"Stringed" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the man a tin to drink out of' Our spring Keeps kindo-sorto cavin' in, but don't "taste" anything! She's kindo agein', Marg'et is—"the old process," like me, All ham-stringed up with rheumatiz, and on ...
— Pipes O'Pan at Zekesbury • James Whitcomb Riley
... marble. It was in reality no bas-relief at all, but a wonderfully skilful bit of painting, so cleverly imitating the sculptor's chisel that even a closer inspection failed to detect the deception. It represented a recumbent Sappho playing on a nine-stringed lyre. The opening in the sounding-board of the instrument appeared to be a veritable hole over which real ...
— Manasseh - A Romance of Transylvania • Maurus Jokai
... the house they heard, coming from within, the mellow voice of a woman singing—an odd little minor theme, with a quaint, lilting rhythm, and words they could not distinguish. Accompanying the voice were the delicate tones of some stringed ...
— The Girl in the Golden Atom • Raymond King Cummings
... observation of the winds whistling in the hollow reeds. As for other kinds of instruments, there were so many occasions for cords or strings, that men were not long in observing their various sounds, which might give rise to stringed instruments. Those of concussion, as drums and cymbals, might result from the observation of the naturally hollow noise made ...
— A Catechism of Familiar Things; Their History, and the Events Which Led to Their Discovery • Benziger Brothers
... played, it seemed to him, by three silver-sounding flutes, so delicate that he could hardly contain himself for gladness; but among his sadder dreams was one of a little man habited like a minstrel who played an ugly enchanted kind of melody on a stringed lute, and smiled a treacherous smile at him; Paul woke in a sort of fever of the spirit; and rising from his bed, felt the floor cool to his feet, and drew his curtain aside; in a tender radiance of dawn he saw the barn, deep in shadow, in the little garden; and over them a little ...
— Paul the Minstrel and Other Stories - Reprinted from The Hill of Trouble and The Isles of Sunset • Arthur Christopher Benson
... Wolf stated that he already felt perfectly at home in Quijada's castle at Villagarcia, and that Dona Magdalena de Ulloa was a lady of rare beauty and kindness of heart. Her musical talent was considerable, and she devoted every leisure hour to playing on stringed instruments and singing. True, there were not too many, for the childless woman had made herself the mother of the poor and sick upon her estates, and had even established a little school where he assisted her ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... covered with a strip of damp black lining, were little lots of potatoes, turnips, carrots, and white onions, arranged in pyramids of four—three at the base and one at the apex, all quite ready to be popped into the pans of dilatory housewives. She also had bundles duly stringed in readiness for the soup-pot—four leeks, three carrots, a parsnip, two turnips, and a couple of springs of celery. Then there were finely cut vegetables for julienne soup laid out on squares of paper, cabbages cut into quarters, and little heaps of tomatoes and slices of ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... 末 CHAP. IV. 1. The Master, having come to Wu-ch'ang, heard there the sound of stringed instruments and singing. 2. Well pleased and smiling, he said, 'Why use an ox knife to kill a fowl?' 3. Tsze-yu replied, 'Formerly, Master, I heard you say,— "When the man of high station is well instructed, he loves men; when the man of low station is well instructed, he is easily ...
— The Chinese Classics—Volume 1: Confucian Analects • James Legge
... music sweet Their hearts and ears did greet As never was by mortal finger strook— Divinely-warbled voice Answering the stringed noise, As all their souls in blissful rapture took; The air, such pleasure loath to lose, With thousand echoes still prolongs each ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman
... biwa, a kind of four-stringed lute, is chiefly used in musical recitative. Formerly the professional minstrels who recited the Heike-Monogatari, and other tragical histories, were called biwa-hoshi, or "lute-priests." The origin of this appellation is not clear; but it is possible that it may have been suggested ...
— Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things • Lafcadio Hearn
... frequency at which the sound waves strike the ear. Pitches are referred to as high or low as the frequency of waves reaching the ear are greater or fewer. Familiar low pitches are the left-hand strings of a piano; the larger ones of stringed instruments generally; bass voices; and large bells. Familiar high pitches are right-hand piano strings; smaller ones of other stringed instruments; soprano voices; small bells; and the voices of most birds ...
— Cyclopedia of Telephony & Telegraphy Vol. 1 - A General Reference Work on Telephony, etc. etc. • Kempster Miller
... enough to answer the captain's object in taking us to the place. We strolled on through the city till we reached the Chinese quarter. There, also, we were attracted by a strange noise intended for music, produced by two stringed-fiddles, violoncellos, drums, and gongs, into a building—a very shabby place; yet in the centre was a table with heaps of gold upon it, and surrounded by a number of odd little men in wide jackets, ...
— A Voyage round the World - A book for boys • W.H.G. Kingston
... defy him, and refuse to accept the everlasting insult latent in the one-sided importunity of a slave. And this is what the Bauel says—he who, in the world of men, goes about singing for alms from door to door, with his one-stringed instrument and long robe of patched-up rags ...
— Creative Unity • Rabindranath Tagore
... took a walk to Akxotla, where we wished to see an ancient painting. Here we encountered greater suspicion than before, and, after wasting the greater part of the day, accomplished nothing. It is true an indian made a camalpa for us. This is a stringed musical instrument; though the name is Aztec, it is unlikely that it was known before the coming of the Spaniards. Quechol says the word means mouth-harp, coming from the Aztec cam, mouth, and the Spanish harpa, ...
— In Indian Mexico (1908) • Frederick Starr
... in a dream among buildings with strangely intense light on them, I heard a faint rhythm of music beginning far away on some stringed instrument. ...
— The Aran Islands • John M. Synge
... string breaks or becomes useless it is only a question of cutting down a banana stalk and stripping it for a new one. These guitars and violins are by no means common, though nearly every village possesses one. The ability to play is regarded as an accomplishment. A stringed instrument still more primitive is made from a single section of bamboo, from which two or three fine strips of outer bark are split away in the center but are still attached at the ends. These strips are of different lengths and are held apart from ...
— Negritos of Zambales • William Allan Reed
... justified in looking upon the great inventor as "an epitome of the genius of the world." To develop a Krag-Joergensen from a bow and arrow, a "velvet-tipped" lucifer match from the primitive fire-stick, or a modern piano from the first crude, stringed, musical instrument has involved much the same intellectual processes as have been operative in transforming fetishism and magic into religion and philosophy, or scattered fragments of knowledge ...
— The Measurement of Intelligence • Lewis Madison Terman
... come such strange noises. Sometimes it is the dragging of something heavy over the floor, that makes me shiver to hear it,—it sounds so like what people that kill other people have to do now and then. Occasionally I hear very sweet strains of music,—whether of a wind or stringed instrument, or a human voice, strange as it may seem, I have often tried to find out, but through the partition I could not be quite sure. If I have not heard a woman cry and moan, and then again laugh as though she would die laughing, I have heard sounds ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... Javanese life remained in stereotyped form. The moving panorama of the tree-shadowed streets possesses a strange fascination, and the light of the past lingers like a sunset glow over the human element of the changed and modernised city. The twang of double-stringed lutes, the tinkle of metal tubes, and the elusive melody of silvery gongs, echo from the ages whence dance and song descend as an unchanged inheritance. An itinerant minstrel recites the history of Johar Mankain, the Una of Java, who shone like a jewel in the world which could not tarnish the ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... deep shadows of the night fell upon his pale face and distorted his gentle features in a most unpleasant way, so that Frederick cried, perfectly alarmed, "What's happened to you all at once?" and stepping back, his foot knocked against Reinhold's bundle. There proceeded from it the jarring of some stringed instrument, and Reinhold cried angrily, "You ill-mannered fellow, don't break my lute all to pieces." The instrument was fastened to the bundle; Reinhold unbuckled it and ran his fingers wildly over the strings as if he would break them all. But his playing ...
— Weird Tales, Vol. II. • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... stove, completed the furniture of the place. In the evening, the dim light from a lamp hanging from the ceiling shows the indistinct figures of a double row of natives listening to the nasal cadences of a band who play a pizzicato accompaniment on small three-stringed violins. ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... their gallery," said the young Student, "and play upon their stringed instruments, and my love will dance to the sound of the harp and the violin. She will dance so lightly that her feet will not touch the floor, and the courtiers in their gay dresses will throng round her. But with me she will not dance, for I have no red rose to give ...
— The Happy Prince and Other Tales • Oscar Wilde
... dim room, but Joyce's heart was still beating hard. Would Leon be as pleased as they? She hoped they would tell him in just the right way, he was so proud, and on the dainty "tinkle-tinkle-tum" of the stringed instrument her thoughts floated outward over the broad sea, to find her childhood's ...
— Joyce's Investments - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... Himself in new loves. Nor before, as if inert, did He lie; for the going forth of God upon these waters had proceeded neither before nor after.[2] Form and matter, conjoined and simple, came forth to existence which had no defect, as three arrows from a three-stringed bow; and as in glass, in amber, or in crystal a ray shines so that there is no interval between its coining and its complete existence, so the triform effect[3] rayed forth from its Lord into its. existence all at once, without ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 3, Paradise [Paradiso] • Dante Alighieri
... Diccon and his father to her, and accordingly took them with him to Greenwich Palace, where they had the benefit of looking on as loyal subjects, while her Majesty, in royal fashion, dined in public, to the sound of drums, trumpets, fifes, and stringed instruments. But though dressed with her usual elaborate care, she looked older, paler, thinner, and more haggard than when Diccon had seen her three weeks previously, and neither her eye nor mouth had the same steadiness. She did not ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge
... truly odious; besides, it is a style of singing quite contrary to nature. The human voice is naturally tremulous, but only so far as to be beautiful; such is the nature of the voice, and it is imitated not only on wind instruments, but on stringed instruments, and even on the piano. But the moment the proper boundary is passed it is no longer beautiful, because it becomes unnatural. It seems to me then just like an organ when the bellows are panting. ...
— The Letters of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, V.1. • Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
... hut to another did Bakahenzie and his satellites return from the ghoulish offices of the dead. Zalu Zako, the chiefs and magicians arose to the wild beating of the drums and the wailing chant of the hereditary troubadour with the five stringed lyre. With Kingata Mata carrying a brand of the newly lighted sacred fire, was Kawa Kendi led in procession through the deserted village to ...
— Witch-Doctors • Charles Beadle
... has no attendant amusement, no dancing, no professional entertainers, and rarely lasts over two hours. Some houses have stringed bands concealed behind barriers of flowers playing soft music, but in the main the dinner is a jollification, a symposium of stories, where the guests take a turn at telling tales. Story-tellers can not ...
— As A Chinaman Saw Us - Passages from his Letters to a Friend at Home • Anonymous
... day an idiot servant of the bishop; and when I, the bell, who am cast in hard and heavy metal, swung about and pealed, I could have broken his head, for he seated himself immediately under me, and began to play with two sticks, exactly as if it had been a stringed instrument, and he sang to it thus: 'Now I may venture to sing aloud what elsewhere I dare not whisper—sing of all that is kept hidden behind locks and bolts. Yonder it is cold and damp. The rats eat the living bodies. No one knows of it; no one ...
— The Sand-Hills of Jutland • Hans Christian Andersen
... commanded to bring the book of records of the chronicles; and they were read before the King." The Rawi would declaim the recitative somewhat in conversational style; he would intone the Saj'a or prose-rhyme and he would chant to the twanging of the Rabab, a one-stringed viol, the poetical parts. Dr. Scott[FN301] borrows from the historian of Aleppo a life-like picture of the Story-teller. "He recites walking to and fro in the middle of the coffee-room, stopping only now and then, when the expression requires some emphatical attitude. He is commonly heard ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... a halt as a tinkling sound—the sound of a stringed instrument, gently thrummed, rose from out of ...
— Major Vigoureux • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... stopping Tom in his recital, and after many attempts Barney finally gave it up, and began unhitching his horse. Meantime the sound of the dancing had ceased, and suddenly up through the silence there rose a voice in song to the accompaniment of some stringed instrument. It was an arresting voice. The group about the horse stood perfectly still as the voice rose and soared and sank and rose again in an old familiar ...
— The Doctor - A Tale Of The Rockies • Ralph Connor
... which produces every variety of sound, from a harsh, unmelodious tone, to a soft, sweet, flute-like sound, has, as yet, been imperfectly imitated by art. It has been compared, by many physiologists, to a wind, reed, and stringed instrument. This inimitable, yet ...
— A Treatise on Anatomy, Physiology, and Hygiene (Revised Edition) • Calvin Cutter
... and in arithmetic and book-keeping by double and single entry. I say nothing of her talents of shaping and hemming and governing a household, which, to give every one their due, she acquired not from me but from the housekeeper; nor do I take merit for her performance upon stringed instruments, whereunto the instructions of an honourable young lady of virtue and modesty, and very facetious withal—Miss Julia Mannering—hath not meanly contributed. ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... divergent corridors and arcades, the faint echoes of her voice seemed to reply to her during the pauses in her song. Then she ceased singing and to the far-away and yet distinct accompaniment of some stringed instrument in the orchestra, she began to dance. Holding her instrument in a graceful fashion against her shoulder as one holds a violin, and with her flowing white gown caught in the other hand, she bowed and smiled and instantly seemed transformed. From the statuesque and dreamy singer she ...
— The Land of the Changing Sun • William N. Harben
... one, and one with a knife: "I KNICKED 'EM DOWN, three four!" he cried; and had himself to be taken to the doctor's and bandaged. Next day, he could not work, glory of battle swelled too high in his threadpaper breast; he had made a one-stringed harp for Austin, borrowed it, came to Fanny's room, and sang war-songs and danced a war dance in honour of his victory. And it appears, by subsequent advices, that it was a serious victory enough; four of his assailants went ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... provided with a certain number of strings stretched over two bridges and fastened to pegs at the extremities. This box carries a ring that serves for suspending it. Kircher recommends that the box be made of very sonorous fir wood, like that employed in the construction of stringed instruments. He would have it 1.085 meters in length, 0.434 meter in width, and 0.217 meter in height, and would provide it with fifteen catgut strings, tuned, not like those of other instruments to the third, fourth, or fifth, but all in unison or to the octave, in order, says ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 483, April 4, 1885 • Various
... things? You've seen me make them cry when I was in the practice. How could I make them cry if I didn't feel like crying myself. You're a doctor—you know that. People forget what I am—what a thousand stringed instrument I am. Now, Doctor Jim, let me tell you something. This is the bottom hard pan of the truth: I never before really cared for these women—these other women—when I got them. But I do care for the chase, I do care for the risk of it—for the exhilaration of it—for ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... with other foliage, tangled all up in rollicking arabesques, forming rosettes, in the midst of which birds are seen perching, and leaving but two spaces open where children dear to Bacchus are plucking grapes or treading them under foot, trilling stringed lyres, blowing on double flutes or tumbling about and snapping their fingers—the urn itself in blue glass and the reliefs in white—for the ancients knew how to carve glass,—ah! undoubtedly, in surveying all these marvels, we should be forced to concede that the citizen ...
— The Wonders of Pompeii • Marc Monnier
... trellis the sound of a waltz floated. As music it was not of a classic order, but this did not matter since nobody was aware of it; and Dinwiddie, which developed quite a taste for Wagner at the beginning of the next century, could listen in the eighties with what was perhaps a sincerer pleasure, to stringed instruments, a little rough, but played with fervour by mulatto musicians. As Virginia drifted off in John Henry's arms for the first dance, which she had promised him, she thought: "I wonder if ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... interrupts Mr. Soloman, tipping his glass very politely, "I never-that is, when I hear our people who get themselves laced into narrow-stringed Calvinism, and long-founded foreign missions, talk-think much could have come of the dark ages. I speak after the manner of an attorney, when I say this. We hear a deal of the dark ages, the crimes of the dark ages, the dark idolatry ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... reception at four, which lasted until six-thirty, and this was followed by a dance at nine, with music by a famous stringed orchestra of Chicago, a musical programme by artists of considerable importance, and a gorgeous supper from eleven until one in a Chinese fairyland of lights, at small tables filling three of the ground-floor rooms. As an added fillip to the occasion Cowperwood had hung, not only the important pictures ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... or from their consideration, soul and body may not unaptly be compared with two stringed instruments tuned by the same hand, and placed alongside of one another. When a string of one of them is touched and a certain tone goes forth, the corresponding string of the other will sound of itself and give the same tone, only ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... because the weight of what was coming impressed them both. Hasamurti sang during the meal, ballad after ballad of the warring history of Rajasthan and its royal heroines, accompanying herself on a stringed instrument, and the ballads seemed to strike the right chord in Yasmini's heart, for when the meal finished she was queenly and alert, ...
— Guns of the Gods • Talbot Mundy
... nerve cells, is an impossibility. The quiet and harmony of the nerve centres and nervous system are gone. Rest is impossible, continuance of work only causes increased jarring and discord of that many stringed ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... Selene Coblenz's engagement reception, an event properly festooned with smilax and properly jostled with the elbowing figures of waiters tilting their plates of dark-meat chicken salad, two olives, and a finger-roll in among the crowd, a stringed three-piece orchestra, faintly seen and still more faintly heard, played ...
— Gaslight Sonatas • Fannie Hurst
... ebony. The value of my friendship was measured by the luxuriousness of my box at the opera, and by the dainty fittings of my yacht, a swift trim vessel furnished with every luxury, and having on board a band of stringed instruments which discoursed sweet music when the moon emptied her horn of silver radiance on the rippling water. In a little while I knew everybody who was worth knowing in Naples; everywhere my name was talked of, my doings were chronicled in the fashionable newspapers; stories of my lavish ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... hear of the last; and as to the first he said, and said truly, that it would impede the free current of conversation, "which," said he, "to be pleasurable at all, must wind hither and thither as the fit takes us. It is like a many-stringed lyre, and to break any one of the chords is to mar the music. And so, my good uncle, if you find us getting upon these topics, join us; we shall seldom be long at a time upon them. I will answer ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... Allegri were two volumes of concerti, published in 1618 and 1619; two volumes of motets, published in 1620 and 1621; besides a number of works still in manuscript. He was one of the earliest composers for stringed instruments, and Kircher has given one specimen of this class of his works in the Musurgia. But the most celebrated composition of Allegri is the Miserere, still annually performed in the Sistine Chapel ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... breeze, far from lessening its force, blew as if to bend the mast, which, however, the metallic lashings held firmly. These lashings, like the chords of a stringed instrument, resounded as if vibrated by a violin bow. The sledge slid along in the midst of a plaintively ...
— Around the World in 80 Days • Jules Verne
... won by the man's eloquence or the twanging of the stringed musical instruments that could be heard in the tent. They were soon inside. A platform on a wagon served as a stage, and a curtain with a cabin and woods as a background hung at the rear of the stage. The entire company of seven persons attired in shirts and trousers ...
— Watch Yourself Go By • Al. G. Field
... attached to the throne. The big lion comes from the West, so it did from Ireland to Scotland and London. On the top we have a crown, and on the top of this we have a lion. On the first quarter are three lions, second quarter one, on the third a stringed harp with an angel's head, and on the fourth three lions, the total of lions nine, and an unicorn. The fact is, this standard, had we time, teaches a world of history, and with the Psalmist we may say: "Thou hast given a banner to ...
— The Lost Ten Tribes, and 1882 • Joseph Wild
... distance. It speaks of the human touch and the man-made whistle. I may measure, define, place it; know the steamer that it speaks far and the man that pulls the throttle cord. I may find the pitch, touch the identical note on guitar or cornet. I have neither wind nor stringed instrument that will record so low a note as that of the drumming of the partridge. I count the vibrations of the first of it with ease. They speed up toward the end, but they do not raise the pitch. I know nothing in our human musical ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard
... its splendor, and had brought away with him much of the old choir music. Some of the books had been written by his own hand, on parchment. He not only sang well, but was a good player on the violin. There was not at any of the Missions so fine a band of performers on stringed instruments as at San Luis Rey. Father Peyri was passionately fond of music, and spared no pains in training all the neophytes under his charge who showed any special talent in that direction. Chief Pablo, after the breaking up of the Mission, had settled at Temecula, with ...
— Ramona • Helen Hunt Jackson
... purely metaphysical idea, stalk solemnly about on a narrow stage occupied only by a few confidents, colourless reflections of the heroes, employed to fill the gaps in a simple, unified, single-stringed plot; if that sort of thing has grown tiresome, a whole evening is not too much time to devote to delineating with some fullness a man among men, a whole critical period: the one, with his peculiar ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... the instruments here enumerated were performed on in the open court below the hall. Nothing is said of the stringed instruments which were used in the hall itself; nor is the enumeration of the instruments in ...
— The Shih King • James Legge
... to his house, had tea with his wife and daughter, and then walked out. It was now dusk. He soon saw that the tendency of all promenaders was towards a particular spot in the Walks, and eventually proceeded thither himself. The notes of a stringed band came from the enclosure that Farfrae had erected—the pavilion as he called it—and when the Mayor reached it he perceived that a gigantic tent had been ingeniously constructed without poles or ropes. The densest point of ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy
... next day, Bat Scanlon had gotten into communication with Ashton-Kirk; the two had lunch in the quiet depths of a rathskeller, where they ate and talked, and afterward smoked, to the drone of some stringed instruments. ...
— Ashton-Kirk, Criminologist • John T. McIntyre
... that if you have two stringed instruments in adjacent apartments, tuned to the same pitch, a note sounded on one of them will be feebly vibrated upon the other as soon as the waves of sound have reached the sensitive string. In like manner a man's heart gives off a faint, but musical, little tinkle of answering love to ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... in the Ausonian land to Italians by the trumpets of the Polish legions.71 The talent of song pays well in Lithuania; it gains people's affection and makes one famous and rich. Jankiel had made a fortune; sated with gain and glory, he had hung his nine-stringed dulcimer upon the wall, and settling down with his children in the tavern he had taken up liquor-selling. Besides this he was the under-rabbi in the neighbouring town, and always a welcome guest in every quarter, and a household counsellor: ...
— Pan Tadeusz • Adam Mickiewicz
... close, stinking dungeon, where there was nothing either to lie down or sit on, where she was kept two days and two nights without bread or water," and then sentenced to be whipped through three towns. "At Cambridge she was tied to the whipping-post, and lashed with ten stripes with a three-stringed whip, with three knots at the end: At Watertown she was laid on with ten stripes more with rods of willow: At Dedham, in a cold frosty morning, they tortured her aged body with ten stripes more at a cart's tail." ...
— The Emancipation of Massachusetts • Brooks Adams
... hand, our great-grandfathers would indubitably have run away from the sound of our brass bands and military music. The earlier symphonies, since they were essentially intended to bring out the effects of the stringed instruments, now seem like darkened pictures. Yet the symphonies have certainly remained unchanged; only our ear has grown dull so far as comprehension of the tone-color of the string quartet is concerned. The same full orchestra, which ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... these parcels that have come for you for?" demanded his superior officer, eyeing with disfavour a mountain of brown paper packages be-sealed, be-stringed, ...
— Bones - Being Further Adventures in Mr. Commissioner Sanders' Country • Edgar Wallace
... music the macabre and sinister note of so much symbolist poetry? Would we not have had in "La Villanelle du Diable" an equivalent for the black mass and "La-bas"; in "Hora mystica" an equivalent for "En route"; in "Music for Four Stringed Instruments" a musical "Sagesse"? Does not Charles Martin Loeffler, who, after writing "A Pagan Poem," makes a retreat in a Benedictine monastery, and who, at home in Medford, Massachusetts, teaches the choristers to sing Gregorian chants, recall Joris Karl ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... the dulcimer, that primitive three-stringed instrument, could not be had, mountain folk in the raggeds of Old Virginia were not at a loss for music with which to make merry at the infare wedding. They stepped the tune to the singing of a ballad, nor did they tire though the infare wedding lasted all of three days and nights. ...
— Blue Ridge Country • Jean Thomas
... the god of poetry, and acts as the special patron of the arts and sciences. Apollo is himself the heavenly musician among the Olympic gods, whose banquets are gladdened by the wondrous strains which he produces from his favourite instrument, the seven-stringed lyre. In the cultus of Apollo, music formed a distinguishing feature. All sacred dances, and even the sacrifices in his honour, were performed to the sound of musical instruments; and it is, in a great measure, ...
— Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece and Rome • E.M. Berens
... harmony of instruments; of voices; and of voices and instruments. Their band was variously composed, consisting either of two harps, with the single pipe and flute; of the harp and double pipe, frequently with the addition of the guitar; of a fourteen-stringed harp, a guitar, lyre, double pipe, and tambourine; of two harps, sometimes of different sizes, one of seven, the other of four, strings; of two harps of eight chords, and a seven-stringed lyre; of the guitar and the square or oblong tambourine; of the lyre, harp, guitar, ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... conformity of the will to His sovereign will, who is the life of our lives—this, and nothing shallower, nothing narrower, is religion in its perfection; and the measure in which we have attained to this harmony with God, is the measure in which we are Christians. As two stringed instruments may be so tuned to one keynote that, if you strike the one, a faint ethereal echo is heard from the other, which blends undistinguishably with its parent sound; so, drawing near to God, and brought into unison with His mind and will, ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... she never lectured her attendants, knowing probably that sermons in example are more impressive than sermons in words. In illustration of the freedom they enjoyed in her presence and hearing, one of them, behind the curtain, touched a stringed instrument—a cithern—and followed the prelude with a ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 2 • Lew. Wallace
... dusted, gently rubbed, but never tuned nor played on. Her opinions were like dried rose- leaves; her attitudes like British sculpture; her voice what he imagined of the possible tone of the old gilded silver-stringed harp in one of the corners of the drawing-room. The lonely little decencies and modest dignities of her life, the fine grain of its conservatism, the innocence of its ignorance, all its monotony of stupidity and salubrity, ...
— Some Short Stories • Henry James
... here the Dance begins. Our guilty parents fly before the flaming sword,—poor Eve cowering, and her hair streaming in a wavy flood upon the wind; and before them, but unseen, Death leaps and curvets to the sound of a vielle or rote,—an old musical stringed instrument,—which he has hung about his neck. His glee, as he leads forth his victims into the valley where his shadow lies, is perceptible in every line of his angular anatomy; his very toes curl up like those of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various
... charmed him was that of a mortal girl reflected on the waters from the rock behind him, on which she had been seated, and on which she had her home. The original air is arch and lively; just listen to it." And Isaura warbled one of those artless and somewhat meagre tunes to which light-stringed instruments ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... a little timidly into the far recesses of the deep, ghostly room, where the fire-light kept catching the sheen of metal, the yellow whiteness of ivory keys or pipes, or the polished case of some stringed instrument. ...
— The First Violin - A Novel • Jessie Fothergill
... they punished with death in the Scriptures, as well as breaches of the second table? Blood I leave to the malignant Church, and admire clemency in Rulers, as much as any; but yet I know the prophane dissolutenesse of the times, requires a three stringed whipp of severity to purge our Augean stable of the soule abuses, whipt often with penns and tongues, but spared by them that beare the sword (a man may say of many Governours) altogether in vaine for matters of religion. Are not kings of the earth charg'd to render ...
— A Coal From The Altar, To Kindle The Holy Fire of Zeale - In a Sermon Preached at a Generall Visitation at Ipswich • Samuel Ward
... seen a broad vista of low country encircled by a wall of mountains, now clothed in a mantle of purple shadows as the sun sank behind the crests of the opposite range. The air was hot and sweet and very dry, and the atmosphere vibrated with the hum of insects like the low, steady accompaniment of stringed instruments in a great orchestra. But at close view, it must be confessed, Nature was very dingy. The pine trees had a rusty look and the parched earth cried out ...
— The Motor Maids at Sunrise Camp • Katherine Stokes
... long flat baton as a symbol of authority makes his proclamation calling upon all present to lay aside their feuds, if any they have, and take their places in the dance. The musicians with three-fingered pipes and two-stringed violins are drawn up in the centre of the ring, when each gallant placing his arms under those of the damsels on either side, and interlacing his fingers with theirs, they all move slowly around in the immense circle, singing at the same time a sort of accompaniment to the instrumental ...
— Life of Schamyl - And Narrative of the Circassian War of Independence Against Russia • John Milton Mackie
... That is to say, stringed and wind instruments;—the lyre and reed. The first arts (with the Jew and Greek) of the shepherd ...
— Mornings in Florence • John Ruskin
... to the door where they could survey the village, unseen by the brown people who now swarmed the hard-packed clearing. They were a squat race. The men, G-stringed, displayed the same powerful physique that had marked the warrior who had conducted the Major, the women were clad in a single width of homespun cotton which draped from waist to knee and passed up over breast and back to knot at ...
— Terry - A Tale of the Hill People • Charles Goff Thomson
... several strips covered with mysterious characters. And these settled the business, for I recognised them as a kind of bed-hanging, popular with the commoner class of the Chinese. Nor were further evidences wanting, such as night-clothes of an extraordinary design, a three-stringed Chinese fiddle, a silk handkerchief full of roots and herbs, and a neat apparatus for smoking opium, with a liberal provision of the drug. Plainly, then, the cook had been a Chinaman; and, if so, who was Jos. Amalu? Or had Jos. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... ideal Celt—be he Irish or Scotch—and General Grant Mackenzie was an ideal Celt. And sitting here with my good guitar on my knee, I cannot help comparing a nature like his to just such a beautiful stringed instrument as this. What a world of fine feeling lies herein; what a wealth of poetry, what sadness, what tenderness—ay, and what passion as well! Behold, on this music-stand lies a big old book—a book with a story to it, for it belonged to my unfortunate ancestor Symon Fraser of Lovat, ...
— As We Sweep Through The Deep • Gordon Stables
... to the wonder-causing instrument. By the gnomon, staff, arc, wheel, instruments for taking the shadow of various kinds.... By water-instruments, the vessel, by the peacock, man, monkey, and by stringed sand-receptacles one may determine time accurately. Quicksilver-holes, water, and cords, and oil and water, mercury and sand are used in these: these ...
— On the Origin of Clockwork, Perpetual Motion Devices, and the Compass • Derek J. de Solla Price
... all were dead—four-and-thirty of them—and not one faintest cry of alarm or of agony had been uttered. Thus skilfully had our work been done. When all was over, the musicians were still playing their stringed instruments and hand-drums, softly now after a great volume of sound that would have overwhelmed any chance scream ...
— Tales of Destiny • Edmund Mitchell
... lad," said a cracked voice close to his side. "He must have had but a poor education, since he does not know how to cross a little stream like this. Or is he afraid of wetting his fine golden-stringed sandals? It is a pity his four-footed schoolmaster is not here to carry him safely ...
— Tanglewood Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... like a ten-stringed instrument, surmounting square shoulders that end in knobs that obtrude above unfilled hollows, is an unpleasing vision that looms up conspicuously too often in ...
— What Dress Makes of Us • Dorothy Quigley
... accommodations of the smallest. They were the sole occupants of the omnibus, and they were embarrassed to be received at their hotel with a burst of minstrelsy from a whole band of music. Isabel felt that a single stringed instrument of some timid note would have been enough; and Basil was going to express his own modest preference for a jew's-harp, when the music ceased with a sudden clash of the cymbals. But the next moment it burst out with fresh ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... said Levine in a troubled voice. "But it just happens that everything I've got on earth is shoe-stringed out to hang onto that pine section of mine up in Bear county. I'm mortgaged up to my eyebrows. Marshall knows it and sees a chance to get hold ...
— Lydia of the Pines • Honore Willsie Morrow
... there, it was Man—Man conscious of his origin, his destiny, and his pilgrimage between, Man sane again after a night of madness—knowing his strength, declaring his law, lamenting in a voice as eloquent as stringed instruments his own failure to correspond. It was a soliloquy rather than an oration. Rome had fallen, English and Italian streets had run with blood, smoke and flame had gone up to heaven, because man had for ...
— Lord of the World • Robert Hugh Benson
... can gouge the eye out of ary man that says Eph Yeates carn't stand up fair and square and whop his weight in wildcats; and I can do it now, if not sooner!" he shrilled. "Come on, you pap-eating, apron-stringed, French-daddied—" ...
— The Master of Appleby • Francis Lynde
... would sport a pair of large rowelled long-necked, ringing, brass spurs. Sometimes he was a Jack tar, with a little glazed hat, a once-round tie, a checked shirt, a blue jacket, roomy trousers, and broad-stringed pumps; and, before the admiring ladies had well digested him in that dress, he would be seen cantering away on a long-tailed white barb, in a pea-green duck-hunter, with cream-coloured leather and ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees
... January 1837, such artists as were so unlucky as to damage their wind or stringed instruments, generally took them to the Rue Froid-Manteau, to a squalid and horrible house, where, on the fifth floor, dwelt ...
— Gambara • Honore de Balzac
... it was to see how the open Region was filled with Horses and Chariots, with Trumpeters and Pipers, with Singers and Players on Stringed Instruments, to welcome the Pilgrims as they went up, and followed one another in at the ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume III (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland I • Francis W. Halsey
... while manhood and womanhood, leading by the hand their little ones, felt in their hearts that zeal for the house of prayer so common to the dwellers in rural England. Long before the hour of service the chapel-yard was thronged, and from within came the sounds of 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 ...
— Lancashire Idylls (1898) • Marshall Mather
... think it richt to burn fiddles, ither fowk disna; and this has to do wi' ither fowk, grannie; it's no atween you an' me, ye ken,' Robert went on, fearful lest she might consider herself divinely commissioned to extirpate the whole race of stringed instruments,—'for I maun sell 't ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... N. musical instruments; band; string- band, brass-band; orchestra; orchestrina[obs3]. monochord[obs3][Stringed instruments], polychord[obs3]; harp, lyre, lute, archlute[obs3]; mandola[obs3], mandolin, mandoline[obs3]; guitar; zither; cither[obs3], cithern[obs3]; gittern[obs3], rebeck[obs3], bandurria[obs3], bandura, banjo; bina[obs3], vina[obs3]; xanorphica[obs3]. viol, violin; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... I call a worldly paradise!" A girl with a face like dear Lady Disdain's sank into a divan placed near the conservatory; her voice chimed in prettily with the music of a spraying fountain and the soft strains of remote stringed instruments. ...
— Other Things Being Equal • Emma Wolf
... through the smaller cities, performing original compositions as well as excerpts from the greatest symphonic orchestral works, and thus educating the masses to an understanding of orchestral tonal color, and the relations, in an analytical form, which the wood wind instruments bore to the stringed family. . . . It was his purpose, after each movement of a composition, to lecture on the same, with special reference to the function performed by each instrument, and in the ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... falling thunderbolt,—these of course made themselves heard as they do to mortal ears. But there were other sounds which enchained my attention more than these voices of nature. As the skilled leader of an orchestra hears every single sound from each member of the mob of stringed and wind instruments, and above all the screech of the straining soprano, so my sharpened perceptions made what would have been for common mortals a confused murmur audible to me as compounded of innumerable easily distinguished sounds. Above them all arose one continued, unbroken, ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... had two sons and two daughters, all of whom were remarkable. The elder son became a great physician, and all his descendants were celebrated for their proficiency in medicine. The second son was a Welsh Tubal-cain. One of the daughters invented the small ten-stringed harp, and the other the spinning wheel. "Thus," we are told, "were introduced the arts of medicine, manufactures, music, and woollen work!" If, then, there were a family at Myddfai celebrated for their leechcraft, and possessed of ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland
... the senses. The most insipid food was alone endurable; he could wear only garments of certain texture; the odors of all flowers were oppressive; his eyes were tortured by even a faint light; and there were but peculiar sounds, and these from stringed instruments, which did not ...
— Short-Stories • Various
... the surprise of his life. As we bumped past him, I started the "Flowers of the Forest"—the old version—on the antique stringed instrument I carried, and I sang the words very plain. Tommy's eyes bulged out of his head, and he shouted at me in English to know who the devil I was. I replied in the broadest Scots, which no man in the submarine or in ...
— Greenmantle • John Buchan
... his expressive, Jewish face; all these rendered him the most extraordinary person I ever beheld. There is something scriptural in the tout ensemble of the strange physiognomy of this uncouth and unearthly figure. Not that, as in times of old, he plays, as Holy Writ tells us, on a ten-stringed instrument; on the contrary, he brings the most powerful, the most wonderful, and the most heart-rending tones from one string. His name is Paganini; he is very improvident and very poor. The D——s, and the Impressario ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... rams lie beside their headless trunks, which are resting on the ground, feet in the air, while a servant brandishes a short sword with which he is about to decapitate the fourth beast. Above these, again, three musicians march in procession, one playing on a harp, another on a five-stringed lyre, and the third on a tambourine. An attendant holding a bow, and the minister Shutsururazi, stand quietly waiting till the sacrifice is accomplished. The long text which runs across several of the figures is doubtless a prayer, and contains the names of ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 7 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... comes he'll sweep A harp with tears all stringed, And the very notes he strikes will weep As they come from his ...
— Poems: Patriotic, Religious, Miscellaneous • Abram J. Ryan, (Father Ryan)
... said, sweetly, "for then you know." And therewithal, as there was a sudden sound of music issuing from the next gallery, she bade Lionel take her to see who had begun—it was Lady Sybil, indeed, who was playing a solo on the violin to an accompaniment of stringed instruments, while all the ...
— Prince Fortunatus • William Black
... on his arrival at Wu-shing, heard the sound of stringed instruments and singing. His face beamed with pleasure, and he said laughingly, "To kill a cock—why use ...
— Chinese Literature • Anonymous
... did I contrive for thee that ear Hungry for music, and direct thine eye To where I hold a seven-stringed instrument, Unless I meant thee to beseech ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... of these stringed instruments, and two kinds of marimba, have found a place in the Jesuit Bonnanis' Gabinetto Armonica, printed at Rome, 1722, and dedicated to Holy King David. The great marimba consists of a large wooden frame; ...
— Journal of a Voyage to Brazil - And Residence There During Part of the Years 1821, 1822, 1823 • Maria Graham
... fingers, like the Indian tom-tom. The drums used at the new-moon levee are of the same shape, but very much larger. The war drum is beaten by women. At its sound the men rush to arms, and repair to their several quarters. There are also several stringed instruments. One of these, which Captain Grant describes, was played by an old woman; it had seven notes, six of which were a perfect scale. Another, which had three strings, was played by a man: ...
— Great African Travellers - From Mungo Park to Livingstone and Stanley • W.H.G. Kingston
... princesses, sugar kings and the high officials of the Territory. Beyond, in long lines, kept in order by the native police, were the carriages and motor-cars of the Honolulu aristocracy. On the wharf the Royal Hawaiian Band played "Aloha Oe," and when it finished, a stringed orchestra of native musicians on board the transport took up the same sobbing strains, the native woman singer's voice rising birdlike above the instruments and the hubbub of departure. It was a silver reed, sounding its clear, unmistakable ...
— The House of Pride • Jack London
... wooden sculpture form the tones of the place, subdued to one bizarre richness which I may as well leave first as last to the reader's fancy; though, let his fancy riot as it will, it never can picture that gorgeousness. Mass was saying at a side altar as we entered, and the music of stringed instruments and the shrill voices of choir-boys pierced the spaces here and there, but no more filled them than the immemorable plastic and pictorial facts: than a certain very lively bishop kneeling on his tomb and looking like George Washington; or than a St. Jerome in the Desert, outwrinkling ...
— Familiar Spanish Travels • W. D. Howells
... dim. of Salma any beautiful woman Rabab the viol mostly single stringed: Tan'oumshe who is soft and gentle. These fictitious names are ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... clad in a different colour or design of feather-silk. Their head-dress, while composed of the entire body of a bird of plumage, lacked the flamboyant tail of the peacock. The music was weird and whimsical, as there were neither stringed nor brass instruments. It was made wholly by women playing upon a vast variety of drums and reeds. There were all sizes of whistling reeds or flutes; several of these of different lengths were grouped into one instrument like the pipes of Pan; a series of long hollow reeds, when rapidly ...
— Pharaoh's Broker - Being the Very Remarkable Experiences in Another World of Isidor Werner • Ellsworth Douglass
... the village, which lay a half-mile back; no roll of wheels, or shout, or peal of bell. Burr Gordon kept on in utter silence until he came near the Hautville house. Then he began to hear music: the soaring sweetness of a soprano voice, the rich undertone of a bass, and the twang of stringed instruments. ...
— Madelon - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... the Parliament be sitting, when he is much busied, being not only a morning man, but at committees also; in the afternoon he is often at Court, or practising of music—just now he exerciseth himself in broken music [the use of stringed instruments] and brachigraphy [shorthand]: then in the evening we join my Lady and her gentlewomen in the withdrawing chamber, and divers gestes and conceits be used—such as singing, making of anagrams, guessing of riddles, and so forth. There ...
— It Might Have Been - The Story of the Gunpowder Plot • Emily Sarah Holt
... resources of a people besides work—love and war. "If music be the food of Love, play on." But will playing on the instruments of Java and other islands of those warm seas conduce to the object? The gamelan, or set of native band instruments, has one stringed instrument, several flageolets, a number of wood and metal harmonicons and inverted bronze bowls, all played with mallets: there are also gongs of various sizes, bells and a drum. The metal harmonicon is ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various
... uneasiness for which I could not then account), performed on a Mississippi instrument closely resembling what was once called in this island a hurdy-gurdy. The Momuses on either side of him had each another instrument peculiar to the Father of Waters, which may be likened to a stringed weather-glass held upside down. There were likewise a little flute and a violin. All went well for awhile, and we had had several sparkling repartees exchanged between the performers on the tambourine and bones, when the black of melancholy aspect, turning to the latter, ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... and Tyrtaus, composed war-songs. Mimnermus, Solon, Theognis, Simonides of Ceos, are among the most famous elegists. Music developed in connection with lyric poetry. The Greeks at first used the four-stringed lyre. Terpander made an epoch (660 B.C.) by adding three strings. Olympus and Thaletas made further improvements. Greek lyric poetry flourished, especially from 670 to 440 B.C. The Aeolian lyrists of Lesbos founded a school of their own. The two great ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... used in a wide sense. One cannot sing continuously on such a sound as b or d, but one may easily outline a tune on a series of b's or d's in the manner of the plucked "pizzicato" on stringed instruments. A series of tones executed on continuant consonants, like m, z, or l, gives the effect of humming, droning, or buzzing. The sound of "humming," indeed, is nothing but a continuous voiced nasal, held on one pitch or varying ...
— Language - An Introduction to the Study of Speech • Edward Sapir
... it was to see how the open region was filled with horses and chariots, with trumpeters and pipers, with singers and players on stringed instruments, to welcome the pilgrims as they went up, and followed one another in at the beautiful gate ...
— A Book of English Prose - Part II, Arranged for Secondary and High Schools • Percy Lubbock
... between their teeth. There were Irish harps, English harps, and Welsh harps. There was no Caledonian harp, though; but a remarkably dirty fellow in the procession seemed to be making up for the lack of one stringed instrument by bringing another,—the Scotch fiddle!—on which he perpetually played the tune of "God bless the gude Duke of Argyle!" There were harps with one, two, and three sets of strings,—harps with gold strings, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 5, March, 1858 • Various
... uniform tone color throughout the compass of a stringed instrument, it is necessary, among other things, to have the tension of all the strings reasonably uniform. In the treble this is accomplished by varying the string lengths. Since the length of a vibrating string is inversely proportional to its frequency, each string is made ...
— Italian Harpsichord-Building in the 16th and 17th Centuries • John D. Shortridge
... found out the secret. The carpets of moss are the Fairies' roof-gardens, where they dance and pretend to be ferns if you look at them. The round stones in the water-beds are the giants' pearls which were lost in the great battle. The music of the forest is an orchestra consisting of Fairy voices and stringed instruments, harps, violins, and 'cellos. And now and then I caught a high soprano note beyond the powers ...
— The Lightning Conductor Discovers America • C. N. (Charles Norris) Williamson and A. M. (Alice Muriel)
... which persons give utterance to, when they murmur and mutter indistinctly their dream-impressions. It was, be it observed, when she was disturbed in her sleep that she ran over her finger alphabet confusedly, like one who, playing on a stringed instrument, has not the attention sufficiently fixed to give precision and expression to the performance. The minstrel, described by Sir Walter Scott, with his fingers wandering wildly through the strings of his harp, resembles poor Laura giving ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... back; he had been struck down; and if some Black Boys of his own side had not come to the rescue, he must certainly have been killed. I am sure no Christmas-box could make any of you children so happy as this fight made Arick. A great part of the next day he neglected his work to play upon the one-stringed harp and sing songs about his great victory. To-day, when he is gone upon his holiday, he has announced that he is going back to the German firm to have another battle and another triumph. I do not think he will go, all the same, or I should be uneasy; for I do not want to have ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... and to send Blaise ahead to Maury, that one of the rooms of our ruined chateau might be made fit for mademoiselle's reception. I had expected to find the inn, as usual, without guests, but on approaching it we heard the sound of music proceeding from a stringed instrument. We stopped at the edge of the small, cleared space before the inn and sent Blaise to reconnoitre. He boldly entered and presently returned, followed by the decrepit Godeau and his strapping ...
— An Enemy To The King • Robert Neilson Stephens
... penetrate every sense and sensation of my body, and to intensify the extreme of misery which I had begun to endure in the hard effort to sleep. His snore was a medley of snuffing and snorting, with an abortive demi-semi aristocratic sort of a sneeze; while to add to the effect of this three-stringed inspiration there was in each aspiration a tremulous and swooning neigh. I had been reading The Origin of Species and The Descent of Man for several previous days, and began to think I had discovered ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 28. July, 1873. • Various
... raised orchestras surrounded with balusters formed of vines wreathed together, from which hang bunches of ripe grapes; within these balusters in three rows, one above another, sit the musicians, with their wind and stringed instruments of various tones, both high and low, loud and soft; and near them are singers of both sexes who entertain the citizens with the sweetest music and singing, both in concert and solo, varied at times as to its particular kind: these concerts continue on those days ...
— The Delights of Wisdom Pertaining to Conjugial Love • Emanuel Swedenborg
... is the subject of its application. Thus galls, bark, rhubarb, camomile tea, &c. &c. are all bitter and astringent. It is, therefore, the immoderate use of such an astringent that ultimately relaxes and debilitates: like the too frequent bracing of a drum, or any other stringed musical instrument, destroys its tensity, the body is unnerved by the overstretching of its fibres. Although we sometimes differ with the celebrated Doctor in part of the conclusion he has drawn from his experiment, yet the following sentiments so perfectly coincide with all our observations upon ...
— A Treatise on Foreign Teas - Abstracted From An Ingenious Work, Lately Published, - Entitled An Essay On the Nerves • Hugh Smith
... then a sort of literary rapture, a princely thing, only possible through costly outlay and jealously selected hours, like a concert of stringed instruments, whose players are unknown, bursting on the ear across the terraces and foliaged walls of some enchanted garden? By no means! That is the shadow of the artistic nature, that the rare occasions of life, where sound and scent and weather and sweet companionship conspire ...
— Joyous Gard • Arthur Christopher Benson
... it on the ruins of an estaminet, roofed it over with odds and ends of tin and tarpaulin, and the play was on. There was the orchestra against the back-cloth, rendering selections from popular Pekin revues on the drum, cymbal and one-stringed fiddle. There were the actors apparelled in the gorgeous costumes of old Cathay strutting mechanically through their parts, the female impersonators squeaking in shrill falsetto and putting in a ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, April 16, 1919 • Various
... had turned grim and gave their prayers as individuals to hearten their soldiers, the Germans were as responsive as a stringed instrument to the master musician's touch. A whisper in Berlin was enough to set a new wave of passion in motion, which spread to ...
— My Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... I looked down at the familiar gondolas, which glide with feminine grace smoothly and majestically as though they were alive, and felt all the luxury of this original, fascinating civilisation. There was a smell of the sea. Some one was playing a stringed instrument and two voices were singing. How delightful it was! How unlike it was to that Petersburg night when the wet snow was falling and beating so rudely on our faces. If one looks straight across the canal, one ...
— The Lady with the Dog and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... and Woled Deleim, the whole country is in a blaze of light of a summer's evening; music, dancing, and rejoicing, is heard in every direction. Their music consists of a kettle-drum, a flute or reed, similar to what Homer describes as the instrument of the ancient shepherds, a rhabeb or two-stringed fiddle, played with a semicircular bow, a tamboureen, and brass castanets. They play in precise time; and the ladies arrange themselves at the entrance of the sheik's tent. It is pleasant to observe the beauty ...
— An Account of Timbuctoo and Housa Territories in the Interior of Africa • Abd Salam Shabeeny
... this song when arranged to represent the scale of E minor coincide exactly with the scale tones of two of the tunings of the Japanese 13 stringed koto. These tunings were both borrowed by the Japanese from the Chinese by whom they were used as special tunings of the ch'in, or kin, one of the ...
— The Tinguian - Social, Religious, and Economic Life of a Philippine Tribe • Fay-Cooper Cole
... ragamuffin, bedaubed with grease, bestriding a wretched, lame jade, and grimacing, buffooning, and making the worshipful company laugh. Finally, when darkness falls, they proceed to hold what we should call a ball in the guest-chamber. A poor, old greybeard strums on a three-stringed instrument—I forget what they call it, but anyhow, it is something in the nature of our balalaika. [8] The girls and young children set themselves in two ranks, one opposite the other, and clap their hands and sing. Then ...
— A Hero of Our Time • M. Y. Lermontov
... lover cannot brook to leave her and return home. A maiden is joyful, When hushing the pan-pipe and double pipe, a stringed instrument ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... favourable hearing. The men are represented draped in long garments of various colours, and wearing sandals unlike the Egyptian—more resembling, in fact, open shoes with many straps. Their arms are bows, arrows, spears, and clubs. One plays on a seven-stringed lyre by means of a plectrum. Four women, wearing fillets round their heads, with garments reaching below the knee, and wearing anklets but no sandals, accompany them. A boy, armed with a spear, walks at the side of the women; and two children, seated in a kind of pannier placed on the back ...
— Ancient Egypt • George Rawlinson
... some carved shell of hollow pearl, almost translucent with the light divine des tous deux within. For ottomans you could have piles of Scott, Moore, Byron, Shelley, and Keats; and for food and drink, you could have stringed instruments, and easel, palette, and brush. How contemptible are womanish tastes in a man!" Again he waited vainly for a reply. The pallid fingers of Althea were pulling in pieces a half-faded flower, upon which her lustrous ...
— Hubert's Wife - A Story for You • Minnie Mary Lee
... that he certainly could not make use of any stringed instrument; could only, were a small and obscure city put into his hands, make ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... but a reflexion as on a mirror from personal experience. It has spoken to the hearts of all later generations of Englishmen because it came from the heart; because it is the true record of the genuine emotions of a human soul; and to such a record the emotions of other men will respond, as one stringed instrument vibrates responsively to another. The poet's power lies in creating sympathy; but he cannot, however richly gifted, stir feelings which he has not himself known ...
— Bunyan • James Anthony Froude
... at my father's door to perform the act of duty of seeing him, and hearing how he had entertained Eckart, if he was still master of his liberty. I should have known him better: I expected silence and gloom. The windows were lighted brilliantly. As the hall-door opened, a band of stringed and wood instruments commenced an overture. Mrs. Waddy came to me in the hall; she was unintelligible. One thing had happened to him at one hour of the morning, and another at another hour. He was at one moment suffering the hands of the ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... by Peter, swiftly and silently, Stella making a valiant effort to simulate an appetite which she was far from possessing. The windows were wide to the night, and from the river bank below there came the thrumming of some stringed instrument, which had a weird and strangely poignant throbbing, as if it voiced some hidden distress. There were a thousand sounds besides, some near, some distant, but it penetrated them all with the persistence of some small imprisoned ...
— The Lamp in the Desert • Ethel M. Dell
... or langleg, is a four-stringed instrument, probably of the same form as the psaltry. The peasant girls in mountain-districts play gladly upon it, and often with great dexterity. In the so-called "Elskov's Song," ...
— Strife and Peace • Fredrika Bremer
... the glorious days Of Accad's sovereignty. Behold the ring Of dancing beauties circling while they sing With amorous forms in moving melody, The measure keep to music's harmony. Hear! how the music swells from silver lute And golden-stringed lyres and softest flute And harps and tinkling cymbals, measured drums, While a soft echo from ...
— Babylonian and Assyrian Literature • Anonymous
... minstrel serenaded us in the evening, playing several quaint tunes on a species of one stringed fiddle, accompanied by wild, but not unmusical songs. He told the Makololo that he intended to play all night to induce us to give him a present. The nights being cold, the thermometer falling to 47 degrees, ...
— A Popular Account of Dr. Livingstone's Expedition to the Zambesi and Its Tributaries • David Livingstone
... "circles" afternoon and evening, for several days, in a small hall at 195 Bowery. The audience were seated next the walls, the principal space being required for the use of "the spirits." The "manifestations" mostly consisted in the thrumming and seemingly rapid movement about the hall of several stringed instruments, the room having been made entirely dark, while the boys were supposed or asserted to be quietly seated at the table in the centre. Two guitars, with sometimes a banjo, were the instruments used, and the noise made by "the spirits" was about equal ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum
... mediaeval workman. Many of the misericordes indeed are no doubt taken from the stone-work outside. As you turn one seat after another to the light, the life and habits and costume of four hundred years ago stand clear before you. There are the musicians with their cymbals, drums, and stringed instruments; the wool-combers with their teasels; the sheep-shearers and cloth-makers; the cobblers and leather-sellers and patten-makers; the barbers and surgeons; the schoolmaster with his pupils; the carver at work upon a stall; the mason ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook
... And the words of the Gods' own fellow, and the hope of days gone by; Then deep is that song-speech laden with the deeds that draw anigh, And many a hope accomplished, and many an unhoped change, And things of all once spoken, now grown exceeding strange; Then keen as the battle-piercer the stringed speech arose, And the hearts of men went with it, as of them that meet the foes; Then soared the song triumphant as o'er the world well won, Till sweet and soft it ended as a rose falls 'neath the sun; But thereafter was ...
— The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs • William Morris
... soon thereafter we discovered a huge ship gliding down the river directly toward us. Those aboard were singing in one mighty chorus that, echoing from bank to bank, sounded like a thousand voices, filling the whole universe with quivering melody. The accompaniment was played on stringed instruments not ...
— The Smoky God • Willis George Emerson
... put on his singing robes, and chant aloud the words of gladness—or of grief, I care not which—to his fellows; in his hours of hopelessness, let him utter his thoughts only to his inarticulate violin, or in the evanescent sounds of any his other stringed instrument; let him commune with his own heart on his bed, and be still; let him speak to God face to face if he may—only he cannot do that and continue hopeless; but let him not sing aloud in such a mood into the hearts of his fellows, for he cannot ...
— The Seaboard Parish Vol. 3 • George MacDonald
... upon which they agree. Before absolute laws governing any organ or instrument can be formulated the nature of the instrument must be known. The scientists have never come anywhere near an agreement as to what kind of an instrument man has in his throat. They have not decided whether it is a stringed instrument, a brass, a single or double reed, and these things are vital in establishing a scientific basis of procedure. Not knowing what the instrument is, it is not strange that we are not of one mind as to how ...
— The Head Voice and Other Problems - Practical Talks on Singing • D. A. Clippinger |
