a moment; he sat upon his tail, and delivered a long and ...
— Foul Play • Charles Reade
... the tone of the rest of the prophecy. Note the lowliness, the suffering, the minor key of it all, and then, all at once, the leap up to rapture and triumph. The special form of the metaphor strikes one as singular. Nothing in the preceding context even remotely suggests it. Even the previous clause about 'making the many righteous' does not do much to prepare ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... strange curves. For myself I know too little of music to tell what relation the recurrent cadences of those songs and their broken rhythms may bear to the antique modes. But I can listen, as long as musicians will perform, to those infinite repetitions, that insistent sounding of the minor key. It pleases me to fancy there a music come from far away—from unknown river gorges, from camp-fires glimmering on great plains. Does not such darkness breathe through it, such melancholy, such haunting of elusive airs? ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... vital work, fresh and authentic. Most of its stories are composed in a minor key, a tone of subdued pathos—pathos marking both the nature and limit of Anderson's talent. (He spoke of himself as a "minor writer.") In a few stories, however, he was able to reach beyond pathos and to strike a tragic note. The single best story in Winesburg, Ohio is, I think, "The Untold Lie," ...
— Winesburg, Ohio • Sherwood Anderson
... about "front rank" and "great American story" and all that, it would doubtless be better for the book, provided anybody would read the preface or believe it when they had read it. But at any rate let us not have a preface in the minor key. ...
— The End Of The World - A Love Story • Edward Eggleston
... forlorn tune it was, ending in a dreary minor key, and it lasted for months and months—at least the children said it did. And they were growing quite dull for want of a playfellow, when, by the greatest good luck in the world, there came to the house not only a new lot of kittens, but a new baby. ...
— The Adventures of A Brownie - As Told to My Child by Miss Mulock • Miss Mulock
... the Risaldar, choosing a larger coal. Then, in the priest's language, which none—and least of all a Risaldar—can understand except the priests themselves, he began to shout directions, pitching his voice into a high, wailing, minor key. He was answered by another sing-song voice outside the door and he listened with a glowing coal held six inches ...
— Told in the East • Talbot Mundy
... were passing, those in each canoe singing a plaintive chant in minor key, accompanied by heavy strokes of the paddle handles against the sides of the canoe, as if to keep time. There were some fine voices to be heard, and though there were but slight variations in the sounds or words, the Indians seemed never to tire in repeating, and ...
— Ox-Team Days on the Oregon Trail • Ezra Meeker
... a five-holed flute was heard behind the trees in the island, playing several airs in a minor key. Another flute answered. This interchange of musical phrases lasted for two or three minutes, ...
— Eight Hundred Leagues on the Amazon • Jules Verne
... hours the strident cries of the exasperated pump, and the screaming gabble of many tongues, all refreshed by slumber and eager for exercise, made such a diabolic tumult and discord as to throw even the braying of the donkeys into the minor key. Of course, sleep under such circumstances would have been miraculous; but, then, no one had any right to sleep when the rocks were breaking again into flame, and the mists which filled the gorge by night were folding up their tents. I therefore accepted this noise as if it had been intended for ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... Longmore was almost persuaded against his finer judgement that he was really the most considerate of husbands and that it was not a man's fault if his wife's love of life had pitched itself once for all in the minor key. The Count's manners were perfect, his discretion irreproachable, and he seemed never to address his companion but, sentimentally speaking, hat in hand. His tone to Longmore—as the latter was perfectly aware—was that of a man of the world to a man not quite of the ...
— Madame de Mauves • Henry James
... he was more sympathetic, but even here his sympathies had their limitations. Music in the minor key made him melancholy, and had to be discontinued when he was in residence at St. Paul's;[162] and this was not ...
— Sydney Smith • George W. E. Russell
... companionway drifted intermittently a confusion of voices, Liane's light laughter, muted clatter of chips, now and then the sound of a popping cork. Forward the ship's bell sounded two double strokes, then a single, followed by a wail in minor key: "Five bells and all's well!" ... And of a sudden Lanyard suffered the melancholy oppression of knowing his littleness of body and soul, the relative insignificance even of the ship, that impertinent atom of human organization which traversed with unabashed effrontery the waters of the ages, ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... things in a minor key as we grow older. There are few majestic passages in the later acts of life's opera. Ambition takes a less ambitious aim. Honor becomes more reasonable and conveniently adapts itself to circumstances. And love—love dies. "Irreverence ...
— Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... themselves issuing from the dark passage-way. These are twelve in number, all men, dressed or undressed as each one's fancy dictates, their faces whitened like the dancers'. Their rude chant or rhythmic shouting is in the minor key. They advance in a body, keeping time with their feet, gesticulating in a manner intended to convey the meaning of their song. In their midst goes the drum-beater, an aged man adorned with an eagle's feather behind each ear. ...
— The Delight Makers • Adolf Bandelier
... indicated instead of blurred, and the treatment is almost devotional in tone, so sympathetic is the quality of the work. There is a total absence of the garish coloring which has become so common, the religious subjects being without exception in a minor key, usually soft grays and blues. It is indeed in composition and careful drawing that this artist excels rather than in coloring, although this afterthought is suggested by the canvasses treating of secular subjects."—Brooklyn ...
— Women in the fine arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D. • Clara Erskine Clement
... Colonel Higginson, who perhaps got nearer to them in sentiment than any other literary man not really, of them, says: "Almost all their songs were thoroughly religious in their tone, however quaint their expression, and were in a minor key both as to words and music. The attitude is always the same, and, as a commentary on the life of the race, is infinitely pathetic. Nothing but patience for this life—nothing but triumph in the next. Sometimes the present ...
— The Colored Regulars in the United States Army • T. G. Steward
... to an editor's decree Puts his verses in the columns of the Times; When the endless minor poet in an endless minor key Gives the public his unnecessary rhymes, When you're weary of the poems which they constantly compose, And endeavour their existence to forget, You may seek and find repose in the satisfying prose Of ...
— Lyra Frivola • A. D. Godley
... their effects in a morbid sadness, in his feeling for subject, and in a gloomy tone of coloring, sometimes only plaintive, but at other times as melancholy as the voice of a lost soul. When healthiest, as in his Harem picture in the Luxembourg Gallery, it is still in the minor key of that lovely Eastern color-work, such as we see in the Persian carpets, and to me always something weird and mysterious and touching, like the tones of an Aeolian harp, or the greetings of certain sad-voiced ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 74, December, 1863 • Various
... contrast to this is the "Valse," Op. 34, No. 2. This is in a minor key and instead of representing the abandon of the dance, it seems rather to depict a melancholy lover allowing his eyes to travel slowly around the ballroom in a futile search of his heart's desire. The prevailing tone of the ...
— The Pianolist - A Guide for Pianola Players • Gustav Kobb
... when the giant's motive from Wagner's Rheingold is played it rises to 83/4 pounds.[95] With the ergograph Tarchanoff found that lively music, in nervously sensitive persons, will temporarily cause the disappearance of fatigue, though slow music in a minor key had an opposite effect.[96] The varying influence on work with the ergograph of different musical intervals and different keys has been carefully studied by Fere with many interesting results. There was a very considerable degree of ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 4 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... their different moods: a theory which, however impossible it may be considered, is not without its advocates, who will perhaps not be displeased to find here some slight confirmation of their opinions. Yet in these songs the prevailing character of the minor key may generally be detected, which, from its being imperfect, and probably vitiated by the mistakes of these rustic melodists, may give a colour to the notion of ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... as we sat by the fire, we finally became tired and sleepy, and with favourable impressions, upon the whole, of this new and strange people, we crawled into our little polog to sleep. A voice in another part of the yurt was singing a low, melancholy air in a minor key as I closed my eyes, and the sad, oft-repeated refrain, so different from ordinary music, invested with peculiar loneliness and strangeness my first night in a ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... the Oratorio of Nineveh is performed again, with incidents in the life of JONAH, one of the features will be a magnificent wail in a minor key.—There is to be a banquet given to musical Dr. TURPIN. It was graceful on the part of the Archbishop of CANTERBURY to make this excellent musician a Doctor—the name of TURPIN being more closely associated ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98 January 11, 1890 • Various
... discussion that his real soul floated up to the surface, and he, as it were, achieved himself. He knew, too, how to play with his listener, to wheedle and beguile him, for after a particularly aggressive phrase he would drop into a minor key, and his criticism would suddenly become serious and illuminative. To him "Parsifal" was a fresco, a decoration painted by a man whose true genius it was to reveal the most intimate secrets of the soul, to tell the enigmatic soul of longing as Leonardo da Vinci had done. But he had been ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... coals, and muse and ponder and soliloquize."(6) Besides his favorite Shakespeare, he had a fondness for poetry of a very different sort—Byron, for example. And he never tired of a set of stanzas in the minor key beginning: "Oh, why should the spirit of ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... into a minor key, as Thorir's pitiful crew landed upon the sand. Haggard and worn and almost too weak to walk, they clung to the brawny arms of their rescuers; and the horrors of their privations were written in pitiless letters on Gudrid's fair white face. ...
— The Thrall of Leif the Lucky • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz
... cough is heard, and around the hearth the children gather closely, no longer sporting amid the flowers, or peopling the cloughs with fairy homes. A dispiriting hand tones down the great orchestra of Nature, and all her music is set to a minor key, her 'Jubilate' becoming a threnody—a ...
— Lancashire Idylls (1898) • Marshall Mather
... evening Maggie went to the writing-table, and all knew what it meant. Mr. Brookes occasionally lamented in a minor key, but without having recourse to his handkerchief. Willy said nothing; his losses on the Stock Exchange had been heavy; and owing to a conversation Frank had drawn him into during dinner the other day, his digestion, he feared, was not quite up to the mark. ...
— Spring Days • George Moore
... road Bishun Singh—tolerant of his Sahib's vagaries—was still chatting with the potter; a blare of discord in a minor key announced an approaching procession; and there, in talk with the bangle-seller, stood the cause of these strange doings; keeping a curious eye on the mad Englishman, but otherwise frankly unconcerned. Again there dawned on Roy the conviction that he had ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... wholesome counsel in this matter is—Be sure that you use the joys which God does give. Many good people seem to think that it is somehow devout and becoming to pitch most of their songs in a minor key, and to be habitually talking about trials and disappointments, and 'a desert land,' and 'Brief life is here our portion,' and so on, and so on. There are two ways in which you can look at the world and at everything that befalls you. ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... struck Miss Verity as only tasteful and tactful that her approach to the distracted dwelling should take place unheralded by rumble of wheels or beat of horse-hoofs, should be pitched in a, so to speak, strictly modest and minor key. On arriving at the front gate she therefore alighted and, bidding her grumpy and streaming flyman take himself and his frousty landau to the Bell and Horns in Deadham village there to await her further orders, proceeded to walk up the carriage-drive ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... may be idealized, and figure as a higher form of sensibility. Their spirit was still too essentially masculine for pessimism to be elaborated or lengthily dwelt on in their classic literature. They would have despised a life set wholly in a minor key, and summoned it to keep within the proper bounds of lachrymosity. The discovery that the enduring emphasis, so far as this world goes, may be laid on its pain and failure, was reserved for races more complex, and (so to speak) more feminine than the ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... see a pilgrim escape! To see him pass by, unmoved by that smile, turning his feelingless back on the true shrine! It was enough to melt the stoutest heart. Madame's welcome of the captured, after such an affront, was set in the minor key; and her smile was the smile ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... longer, and then began playing in a soft minor key, and his answer, when it finally came, seemed at first to have no connection with what he had been ...
— The Little Colonel: Maid of Honor • Annie Fellows Johnston
... he had begun to whistle a dismal old air in a minor key after propping himself across the rough crack so ...
— The Lost Middy - Being the Secret of the Smugglers' Gap • George Manville Fenn
... return. Oh how inexpressibly mournful were their chants that night! I remember one especially. It began with a wailing recitative—a prolonged, mournful recitative in the minor key by female voices only, and at its close the men joined them in a full, deep chorus, slow and solemn, the last words of which were "Dead and gone!" The black ravine took up the sound, and from its deep, mysterious heart came back the solemn echo, "Dead and gone!" It was simply ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, November, 1878 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... among the birds. One might think the call of the turtle-dove, which sounds to us like "woe, woe, woe," a wail of despair; but it is not. It really means "love, love, love." The plaint of the wood pewee, pensive and like a human sigh, is far from pessimistic, although in a minor key. The cuckoo comes the nearest to being a pessimist, with his doleful call, and the catbird and the jay, with their peevish and complaining notes, might well be placed in that category, were it not for their songs when the love passion makes optimists even of them. The strain of the hermit ...
— Under the Maples • John Burroughs
... steamboat, with its flag flying, came down the Ohio and rounded to at the wharf. As it made the turn, we noticed that the deck was crowded with negroes, and we heard them singing some of their camp meeting hymns in a way to touch all hearts. The strain was in a minor key, and, as the poor creatures swayed their bodies back and forth and clapped their hands at intervals, we were strangely moved; and when, the landing being effected, and the gang-plank arranged, they came off, chained in pairs, and were ...
— 'Three Score Years and Ten' - Life-Long Memories of Fort Snelling, Minnesota, and Other - Parts of the West • Charlotte Ouisconsin Van Cleve
... the gloom of the wretched day seemed to play on Rose's spirits. She sang all the melancholy songs she knew, in a mournful, minor key, until the conversation of the other two ceased, and they felt ...
— Kate Danton, or, Captain Danton's Daughters - A Novel • May Agnes Fleming
... goes well with them, they are unwilling to believe that such good fortune will last. If anything goes wrong with them, they are sure that this is only the beginning of something even worse. The music of their lives is written in a minor key. ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... again, it is on the pavement, almost beneath the window, and the old musician, perhaps unconsciously wrought upon by the silent influence of the hour, has merged from the gay to the pathetic, and plays only sad little pieces in the minor key. Presently from the multitude of sweet sounds there arises on the air a song lower and sadder than the others—a strange, pathetic melody, falling on the ear like a low, plaintive wail, broken by keen throbs of agony: her whole nature beats in responsive echo. O God! gone ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 5, No. 6, June, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... the piano, but not to play a tune. Impossible to insult that crippled tempest on the sofa with the sweet eternal placidities of Mozart or Bach. His fingers wandered over the lower register, improvising, modulating from one minor key to another in a cobweb of silver harmony spun pale and low from a minimum of technical attention. For once Bernard had struck home. "The shot that broke your arm broke your life." Stripped of Bernard's ...
— Nightfall • Anthony Pryde
... of duty, we wended our way to the "royal property," to take a last look at the long-expiring gardens. It was a wet night—the lamps burnt dimly—the military band played in the minor key—the waiters stalked about with so silent, melancholy a tread, that we took their towels for pocket-handkerchiefs; the concert in the open rain went off tamely—dirge-like, in spite of the "Siege of Acre," which was described in ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... plays, perhaps because these awaken feelings which their happy lot in general permits to sleep. They are very fond of music, and can all sing or play on some musical instrument. Their favourite melodies are mostly in a minor key, and they dislike noisy music; indeed, noise of any sort. Gesture and the dance are fine arts, and they can imitate almost any action without words. A favourite amusement is to gather in the dusk of the evening, crowned with flowers, or wearing fanciful dresses, and ...
— A Trip to Venus • John Munro
... and "Dickens-Land." It, however, lacks the freshness of his earlier writings. Surely he must have lost his old love for Dickens, or things must have gone wrong at the Ecclesiastical Conference which took place at Gravesend on "That Longest Day." Altogether it is pitched in a minor key. ...
— A Week's Tramp in Dickens-Land • William R. Hughes
... kisses—for a whole week; and occasionally he would come blowing out his cheeks like a king's trumpeter, to announce that Mike Laflin might be at any moment expected. But for the most part these impersonations were in a minor key, as Mike had soon discovered that the more pathetic he was, the more he was hugged and called a "weenty," which was one of his own sad little ...
— Young Lives • Richard Le Gallienne
... object of their journeying into this unknown world was in all truth a matter for silence rather than speech; its influence was toward deep and earnest meditation, to which the joyous, awakening world could do no more than chant in a minor key a melancholy accompaniment. Never did a soldier advancing upon a breach in the enemy's breastworks more certainly confront the grinning face of Death, than did this trio in their progress across the singing prairie; but where the plaudits ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... panegyrics in honour of chiefs and guests. Their dances have been copied in Europe. Without ever inventing the modes of the Greeks, which are still preserved by the Hindoos, they have an original music, dealing in harmony rather than in tune, and there are motives, of course all in the minor key, which might be utilized by advanced peoples; these sons of nature would especially supply material for that recitative which Verdi first made something better than a vehicle for dialogue. Hence the old missioners are divided ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... he came to the round figure in the center he dug up a cup which had been buried there. He erased the picture with a long slender wand and sang in the meantime, to the accompaniment of the rattling of his assistants, a plaintive chant in a minor key, which was perhaps the most melodious Indian song I ever heard. All was over at half ...
— The Mountain Chant, A Navajo Ceremony • Washington Matthews
... bodily impediments are swept away, and, as the earthly shadows lengthen, as the chill winds of old age strengthen, we more and more appreciate the wonderful expression of this thought, in that sweetest of all poems of the minor key, ...
— The Gentleman from Everywhere • James Henry Foss
... which is justly celebrated as a minstrel, but which does not rehearse a well-defined theme. The towhee's song is sprightly and cheerful, wild and free, has the swing of all outdoors, and is not pitched to a minor key. It gives you the impression that a bird which sings so blithesome a strain must surely be ...
— Birds of the Rockies • Leander Sylvester Keyser
... Egyptian travel to see these men;—the red fiery sunsets, the palm-trees, and crocodiles, and obelisks, and Indian corn, and, over all, the thrumming, not unmusical sound of the tarabookrah—earthen drum—with the wailing melodies in a minor key of the "Chaldaeans whose cry is ...
— The Voyage Alone in the Yawl "Rob Roy" • John MacGregor
... into harmony with the key-note of divine order, of this earth that it is a training school for a better sphere of existence. The Christian pessimist in his most typical manifestation is apt to wear a solemn aspect, to speak, especially from the pulpit, in the minor key, to undervalue the lesser enjoyments of life, to insist on a more extended list of articles of belief. His theory of the universe recognizes this corner of it as a moral ruin; his idea of the Creator is that of a ruler whose pardoning power is subject to the ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... throat, and to reach the outer air with very much the effect of a big steamship's syren in a dense fog. It is a very long-drawn cry, beginning away down in the bass, dragging up slowly to an anguished treble note in a very minor key, and subsiding, despairingly, about half-way back to the bass. It is a sound that carries a very long way—though not so far as from the place of Finn's captivity to the Sussex Downs—and carries misery with it just as far as ever it can reach. ...
— Finn The Wolfhound • A. J. Dawson
... expands. Sympathy for others in distress is born, and thus a decided evolutionary advance is made. We have only to reflect upon the fact that separation without death produces the same effects in a minor key, to realize the evolutionary value of death. In constant association we grow careless and indifferent. But an absence of a month or two enables one to get a truer perspective of personal associations and thereafter life has new zest. A child regards its mother with a certain degree of appreciation ...
— Elementary Theosophy • L. W. Rogers
... distance of the intervening years, midday halts, where an hour of daydream lay sandwiched in between two half days of tramp. And I thought of the companions now so far away. Having heard the tune in a minor key, these came in as chords of some ampler variation, making a kind of symphony of sentiment, where I was brought back ever and anon to the simple motif. And the teahouse maidens entered and went out again like mutes in my mind's ...
— Noto, An Unexplored Corner of Japan • Percival Lowell
... With tea it is usual to have milk, and with milk it is usual, if there is a cat in the house, to have feline society. Captain Kettle, which was the name thought suitable to this cat by his godfathers and godmothers, was on hand early. As he stood there pawing the mat impatiently, and mewing in a minor key, Mrs Williamson felt that here was the cat for her. He certainly was good to look upon. His black heart was hidden by a sleek coat of tabby fur, which rendered stroking a luxury. His scheming brain was out of sight in ...
— Tales of St. Austin's • P. G. Wodehouse
... Bevins would not let herself be gainsaid, sobbing a little, elbowing her way through the group of mental unborns, and leaving me to blow my pitch pipe for a minor key. ...
— The Vertical City • Fannie Hurst |
