"Piano" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... sittin' right there in the room, there's a lot doin' that she ain't in on. Trust Vee. Say, she can drum out classical stuff on the piano and fire a snappy line of repartee at me all the while, just loud enough for me to catch and no more, without battin' an eye. Say, I'm gettin' quite a musical education, just helpin' to stall off Auntie that way. And you should see the cute schemes Vee puts over—settin' a framed photo ...
— Wilt Thou Torchy • Sewell Ford
... a moist, flushed Priscilla. "That looks nice. You haven't got very far yet, have you? Never mind. Things go a lot faster after you've done 'em a while. Why, when I first tried to play the piano, my fingers went so slow, they just made me ache. Now they ...
— The Camerons of Highboro • Beth B. Gilchrist
... invariably be a musicale— generally a quartette, with a few connoisseurs to listen and to criticise. Then the piano would be drawn out from its corner and the lid propped up, so that Max Unger of the "Harmonie" could find a place for his 'cello behind it, and there still be room for the inventor with his violin—a violin with a tradition, for Ole Bull had once played on it and in that same room, too, ...
— The Fortunes of Oliver Horn • F. Hopkinson Smith
... professionals had done their work there was a little pause, succeeded by the slight buzz that spoke of expectation. "Miss Pynsent is going to play," Mrs. Murray said to Sydney, putting up her long-handled eyeglass and looking expectantly towards the grand piano. "Oh, now, we shall ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... Aurora to Aeolus, as they sat o'er their bohea, Surrounded by Zephyruses—exactly three times three— "Olus, dear, a new piano is the thing of things we want." I regret to say Aeolus raised his eyes and said "We dont!" So unlike his mournful manner, when his sweet sad harp he plays; And he heav'd a sigh regretful as he thought of other days— As he thought of early moments, ere Aurora's heart was won— Ere beefsteak ...
— The Death of Saul and other Eisteddfod Prize Poems and Miscellaneous Verses • J. C. Manning
... leaning lightly against a pillar by the fountain. "I never hear a pianist, however great and famous, but I see the little cream-colored hammers within the piano bobbing up and down like acrobatic brownies. I never hear the plaudits of the crowd for the artist and watch him return to bow his thanks, but I mentally demand that these little acrobats, each resting on an individual pedestal, and weary from his efforts, shall appear ...
— The Fifth String, The Conspirators • John Philip Sousa
... you would have seen that the women had a rest room of their own where they could eat their lunch in comfort—a rest room with couches, and easy chairs, and palms and flowers, and a piano, and a talking machine, and a floor that you could dance on, if you felt like dancing immediately before or after lunch. And how the eight Josiahs would have stared at that happy, swaying throng in its Turkish overalls—especially on Friday ...
— Mary Minds Her Business • George Weston
... everyday coat, and go with you to her for an evening. No sort of etiquette is necessary there, my dear boy! You're learned, you know, and fond of literature and music'—(there actually was in Aratov's study a piano on which he sometimes struck minor chords)—'and in her house there's enough and to spare of all those goods!... and you'll meet there sympathetic people, no nonsense about them! And after all, you really can't at your age, with your ...
— Dream Tales and Prose Poems • Ivan Turgenev
... Andover for music lessons—piano and organ. A valuable friend was found in Miss Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, who had just published her Gates Ajar. She invited me to her study and wanted to know what I meant to accomplish in life and urged me to write. ...
— Memories and Anecdotes • Kate Sanborn
... can I get along now! My piano is gone and how can I give lessons without it! I will have to go back ...
— The Strange Adventures of Mr. Middleton • Wardon Allan Curtis
... by members of noble English families: 'the caresses of the great' may be lavished on athletes, and actors, and musicians, and Home's remarkable performances were quite enough to make him welcome in country houses. Moreover, he played the piano, the accordion, and other musical instruments. For his mysterious 'gift' he might be invited to puzzle and amuse royal people (not in England), and continental emperors, and kings. But he did much more than what Houdin or Alexis, a conjuror and a clairvoyant, ...
— Historical Mysteries • Andrew Lang
... pretty obeisance, and bade her good night. Hesper returned her adieu kindly, but neither shook hands with her nor rang the bell to have her shown out Mary found her own way, however, and presently was breathing the fresh air of the twilight fields on her way home to her piano and her books. ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... was five years old the 21st of January, and I had such a happy birthday. In the morning when I got up I found at the foot of my crib six books of natural history full of pictures for little folks, a piano, a box of colors, and two dancing bears, one black and one brown. And when I went down to the dining-room, on my tray was a beautiful cup and saucer, and on the cup, in gold letters, "A Gift." And in my chair was a box with twenty-five ...
— Harper's Young People, February 17, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... as a bored musician, listening to the piano-antics of defective children, might have regarded the playing of a disguised Paderewski. Wherefore, he had waved the dog to one side while he judged the lesser entrants, and then had given him ...
— His Dog • Albert Payson Terhune
... child is longing for a pot of sugar candy? Then rub your eyes, you ecclesiastical bats, and let me show you the 'outcome' of all this wise and learned chat, with which you edify one another. You know she beguiled me into giving her lessons on the organ, as well as the piano, and yesterday when I went over to the church at instruction hour, I was astonished at a prelude, which she had evidently improvised. Screened from her view, I listened till she finished playing. Of course I praised ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... corner and came into a narrow street that throbbed with the joyous melody of a piano-organ. His heart leapt up. The roadway bubbled with Jewish children, mainly girls, footing it gleefully in the graying light, inventing complex steps with a grace and an abandon that lit their eyes with sparkles and painted ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... the Handelian form, words and music by Samuel Butler and Henry Festing Jones: MS. of the piano score in the British Museum. MS. of the orchestral score ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... began to feel that Bathilde had become one of the necessities of his life; but as he could not pass the whole night at his window, he then closed it, and came into his room, although only to follow up the recollections with which it was filled. He opened his piano, and passed his fingers over the keys, at the risk of re-exacting the anger of the lodger on the third floor. From the piano he passed to the unfinished portrait of Bathilde. At length he slept, listening again in his mind to ...
— The Conspirators - The Chevalier d'Harmental • Alexandre Dumas (Pere)
... and S.—or did when last inspected. It commands a magnificent view of the back gardens of the next street, where a weekly regatta is held every Monday. For lovers of music there is a piano next door and five gramophones within audible distance; an organ plays every ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, June 10, 1914 • Various
... other on the stairs. If a stranger had entered the house that day, he might have imagined that an unexpected disaster had happened in it, instead of an unexpected necessity for a journey to London. Nothing proceeded in its ordinary routine. Magdalen, who was accustomed to pass the morning at the piano, wandered restlessly about the staircases and passages, and in and out of doors when there were glimpses of fine weather. Norah, whose fondness for reading had passed into a family proverb, took up book after book from table and shelf, and laid them ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... by the English, or made to dig trenches." The whole scene was so comic that I sat down and laughed, and the climax was reached when the cock-sparrow, who had always talked so big of what he was going to do and to say to the Boers, crawled under the old grand piano in the farther corner of the big room. I was forced to tell him that no American or Englishman could be found in such an ignominious position, should the house be searched, and I even assured the little ...
— South African Memories - Social, Warlike & Sporting From Diaries Written At The Time • Lady Sarah Wilson
... instrument save the tambourine—my highest success otherwise has been to finger out "God save the Queen" and "We won't go home till morning" on the ocarina—and to this day a person able to play the piano or the fiddle seems possessed of an uncanny gift; but in that remote period of my fresh rescue from the gutter, an executant appeared something superhuman. I stared at him with stupid open mouth. He played what I afterwards learned was one of Brahms's Hungarian dances. His lank figure and long ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... bowls of roses, jars of pink carnations and occasionally a vase of pink orchids were on mantel, low bookcases or piano. And sometimes the odor of a cigarette or a burning pastille of Oriental fragrance, added to the Bohemian effect which is, oftener than not, discernible by ...
— Vicky Van • Carolyn Wells
... speak to my pianist about Wagner's Lohengrin; he plays with great taste and feeling, and I purchased a fine Parisian piano to enable him to go ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Volume III (of 3), 1854-1861 • Queen of Great Britain Victoria
... passages, so they were not only quite safe from shells but were exceedingly interesting and picturesque. We had several services for the men and one for a field ambulance which made its home in the Deaf and Dumb Asylum. In a large room in the Asylum there was a good piano, so it enabled us to use the place at one time as a church and at another as a ballroom. There was a strange charm about dear old Arras which is quite indescribable. In spite of the ruined buildings and the damaged grass-grown streets, there was the haunting beauty of a quiet medievalism about ...
— The Great War As I Saw It • Frederick George Scott
... years old. They were very pleasant-looking, of olive complexions. Their hair was tied in a knot behind, with a wreath of flowers round the knot; they had large gold ear-rings and European dresses. One played very nicely on the piano, while the rest sang very nicely a funny song, which shows the native way of thinking about some of our customs. They sang some nice hymns, and repeated some pieces, as the 'Wreck of the Hesperus,' which was given at the examination of ...
— The Personal Life Of David Livingstone • William Garden Blaikie
... heard me playing on the piano, for I thumped as loud as ever I could; but he did not come in. It seems to me he is trying 'to cool off,' as we girls in the bindery used ...
— Pretty Madcap Dorothy - How She Won a Lover • Laura Jean Libbey
... their houses so that they could go and lay their hands on it in the darkest night. I'll bet they could in our house. From end to end it is kept looking as if we had shut it up and gone to Europe,—not a book, not a paper, not a glove, or any trace of a human being in sight; the piano shut tight, the bookcases shut and locked, the engravings locked up, all the drawers and closets locked. Why, if I want to take a fellow into the library, in the first place it smells like a vault, and I have to unbarricade windows, and unlock and rummage for half ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... few days, and she had obtained permission to accompany him to Old Point. Very pretty, she seemed, in her travelling hat and flowing robes; and he wore a handsome new uniform with prodigious shoulder-bars. There was a piano in the saloon, where another young lady of the party performed during the evening, and the bride and groom accompanied her with a song. It was the popular Federal parody of "Gay ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... sort of home we wanted, but we were willing to begin humbly. This was not because we were averse to starting at the top. Both Mother and I had then, and have now, a fondness for the best things of life. We should have liked a grand piano, and a self-making ice box, and a servant, and an automobile right off! But less than five hundred dollars capital and twenty-eight dollars a week salary ...
— Making the House a Home • Edgar A. Guest
... his thoughts by singing louder and louder the favorite melody of the day, Marlborough s'en va-t-en guerre. But Josephine had the satisfaction that Hortense was not only an excellent performer on the piano and the harp, but that she could also write original compositions, whose softness and harmonious combinations made them popular throughout France. Another satisfaction was, that Eugene sang, in a fine ...
— The Empress Josephine • Louise Muhlbach
... tell me about her school life. She began at once to enumerate all her different studies—piano, style, chronology of the Kings of France, sewing, drawing, catechism, deportment... I could never remember them all! She still held in her hands, all unconsciously, the two ends of her skipping-rope, and she raised and lowered ...
— The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard • Anatole France
... seen, owing to the rapidity of the vibrations, although a scale of an octave may be sung; in the lower notes, however, the vocal cords are seen not so closely approximated as in the very high notes. This may account for the difficulty experienced in singing high notes piano. Sir Felix Semon in a Friday evening lecture at the Royal Institution showed some remarkable photographs, by Dr. French, of the larynx of two great singers, a contralto and a high soprano, during vocalisation, ...
— The Brain and the Voice in Speech and Song • F. W. Mott
... Quick we put piano where it can sing best, chairs all in circle. Big spot in middle for tree, which comes at very ...
— Mr. Bamboo and the Honorable Little God - A Christmas Story • Fannie C. Macaulay
... the million mark. Not wishing to seem rude, the colonel moved slowly on down the street. When he turned his head, after going a rod or two, and looked back over his shoulder, the girl had risen and was re-entering the house. Her disappearance was promptly followed by the notes of a piano, slightly out of tune, to which some one—presumably the young woman—was singing in a high voice, which might have been better had it ...
— The Colonel's Dream • Charles W. Chesnutt
... and everywhere were swinging baskets of silver birch, brimming over with the delicate green of smilax or clouded in an amethystine mist of lobelias. I can still see the little sitting-room with its piano, its plenitude of cushions, its book-rack, its Indian corner, its tasteful paper, its pictures, and always and everywhere flowers, flowers. The air was heavy with the fragrance of them. They glorified the crudest corner, and made our home like ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... Box Street tenement, distributing smiles, pennies, impulsive, genuine caresses, to the children as he went, tipping their faces, patting their heads, all in the rare, unquestioned way, being not alien to the manner of the poor. A street piano, at the corner, tinkled an air to which a throng of ragged, lean little girls danced in the yellow sunshine, dodging trucks and idlers and impatient pedestrians with unconcern, colliding and tripping with utmost good nature. The curate ...
— The Mother • Norman Duncan
... It was a dear little apartment that the girls shared, with a living-room chosen especially for having nice times in. It was lighted by tall candles, and had a gas grate that was almost human. There was a grand piano which took up more than its share of room, there was the davenport aforesaid, there were companionable chairs and taborets acquired by Lucille and kept by Marjorie in the exact places where they looked best; there were soft draperies, also hemmed and put up by Marjorie. ...
— I've Married Marjorie • Margaret Widdemer
... last century a pianoforte had not figured in any Royston household, but it came at the beginning of this century when Lady Wortham as she was always styled—as the daughter of Sir Thomas Hatton, Bart., and wife of Hale Wortham, Esq.—became the owner of the first piano at their house in Melbourn Street (now ...
— Fragments of Two Centuries - Glimpses of Country Life when George III. was King • Alfred Kingston
... but it is seldom that I have written anything with so much pleasure," she tells us. "It was in the country, in summer weather, as hot as the Italian climate I had lately left. I have never seen so many birds and flowers in my garden. Liszt was playing the piano on the ground floor, and the nightingales, intoxicated with music and sunshine, were singing ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... There was no one to control her, because her grandmother was confined to her own room. And so Aurore Dupin, now in superb health, rushed into every sort of diversion with all the zest of youth. She read voraciously—religion, poetry, philosophy. She was an excellent musician, playing the piano and the harp. Once, in a spirit of unconscious egotism, she wrote ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... them the next at their lodgings, the modesty of which was enhanced by a hundred pretty feminine devices—flowers and photographs and portable knick-knacks and a hired piano and morsels of old brocade flung over angular sofas. I took them to drive; I met them again at the Kursaal; I arranged that we should dine together, after the Homburg fashion, at the same table d'hote; and during several days this revived ...
— Louisa Pallant • Henry James
... before they carried things with too high a hand. Not having a half-penny at command, she was helpless. Without money and without friends, you may wonder how she supported herself while the correspondence was going on. She supported herself by playing the piano-forte at a low concert-room in Brussels. The men laid siege to her, of course, in all directions; but they found her insensible as adamant. One of these rejected gentlemen was a Russian; and he was the means of making ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins
... doctor; don't, please. I'm a warm man, and I'm getting warmer. My house is tip-top. I gave two-fifty for the piano, I did, 'pon my soul, and fifty apiece for the cut-glass chandies in the drawing-room. There ain't a better garden in Sydenham. You're willing, ...
— The Bag of Diamonds • George Manville Fenn
... close-shuttered, handsome, brutally insensible houses. If I were a poor man, with a sick child pining in some garret or cellar at the North End, I should break into one of them, and camp out on the grand piano." ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... trumpets, trombones and drums to produce a deafening uproar, but it took all the native force of a Wagner to fill, to inform, the thought itself with such energy that, looking at the score, the passages seem almost to leap out from the page, and, played on even a small piano, their effect is still overwhelming. When the opera was produced the effect on the audience was certainly overwhelming, almost stupefying. The Dutchman had been accepted at Berlin on Meyerbeer's recommendation, but that recommendation Wagner ...
— Wagner • John F. Runciman
... Gilbert, was a delicate lad, in his fourteenth year, handsome, spirituelle and intellectual to a remarkable degree. He was a real genius, passionately fond of books, art and music; already an accomplished player on both the piano and violin. Yet withal, he was very reticent, sensitive and shy, on account of his small size and deformed body, the result of spinal trouble caused by ...
— Solaris Farm - A Story of the Twentieth Century • Milan C. Edson
... men, but the greatest hospitality, and all the peasants very submissive! Sanin tried to impart to her and her daughter some more exact information. When the conversation touched on Russian music, they begged him at once to sing some Russian air and showed him a diminutive piano with black keys instead of white and white instead of black. He obeyed without making much ado and accompanying himself with two fingers of the right hand and three of the left (the first, second, and little ...
— The Torrents of Spring • Ivan Turgenev
... a big chair beside the piano, and sat there alone, interested and curious. And presently Pittiwitz, stealing toward the hearth, arched her back under his hand, and he reached down and lifted her to his knee, where she stretched herself, sphinx-like, her amber eyes shining ...
— Contrary Mary • Temple Bailey
... half-light of the great salon clad in its summer garb, filled with flowers, the plush furniture swathed in white covers, the chandeliers draped in gauze, the shades lowered and the windows open, Madame Jenkins sits at the piano, picking out the last production of the fashionable musician of the day; a few sonorous chords accompany the exquisite lines, a melancholy Lied in unequal measures, which seems to have been written for the serious sweetness of her ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... mistake, or, perhaps, a purposed misdirection; but, nothing daunted by the difficulties encountered, she succeeded in gaining admittance to apartments on the second floor, where, instead of poverty and sickness, she found the mother in the midst of evident comfort, seated at her piano, who at first denied all knowledge of the little charity girl, and was only confronted successfully by the entrance unguardedly of ...
— Gathering Jewels - The Secret of a Beautiful Life: In Memoriam of Mr. & Mrs. James Knowles. Selected from Their Diaries. • James Knowles and Matilda Darroch Knowles
... the chateau, then classified, registered, packed and "put into two carts, upon which they took care to place the Red Cross flag." We read in the note-book of a wounded German soldier, under medical treatment at Brussels, "A car has arrived at the hospital, bringing war booty, a piano, two sewing machines and all sorts of ...
— Their Crimes • Various
... and, when they had almost reached the house, they heard the sound of a piano, and a female voice singing the never-failing ...
— Frank on a Gun-Boat • Harry Castlemon
... precisely the same in plan and construction, only in the larger sizes the handles develop or evolve into shafts; and they are equally suitable, according to size, for the vending of whelks, for a hot-potato can, a piano organ, or for the conveyance of a cheery and numerous party to the Derby. Fothergill bought a medium sized "developed'' one, and also a donkey to fit; he had it painted white, picked out with green — the barrow, not the donkey — and ...
— Pagan Papers • Kenneth Grahame
... at her coming. He cared no more for music than does a cat, but eagerly followed her across the broad hall into the parlor when she suggested showing him the beautiful piano papa had given her; and old John, blessing her, lurched for the sofa, buried his hot head in a pillow, and was asleep in ten seconds. Major Burleigh was alone with the lovely daughter of the veteran trader. He was a man of the world; she an ...
— Warrior Gap - A Story of the Sioux Outbreak of '68. • Charles King
... her mistress: and she sat down, staring uneasily round about her, as if wondering what was going to befall her next. Very silent was the little parlor; so small, that it was almost filled up by its large square piano, its six cane-bottomed chairs, and one easy chair, in which sat Miss Leaf with the great Book ...
— Mistress and Maid • Dinah Craik (aka: Miss Mulock)
... atmosphere of the Dean household, her reserve melted and before dinner was over she had forgotten all about herself and was laughing merrily with Marjorie over Mr. Dean's nonsense. After dinner Mrs. Dean played on the piano and Constance, who knew how to dance was initiated into the mysteries of several new steps which were favorites of the Franklin girls, and later the two girls spent a happy hour in Marjorie's room with her books, of which she ...
— Marjorie Dean High School Freshman • Pauline Lester
... Gluck, a piano manufacturer of Munich, was a follower of Horace Fletcher, the American munching missionary. Unlike the Swiss, who craved raw food, Herr Gluck ate everything, but each mouthful only after thorough maceration, salivation, and slow deglutition. At breakfast he absorbed a glass of milk ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... your add in the Chicago Defender for laborers. I am a young man and want to finish school. I want you to look out for me a job on the place working morning and evening. I would like to get a job in some private family so I could continue taking my piano lesson I can do anything around the house but drive and can even learn that. Send me the name of the best High school in Chicago. How is the Wendell Phillips College. I have finish the grammer school. I cannot come before the ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 4, 1919 • Various
... at the piano in the drawing-room, and Toni was entertaining her lover with music, not voluntarily, however, but at her father's request, for she herself considered music a wearisome and superfluous accomplishment. But the head forester had insisted ...
— The Northern Light • E. Werner
... that day were anything but a satisfaction to Fraeulein Bernhardt, the piano teacher. Her mind was so abstracted that she kept continually playing wrong fingering, or even an occasional wrong note in the harmonic minors. Her study was little better, and her piece a dead failure. The mistress, with characteristic ...
— The New Girl at St. Chad's - A Story of School Life • Angela Brazil
... call that thing artistic, Mrs. Hewson, if you mean the thing that's over the piano in ...
— Sally Bishop - A Romance • E. Temple Thurston
... wife for some neighbours. One of them was a professional furniture- remover, and, half-way up the narrow stairs, the unfortunate had to remind him that he was dealing with a British working man, and not a piano. Four pairs of hands deposited Mr. Scutts with mathematical precision in the centre of the bed and then proceeded to tuck him in, while Mrs. Scutts drew the sheet in a straight ...
— Night Watches • W.W. Jacobs
... Her big drooping eyes were wet with tears, and the little homesick note in her voice made an irresistible appeal to the hearts of those who heard it,—at least it did to mine, and I sneaked away behind the lid of the grand piano, which was open, to get out my pocket handkerchief, for I did not choose to make a spectacle of myself, and I don't know how to cry prettily, like Nora Costello. My nose gets red, and my eyes look as if I were addicted to the use ...
— Flint - His Faults, His Friendships and His Fortunes • Maud Wilder Goodwin
... costume; and in a conspicuous place, evidently the pride of the whole collection, was a full-length portrait of the Queen, smiling benignantly down on her subjects. Below the cases of butterflies and birds was a piano—yes, actually, a piano—and by no means a bad one too. Then, near the fire-place, was a snug little book- case, well furnished with books; and over the mantelpiece, in the centre of a warm-looking paper, was the text, in large characters, "The love of Christ constraineth us." The mantelpiece ...
— Frank Oldfield - Lost and Found • T.P. Wilson
... the letter from his sister telling of young Arthur's infatuation for the cheap actress, Miss Fotheringay, the story carries one along in the leisurely way of the last century. All the people are a delight, from Captain Costigan to Fowker, and from the French chef, who went to the piano for stimulus in his culinary work, to Blanche Amory and her amazing French affectations. But Pendennis is ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... compare these two conditions of the brain, to a piano at which some great musician sits, and who as he throws his fingers over the keys recalls some melody which he might harmonize if he use all his power. This comparison may be extended yet further, when we remember that reflection is to ideas, what harmony is to sounds; ...
— The Physiology of Taste • Brillat Savarin
... playing the piano as an example of the kind of action we are in search of, we observe that a practised player will perform very difficult pieces apparently without effort, often, indeed, while thinking and talking of something quite other than his music; yet he will play accurately ...
— Selections from Previous Works - and Remarks on Romanes' Mental Evolution in Animals • Samuel Butler
... a proposition in Euclid, should we really be satisfied with the statement that it represented the random pencil-strokes made by a blindfolded child ignorant of geometry? On the other hand, if a fretful baby is allowed to divert himself by hammering the piano keys, is the result ever remotely akin to a tune? We know perfectly well that we never get harmony, order, beauty, rationality by accident; and there is only one other alternative—design, purpose, guidance. Professor Fiske ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... basso of the Opera, accompanied at the piano by one of the unclassified ladies, was just finishing Mephistopheles' drinking song out of Faust when ...
— Jason • Justus Miles Forman
... were other local representatives—naval captains with staffs similar to those of the home ports—so that, to use a phrase of the Director of Transports, the ships were "well shepherded." It was, in fact, much the position of a man who with ten fingers manipulates {p.097} the several keys of a piano. If the end crowns the work it may be said, although the end is not quite yet, that the work of transportation has been crowned. No loss of human life by preventable cause has occurred, nor has complaint been heard of serious hitch of any kind. ...
— Story of the War in South Africa - 1899-1900 • Alfred T. Mahan
... completed in 1842, at Teplitz, during an excursion in the Bohemian mountains; but the whole score was not finished until three years later. Wagner had gone over it all so carefully that it was printed without much revision, and he had even written the piano score, which was sent to Berlin in 1845 and appeared in the same year that the opera was produced ...
— Stories of the Wagner Opera • H. A. Guerber
... When they found they were not to be oppressed they became servile and fawning. I had my officers' mess in the schoolmaster's house. He had been a non-commissioned officer of infantry, and yet he wanted to send his daughters in to play the piano for us after dinner. We would have despised the German less if he had been able to "hate" a little more after he was beaten and not so bitterly while he felt ...
— War in the Garden of Eden • Kermit Roosevelt
... a more important place among educational influences now that the old superstition of making every child play the piano is passing away. It was an injustice both to the right reason of a child and to the honour of music when it was forced upon those who were unwilling and unfit to attain any degree of excellence in it. We are renouncing these superstitions and turning to something more widely possible—to ...
— The Education of Catholic Girls • Janet Erskine Stuart
... suddenly in her German Russian, 'music greatly loves, and herself very beautifully plays the piano, only she likes not to play the piano when she ...
— The Jew And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... not only for her beauty, but for her accomplishments. She was one of the ladies who sang: a gentleman accompanied her on the piano. She and Mr. Rochester ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... in their glory, and as soon as the breakfast things were out of the way, they prepared for a grand cooking-time. They were handy girls, though they had never heard of a cooking-school, never touched a piano, and knew nothing of embroidery beyond the samplers which hung framed in the parlor; one ornamented with a pink mourner under a blue weeping-willow, the other with this pleasing verse, each word ...
— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag VI - An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving, Etc. • Louisa M. Alcott
... one of their clashes, she devilled him at the piano, playing a mad damned thing that stirred and irritated him and set his pulse pounding wild and undisciplined fancies in the ordered chamber of his brain. The worst of it was she saw and knew just what she was doing. She was ...
— The Turtles of Tasman • Jack London
... indecent poverty. Better education; better housing; better chances for healthy recreation—these are the things for which the masses are clamouring. Why is it wrong for a workman who has made money during the war to buy a piano—and to hear people talk that seems to be one of their most dastardly crimes—when it is quite all right for his employer, who has made more money out of the war, to pay five pounds for one good dinner, or ...
— Over the Fireside with Silent Friends • Richard King
... there save for the war. At present he is chiefly conscious of his clothes. His mother embraces him with cries of rapture, while Mr. Torrance surveys him quizzically over the paper; and Emma, rushing to the piano, which is of such an old-fashioned kind that it can also be used as a sideboard, plays 'See the ...
— Echoes of the War • J. M. Barrie
... and above their school learning they've been taught to swim, ride, dance, use tools, play on the piano, and speak fair to middling French. Yet, as you say, Fred, the most difficult part is to come, just as we fancied that we were through. And the terrible reflection is that we're not so sure now what we ought to do for them as we ...
— The Opinions of a Philosopher • Robert Grant
... chairs and tables. Everywhere were evidences of the haste with which the place had been vacated as well as the superstitious dread which had prevented it being re-entered for the commonplace purpose of cleaning. Even the piano had not been shut, and under it lay some scattered sheets of music which had been left where they fell, to the probable loss of some poor musician. The clock occupying the center of the mantelpiece alone gave evidence of ...
— The Filigree Ball • Anna Katharine Green
... Bruennhilde, and, especially, of Siegmund, bear a close relationship to Beethoven's symphonies and sonatas. I can never play the recitative con espressione e semplice of the seventeenth sonata for the piano (Op. 31, No. 2) without being reminded of the forests of Die Walkuere and the fugitive hero. But in Siegfried I find, not only a likeness to Beethoven in details, but the same spirit running through the work—both ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... a house of my own, when I'm grown up," said pretty Del; "I shall have a red carpet and some curtains; my husband will buy me a piano." ...
— Men, Women, and Ghosts • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
... expedition on leaving Cape Columbia comprised two wooden reels of a length equal to the width of the sledge, a detachable wooden crank to go on each end of the reel, to each reel a thousand fathoms (six thousand feet) of specially made steel piano wire of a diameter .028 inches, and one fourteen-pound lead having at its lower end a small bronze clam-shell device, self-tripping when it reached the bottom, for the purpose of bringing up samples of the ocean bed. The weights of this outfit were as follows: each thousand ...
— The North Pole - Its Discovery in 1909 under the auspices of the Peary Arctic Club • Robert E. Peary
... Amsterdam, there was placed in the apartments of the Empress a piano so constructed as to appear like a desk with a division in the middle, and in this space was placed a small bust of the Emperor of Russia. Soon after, the Emperor wished to see if the apartments of the Empress ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... from the door and went on with his explorations. In the parlor there was light enough from the front door to show him the long formal room with its white marble centre-table adorned with a few gilt-topped books and a spindly lamp, the square piano, the stiff-looking chairs and rockers, the few pictures against the faded gold paper, the white mantel, set with shells and vases and a few photographs, the quaint curving-backed sofa between the side windows. He closed the door again and turned ...
— The Lilac Girl • Ralph Henry Barbour
... the moonlight to get rid of the excitement of the evening, bent our steps in that direction. There were about as many persons assembled as the little drawing-room would hold, and Clara, having forgotten her headach, and looking as lovely as ever, was seated at a wretched piano, endeavouring to accompany herself in her favourite songs. Willingham and myself stood by, and our repeated requests for some of those melodies which, unknown to us before, we had learnt from her singing to admire beyond all the fashionable trash of the day, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... there was a quiver of excitement in his voice, like the tremor of a piano string long after it has been struck. "Dan, I been thinking about something and now I'm ready to tell ...
— The Night Horseman • Max Brand
... middle age,—then, as ever, "the poet of all circles, and the idol of his own." As his visits to his native city were few and far between, the power to see him, and especially to hear him, was a boon of magnitude. It was, indeed, a treat, when, seated at the piano, he gave voice to the glorious "Melodies" that are justly regarded as the most valuable of his legacies to mankind. I can recall that evening as vividly as if it were not a sennight old: the graceful man, small and slim in figure, his upturned ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various
... tears in her eyes, 'Boys, always take care of one another.' So each evening I have tried to tuck Bertie in his little bed, and Bertie, with equal enthusiasm, has attempted to tuck me in. It has been hard on pyjamas, bed springs, and the temper of the Lady with the Piano who resides in the apartments immediately beneath; so, at the wise suggestion of our friends in the windows"—he waved a graceful hand toward them, and they gravely bowed acknowledgment—"we are now engaged in deciding the matter Graeco-Roman. The winner ...
— The Claim Jumpers • Stewart Edward White
... Earliest Youth, bent all his Energies toward Learning to play the Piano. He studied at Home and Abroad with Greatest Masters, and he Achieved Wonderful Success. But as he was about to Begin his Triumphant and Profitable Career, he had the Misfortune to lose both ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume III. (of X.) • Various
... write such a letter as would be a comfort to her mother, so she gave that up, and made her sole assertion of liberty the working out of a tough double equation in Colenso, which actually came right, and put her in such good humour that she was no longer afraid of drumming the poor piano to death and Aunt Ada upstairs to distraction, but ventured on learning one of the Lieder ohne Worte; and when her Aunt Ada came down and complimented her on the sounds that had ascended, she was complacent enough to write a very cheerful letter, whilst her aunt was busied with her ...
— Beechcroft at Rockstone • Charlotte M. Yonge
... making such a noise about me I cannot write any more. Mary is playing on the piano; Martha is chattering as fast as her little tongue can run; and Branwell is standing before her, ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte - Volume 1 • Elizabeth Gaskell
... flowers and arranged the sheets of music scattered in disorder over the piano, she looked at the samovar, and remarked, ...
— Mother • Maxim Gorky
... the energetic sense of loathing for the negro proved it. The music, loud and strident—an ordinary Italian piano-organ having been introduced amongst the Oriental instruments—banged on, and then abruptly came to a stop when the negro cracked his whip. The two African women resumed their chairs, there was some applause, and a good many small coins fell on the stage from the hands ...
— Six Women • Victoria Cross
... the little folks are tired of hearing about pets, but I want to tell them how my kitty jumped on the piano, and ran over the keys from one end of them to the other, and the tune she played frightened her so that she scampered away with all her might. She is now curled up in my hat, fast asleep. I have two carrier-doves for ...
— Harper's Young People, September 28, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... going to write until my sister begins playing the piano. Music and literature don't mix—believe me. There are two cruises in this book—a big one and a little one. You can take your pick. The little one is full of mud and the big one is full of pep. Anyway you get your money's ...
— Roy Blakeley • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... which had been transformed into an impromptu ball-room by taking up the rugs and moving the piano to one end of it, ...
— Marjorie Dean - High School Sophomore • Pauline Lester
... instruments, too, is the cause of modifications in the music written for them. The limited compass of the pianoforte, for example, was certainly the sole reason why Beethoven failed to continue in octaves the entire ascending scale in one of his sonatas. Had the piano in his day possessed its present compass, he would undoubtedly have written the passage throughout in octaves, i.e., as modern pianists play it. If a rigid adherence to the printed letter of ancient music is to be strictly observed, without ...
— Style in Singing • W. E. Haslam
... of Pleasure (ltd.). Not the girls in whose hearts Berlin is beating, not the girls in whose elan Berlin lives and laughs. Leave behind all places such as these, seeker after the soul of Berlin. Leave behind the Tingel-Tangel with its uniformed bouncer at the gate, with its threadbare piano, with its "na kleener Dicker" smirked by soiled decolletes, its doleful near-naughty ditties—"Ich lass mich nicht verfuehren, dazu bin ich zu schlau, ich kenne die Manieren der Maenner ganz genau"—"I won't be led astray, I am ...
— Europe After 8:15 • H. L. Mencken, George Jean Nathan and Willard Huntington Wright
... necessitated it being kept in the drawing-room, as otherwise she forgot all about it; and Vane had a vivid recollection of a large and incredibly stout bird with a watery and furtive eye ensconced on cushions near the piano. ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile
... in his work something of the passion for form and style that one finds in Flaubert and Pater, but where they are often hard, percussive, like a piano, he is soft and strong and intimate like a violin on which he plays his reading of life. Such analogies, however, have little significance, except that they indicate a unique and ...
— Mogens and Other Stories - Mogens; The Plague At Bergamo; There Should Have Been Roses; Mrs. Fonss • Jens Peter Jacobsen
... staff arranged for supper at the house of Colonel Bacon, an old man and Secessionist. The Colonel treated us politely, but while we were eating a number of ladies of the town assembled in an adjoining parlor in which there was a piano, threw the communicating door open, and proceeded to sing such Confederate war-songs as Stonewall Jackson's Away and My Maryland. We of course accepted good humoredly this concert for our benefit, but when we had finished supper, ...
— Slavery and Four Years of War, Vol. 1-2 • Joseph Warren Keifer
... defiance of the Inferno outside, festal preparations were being made in a little house on Campden Hill. Lamps were lit; in the drawing-room chairs were pushed back; the piano was open, and a violin stand towered beside it; chrysanthemums were everywhere; an invalid lady in a 'best cap' occupied the sofa; and two girls were flitting about, clearly making the last arrangements necessary for ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... besides the armchair, two other chairs, a piano, a three-legged table, and a cosy corner. Of the walls, one was occupied by the window, the other by a draped mantelshelf bristling with Cupids. Opposite the window was the door, and beside the door a ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... her aware of Peters standing beside her. He looked down silently on the card table for a few moments, pointed with a nicotine-stained finger to a move Miss Craven had missed and then wandered across the room and sat down at the piano. For a while his hands moved silently over the keys, then he began to play, and his playing was exquisite. Gillian sat and marvelled. Peters and music had seemed widely apart. He had appeared so essentially a sportsman; in spite of the literary tendency that his sympathetic ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull
... garter snake in the park the other day and he brought it home and hid it in the piano. When his sister's young man opened the instrument that evening to play "For Goodness Sake" he thought he had 'em and yelled like a Piute on the war-hath. They won't believe in Johnny's innocence somehow, and his father ...
— Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56: No. 1, January 5, 1884. - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various
... speak. He swayed back a half step with a flicker of change crossing his face then stood steady and smiling again. That brief grimace touched Bryce's nerves with a sensation that was like the jangle of something heavy dropped inside a piano, a sound he had heard once. But the numbness did not lift from his feelings. He was still smiling. The third bullet would be between ...
— The Man Who Staked the Stars • Charles Dye
... being occupied by a sort of sideboard on each side of the entrance door, while against the after bulkhead stood a very handsome pianoforte, open, with a quantity of music in a stand beside it. There was a door to the right of the piano, which, I conjectured, led to the captain's state-room, right abaft; and the side bulkheads, which like the rest of the woodwork of the cabin were painted in white enamel, were each pierced by two doors, close together, which, I had no doubt, gave access to state-rooms. My surmise ...
— A Middy of the Slave Squadron - A West African Story • Harry Collingwood
... note. "Will you take it?" My heart beat—my agonies of want pressed, but it was too little. I trembled out, "I cannot." The gentleman invited me to dine, and when we were sitting over our wine, agreed to give me my price. His lady said, "But, my dear, where am I to put my piano?" and the bargain was at an end!' On the third day Sir George Beaumont and Mr. Holwell Carr came to the Exhibition, having been deputed to buy the picture for the British Gallery. While they were discussing its merits, one of the officials went over, and put 'sold' on the frame, whereupon the ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... through the sky. But regularly they dipped their wings in pitch black; Notting Hill, for instance, or the purlieus of Clerkenwell. No wonder that Italian remained a hidden art, and the piano always played the same sonata. In order to buy one pair of elastic stockings for Mrs. Page, widow, aged sixty-three, in receipt of five shillings out-door relief, and help from her only son employed ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... stretching away northward for ten or fifteen miles, with Mount Orford and his supporting hills in the near background; while I had only to walk the length of the piazza to look round the corner of the house at Owl's Head itself, at whose base we were. The hotel had less than a dozen guests and no piano, and there was neither carriage-road nor railway within sight or hearing. Yes, this was the place where I would spend the eight days which yet remained to ...
— Birds in the Bush • Bradford Torrey
... Still young, though already bald, always carefully shaved, a little corpulent, as it was fitting, wearing a gold pince-nez instead of old-fashioned spectacles, active, gallant, and joyous, he passed in Vernon for an artist. He thrummed on the piano and played on the violin, and gave musical evenings where interpretations were given of ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant
... and also from the West Indies. The former is classed as "Honduras"; the latter is generally known as San Domingo mahogany and commands the highest price. Rosewood is obtained from Brazil, and is used almost exclusively in piano-cases. Both are cut into thin veneers, to be glued to a less ...
— Commercial Geography - A Book for High Schools, Commercial Courses, and Business Colleges • Jacques W. Redway |
