"Chromatic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the British Museum. He was born at Namur, learned singing, and according to Vander Straeten, studied the works of Boethius under Vittorino da Feltre in Italy. He cites Marchetto of Padua as the first to write in the chromatic manner since Boethius. Bertolotti in his searching examination[7] of the records of Mantua found numerous names of musicians employed at the court or permitted to exercise their calling within the boundaries of the marquisate. He notes the predominance of Flemish ...
— Some Forerunners of Italian Opera • William James Henderson
... growing unquiet, and my landlord's cat, inspired by that sweet duet, is making close by my window (for, of course, my musico-poetic laboratory is an attic,) certain tender confessions,—upward through the whole chromatic scale, soft complaining, to the neighbour's puss, with whom he has been in love since March last! Till this is all fairly over, II think will sit quietly here. Besides, there is still blank paper and Burgundy left, of which I forthwith take ...
— Hyperion • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... unbeautiful music all their own, generally produced at late hours of the night on the house tops, garden walls, and in the alleys of our dwellings. Miss Cat's songs are far too chromatic to be appreciated by human ears; as a result her concertos and solos are rarely spoken of by human critics. However, Nature does sometimes produce a Tetrazzini, Alice Neilson, or Caruso, in the form of a cat, ...
— The Human Side of Animals • Royal Dixon
... in chord combinations since the introduction of the tempered system is not very great. All, or nearly all, the chords used by Wagner are to be found in the works of Bach. The suggestion to explain Wagner's harmonies by assuming a "chromatic scale" rests upon a misapprehension of the nature of a scale. Every scale implies a tonality, i.e. a tonic note, to which all the other notes bear some definite numerical relation. There cannot be a chromatic scale in the scientific sense in music; ...
— Wagner's Tristan und Isolde • George Ainslie Hight
... the case of a Mr. Peek, where the luminous affection reminds one of the chromatic hallucinations produced by the intoxicant cactus buds called mescal by ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... exhaust the variety of those varied mountain slopes and tops. Their picturesqueness of form and their delight of color would beggar any thesaurus of its descriptive reserves, and yet leave their beauty almost unhinted. A drop-curtain were here a vain simile; the chromatic glories of colored postal-cards might suggest the scene, but then again they might overdo it. Nature is modest in her most magnificent moods, and I do not see how she could have a more magnificent mood than Madeira. It can never be represented by my art, but it may be measurably ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... passing young people who must be under a deep delusion as to the success of their own toilette. Instead of graceful and noble simplicity of form, instead of combinations of colour at once rich and delicate, because in accordance with the chromatic laws of nature, one meets with phenomena more and more painful to the eye, and startling to common sense, till one would be hardly more astonished, and certainly hardly more shocked, if in a year or two one should pass some one going about like ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... under a clouded sky. Without knowing why, the unhappy man felt the impending catastrophe and hastened to escape it. But in vain. His feet were as lead, and suddenly the heavens opened, fiercely lightened, the savage thunder leaping upon him in chromatic dissonances; then a great stillness in C major, and with solemn, silent steps he descended in modulated chords until he reached an awful crevasse. With a howl the tempest again unloosed, and in screeching accents the end came, came in F ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... They were the brightest colored things in all that vanished world. Upon them, in successive layers of paste and paper, all the rough enterprises of that time joined in chromatic discord; pill vendors and preachers, theaters and charities, marvelous soaps and astonishing pickles, typewriting machines and sewing machines, mingled in a sort of visualized clamor. And passing that there ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... still insists on doing his work with India ink and keeping his spectral palette strictly to himself. For cheap and popular renderings of color man was then, as now, fain to have recourse to the press. The English exhibited some chromatic printing, far inferior ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. XVII, No. 99, March, 1876 • Various
... blowing, and long plumes of dust whisked up out of the curving street and swept over the ill-kept yards, past the cabins, and toward the sere fields and chromatic woods. The wind beat at the brown man; the dust whispered against his clothes, made him squint his eyes to a crack and tickled ...
— Birthright - A Novel • T.S. Stribling
... about the room like an intoxicated bird, waving the letter, and trilling and running joyful chromatic scales, for ...
— Ladies-In-Waiting • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... ignorance compelled me to use! How I longed to discover the secret of some perfect lens whose magnifying power should be limited only by the resolvability of the object, and which at the same time should be free from spherical and chromatic aberrations, in short from all the obstacles over which the poor microscopist finds himself continually stumbling! I felt convinced that the simple microscope, composed of a single lens of such vast yet perfect power, was possible of construction. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... substance made up of molecules of different sizes and requiring wave lengths of different orders to decompose them, so that a part of the substance may be quite disintegrated, while other molecules may be quite entire throughout the visual space. This will account for most of the chromatic effects of vision, for complementary colors, and for color blindness, by supposing that the purpurine is not normally constituted. This is in accordance with experimental photography, for it has been found that ...
— Scientific American, Volume XLIII., No. 25, December 18, 1880 • Various
... contrasted with a standard for gentlemen? It ought not to have required much eloquence to convince us that Widnes is unlovely; the smell of it should have been enough. It is curious that we needed festoons of chromatic sentences to warn us that cruelty to children, even when profit can be made of it, is not right. But I fear some people really enjoy remorseful sobbing. It is half the fun of doing wrong. Yet I would ask in humility—for it is a fearful thing to doubt Ruskin, ...
— Waiting for Daylight • Henry Major Tomlinson
... proceedings terminate by a Grand Al Fresco Carnival. Ladies of the ballet dance bewitchingly, while soldiers play at Bo-Peep behind enormous red hoops. Finally the entire strength of the ballet link arms in one immense line, and simultaneously execute a wonderful chromatic kick, upon which the blue draperies descend amidst prolonged and thoroughly well-deserved ...
— Punch Volume 102, May 28, 1892 - or the London Charivari • Various
... perfection and complication.—To suppose that the eye, with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree. Yet reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a perfect and complex eye to one very imperfect and simple, ...
— On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection • Charles Darwin
... own orbs, as though for the first time, fixed it peeringly upon her, and smiling dreamily, threw into his strains the reserve of expression which he could not afford to waste on a big and noisy dance. Crowds of little chromatic subtleties, capable of drawing tears from a statue, proceeded straightway from the ancient fiddle, as if it were dying of the emotion which had been pent up within it ever since its banishment from some Italian city where it first took shape and sound. There was that in ...
— Life's Little Ironies - A set of tales with some colloquial sketches entitled A Few Crusted Characters • Thomas Hardy
... or that "Major Buckley developed one hundred and forty-eight persons so that they could read sentences shut up in boxes or nuts," would listen attentively to what he has to say on the anatomy of an atom, metachronism and "chromatic attraction." ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... that it is three months since I got to know her, and from the very first day of our acquaintance my love mounts continually crescendo, like a chromatic scale, higher and higher, and at the present moment I am simply in the seventh heaven. I jest, but in reality my devotion to this woman is something extraordinary, supernatural. Fancy, I scarcely talk to her, I can do nothing but stare at her, ...
— The Diary of a Superfluous Man and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... caused by this over-chromatic correction may, I think, be remedied by the use of the achromatic condenser in the place of an object-glass; that kind of condenser, at least, which is supplied by the first microscopic makers. I cannot help thinking that this substitution ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 188, June 4, 1853 • Various
... it. In reply to these grand words he urges the superiority of sure profits, fat meals, and sounding money. Then the adventures begin again. The two companions fly through the air on wooden horses; and the illusion of this giddy voyage is given by chromatic passages on the flutes, harps, kettledrums, and a "windmachine," while "the tremolo of the double basses on the key-note shows that the horses have ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... color, I must protest against his endeavor to form any judgment whatever of this church of St. Mark's. But, if he both cares for and loves it, let him remember that the school of incrusted architecture is the only one in which perfect and permanent chromatic decoration is possible; and let him look upon every piece of jasper and alabaster given to the architect as a cake of very hard color, of which a certain portion is to be ground down or cut off, to paint the walls with. ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume II (of 3) • John Ruskin
... brilliant work on a maestoso, reached high C with ease, went down into the bass clef and climbed out again, quavered and held, did sixteen notes by the handful—payable on demand—waltzed along a minor passage, gracefully turned the dal segno, skipped a chromatic run, did the con expressione act worthy of a De Reszke, poured forth volumes on a measure bold, broke the centre of an andante passage for three yards, retarded to beat the band, came near getting applause ...
— Little Masterpieces of American Wit and Humor - Volume I • Various
... sun-down shadows lengthen over the limitless and lonesome prairie; Where herds of buffalo make a crawling spread of the square miles far and near; Where the splash of swimmers and divers cools the warm noon; Where the katydid works her chromatic reed on the walnut-tree over ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... One day spatted he would fare, Lacking colour; and the next Spatless, in chromatic wear. No dilemma reads him now, Bidding this or that to go. See, his side-cleft bags allow Spat and sock an ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, March 18, 1914 • Various
... the world by its rapid development in the hands of Herschel, its unpretending rival was slowly making its way towards the position which the future had in store for it. The great obstacle which long stood in the way of the improvement of refractors was the defect known as "chromatic aberration." This is due to no other cause than that which produces the rainbow and the spectrum—the separation, or "dispersion" in their passage through a refracting medium, of the variously coloured rays composing ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... science of melo-dramatic music has been hitherto very imperfectly understood amongst us. The art of making "the sound an echo of the sense"—of expressing, by orchestral effects, the business of the drama, and of forming a chromatic commentary to the emotions of the soul and the motions of the body, has been shamefully neglected on the English stage. Ignorant composers and ignoble fiddlers have attempted to develop the dark mysteries and intricate horrors of the melo-drama; but unable to cope with the grandeur ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... called "abstract" and sometimes "non-representative" painting. Despite their natural puzzlement everyone (plantons excepted) was extraordinarily kind and brought us often valuable additions to our chromatic collection. Had I, at this moment and in the city of New York, the complete confidence of one-twentieth as many human beings I should not be so inclined to consider The Great American Public as the most aesthetically incapable organization ...
— The Enormous Room • Edward Estlin Cummings
... to their having only the minor key. The natural ascent of the voice is in the major key, and with their exquisite sensibility to sound they could not have missed the obvious expression of cheerfulness. With their three scales, diatonic, chromatic, and enharmonic, they must have exhausted every possible expression of feeling. Their scales were in true intervals; they had really major and minor tones; we have neither, but a confusion of both. They had both sharps and flats: we have neither, ...
— Gryll Grange • Thomas Love Peacock
... of the middle distance, as they beheld it, was a circular isolated hill, of no great elevation, which placed itself in strong chromatic contrast with a wide acreage of surrounding arable by being covered with fir-trees. The trees were all of one size and age, so that their tips assumed the precise curve of the hill they grew upon. This ...
— Two on a Tower • Thomas Hardy
... large instruments are much more liable than smaller ones to what is termed 'chromatic' and 'spherical' aberration; and this also is detrimental to definition. No very large refractor is entirely free from ...
— To Mars via The Moon - An Astronomical Story • Mark Wicks
... high sky, driving the flocculent white masses here and there as listed a changing will. The trees were red and yellow, the leaves firm, full-fleshed, as if the ebbing sap of summer still ran high in every fibre; their tint seemed no hectic dying taint, but some inherent chromatic richness. Fine avenues the eye might open amongst the rough brown boles that stood in dense ranks, preternaturally dark and distinct, washed by the recent rains, and thrown into prominence by the masses of yellow and red leaves carpeting the ground, and the ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... made her fingers behave, but not her heart. It was singing a tune far out of harmony with chromatic exercises, and she was glad her mother could ...
— Missy • Dana Gatlin
... to say that my own triangle at home, the Strad, is in the chromatic scale of A, and has a splice. It generally gets the chromatics very badly ...
— The Holiday Round • A. A. Milne
... the wild chromatic passages that Krafft sent up and down the piano with his right hand, while his left followed with full-bodied chords, each of which exceeded the octave. Before, however, there was time to laugh, this riot ceased, and became a mournful ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... which we find ourselves at the moment of hearing it. It is objective when, affected only by the purely physical sensation of sound, we listen to it passively, and it suggests to us impressions. A march, a waltz, a flute imitating the nightingale, the chromatic scale imitating the murmuring of the wind in the "Pastoral Symphony," may ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... the window recesses Rhapsodie Pantril was talking vaguely but beautifully to a small audience on the subject of chromatic chords; she had the advantage of knowing what she was talking about, an advantage that her listeners did not in the least share. "All through his playing there ran a tone-note of malachite green," she declared recklessly, feeling safe from immediate contradiction; "malachite green, my ...
— When William Came • Saki
... and sapphire; but these are, at best, vague terms. Our language has not terms enough to signify the different delicate shades; our factories have not the stuff whose hues might make a chromatic scale ...
— Maria Mitchell: Life, Letters, and Journals • Maria Mitchell
... pearly chromatic scale, and replied: 'Alas! madame, I am only deferring my departure on account of a letter that cannot be much longer delayed; in less than a week, I shall have the ...
— Samuel Brohl & Company • Victor Cherbuliez
... upon the company of clear-headed financiers was extremely remarkable. The unknown metal appeared to exercise a kind of mesmeric influence, its soft hues blending together in a chromatic harmony which captivated the sense of vision as the ears are charmed by a perfectly rendered song. Gradually all gathered in an eager ...
— The Moon Metal • Garrett P. Serviss
... his matin voluntaries often mingled with my half-waking dreams in the morning at dawn's peeping, and I loved to hear it too well to be angry for being aroused at an unseasonable hour. The song is quite a complicated performance at its best, considerably prolonged and varied, running up and down the chromatic scale with a swing and gallop, and delivered with great rapidity, as if the lyrist were in a hurry to have done, so that he could ...
— Birds of the Rockies • Leander Sylvester Keyser
... blue; E, white; I, black; O, whity-brownish; U, opaque brown). The other is only heterodox on the A and O; A being with her black, and O white. My sister and I never agreed about these colours, and I doubt whether my two brothers feel the chromatic force ...
— Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development • Francis Galton
... man's degeneration or fall, on your Earth, he has lost all receptibility to the more refined vibratory tones of the chromatic scale. ...
— The Planet Mars and its Inhabitants - A Psychic Revelation • Eros Urides and J. L. Kennon
... music, and I left exasperated after the third act. A friend was with me and he left, but for different reasons; he suffered in his ears; it was my intelligence that suffered. Why did the flute play the chromatic scale when the boy said, "Il faut que cela soit un grand navire," and why were all the cellos in motion when the girl answered, "Cela ou bien tout autre chose?" I suffered because of the divorce of the orchestra and singers, uniting perhaps at the end of the scene. It was speaking ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... midst of a piece of gossip, Sophia was interjecting exclamations of moderation and reproach, and Mrs. Sales was manifestly amused. Her chromatic giggle was as punctual as Sophia's reproof, and Rose drew closer to the group made by the three, and said, 'I'm missing Caroline's story. Which one is it?' And now it ...
— THE MISSES MALLETT • E. H. YOUNG
... constantly repeating his few notes. His song was tender and bewitching in its effect, though it was really simple in construction, being merely nine notes, the first uttered twice, and the remaining eight in descending chromatic scale. ...
— A Bird-Lover in the West • Olive Thorne Miller
... and had an objective of two feet diameter. It was firmly supported on a trap rock pedestal. The eye piece adjustment was unusually successful, and the remarkable freedom of the objective from any traces of spherical or chromatic aberration gave us an image of surprising clearness. The photographic results were admirable. I imagine few more satisfactory photographs of the face of Moon have been made than those we secured, so far at least as definition ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... Whistler's brochures. The printing exhibits every fantastic variation of type, and the pages range in colour from blue to brown, from grey to sage green and from rose pink to chrome yellow. The Philistines may sneer at this chromatic chaos, but we do not. As the painters are always pilfering from the poets, why should not the poet annex the domain of the painter and use colour for the expression of his moods and music: blue for sentiment, and red ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... in its nature, and unrepentant in its arrogant heart. When you have got so far down you have had time to discover what that is which has put you so low. The day may be radiant, the sky just what you had hoped to find in Africa, and the people in the market-place a lively and chromatic jangle; but the shadow of what we call inhumanity (when we are trying to persuade ourselves that humanity is something very different) chills and ...
— Old Junk • H. M. Tomlinson
... magnificent spectacle. The play of colours in the heavens is quite indescribable. When the moon rises, the same thing occurs. Opposite the orb, a huge pile of vapour rises in shadowy forms, on which the light is thrown, producing the most wonderful effects. In these chromatic displays, red is the colour that predominates. Towards midnight, the wind begins to blow from the east, at first gently, but icy cold, for it comes from the regions of perpetual frost and snow. The radiation of heat from such an ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 461 - Volume 18, New Series, October 30, 1852 • Various
... are three classes of modes: first, that which the Greeks term the enharmonic; second, the chromatic; third, the diatonic. The enharmonic mode is an artistic conception, and therefore execution in it has a specially severe dignity and distinction. The chromatic, with its delicate subtlety and with ...
— Ten Books on Architecture • Vitruvius
... it, puts such knowledge within our grasp. Ether- waves and your anger, for example, are things in which my thoughts will never PERCTEPTUALLY terminate, but my concepts of them lead me to their very brink, to the chromatic fringes and to the hurtful words and deeds which are their ...
— The Meaning of Truth • William James
... Hollingsworth. Attorney-at-Law. Mortgages. Loans. Farms." In the room were a table, three chairs, a case of law books, a desk, on the top of the desk a "plug" hat, so venerable that it looked a very great-grandsire of hats, and two cuspidors marked with chromatic evidence that they were not ...
— Counsel for the Defense • Leroy Scott
... the most heterogeneous collection of people that Audrey had ever seen; men and women, girls and old men, even a few children with their mothers. Liquids were of every colour, ices chromatic, and the scarlet of lobster made a luscious contrast with the shaded tints of salads. In the extreme background men were playing billiards at three tables. Though nearly everybody was talking, no one talked loudly, so that the resulting monotone of conversation was a gentle drone, out of which ...
— The Lion's Share • E. Arnold Bennett
... with her roll of music under her black shawl, had many pupils, and more than twenty houses had well-nigh become uninhabitable through her exertions with little girls, whose red hands made an unendurable racket with their chromatic scales. Louise's earnings constituted the surest part of their revenue. What a strange paradox is the social life in large cities, where Weber's Last Waltz will bring the price of a four-pound loaf of bread, and one pays the grocer with ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... encouragement. Alypius of Alexandria and his friend Iamblichus, however, still taught the philosophy of Ammonius and Plotinus. The only writings by Alypius now remaining are his Introduction to Music; in which he explains the notation of the fifteen modes or tones in their respective kinds of diatonic, chromatic, and enharmonic. His signs are said to be Pythagorean. They are in pairs, of which one is thought to represent the note struck on the lyre, and the other the tone of the voice to be sung thereto. ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 11 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... regular business. Unfortunately, the Fifteenth Amendment had rendered the colored man incapable of being hereafter regarded as an oppressed creature. He was sorry, but it could not be helped. He was therefore forced to go down the chromatic scale of creation and find another class of clients. He found them in cattle. HOMER had sung about the ox-eyed Juno, and WALTER WHITMAN about bob veal. COWPER had remarked that he would not number ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 5, April 30, 1870 • Various
... tears of grateful joy. She wore them for several days near her heart; she preserved them through her whole life as one of the endeared means by which she had gone happily through the chromatic ...
— The Home • Fredrika Bremer
... the matter becomes clear enough when we remember the radical importance of impregnation as regards heredity. It is well known that not only the most delicate bodily structures, but also the subtlest traits of mind, are transmitted from the parents to the children. In this the chromatic matter of the male nucleus is just as important a vehicle as the large caryoplasmic substance of the female nucleus; the one transmits the mental features of the father, and the other those of the mother. The blending ...
— The Evolution of Man, V.1. • Ernst Haeckel
... were burnt down by some mischievous malignant. Whatever of sterility deformed the scene lay robed under a glory of colour painted with perfect beauty by the last smile of the sun. Earth and air and sea showed every variety of the chromatic scale, especially of rose-tints, from the tenderest morning blush of virgin snow to the vinous evening flush upon the lowlands washed by the purple wave. The pure translucent vault never ceased to shift its chameleon-like hues, that ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton
... sounds blending harmoniously like the double pipe of an ancient Greek flute player. All of us felt the spell of the scene and the occasion. Everyone listened tense and silent until the descending chromatic passage at the end when the "Valkyries" vanish into space, the echo of their laughter dies away, and the "Ride" ends in a sound like the fluttering of wings in the distance. When Paul rose from the piano the pent-up feelings of the audience found ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... to make the music he wrote an interpretation of the words it was set to'; he 'broke many of the laws of music'; he 'considerable altered the stage'; he 'was noted for using many instruments not invented before'; in his 'composition he used the chromatic scale very much, and goes very deep in harmony'; he 'was the first taking up the style, and therefore to make a great change in music'; he was 'the cause of much censure and bickering through his writings'; he 'promoted a less strict mode of writing and other beneficial things'; and, ...
— Literary Blunders • Henry B. Wheatley
... based on scientific principles which embody so much in the way of chromatic paradox as to warrant setting forth rather fully, even though at the present time, for good and sufficient reasons relating to German methods of locating vessels, the Americans have more or less abandoned ...
— Our Navy in the War • Lawrence Perry
... and produced such efforts as a poem to the gout, a nature-poem depicting barn-yard sounds, and even Iriarte's La musica (1780), in which one may read in carefully constructed silvas the definition of diatonic and chromatic scales. ...
— Modern Spanish Lyrics • Various
... a democratic effort to curb the egoism of the strong—a conspiracy of the chandala against the free functioning of their superiors, nay, against the free progress of mankind. This theory is the thing he exposes in "The Antichrist," bringing to the business his amazingly chromatic and exigent eloquence at its finest flower. This is the "conspiracy" he sets forth in all the panoply of his characteristic italics, dashes, sforzando interjections and ...
— The Antichrist • F. W. Nietzsche
... winter night, with its intense darkness relieved at times by the light of the moon and brilliant chromatic displays of the aurora australis, succeeds a day of perpetual sunshine. All these are on such a scale of sublimity that no pen can adequately describe nor brush portray them. Nowhere else on the face of ...
— Wealth of the World's Waste Places and Oceania • Jewett Castello Gilson
... hardly name it. Through the fog, it struck him as a dull slate-gray, almost a blue. He recalled that once he had seen a child's modeling-clay, much-used and very dirty, of the same shade, which certainly had no designation in the chromatic scale. Some of the Things were darker, some a trifle lighter—these, no doubt, the younger ones—but they all partook of this same characteristic tint. And the skin, moreover, looked dull and sickly, rather mottled and wholly repulsive, very like ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... tosses it and catches it until every fibre is clear, when the fluffy mass is deftly cast aside. All the while, through the beating of the wool, the two sticks beaten against each other play a distinct air, and each mattress-maker has his own, handed down from his forefathers, ending with a whole chromatic scale as the shorter stick swoops up the length of the longer to sweep away the lingering wool. Thus the whole mattress is transferred from a sodden heap to a high and fluffy mountain of carded wool, all baked by ...
— The Velvet Glove • Henry Seton Merriman
... the local people call the jays. Then, too, there are the birds down among the watercress and the brooklime in the clear pool below the spring, moorhens occasionally awakening the echoes by running down a weird chromatic scale or calling with their loud and mellow note to their friends and relations over at the brook; here, too, the softer croak of the mallard and the wild duck is also heard. A hawk, chasing some smaller bird, is darting and hovering over the tops of the firs, but, catching a glimpse of me, ...
— A Cotswold Village • J. Arthur Gibbs
... Republic of Venice, was based on gouache paintings by Marco Ricci, probably done on goatskin or leather in his usual manner. For Jackson to make these color prints was a logical step, since his work had tended toward the full chromatic range even in the chiaroscuros, which "adumbrated" color. His new prints were all color— clear, sensitive, and tonally just. It is not surprising that he seized upon Ricci's opaque watercolors. The paintings of the Venetian masters had darkened in ill-lit ...
— John Baptist Jackson - 18th-Century Master of the Color Woodcut • Jacob Kainen
... to find no inaccuracy in the 1888 edition, which is indeed stated in the introduction to be entirely by mechanical process, without hand intervention; but being reproduced by printer's ink in black only, not only do the colors not appear, but the chromatic values are actually far inferior to the photographs of 1864. It was stated further by Prof. de Rosny that some features of the MS. had been lost by deterioration in the 25 years previous to his editions ...
— Commentary Upon the Maya-Tzental Perez Codex - with a Concluding Note Upon the Linguistic Problem of the Maya Glyphs • William E. Gates
... Him" in the "John" amount to fifty bars. Moreover, the people's choruses are written in a much more violent and tempestuous style in the earlier than in the later setting. In the "Matthew" there is nothing like those terrific ascending and descending chromatic passages in "Waere dieser nicht ein Ubelthaeter" and "Wir duerfen Niemand toeden," or the short breathless shouts near the finish of the former chorus, as though the infuriated rabble had nearly exhausted itself, or, again, the excited chattering of the soldiers ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman
... solar spectrum the chemist can detect the presence of what are known as 'actinic' rays. They represent colors—integral colors in the composition of light—which we are unable to discern. The human eye is an imperfect instrument; its range is but a few octaves of the real 'chromatic scale.' I am not mad; there are colors that we ...
— The Best Ghost Stories • Various
... 3. Chromatic dispersion by our atmosphere, together with selective absorption, also by our atmosphere and its vapors, have been suggested as causes in this curious ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 441, June 14, 1884. • Various
... his pursuit that he did not mark the brilliant chromatic effect of which he composed the central feature, till it was brought home to his intelligence by the warmth of the moulded stonework under his touch when measuring; which led him at length to turn his head ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... all that train: Joy to great Chaos! let division reign:[385] Chromatic[386] tortures soon shall drive them hence, Break all their nerves, and fritter all their sense: One trill shall harmonise joy, grief, and rage, Wake the dull church, and lull the ranting stage;[387] To the same notes ...
— Poetical Works of Pope, Vol. II • Alexander Pope
... a few occasional chromatic giggles, Mary looked through her beautiful eyes, glistening with tears of fun, and said, in a ...
— A Christmas Story - Man in His Element: or, A New Way to Keep House • Samuel W. Francis
... chords, and utterly spit at and defy chromatic passages from one end of the instrument to the other, and back again; flats, sharps, and most appropriate "naturals," splattered all over the page. The essential spirit of discord seems let loose on our modern music, tainted, as it were, with the moral infection that has seized the land; ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... would doubtless attract lovers of the Sydney Smith type of salon music, if there are any of them left. It opens in quite a bewitching dance manner and then goes on tinkling away on top notes, with chromatic runs, half floating arpeggios and all the rest of the stock-in-trade of pretty salon music. There are, however, some rather characteristic touches in it, which distinguish it from its companions. The key transitions from A flat major through distant ...
— Edward MacDowell • John F. Porte
... fancy, as she stood rigid with indignation, her cheeks flushed, it must have been a heady spectacle to note how their shell-pink repeated the pink of her fantastic garment like a chromatic echo; and how her sunny hair, a thought loosened, a shade dishevelled, clung heavily about her face, a golden snare for eye and heart; and how her own eyes, enormous, cerulean—twin sapphires such as in the old days might have ransomed a brace of emperors—grew ...
— The Eagle's Shadow • James Branch Cabell
... you," he insisted. "What I say is true. I'm grateful to you for violently injecting romance into my perfectly commonplace existence. You have taken the book of my life and not only extra illustrated it with vivid and chromatic pictures, but you have unbound it, sewed into its prosaic pages several chapters ripped bodily from a penny-dreadful, and you have then rebound the whole thing and pasted your own pretty picture on the cover! Come, now! Ought not a man to be grateful ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers
... moving attitude more attentive to the curve of change than to the possible halting-points along the road. But this is not the case at all; the effort would be too great, and what happens, on the contrary, is this. For the spectrum a chromatic scale of uniform tints is very quickly substituted. This is in itself an undesirable simplification, for it is impossible to reconstitute the infinity of real shades by combinations of fundamental colours each representing ...
— A New Philosophy: Henri Bergson • Edouard le Roy
... the latter it is plain, diatonic and immensely—in the best sense—effective; in Rienzi, in spite of the vigour of its presentation, the effect is weakened by the way in which it is bent away to a chromatic something which is neither frankly Italian nor honestly German. Again, he composed with an audience in his mind's eye that could only take in one melody or theme at a time. The melody might be in an upper part, a middle, or in the bass. In one or another it always is, and the rest ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... more so than in ordinary individuals, and in this the criminal resembles the savage. Chromatic sensibility, on the contrary, is decidedly defective, the percentage of colour-blindness being twice that of normal persons. The field of vision is frequently limited by the white and exhibits much stranger anomalies, a special irregularity of outline with deep peripheral ...
— Criminal Man - According to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso • Gina Lombroso-Ferrero
... leg is 'thar.' In the real knee movement, there is a peculiar spring, that must be seen to be known and valued, words don't give you the idea of it. It's like the wire end of a pair of galluses—oh, it's charming. It's down and off in a jiffy, like a gall's finger on a piano when she is doin' chromatic runs. Fact is, if I am walking out, and see a critter with it, I have to stop and stare; and, Doctor, I will tell you a queer thing. Halt and look at a splendid movin' hoss, and the rider is pleased; he thinks half the admiration is for him, as rider and ...
— Nature and Human Nature • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... high-toned note could be heard as one drifted by the ear. The wood-fire smoke rose straight and steadily from kitchen chimneys, as the sticks, set alight to boil the billy for tea, gradually went out, and the aromatic scent of it floated through the air, seeming to fit in with the chromatic whistle of the magpies from the gum trees in the paddocks. But the men who were gathered round Marmot's verandah noted nothing of these things. Marmot himself, with his shirt-sleeves rolled up, sat on a box of Barret twist tobacco in the doorway, where ...
— Colonial Born - A tale of the Queensland bush • G. Firth Scott
... chant. It is in the minor key, and consists ordinarily of two phrases, ending in a screaming monotone, prolonged until the breath of the singer fails, and often running down at the close into a blurred chromatic. No sooner is one strain ended than it is suddenly taken up again in the prestissimo time and "slowed" down to the same dismal conclusion. Heard near, it is deafening and disagreeable. But when refined by distance, it has a sad and pleasant effect, and seems to belong ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various
... parabolic instead of a spherical form. In an analogous way the spherical aberration of a lens can be corrected by altering its curves, but the second difficulty that arises with a lens is not so easily disposed of: this is what is called chromatic aberration. It is due to the fact that the rays belonging to different parts of the spectrum have different degrees of refrangibility, or, in other words, that they come to a focus at different distances from ...
— Pleasures of the telescope • Garrett Serviss
... attempt an improvement of the telescope. Reflecting upon the process of making lenses then in vogue, young Huygens and his brother Constantine attempted a new method of grinding and polishing, whereby they overcame a great deal of the spherical and chromatic aberration. With this new telescope a much clearer field of vision was obtained, so much so that Huygens was able to detect, among other things, a hitherto unknown satellite of Saturn. It was these astronomical researches that led him to apply the pendulum to regulate the movements of clocks. ...
— A History of Science, Volume 2(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... really existed in this scarcely vertebrate condition of the amphioxus,—a conclusion which, strictly understood, yields no meaning,—we can make the case much more easily conceivable if we represent the thinking, or invention of the world, as an ascending scale, in which even the least chromatic tone must have a place without a break, while the principal tones do not become clear and full until the requisite number of vibrations is attained. These gradations of tone are the really interesting thing in nature. As the full, clear tones imply certain numerical relations ...
— The Silesian Horseherd - Questions of the Hour • Friedrich Max Mueller
... concerts. "Repeated by flute and oboe, with accompaniment for clarionet (in triplets) and strings pizzicato, and then worked up by the full orchestra, this melody is eventually allotted to the 'cellos, its accompaniment now taking the form of chromatic passages," and so forth. Not less useless is it to write a rhapsody which has nothing to do with the notes, and to present this as an interpretation of what the notes have said in an unknown language. Yet what method is there besides these two methods? None, indeed, ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... bestowed on us, an instrument so perfectly adapted to the imperfections of this lower world, and whose very imperfections are the materials from which he produces clear and perfect vision? No! in God's eye there are no chromatic refractions of passions, or prejudice, or party feeling, or self-love. He sees no reflected or refracted light. O Father of Light! with whom is no variableness, or shadow of turning, open our eyes to ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... Smith; The History of Propellers, and Steam Navigation, illustrated by engravings: a manual, said to combine much valuable information on the subjects, derived from the most authentic sources, by Mr. Robert MacFarlane, editor of the Scientific American; and Mr. Ridner's Artist's Chromatic Hand-Book, or Manual of Colors, will also be speedily issued by the same publisher. Mr. Putnam's own production, The World's Progress, or Dictionary of Dates, containing a comprehensive manual of reference in facts, or epitome of historical and general statistical knowledge, with ...
— The International Weekly Miscellany, Volume I. No. 8 - Of Literature, Art, and Science, August 19, 1850 • Various
... chromatic tints of these waters, a hollow pasteboard cylinder, five or six centimeters in diameter, and sixty or seventy centimeters in length, was sometimes employed for the purpose of excluding the surface reflection and the disturbances due ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... by who knows what symphonic scheme of things, life was a chromatic scale, yielding up to him through throbbing, living nerves of sheep-gut, the sheerest semitones of ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various
... them written down by a musician in the theatre. But the employment of them in this duet is my own idea. I have already surprised and delighted a great many people with them in parties. The grand, rushing, chromatic scale with which the artistic Garcia astonishes every one, when acting the dreaming, fainting Amina in "La Somnambula," I introduce in the grand aria of the divine "Prophet;" rather timidly, it is true, ...
— Piano and Song - How to Teach, How to Learn, and How to Form a Judgment of - Musical Performances • Friedrich Wieck
... the grate looked impish—demoniacally funny, as if it did not care in the least about her strait. The fender grinned idly, as if it too did not care. The light from the water-bottle was merely engaged in a chromatic problem. All material objects around announced their irresponsibility with terrible iteration. And yet nothing had changed since the moments when he had been kissing her; or rather, nothing in the substance of things. But the ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... Schumann and introduced me to the mystic beauties of the Beethoven sonatas. I can still recall how in the Beethoven C minor sonata, in the first movement, Liszt would bring out a certain broken chromatic passage in the left hand, with a mighty crescendo, an effect of melodious thunder, of enormous depth of tone, and yet with the most exquisite regard for the balance between the violin and his own instrument. And there ...
— Violin Mastery - Talks with Master Violinists and Teachers • Frederick H. Martens
... aquarium in Honolulu, which is like a pelagic rainbow factory, and the aquarium in New York with all its strange and beautiful denizens, I am a little ashamed of our English apathy. To maintain picture galleries, where, however beautiful and chromatic, all is dead, and be insensitive to the loveliness of fish, in hue, in shape and in movement, is not ...
— Roving East and Roving West • E.V. Lucas
... more interesting for the child to study different colours through painting leaves, flowers, and fruits, than to learn them through mere sense impressions, or even through comparing coloured objects, as in the Montessori chromatic exercises. A study of the various kindergarten games and occupations would give an abundance of examples illustrative of the possibility of presenting knowledge in direct association with various types ...
— Ontario Normal School Manuals: Science of Education • Ontario Ministry of Education
... he had his grog, and having nothing to do he thought he would see what was that story which had prevailed so far over the stern realities of system as to derange that piece of clock work that went by the name of Fry. He yawned over the first pages, but as the master hand unrolled the great chromatic theory, he became absorbed, and devoured this great human story till his candles burned down in their sockets and sent him to bed four hours ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... disguised as Mercury, to hasten his departure. Dido's death song, which is followed by a chorus of mourning Cupids, is one of the most pathetic scenes ever written, and illustrates in a forcible manner Purcell's beautiful and ingenious use of a ground-bass. The gloomy chromatic passage constantly repeated by the bass instruments, with ever-varying harmonies in the violins, paints such a picture of the blank despair of a broken heart as Wagner himself, with his immense orchestral resources, never ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... day betokened. The hack was to call for me at eight. At five minutes to eight I went upstairs and dressed in my usual bijou and operatic style, and rolled away to the opera. Emma sang finely. I applauded at the wrong times, and praised her rendering of the chromatic scale when she was performing on "c" flat andante pianissimo, but otherwise the occasion passed off without anything to mar the joyousness of the hour. Everybody was there. Isidor Moses and John Ireland, and ...
— Rolling Stones • O. Henry
... powerful party organ. The cornea was perhaps a shade sallow or so, even verging on the Widow's favourite Yellow—(for the Widow, like some modern decorative artists, was sweet upon all tawny tints, from the most delicate buff to the most flamboyant Orange)—but as to any touch, tint, or tone of her chromatic antipathy, Green——!!! ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, April 22, 1893 • Various
... that so far as the harps were concerned, the music must have been strictly diatonic in character. To quote Rowbotham, "the harp, which was the foundation of the Egyptian orchestra, is an essentially non-chromatic instrument, and could therefore only play a straight up and down diatonic scale." Continuing he says, "It is plain therefore that the Egyptian harmony was purely diatonic; such a thing as modern modulation was unknown, and every piece from beginning ...
— Critical & Historical Essays - Lectures delivered at Columbia University • Edward MacDowell
... each, on a low bench like a settee. They vary in one from twenty to twenty-four centimetres in diameter, and in the other from twenty-seven to thirty-two. They are intended, doubtless, to agree with the chromatic scale of the island, but are faulty on the fourth and seventh, as it seems to me, and yet, contrary to Raffles, Lay and other writers, are not pentatonic, in which the fourth and seventh are rejected altogether and no semi-tones are used. There is no doubt that ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various |
