"Sounding-board" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Ambassador, Your Honor, is simply trying to use the courts of the Planet of New Texas as a sounding-board for his ...
— Lone Star Planet • Henry Beam Piper and John Joseph McGuire
... preacher is Jack, standing erect in his particolored pulpit with a sounding-board over his head; but he is a gay deceiver, a wolf in sheep's clothing,, literally a "brother to dragons," an arrant upstart, an ingrate, a murderer of innocent benefactors! "Female botanizing classes pounce upon it as they would upon a pious young clergyman," complains ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... this was just one of those facts that are propagated with a mysterious and ridiculous rapidity. The whisper that carries them is very small, in the great scale of things, of air and space and progress, but it is also very safe, for there is no compression, no sounding-board, to make speakers responsible. And then repetition at sea is somehow not repetition; monotony is in the air, the mind is flat and everything recurs—the bells, the meals, the stewards' faces, the ...
— A London Life; The Patagonia; The Liar; Mrs. Temperly • Henry James
... own, and all faced different ways except two fish-houses, which stood amiably side by side. There was a church, which we had been told was the oldest in the region. Through the windows we saw the high pulpit and sounding-board, and finally found the keys at a house near by; so we went in and looked around at our leisure. A rusty foot-stove stood in one of the old square pews, and in the gallery there was a majestic bass-viol with all its strings snapped ...
— Deephaven and Selected Stories & Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... caught another pregnant sound, a mumbling of male voices in the adjoining front room. I waited a bit, hearkening laboriously, and then ever so gradually I slid from the bed, put on everything except my boots, and moved by inches to the door between the two rooms. It was very thin; "a good sounding-board," thought I as I listened for life or death and hoped my ear was ...
— The Cavalier • George Washington Cable
... How many times have I carried her footstove for her and filled it in the vestry-room. I have frozen in the old pew while grandma kept nice and warm and nibbled lozenges and cassia cakes during meeting. I remember the old sounding-board. There was no melodeon in that meeting-house; and the leader of the choir pitched the tune with a tuning-fork. As a boy I used to play hi-spy in the horse-shed. But I am not so very old—no, a man is still a boy at forty, ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... surfaces] cymbal, bell, gong; tambour^, tambourine, tamborine^; drum, tom-tom; tabor, tabret^, tabourine^, taborin^; side drum, kettle drum; timpani, tympani^; tymbal^, timbrel^, castanet, bones; musical glasses, musical stones; harmonica, sounding-board, rattle; tam-tam, zambomba^. [Vibrating bars] reed, tuning fork, triangle, Jew's harp, musical box, harmonicon^, xylophone. sordine^, sordet^; sourdine^, sourdet^; mute. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... at the head waters of the Delaware is a chosen haunt of the winter wren. His voice fills these dim aisles, as if aided by some marvelous sounding-board. Indeed, his song is very strong for so small a bird, and unites in a remarkable degree brilliancy and plaintiveness. I think of a tremulous, vibrating tongue of silver. You may know it is the song of a wren from its gushing, lyrical character; but you must needs look sharp to ...
— Bird Stories from Burroughs - Sketches of Bird Life Taken from the Works of John Burroughs • John Burroughs
... stringed instruments as they were tuned to pitch by the musicians, who had already taken their place in the singing-pew beneath the pulpit, which stood square and high, canopied with its old-fashioned sounding-board and cornice of plain deal. There was 'owd Joel Boothman,' who had played the double bass for half a century, resining his bow with a trembling hand; and Joe and Robert Hargreaves fondly caressing their 'cellos. Dick o' Tootershill and his two sons were delicately touching the trembling ...
— Lancashire Idylls (1898) • Marshall Mather
... the double line of windows all round, broken by the long round-topped window midway on the back side, and the two-storied vestibule on the front, and, more than all, the old pulpit still remaining within, with the sounding-board suspended above it, bore witness. Here assembled every spring, at the March meeting, the voters of the town, to elect their selectmen and other town officers for the ensuing year, to vote what moneys should be raised for the repair of roads, ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 5, May, 1884 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... a sounding-board of inky clouds, the alarm shots at Brannon, the shouting, the reports of the Gatlings, and the trumpet-calls fell sharp and clear upon the shack. Dallas, watching into the blackness from her bench by the door, was up and ...
— The Plow-Woman • Eleanor Gates
... certain applications of upholstery; which, curiously enough, are always in worse taste than even those of our drawing-rooms. Nor do I understand how our congregations can endure the aspect of the wooden sounding-board attached only by one point of its circumference to an upright pillar behind the preacher; and looking as if the weight of its enormous leverage must infallibly, before the sermon is concluded, tear it from ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume II (of 3) • John Ruskin
... boarders' work was more than likely. Thirty spare rowers rested impatiently on the centre deck, ready to leap wherever needed. On the forecastle commanded the proreus, Ameinias's lieutenant, and with him the keleustes, the oar master who must give time on his sounding-board for the rowing, and never fail,—not though the ships around reeled down to watery grave. And finally on the poop by the captain stood the "governor,"—knotted, grizzled, and keen,—the man whose touch upon ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... hortator, the great man glanced at him; and when he dropped his oar all the section of the ship on his side seemed aglow. He heard nothing of what was said; enough that the chain hung idly from its staple in the bench, and that the chief, going to his seat, began to beat the sounding-board. The notes of the gavel were never so like music. With his breast against the leaded handle, he pushed with all his might—pushed until the shaft bent ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... gained the color of those fragmentary wrecks of cigar-boxes which you see upon the top shelves in the bar-rooms of country taverns. The minister's desk is lofty, and has once been honored with a coating of paint;—as well as the huge sounding-board, which to your great amazement protrudes from the wall at a very dangerous angle of inclination over the speaker's head. As the Squire's pew is the place of honor to the right of the pulpit, you have a little tremor yourself at sight of the heavy sounding-board, and cannot forbear ...
— Dream Life - A Fable Of The Seasons • Donald G. Mitchell
... house will understand that where the noise seemed to me to be was in the neighbourhood of the dome. For all I know, the dome, as somebody suggested, may be a regular sounding-board; but even so, that does not help much towards an explanation. Wherever the noise may have been produced, the question still remains, 'What produced it?' and that we have ...
— The Alleged Haunting of B—— House • Various
... story interfered with the little lad's sleep, and his mother was a good deal disturbed about this violent yarn we were reading together. How close he used to sit beside me as we read of the dark doings at the Admiral Benbow: and how his face would fall when, clear and hollow from the sounding-board of the hills, came the quick clop, clop of the ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... Belsham will discuss you the attributes of the word 'God' in a pulpit; and will talk of infinity with a tongue that dangles from a skull that never reached in thought and thorough imagination two inches, or further than from his hand to his mouth, or from the vestry to the sounding-board of the pulpit. ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... later years, when calm philosophy was his, he realized that Minna Planer had supplied him a stinging discontent, a continued unrest that formed the sounding-board on which his sorrow and his hope and his faith in the Ideal ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard
... all bad in itself but utterly out of character with the Gothic work behind and around it. At the same time the sanctuary was railed and paved with black and white marble, the body of the church newly paved and galleried, a pulpit with sounding-board erected, and the whole church "cleaned, white-washed, and beautified throughout, at the charge of the parish." That the work was generally approved may be inferred from the remark of Stow's "Continuator": ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: Southwark Cathedral • George Worley
... who had been used for more than a quarter of a century to seeing old Dr. Gilman's gentle face under the familiar and faded dove of the sounding-board, to the deliberation of his walk, and the hesitation of his manner, the first impression of the Reverend John Hodder was somewhat startling. They felt that there should be a leisurely element in religion. He moved across the chancel with incredible ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... to the literary connoisseurs was Borrow's lack of style. By style, in the generation of Macaulay and Carlyle, of Dickens and George Eliot, was implied something recondite—a wealth of metaphor, imagery, allusion, colour and perfume—a palette, a pounce-box, an optical instrument, a sounding-board, a musical box, anything rather than a living tongue. To a later race of stylists, who have gone as far as Samoa and beyond in the quest of exotic perfumery, Borrow would have said simply, in the words of old Montaigne, "To smell, ...
— Isopel Berners - The History of certain doings in a Staffordshire Dingle, July, 1825 • George Borrow
... such a passionate lover of music, playing also myself a little on the piano, I should long ago have lost patience with my work, but I like my instruments to respond to the player, and to be durable." His pianos do really last well. He warrants the sounding-board neither breaking nor cracking; when he has finished one, he exposes it in the air to rain, snow, sun, and every kind of devilry, that it may give way, and then inserts slips of wood which he glues in, making it quite strong and solid. He is very ...
— The Letters of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, V.1. • Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
... up to her). The blood money of my daughter? To Beelzebub with thee, thou infamous bawd! Sooner will I vagabondize with my violin and fiddle for a bit of bread—sooner will I break to pieces my instrument and carry dung on the sounding-board than taste a mouthful earned by my only child at the price of her soul and future happiness. Give up your cursed coffee and snuff-taking, and there will be no need to carry your daughter's face to market. I have always had my bellyful and a good ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... was formed by cutting arches through what probably were at one time the outside walls of the church; two of these on the south side open into the chapel. The carved oak pulpit of early seventeenth-century work, with its sounding-board and iron frame for the hour-glass, demands attention; but the chief attraction of the church for many is the alabaster statue of Francis Bacon, which is placed in a niche in the north wall of the chancel. He wished ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Saint Albans - With an Account of the Fabric & a Short History of the Abbey • Thomas Perkins
... movement, but it can scarcely be doubted that the permeation of a great mass of the German people by the socialistic conceptions which in their bearing on women have been rendered so familiar by Bebel's exposition has furnished, as it were, a ready-made sounding-board which has given resonance and effect to voices which might otherwise have been quickly lost ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... church. He watched the party out of sight, and then, the church-door standing open, he took the fancy to stroll into the building. He looked about him at the maze of dusty green-cushioned pews with little alleys winding hither and thither among them; at the great three-decker with its huge sounding-board; at the royal escutcheon, and the faded tables of the law, and was about to leave as aimlessly as he had entered, when he espied the open vestry door. Popping in his head, his eye fell on a folio bound in sheepskin, that lay open ...
— The Castle Inn • Stanley John Weyman
... for this change, and set it down to that flightiness of purpose which—as he had read in books—is common to all savages. He had yet to learn that in solitary lands the very sky becomes as it were a vast sounding-board, and rumour travels, no ...
— Fort Amity • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... position, simply a vantage-ground chosen by priests,—whether Druid or Christian of course it would be impossible to say,—from which to address a multitude. The rock served as a kind of background and sounding-board, while the beautiful sloping of the sward upward from the speaker made it an excellent position for out-of-door discourses. On this day it was only a blooming solitude, the birds had done all the talking, until we arrived. It ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... raised his weapon and fired. She heard the woods behind reverberate with the echoes like a sounding-board, saw the white spurt of smoke and the skitter of the bullet as it went wide. It was a long shot, and had been fired as a final warning; but Doret made no outcry, nor did he cease coming; instead, his paddle clove the water ...
— The Barrier • Rex Beach
... written by a very common pen. Carey's English cobbler-shop became a sounding-board whose insistent, ringing messages began to waken the Church. The Church is waking up, and shaking itself, and tightening on its clothes, for the greatest work yet to be done in fulfilling the life-mission ...
— Quiet Talks with World Winners • S. D. Gordon
... perform the service of his church, he was under the necessity of shutting it up in his room. Once, however, the animal escaped, and followed the father to the church; where silently mounting the sounding-board above the pulpit, he lay perfectly still till the sermon commenced. He then crept to the edge, and overlooking the preacher, imitated all his gestures in so grotesque a manner, that the whole congregation were unavoidably urged to ...
— A Hundred Anecdotes of Animals • Percy J. Billinghurst
... their season, and violets, sad and shadowy recluses, such as Priscilla was when we first knew her; children of the sun, who had never seen their father, but dwelt among damp mosses, though not akin to them. At the summit, the rock was overshadowed by the canopy of a birch-tree, which served as a sounding-board for the pulpit. Beneath this shade (with my eyes of sense half shut and those of the imagination widely opened) I used to see the holy Apostle of the Indians, with the sunlight flickering down upon him through the leaves, and glorifying his figure as ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... reading it. So there wasn't any noise to show anybody outside that there was some one in the room. And then I heard Burgess and Spence jawing on the steps. They thought the place was empty, of course. I couldn't help hearing what they said. The pav.'s like a sounding-board. I heard every word. Spence said, 'Well, it's about as difficult a problem as any captain of cricket at Wrykyn has ever had to tackle.' I had a sort of idea that old Billy liked to boss things all on his own, but apparently he does consult Spence sometimes. After all, he's cricket-master, ...
— Mike • P. G. Wodehouse
... the earth, helps us to get the slow, large rhythm, the rich gloom of Millet's pictures. But it is the rhythm and the gloom that are the beauty, and the idea reinforces our consciousness thereof. The idea is a sounding-board for the beauty, and so can be truly said to enter into the ...
— The Psychology of Beauty • Ethel D. Puffer
... suffered the thrust in patience. "What is the use?" he asked, with a certain sadness. "The preacher's voice is lost in his sounding-board nowadays, when all the Sunday newspapers are crying aloud from ...
— The Quality of Mercy • W. D. Howells
... he preferred, of course, that his monkey should stay at home, and used to confine him accordingly. One Sabbath morning the animal escaped, and followed his master to the church; and silently mounting the sounding-board over the minister's head, he lay perfectly still till the sermon commenced. Then he crept to the edge, where he could see his master, and imitated his gestures in such a droll and amusing manner, that the entire congregation began to laugh. The ...
— Stories about Animals: with Pictures to Match • Francis C. Woodworth
... because the lid there's a sounding-board; and what in all things makes the sounding-board is this—there's naught beneath. And yet, a coffin with a body in it rings pretty much the same, Carpenter. Hast thou ever helped carry a bier, and heard the coffin knock against the churchyard ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... facing the rude benches, were three rows of seats, one above the other. On these sat at the back the elders, and in front of them the overseers. The clerk of the Meeting had a little desk provided for him. Over their heads was a long sounding-board. ...
— Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker • S. Weir Mitchell
... rhetorical splendor, who recalls his full-blown, high-colored, double-flowered periods, the rich, resonant, grave, far-reaching music of his speech, with just enough of nasal vibration to give the vocal sounding-board its proper value in the harmonies of utterance,—it is with delight that such a one reads the glowing words of Emerson whenever he refers to Edward Everett. It is enough if he himself caught inspiration from those eloquent lips; but many a listener has had his ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... universal satisfaction. It is considered the best 50-cent outfit ever produced, and, although we have made several improvements lately, the price is the same as before. In connection with a peculiar oscillating electro-magnet and a queer anvil, the sounding-board aids in giving out a loud, clear click that is found elsewhere only in noisy railroad sounders. This outfit is best adapted for a learner's set of one instrument and a battery to be used on the table for practising, either ...
— How Two Boys Made Their Own Electrical Apparatus • Thomas M. (Thomas Matthew) St. John
... itself. Its great, deep-breathing soul resented the mockery, the insolence, the irritation of the prim garden at its very gates. It would absorb and smother them if it could. And every wind that blew its thundering message over the huge sounding-board of the million, shaking trees conveyed the purpose that it had. They had angered its great soul. At its heart was ...
— The Man Whom the Trees Loved • Algernon Blackwood
... and wonder what each would say to it. I spread my hands before my eyes, not being so brave as some men; and hoping, in some foolish way, to cover my heart with my elbows. I heard the breath of all around, as if my skull were a sounding-board; and knew even how the different men were fingering their triggers. And a cold sweat broke all over me, as the Colonel, prolonging his enjoyment, ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... favourite subjects. In 1603 the churchwardens were ordered to provide in every church "a comely and decent pulpit." Hence most of our pulpits date from this period. The sides were panelled and carved with scrollwork; and at the same time a sounding-board was introduced. Occasionally the hour-glass which regulated the length of the preacher's discourse remains, ...
— English Villages • P. H. Ditchfield
... collected but somewhat palely smiling, sat Mistress Evelyn Byrd beside her father. All this was before the sermon. When the minister of the day mounted the pulpit, and, gaunt against the great black sounding-board, gave out his text in a solemn and ringing voice, such was the genuine power of the man that every face was turned toward him, and throughout the building there fell ...
— Audrey • Mary Johnston
... great red-headed woodpecker, or woodcock, as he is called by the country people, looking like a miniature man with a crimson turban and sable spear, attacking the bark of yon old oak. He is making a sounding-board of the seamed mail of the venerable monarch, to detect by the startled writhing within the grub snugly ensconced, as it thinks, there, in order to transfix it with his sharp tongue through the hole made by his bill. He ceases his work though ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 3 September 1848 • Various
... was trembling with echoes. Every snapped twig, every bird murmur, every brush of a padded foot on leaf mould was multiplied many-fold. The fog was a sounding-board. All the spectral space around me, above me, below me was quivering and talking. My very breath was peopled with murmurs. I have been in many fogs, but none like this one. If the spirits of the dead should revisit us, they would whisper, ...
— Montlivet • Alice Prescott Smith |
