"Aeolian" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... her, I drew back into the room. I was glad I had done so when, from the dark corner where I stood, I saw her steal up the marble steps and stand timidly looking in at the door. Then, after a long pause, came a whisper as faint and sweet as the music of a distant AEolian harp: ...
— The Lady of the Shroud • Bram Stoker
... has been compared with Webster's "Call for the robin redbreast" in The White Devil, but solemn as Webster's dirge is, it tolls, it docs not sing to us. Shakespeare's "ditty," as Ferdinand calls it, is like a breath of the west wind over an aeolian harp. Where, in any language, has ease of metre triumphed more adorably than in Ariel's Fourth Song,—"Where the bee sucks"? Dowden saw in Ariel the imaginative genius of English poetry, recently delivered from Sycorax. If we glance at Dry den's recension of The Tempest we may be ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... stain the spokes with mire; Thick folds of ebon night on loch and law; The moan of breezes wailing through the shaw Like the weird plaints of an AEolian lyre: And intermittently through the clouds, the fire Of lightning streaks the night with glitter and awe, And lapses swiftly in the dismal maw Of darkness, 'mid the din of thunder dire. But to relieve the sad night's sullenness, And clear the heavens for the ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... and the nymph Orseis, represented in Homer as the happy ruler of the Aeolian Islands, to whom Zeus had given dominion ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... companionship isn't a matter of over-crowded subways. And the strap-hangers and the train-catchers and the first-nighters can have what they've got. I don't seem to envy them the way I used to. I don't need a Louvre when I've got the Northern Lights to look at. And I can get along without an AEolian Hall when I've got a little music in my own heart—for it's only what you've got there, after all, that really counts in ...
— The Prairie Child • Arthur Stringer
... of aeolian deposits (cf. BERMUDAS) and coral reefs. The aeolian deposits, which form the greater part of the islands, frequently rise in rounded hills and ridges to a height of 100 or 200 ft., and in Cat Island nearly 400 ft. They vary in texture from ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... on the threshold of their burrows. And then the fine sand, soft to the touch, easily tunnelled, easily excavated or built into tiny huts which we thatch with moss and surmount with the end of a reed for a chimney; and the delicious meal of apples, and the sound of the aeolian harps which softly whisper among ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
... thankful for the blessings of good health and strong nerves, but I sometimes wish I could cry more easily. I should not like to be like poor Mrs. Rampant, whose head or back is always aching, and whose nerves make me think of the strings of an AEolian harp, on which Mr. Rampant, like rude Boreas, is perpetually playing with the tones of his voice, the creak of his boots, and the bang of his doors. But her tears do relieve, if they exhaust her, and back-ache cannot ...
— A Great Emergency and Other Tales - A Great Emergency; A Very Ill-Tempered Family; Our Field; Madam Liberality • Juliana Horatia Gatty Ewing
... scale of the Orient but the scale of a Walden morning—"music in single strains," as Emerson says, which inspired many of the polyphonies and harmonies that come to us through his poetry. Who can be forever melancholy "with Aeolian music ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... profession, which it is too late to change for another, should find his temper souring, to endeavour to counteract that misfortune, by filling his private chamber with amiable, pleasurable sights and sounds. In summer time, an Aeolian harp can be placed in your window at a very trifling expense; a conch-shell might stand on your mantel, to be taken up and held to the ear, that you may be soothed by its continual lulling sound, when you feel the blue fit stealing over you. For ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... tell.... Indeed, I did not know myself why I liked so much to loiter behind with her, when returning in the evening from our labors; why the tones of her voice made my heartstrings thrill like an AEolian harp; and especially why my pulse beat such a furious ratan when I looked and fingered over her little hand, to pick out the cruel nettle-stings and thistles. Among her love-inspiring qualities, she sung sweetly; and it was her favorite ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... that 300,000 were thus employed. As they never feed after sunset, it is necessary, when journeying, to allow them to graze for several hours during the day. They utter a peculiar low sound, which at a distance resembles, when the herd is large, the tone of numerous Aeolian harps. On seeing any strange object which excites their fears, they immediately scatter in every direction, and are with difficulty reunited. The Indians treat them kindly, ornamenting their ears with ribbons, and hanging ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... laid on the heart-strings is followed by a strong stroke on conscience. The heart vibrates most readily in answer to gentle touches: the conscience, in answer to heavier, as the breath that wakes the chords of an Aeolian harp would pass silent through the brass of a trumpet. 'Wherefore art thou come?'—if to be taken as a question at all, which, as I have said, seems most natural, is either, 'What hast thou come to do?'—or, 'Why hast thou ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... strains so mild, But fancy moulds them gay and wild. Now, as the music low declines, 'T is sighing of the forest pines; Or 't is the fitful, varied war Of distant falls or troubled shore. Now, as the tone grows full or sharp, 'T is whispering of the AEolian harp. The viol swells, now low, now loud, 'T is spirits chanting on a cloud That passes by. It dies away; So gently dies she scarce can say 'T is gone; listens; 't is lost she fears; Listens, and thinks again she hears. ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume II • Samuel F. B. Morse
... Master Betty's acting was a singular phenomenon, but it was also as beautiful as it was singular. I saw him in the part of Douglas, and he seemed almost like 'some gay creature of the element,' moving about gracefully, with all the flexibility of youth, and murmuring AEolian sounds with plaintive tenderness. I shall never forget the way in which he repeated the line in which young Norval says, speaking of the fate of ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... birth an AEolian, was by settlement a Boeotian. He lived and farmed his own land on the slopes of Helikon, under the governance of the lords of Thespiae, whoever they were. I have been to Thespiae, and certify that there are no lords ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett
... measured verse, AEolian charms and Dorian lyric odes, And his who gave them breath, but higher sung, Blind Melesig[e]n[^e]s, thence Homer called, Whose poem Phoebus challenged for ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... hearing her mother sing. The tears ran in streams down Krespel's cheeks; even Angela he had never heard sing like that. Antonia's voice was of a very remarkable and altogether peculiar timbre: at one time it was like the sighing of an Aeolian harp, at another like the warbled gush of the nightingale. It seemed as if there was not room for such notes in the human breast. Antonia, blushing with joy and happiness, sang on and on—all her most beautiful songs, B—— playing between whiles as only ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: German • Various
... stands on Argos' utmost bound, (Argos the fair, for warlike steeds renown'd,) Aeolian Sisyphus, with wisdom bless'd, In ancient time the happy wall possess'd, Then call'd Ephyre: Glaucus was his son; Great Glaucus, father of Bellerophon, Who o'er the sons of men in beauty shined, Loved for that valour which preserves mankind. Then mighty ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... principal settlements of the AEolians lay around the Pagasaean Gulf, and were blended with the Minyans, a race of Pelasgian adventurers known in the Argonautic expedition, under AEolian leaders. In the north of Boeotia arose the city of Orchomenus, whose treasures were compared by Homer to those of the Egyptian Thebes. Another seat of the AEolians was Ephyra, afterward known as ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... played upon his faculties, as the Hindus play upon the vina, that strange, sensitive, oriental harp with a dozen strings, of which the musician touches but one. The other strings through sympathetic vibration furnish an undertone almost like an aeolian harmony. You must listen in a still place to catch the mystic accompaniment. So it was in Bedient's mind. Beth Truba played upon the single string, and the others glorified her with their shadings. And the plaint from all humanity was in that undertone, ...
— Fate Knocks at the Door - A Novel • Will Levington Comfort
... did I catch a plaintive tone of sorrow in her thought and speech, like the wail of an AEolian harp heard at intervals from some upper window. She had never met one who could love her as she could love; and in the orange-grove of her affections the white, perfumed blossoms and golden fruit wasted away unclaimed. Through the mask of slight personal defects ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. II • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... ones over a deep water-hole just above the crossing. The creek oaks have rough barked trunks, like English elms, but are much taller, and higher to the branches—and the leaves are reedy; Kendel, the Australian poet, calls them the 'she-oak harps Aeolian'. Those trees are always sigh-sigh-sighing—more of a sigh than a sough or the 'whoosh' of gum-trees in the wind. You always hear them sighing, even when you can't feel any wind. It's the same with telegraph wires: put your head against a telegraph-post on a dead, still day, ...
— Joe Wilson and His Mates • Henry Lawson
... very commencement, by strong impressions, transport his hearers out of themselves, and, as it were, take bodily possession of their attention. There is a species of poetry which gently stirs a mind attuned to solitary contemplation, as soft breezes elicit melody from the Aeolian harp. However excellent this poetry may be in itself, without some other accompaniments its tones would be lost on the stage. The melting harmonica is not calculated to regulate the march of an army, and kindle ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... island of Ceylon; and according to the account, it was the most beautiful island of which man can conceive. Such birds, such songs, such flowers and such verdure! And the branches of the trees were so arranged that when the wind swept through them every tree was a thousand aeolian harps. The Supreme Brahma when he put them there said, "Let them have a period of courtship, for it is my desire and will that true love should forever precede marriage." When I read that, it was so much more beautiful and lofty than the other, that ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... of a thousand years, they had advanced to their "great system" of the double octave. Through all which changes there of course arose a greater heterogeneity of melody. Simultaneously there came into use the different modes—Dorian, Ionian, Phrygian, AEolian, and Lydian—answering to our keys; and of these there were ultimately fifteen. As yet, however, there was but little heterogeneity in the time of their music. Instrumental music being at first merely the ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... Else had the life of that delighted hour Drunk in the largeness of the utterance Of Love; but how should earthly measure mete The heavenly unmeasured or unlimited Love, Which scarce can tune his high majestic sense Unto the thunder-song that wheels the spheres; Scarce living in the Aeolian harmony, And flowing odour of the spacious air; Scarce housed in the circle of this earth: Be cabin'd up in words and syllables, Which waste with the breath that made 'em. Sooner earth Might go round ...
— The Suppressed Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... him his power over lyric verse. He had imitated at first the older Roman satirists; here by Maecenas' advice he copied from Greek models, from Alcaeus and Sappho, claiming ever afterwards with pride that he was the first amongst Roman poets to wed Aeolian lays to notes of Italy (Od. III, xxx, 13). He spent seven years in composing the first three Books of the Odes, which appeared in a single volume about B.C. 23. More than any of his poems they contain the essence of his indefinable magic art. They deal apparently with dull ...
— Horace • William Tuckwell
... too, of a certain woman who performed an aeolian crepitation at a dinner attended by the witty Monsignieur Dupanloup, Bishop of Orleans, and that when, to cover up her lapse, she began to scrape her feet upon the floor, and to make similar noises, the Bishop said, "Do not trouble to find ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... choruses were attuned into two great accords: one thundered fortissimo, the other gently warbled; one seemed to complain, the other only sighed; thus the two ponds conversed together across the fields, like two AEolian ...
— Pan Tadeusz • Adam Mickiewicz
... of his matchless genius he struck the chords of sorrow to their inmost tone and played on the heart strings of joy with the tender vibrations of an aeolian harp, trembling with melodious echoes among the wild ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce
... this vast AEolian intonation, when my eye filled with the golden fullness of life, the pomps and glory of the heavens outside, and, turning, when it settled upon the frost which overspread my sister's face, instantly ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... Ponting always manages to work in detail concerning the manners and customs of the peoples in the countries of his travels; on Friday he told us of Chinese farms and industries, of hawking and other sports, most curious of all, of the pretty amusement of flying pigeons with aeolian whistling pipes attached to their ...
— Scott's Last Expedition Volume I • Captain R. F. Scott
... for the night, but promising that ye were to be seen in the morning. Coleridge had got a blazing fire in his study, which is a large, antique, ill-shaped room, with an old-fashioned organ, never played upon, big enough for a church, shelves of scattered folios, an AEolian harp, and an old sofa, half-bed, etc.; and all looking out upon the last fading view of Skiddaw and his broad-breasted brethren. What a night! Here we stayed three full weeks, in which time I visited Wordsworth's cottage, ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... he described himself as Idolocrastes Satyrane. Under this disguise he looked upon himself as the spokesman of the Idea of the Omnipresence of the Deity. In order to appreciate the following beautiful letter, one of the finest Coleridge ever wrote, the reader should peruse Coleridge's "Aeolian Harp", "Lines written on leaving a Place of Retirement", "The Lime-Tree Bower", and Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey". Wordsworth's sonnet, "It is a beauteous evening", and Coleridge's own "Hymn before Sunrise in the Vale of Chamouni", also belong to the same feeling for the God of ...
— Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1. • Coleridge, ed. Turnbull
... rock that intersects the channel, two or three hundred yards to the eastward. They were said to be heard at night, and most distinctly when the moon was nearest the full, and they were described as resembling the faint sweet notes of an AEolian harp. I sent for some of the fishermen, who said they were perfectly aware of the fact, and that their fathers had always known of the existence of the musical sounds, heard, they said, at the spot alluded to, but only during ...
— Sketches of the Natural History of Ceylon • J. Emerson Tennent
... the aeolian wire, As a core of fire Is laid upon the blast To kindle and glow and fill the purple ...
— Behind the Arras - A Book of the Unseen • Bliss Carman
... I have the advantage of having heard most of them played by Chopin himself, and, as Florestan whispered in my ear at the time, "He plays them very much a la Chopin." Imagine an AEolian harp that had all the scales, and that these were jumbled together by the hand of an artist into all sorts of fantastic ornaments, but in such a manner that a deeper fundamental tone and a softly-singing higher part were always ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... freighter perceived the interest he had created, and promptly became expansive. "From the AEolian Musical Corporation, Highfield, Californy. To order of William Henderson, shipped to wife of same, Barnriff, Montana. Kind o' musical ...
— The One-Way Trail - A story of the cattle country • Ridgwell Cullum
... will be able to do this by demanding, acquiring, and employing as the servants of the people, men who are experts in human nature, masters in not treating men alike—Crowbars, lemonade-straws, chisels, and marshmallows, powerhouses and AEolian harps by the people, for the people, and of the people, will be rated for what they are and will be used for ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... designed them for my baby, and Fabian sent the pattern to Paris, and we received the goods in due time. I will tell you another thing. I have an AEolian harp for her. It is under the front window of the upper hall, but its aerial music can reach her here when it is in place. When she is a little stronger I am going to have a music box for her. Oh, I want my little baby to live in a sphere of 'sweet ...
— For Woman's Love • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... from one of its branches since Judge Trent's visit. From beneath its shade was no view of the sea, but one could lie there and listen to the rhythmic murmur of the waves answering the strains of an AEolian harp which Thinkright's clever hands had fashioned and placed in the shadow of the upper branches. There Sylvia took the books which her cousin gave her to study, and read and study she did, despite the temptation to day-dreaming. Little by little, by gentle implications, Thinkright had ...
— The Opened Shutters • Clara Louise Burnham
... With glint of plume and silver brede! And while she whispered in my ear, The pleasant Arno murmured near, The dewy, slim chameleons run Through twenty colors in the sun; The breezes broke the fountain's glass, And woke aeolian melodies, And shook from out the scented trees The lemon-blossoms on the grass. The tale? I have forgot the tale,— A Lady all for love forlorn, A rose-bud, and a nightingale That bruised his bosom ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various
... All of animated nature Be but as Instruments diversely framed That tremble into thought, as o'er them sweeps One infinite and intellectual Breeze, At once the Soul of each, and God of all? The AEolian Harp, S. T. COLERIDGE. ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... the Capitol, triumphant shown, The victor-laurel on his brow, For Cities storm'd, and vaunting Kings o'erthrown;— But Tibur's streams, that warbling flow, And groves of fragrant gloom, resound his strains, Whose sweet AEolian grace ...
— Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace • Anna Seward
... not understand how you can be talking about gains and losses," intervened the Alcalde. "What will these amiable and discreet young women, who honor us with their presence, think of us? To my mind, the young women are like AEolian harps in the night. It is only necessary to lend an attentive ear to hear them, for their unspeakable harmonies elevate the soul to the celestial spheres of the infinite ...
— Friars and Filipinos - An Abridged Translation of Dr. Jose Rizal's Tagalog Novel, - 'Noli Me Tangere.' • Jose Rizal
... Awake, Aeolian lyre, awake, And give to rapture all thy trembling strings. From Helicon's harmonious springs A thousand rills their mazy progress take: The laughing flowers that round them blow Drink life and fragrance as they flow. Now the rich stream of Music winds along Deep, majestic, ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... seized town after town;** they descended from the basin of the Sangarios into that of the Bhyndakos; they laid waste the Troad, and, about 670 B.C., they established themselves securely in the stronghold of Antandros, opposite the magnificent AEolian island of Lesbos, and ere long their advanced posts were face to face on all sides with ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 8 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... rendered only by sylphs moving to "soft recorders" in the humour of wildness, languor, bewitching caprices, giving a new sense to melody. How I wish you had been with me to hear him! It was the most AEolian thing ever caught from a night-breeze by ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... A gust of wind swept through the pines, and struck a faint Aeolian cry from the wires above their heads; and the rain and the darkness again ...
— The Twins of Table Mountain and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... thy gloomy gallows boughs, A human corpse swings, mournful, rattling bones and chains— His eighteenth century flesh hath fattened nineteenth century cows— Ghastly Aeolian harp ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson, an Elegy; And Other Poems • Richard Le Gallienne
... literature, revealing a learning positively prodigious, a style that flows with a sonorous majesty and crashes with a vitriolic and destroying power, a lavish richness in figurative language, a beauty of Aeolian harps, of sapphire seas, of the flushed and ardent ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... interchanged terrible looks, and then they grasped their knives and watched their leader's eye for some deadly signal. Again and again the word "g-o-l-d" came like an Aeolian note into the secret cave, and each time eye sought eye and read the unlucky speaker's death-warrant there. But when George prevailed and the two men started for the valley, the men in the cave cast uncertain looks on one another, and ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... whooping howling wilderness, a sort of Malibran. With Lind, Labache and Melba mixed and all combined in one. I'm a grand cathedral organ and a calliope sharp, I'm a gushing, trembling nightingale, a vast AEolian harp. ...
— Wild Animals at Home • Ernest Thompson Seton
... bed-room) really looked as bright and beautiful as any royal chamber in the universe. The rarest flowers, the prettiest gardens under glass, bowls with gold and silver fish in them, a small aviary of birds, an Aeolian harp to put on the window-sill in summertime, some of Valentine's best drawings from the old masters, prettily-framed proof-impressions of engravings done by Mrs. Blyth's father, curtains and hangings of the tenderest color ...
— Hide and Seek • Wilkie Collins
... Mill than to the whole range of Christian divines. In a sentence, Ward 'had launched on the great deep of human controversy as frail a bark as ever carried sail,' and his reviewer undoubtedly let loose upon it as shrewd a blast as ever blew from the AEolian wallet. The article was meant for the Quarterly Review, and it is easy to imagine the dire perplexities of Lockhart's editorial mind in times so fervid and so distracted. The practical issue after all was not the merits or the demerits of Cranmer, Ridley, ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... did he return, this haughty brave, Who whipt the winds, and made the sea his slave? (Though Neptune took unkindly to be bound And Eurus never such hard usage found In his AEolian prison under ground).' ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... of the AEolian isle, where King AEolus gave him all the winds in a bag, came into ...
— The World's Desire • H. Rider Haggard and Andrew Lang
... produced by a quick perception of the beautiful and sublime when it is exercised in observing animated nature, when every beauteous feeling and emotion excites responsive sympathy, and the harmonised soul sinks into melancholy or rises to ecstasy, just as the chords are touched, like the AEolian harp agitated by the changing wind. But how dangerous is it to foster these sentiments in such an imperfect state of existence, and how difficult to eradicate them when an affection for mankind, a passion for an individual, is but the ...
— Letters written during a short residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark • Mary Wollstonecraft
... attack of mumps, with measles complicating, pulled them to one side and burned the bridge. They afterward drew tight down on the sounding board, so that now when I talk the rickety buzz is like that of a horse-fiddle played with the tremolo and the soft pedal. An aeolian harp made of rubber bands on a bicycle, aroused by the wind as the machine moves swiftly, gives the same ...
— Cupid's Middleman • Edward B. Lent
... she remained motionless as the marble statue of Psyche that adorned the recess in which she stood. Then the lips moved and the words "Put your trust in God," came forth soft and bewitching as the strain of an aeolian harp, and leaving, as it were, a holy hushed spell, subduing the soul of ...
— Marguerite Verne • Agatha Armour
... extremely sensitive to sound. They vibrated to it, like Aeolian harp in the wind. He placed pianos, cats, fish peddlers, and hand organs on precisely the same footing, as nuisances. Nothing but the ruling desire to make a lady of his child, could have steeled him to the endurance, hour after hour, of her monotonous ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... peaceful, for the repetitions of the worshippers in the open air are not disturbing; and from far overhead comes a little tinkling from the light AEolian bells moved by the breeze high up on the Hte. If you look up you see the Hte against the blue. It is an elaborate piece of metal work on the tip top of the pagoda; you cannot make out its details but ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch |
