"Music of the spheres" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... charm the ear unless they bring silent thoughts of corresponding sweetness to the mind; nor could the most sonorous, vapid verses be changed into poetry if they were set to the music of the Spheres. It is scarcely necessary to say that Petrarch has intellectual graces of thought and spiritual felicities of diction, without which his tactics in the mere march of words would be ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... lifting, digging, driving, buying, selling, sweating, swearing, praying, loving, hating, struggling, failing, sinning, repenting—all working and living according to a vast harmony, which sometimes we can catch clearly and sometimes miss entirely. I think, that morning, for a time, I heard the true music of the spheres, the ...
— The Friendly Road - New Adventures in Contentment • (AKA David Grayson) Ray Stannard Baker
... second to none, although he plucked from the stars the secrets of the universe, was an astrologer, and really believed that he could predict the career of a man by finding what star was in the ascendant at his birth. This great man breathed, so to speak, the atmosphere of his time. He believed in the music of the spheres, and assigned alto, bass, tenor, ...
— The Ghosts - And Other Lectures • Robert G. Ingersoll
... as the spot where they appear he nears, Surprised at these unwonted signs of idling, He hears—alas! no music of the spheres, But an unhallowed, earthly sound of fiddling! A melody which made him doubt his ears, The cause being past his guessing or unriddling; A pipe, too, and a drum, and shortly after— A ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... they were alone and she thought he was asleep he would see the dancing, restless light die out of her eyes, and a beautiful exalted look come into them as if she were listening to the music of the spheres. ...
— Quin • Alice Hegan Rice
... contribution of the religious perceptions in the past, namely, the comprehensive vision of life and the world and time sub specie aeternitatis is here abandoned. Eternity is unreal or empty; we never heard the music of the spheres. We are facing at this moment a disintegrating age. Here is a prime reason for it. The spiritual solidarity of mankind under the humanistic interpretation of life and destiny is dissolving and breaking down. Humanism is ingenious and reasonable ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... while he discourses thereon: 'So long as the several elements of life, all fitly adjusted, can pour forth their movement like harmonious tuned strings, it is melody and unison: life, from its mysterious fountains, flows out as in celestial music and diapason—which, also, like that other music of the spheres, even because it is perennial and complete, without interruption and without imperfection, might be fabled to escape the ear. Thus, too, in some languages, is the state of health well denoted by a term expressing unity; ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... during my future life as though when wandering through the green fields in some long-past day, I had met a bright angel from another world; and the angel had stopped to speak to me, and had surrounded me with her glorious wings, and had given me of her heavenly light, and had spoken to me with the music of the spheres, and I had thought that she would stay with me for ever. But there had come a noise of the drums and a sound of the trumpets, and she had flown away from me up to her own abode. To have been so favoured, ...
— Marion Fay • Anthony Trollope
... most dangerous of all passions—the passion for an idea. Though she was ignorant of the fact, it was not Miss Le Pettit she adored, it was beauty; not silk underskirts that rustled in her ear, but the music of the spheres; a new ideal she saw not in the angelic visitant, but in herself. She, too, would be all white and dazzling, was accounted worthy to follow in the same steps, were it but in those of a dance. She made the common mistake of a lover—she imagined she was in love with ...
— The White Riband - A Young Female's Folly • Fryniwyd Tennyson Jesse
... in the heavy shadows across the table. He felt a great respect, even tenderness, for this taciturn, high-principled, devoted scientist. He had never seen him excited, hardly ever aroused. He was a man of figures, whose only passion seemed to be the "music of the spheres." ...
— The Man Who Rocked the Earth • Arthur Train
... the world's smiles and tears Hover about like butterflies and bees. Thou art the theme the music of the spheres Echoes in endless, ...
— Poems • Alan Seeger
... the rough-rider, 'it's I, sure enough;' and, to judge by the countenance of his female conductor, every accent of his anger was music of the spheres to her unquenchable wrath: 'I'm the man, sure enough, whose horse you rode away with; and that you'll find to be a ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... expression. Every poet has an invisible audience, as an orator has a visible one, who deserve a great part of the merit of his works. Some men may write for the religious or philosophic recluse, and therefore utter the emotions which come to ordinary mortals in the rare moments when the music of the spheres, generally drowned by the din of the commonplace world, becomes audible to their dull senses. Pope, on the other hand, writes for the wits who never listen to such strains, and moreover writes for their ordinary moods. He aims at giving ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... coloured light, all wheeling and swaying, floating and circling round some distant, unknown, motive, centre-point, in the pauseless measures of a perpetual dance of joy, keeping time and tune with most ecstatic harmony, and producing upon the enthralled mind the not imaginary music of the spheres. ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles
... fig for all the stars in the sky! Your bright eyes outshine them all in radiance, and overpower them in influence. All the music of the spheres is to me discord compared with the voice of Angelique des ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... sounds!" he said, throwing the gold pieces on the table, and constantly adding new ones to them. "There is no music of the spheres to be compared with this sound, and no view is more charming than the aspect of this pile of gold. How many tender love- glances, how many sumptuous dinners, how many protestations of friendship and love-pledges, how many festivals and pleasures do not flash forth from those ...
— LOUISA OF PRUSSIA AND HER TIMES • Louise Muhlbach
... the heavens were ordered in consonance with number, they must move in eternal order. "The spheres" revolved in harmonious order around the great centre of light and heat—the sun—"the throne of the elemental world." Hence the doctrine of "the music of the spheres." Pythagoras ad harmoniam canere mundum existimat. [Footnote: Cicero, De Nat. D., iii. ii. 27.] The tendency of his speculations, obscure as they are to us, was to raise the soul to a contemplation of order and beauty and law, in the material universe, and hence ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... connecting the distances of the planets from the sun with their periodic times, was then mixed up with a preposterous conception about the properties of the different planets. They were supposed to be associated with some profound music of the spheres inaudible to human ears, and performed only for the benefit of that being whose soul formed the animating ...
— Great Astronomers • R. S. Ball
... little of the great founder of so many systems and theories connected with human life and philosophy. It was he who invented the multiplication table, and solved the forty-seventh proposition of the first book of Euclid. It was he who, from his profound knowledge of music, first discovered the music of the spheres—a divine harmony, which, from its unbroken continuity, and incessant play in the heavenly bodies, we are ...
— The Evil Eye; Or, The Black Spector - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... completion and fruition. The first two, says Rolle, are gained by devotion, and out of them springs the third.[60] Rolle's description of it, of the all-pervading holy joy, rhythm, and melody, when the soul, "now become as it were a living pipe," is caught up into the music of the spheres, "and in the sight of God ... joying sounds,"[61] deserves to be placed beside what is perhaps the most magnificent passage in all mystical literature, where Plotinus tells us of the choral dance of ...
— Mysticism in English Literature • Caroline F. E. Spurgeon
... the ether through which they move in their celestial orbits; produce harmonious sounds, varying according to the differences of the magnitudes, velocities, and relative distances of the planets, in a manner corresponding to the proportion of the notes in a musical scale. Hence the "music of the spheres." From what can be gathered of the astronomical doctrine of Pythagoras, it has been inferred that he was possessed of the true idea of the solar system, which was revived by Coper'nicus and fully established by Newton. With respect to God, Pythagoras appears to have taught ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... sounds are also measurable in their own category: they have comparable pitches and durations, and definite and recognizable combinations of those sensuous elements are as truly objects as chairs and tables. Not that a musical composition exists in any mystical way, as a portion of the music of the spheres, which no one is hearing; but that, for a critical philosophy, visible objects are also nothing but possibilities of sensation. The real world is merely the shadow of that assurance of eventual experience which accompanies sanity. This objectivity can accrue to any mental figment that has enough ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... know no more those passions' dreams, While musing near these quiet streams; That biting state of savage lust Which, true love absent, burns to dust. Gold's rattle shall not rob my ears Of this sweet music of the spheres. I'll walk abroad with fancy free; Each leafy, summer's morn I'll see The trees, all legs or bodies, when They vary in their shapes like men. I'll walk abroad and see again How quiet pools are pricked by rain; And you shall ...
— Foliage • William H. Davies
... public makes demand for these. It gets them. Then it cries 'More! More!' Where is the writer who does not think with the printing-press hot upon his track, and the sound of the pulp-mill making paper for his poems, and the buzz of editors, instead of the music of the spheres? Think of the destruction to American forests, the bare and glaring hills that face us day and night, all for a literature like this—thousands of square miles of it, spread before our faces, morning after morning, week after week, through all this broad and glorious land! Seventy ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee
... playfulness and mirth. Of those who passed him, gay in youth and hope, He took at Jupiter a shilling's worth Of gazing, through the showman's telescope; Sounds as of far-off bells came on his ears, He fancied 'twas the music of the spheres. ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... trickled into the bathing sheds; it swelled still higher upon the trim-kept promenade, until it lapped the highest point and then went gently down again. Eclipses and tides are patent proofs to the people that physical science can appeal to. The "music of the spheres" hath also a true rhythm, "There is neither speech nor language but ...
— The Voyage Alone in the Yawl "Rob Roy" • John MacGregor
... upon the harmony of body, soul, and spirit. Confident, but entirely unassuming; serious, but without sadness; joyous, but not to mirthfulness; eager, but without haste; she moves steadily forward with steps timed to the rhythmic music of the spheres. The child is no burden, but a part of her very being. The two are one in love, thought, and purpose. Sharing the secret of his sacred calling, the mother bears her son forth to meet ...
— The Madonna in Art • Estelle M. Hurll
... of the combatants and the yells of the wounded had long since drowned the soft music of the spheres above their heads. The call of tubas and bugles rang without ceasing through the great building, to the frequent accompaniment of the most horrible sound of all in this hideous spectacle—the heavy fall of a dead man dropping ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... depend on the Akasha, the ether of space, of the existence of which your scientists have not made perfectly sure as yet. This was the teaching of the ancient Chinese and Egyptians, as well as of ancient Aryans. The doctrine of the 'music of the spheres' first saw the light here in India, and not in Greece or Italy, whither it was brought by Pythagoras after he had studied under the Indian Gymnosophists. And most certainly this great philosopher—who revealed to ...
— From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan • Helena Pretrovna Blavatsky
... paganized; and the seven days were allotted to the five planets and the sun and moon in the order which still survives among the Latin nations, and here in England with a further introduction of Scandinavian mythology. The principle of the distribution was what is popularly called "the music of the spheres," and turns on a law of Greek music, which is called by Don Cassius the [Greek: armonia dia teddaron]. Assuming the earth to be the centre of the universe, the celestial bodies which have a proper movement of their own among the stars were arranged in the order ...
— Caesar: A Sketch • James Anthony Froude
... enormous learning and profound information, he possessed an almost miraculous mastery of the fiddle. He was a Dutch Paganini, and drew such notes from his instrument, that the burgomaster, in smoking his pipe and listening to the sounds, thought it had a close resemblance to the music of the spheres. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... worlds of worlds, and heard there in her little room the tread of armies, the paeans of victory, the breaking of hearts, and the music of the spheres. ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... interchange of intelligence, such as belongs to their sex in virtue of its specialty. Talk without words is half their conversation, just as it is all the conversation of the lower animals. Only the dull senses of men are dead to it as to the music of the spheres. ...
— The Guardian Angel • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... sound of lamentation 'mid the murmuring nocturne noises, And an undertone of sadness, as from myriad human voices, And the harmony of heaven and the music of the spheres, And the ceaseless throb of Nature, and the flux and flow of years, Are rudely punctuated with the drip of human tears ...
— The Workingman's Paradise - An Australian Labour Novel • John Miller
... the spot where they appear he nears, Surprised at these unwonted signs of idling, He hears—alas! no music of the spheres, But an unhallow'd, earthly sound of fiddling! A melody which made him doubt his ears, The cause being past his guessing or unriddling; A pipe, too, and a drum, and shortly after, A most unoriental ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... great trucks. One would not suppose there were so many trucks on the face of the earth. It is a glorious sight, and any man whose soul is not dead should jump with joy to see it. And the thunder of them altogether as they bang over the stones is like the music of the spheres. ...
— Walking-Stick Papers • Robert Cortes Holliday
... those who suffer in the marriage relation—go up incessantly to God, and the woe of the children who, through these conditions, have inherited only animal love and instinct is enough to drown the "music of the spheres." ...
— Insights and Heresies Pertaining to the Evolution of the Soul • Anna Bishop Scofield
... wondrous 'rangement, that a tuneful gnome Drew from them sounds more varied, clear, and sweet, Than ever yet had rung in any earthly dome. Loud, shrilly, liquid, soft; at that quick touch Such modulation wooed his angel ears That Zophiel wondered, started from his couch And thought upon the music of the spheres. ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 2 August 1848 • Various
... but he saw her, he heard her voice, he lived in the glory of her presence. Moreover, she consented to play. Of her skill as a pianist, Otway could not judge; what he heard was Music, music absolute, the very music of the spheres. When it ceased, Mrs. Borisoff chanced to look at him; he was startlingly pale, his eyes wide as if ...
— The Crown of Life • George Gissing
... with uncommon beauty and interest. The dingy old houses might have been fairy palaces, for anything they saw to the contrary; the dusty walks, the trampled grass, were regular Elysian fields to them, and the music was the music of the spheres, though they found themselves "Right in the middle of the boom, jing, jing." For both had made a little discovery,—no, not a little one, the greatest and sweetest man and woman can make. In the sharp twinge of jealousy which the sight of Kitty's flirtation ...
— Kitty's Class Day And Other Stories • Louisa M. Alcott
... Within this limited region now," he said. "You'll find your moving planet. I'm not more Than one degree in error." He left his proofs; But Airy, king of Greenwich, looked askance At unofficial genius in the young, And pigeon-holed that music of the spheres. Nine months he waited till Le Verrier, too, Pointed to that same region of the sky. Then Airy, opening his big sleepy lids, Bade Challis use his telescope,—too late, To make that honour all his country's own; For all Le Verrier's proofs were now with Galle Who, ...
— Watchers of the Sky • Alfred Noyes
... buildings ever in process of construction, yet ever finished, developing from perfection to perfection, profusion without overabundance; every particle visible or invisible in glorious motion, marching to the music of the spheres in a region regarded as the abode ...
— The Mountains of California • John Muir
... were whisperings and rustlings and the occasional strange and sometimes beautiful musical notes whose origin is yet obscure, but which, since they are carried by electromagnetic radiation of wildly varying wave lengths, are not likely to be the fabled music of the spheres. ...
— This World Is Taboo • Murray Leinster
... night Within the "Rational" latter years! A female throng, dowdy, bedight In veils, and drowned in tears, Sits in a theatre, to see A play of hopes and fears, Whilst the orchestra breathes fitfully The music of the spheres. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 101, September 26, 1891 • Various
... malicious were in trine. Thy brother-angels at thy birth Strung each his lyre, and tun'd it high, That all the people of the sky Might know a poetess was born on earth; And then, if ever, mortal ears Had heard the music of the spheres. And if no clust'ring swarm of bees On thy sweet mouth distill'd their golden dew, 'Twas that such vulgar miracles Heaven had not leisure to renew: For all the blest fraternity of love Solemniz'd there thy birth, ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... with electricity, flashing and crackling on every hand. One has a sense of having strayed unwittingly into the midst of a miniature planetary system in full swing, with the boom of the trolleys, in their mazy courses, to represent the music of the spheres. ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... food and drink, physical life,—to a useful, noble, highly educated, refined, learned son who could "listen in the orange groves of Verona to the sweet vows of Juliet, or to the blind bard's harp as he strikes the chords but seldom struck harmonious with the morning stars, or to the music of the spheres as they hymn His praises around their Creator's throne"? Far more than the earthly father would choose the latter for his son, does the Heavenly Father value the soul and its development ...
— God's Plan with Men • T. T. (Thomas Theodore) Martin
... Mountains; for as we then saw them, the centre height especially wore the appearance of a huge organ. "A grand instrument that," said Tony, "such as I suppose an angel might choose to sound forth the music of the spheres." ...
— On the Banks of the Amazon • W.H.G. Kingston
... such a sensible, acute, and touching way, and so poetically and with especial reference to his friend's loss, and afterwards in the theatre he expressed his sympathy in such kind and delicate lines, whilst tears of genuine feeling stood in his eyes, that his friend was obliged to admit, "This music of the spheres, which I had heard at least a dozen times before, exerted a greater power over me than all the dictates of reason or the consolations ...
— Weird Tales, Vol. II. • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... be a song Sweet as the music of the spheres, That still their harmonies prolong For him who rightly hears. The heavens and the earth do play Upon us, if we be in tune: Winter shouts hoarse his roundelay, And tender sweet pipes June. But oftentimes the songs are pain, And discord mars our harmonies: Our ...
— Our Unitarian Gospel • Minot Savage
... slain heroes in Valhalla take to their toes in celebration of their valorous deeds done in the body upon the bodies of their enemies. Angels dance before the Great White Throne to harps attuned by angel hands, and the Master of the Revels—who arranges the music of the spheres—looks approvingly on. ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 8 - Epigrams, On With the Dance, Negligible Tales • Ambrose Bierce
... apparently as indifferent to the slaughter they committed as if it were the finest fun in the world! Talk of your French beauties, your Italian beauties, your Spanish beauties! Give me, for the impersonation of soul expressed in the human form divine—for features "woven from the music of the spheres and painted with the hues of the aurora borealis"—a Swedish beauty, the nearest approach upon earth to an American beauty, which, being altogether angelic, must ever remain the highest type of perfection ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... melodious passages that might be the musical thought of Franz Lehar or Leo Fall. He has no great liking for the music of Richard Strauss, and his admiration of Wagner, if certain themes, that must, one feels, have been drawn from the music of the spheres, be excepted, is respectful rather than rapturous. Of Wagner's works the ...
— William of Germany • Stanley Shaw
... interpreter of human love. We call him poet, composer, artist, and speak of him reverently as Master. We say that his lips have been wet with dews of Hybla,—that, like the sage of Crotona, he has heard the music of the spheres,—that he comes to us, another Numa, radiant and inspired from the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 • Various
... benefactor. And a note of exquisite moral beauty is added if the benefactor be the same person whom the guilty man had injured. This is what is meant by forgiveness. This is why forgiveness is so divine a thing. This is the reason why, when an act of genuine forgiveness occurs, "the music of the spheres" seems to become audible in our nether world. And this is also the reason why we often see such a strange kind of tie springing up between a person who has been chastised and the one who has chastised him in the right spirit and then forgiven him—a tie ...
— The Essentials of Spirituality • Felix Adler |
