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Viola   Listen
noun
Viola  n.  (Mus.) An instrument in form and use resembling the violin, but larger, and a fifth lower in compass.
Viola da braccio, the tenor viol, or viola, a fifth lower than the violin. Its part is written in the alto clef, hence it is sometimes called the alto.
Viola da gamba, an instrument resembling the viola, but larger, and held between the knees. It is now rarely used.
Viola da spalla, an instrument formerly used, resembling the viola, and intermediate in size between the viola and the viola da gamba.
Viola di amore, a viol, larger than the viola, having catgut strings upon, and brass or steel wires under, the keyboard. These, sounding sympathetically with the strings, yield a peculiarly soft and silvery sound. It is now seldom used.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Viola" Quotes from Famous Books



... at Shottery, a little out of Stratford, whose house is still an object of pilgrimage for Shakespeare lovers. We have really no just ground for inferring, from the poet's early departure for London, that his married life was unhappy. The Duke in Twelfth Night (IV, iii) advises Viola against women's marrying men younger than themselves, it is true; but such advice is conventional. No one can tell how much the dramatist really felt of the thoughts which his characters utter. Who would guess from any words in I Henry IV, ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken

... most assuredly sing in parts, but the quality of tone which in the woman's voice is called alto or contralto cannot be secured for certain physical reasons previously explained; and the use of the chest-tone, which resembles the adult woman's chest-voice as a clarinet resembles a viola, is wholly objectionable. ...
— The Child-Voice in Singing • Francis E. Howard

... of certain novelists that they write at the top of their voices, so, I think, one might describe Miss VIOLA MEYNELL as writing in a whisper. This certainly is the effect that Modern Lovers (SECKER) produced upon me. The gentle method of it invested the story—which of itself is a very slight thing—with an odd significance almost impossible ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 146., January 14, 1914 • Various

... St. Magdalen College, and bears plenty of the yellow cow-wheat which Kingsley holds as the mark of primeval waste-land; but it is not exceptional in its other plants, except that a spring, half-way down, has the rare Viola palustris around it. The whole tract remained untouched till a pleasant residence called the Grange was taken out of it to the south, at a ground rent, by Rowland Jones Bateman, Esq., whose beneficent kindness and excellent religious influence told on ...
— John Keble's Parishes • Charlotte M Yonge

... First of all the thing is perfectly credible: Italians were swarming into the Occidental Province at the time, as anybody who will read further can see; and secondly, there was no one who could stand so well by the side of Giorgio Viola the Garibaldino, the Idealist of the old, humanitarian revolutions. For myself I needed there a man of the People as free as possible from his class-conventions and all settled modes of thinking. This is not a side snarl at conventions. ...
— Notes on My Books • Joseph Conrad

... other, with a sigh of infinite regret. "I am fond of the violincello, the viola da gamba of medieval times. Properly it is not a viol—not a base viol as some suppose, but a violin of extra large size. That is what ...
— A Dream of Empire - Or, The House of Blennerhassett • William Henry Venable

... and the smiling aspect of the cultured country beneath. We beheld the plants divided by zones, as the temperature of the atmosphere diminished with the elevation of the site. Below the Piton, lichens begin to cover the scorious and lustrous lava: a violet,* (* Viola cheiranthifolia.) akin to the Viola decumbens, rises on the slope of the volcano at 1740 toises of height; it takes the lead not only of the other herbaceous plants, but even of the gramina, which, in the Alps and on the ridge of the Cordilleras, form close ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt

... 'Essays of Elia' an analysis (which has become classical) of Bensley's performance of Malvolio. But Bensley's powers were rated more moderately by more experienced playgoers. {338} Lamb's praises of Mrs. Jordan (1762-1816) in Ophelia, Helena, and Viola in 'Twelfth Night,' are corroborated by the eulogies of Hazlitt and Leigh Hunt. In the part of Rosalind Mrs. Jordan is reported on all sides to have beaten Mrs. Siddons out ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee

... became bad. The German advance to the north was said to be considerable and rapid. Orders came that all the British Batteries were to pull out and park that night at Villa Viola, behind Gradisca, "for duty on another part of the Front." Probably, we thought, we were going north. "The gun concentration up there must be awful," said the Major. I told Cotes that we were probably ...
— With British Guns in Italy - A Tribute to Italian Achievement • Hugh Dalton

... Allan promptly. "Everything's going beautifully. Philip's happy, and Angela's going to be gloriously dirty in a minute, which will give her nurse something to wash. You know how bitter Viola is about never getting the children to herself ...
— The Wishing-Ring Man • Margaret Widdemer

... twigs of the oaks give deep tones like the vibrations of the thick strings on the big double bass. The opposite, widespreading twigs of the ash sing like the cello, and the tones of the alternate spray of the lindens are finer, like the viola. The still smaller, opposite twigs of the maples murmur like the tender tones of the altos and the fine, yielding spray of the birches, the feathery elm and the hackberry make music pure and sweet as the wailing of the first violins. When the director of this maestoso March ...
— Some Winter Days in Iowa • Frederick John Lazell

... directions: 'Idomeneo in ginochione nel tempio (Idomeneus, kneeling in the temple).' That will never do; he must come with all his following. That necessitates a march, and I have composed a very simple one for two violins, viola, bass and two oboes, which is to be played a mezza voce, during which the King enters and the priests make the preparations for the sacrifice. Then the King sinks on his knees and begins his prayer. In Electra's recitative, after the subterranean voice, the word 'Partono (they ...
— Mozart: The Man and the Artist, as Revealed in his own Words • Friedrich Kerst and Henry Edward Krehbiel

... at his own hell-begotten conception." Saul is guilty of tampering with the Witch of Endor, and is alarmed at the Ghost of Samuel, whose words distinctly embody and vibrate the fears of his own heart, and he "falls straightway all along on the earth." "The exquisite refinement of Viola triumphs over her masculine attire." The exquisite refinement of Ruth triumphs in ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various

... me. Nothing of the sort; but my conception is better suited to me. Its very vagueness answers, nine times out of ten, to my repugnance and my preference; and the high lights, the vividly realized portions emerging from that vagueness, represent what I like. Hamlet or Portia or Viola and Olivia, exist for me under the evocation of the magician Shakespeare, but formed of recollections, impressions of places, people, and other poets, floating coloured atomies, which have a brooding charm, as being mine; why should ...
— Hortus Vitae - Essays on the Gardening of Life • Violet Paget, AKA Vernon Lee

... thee): Small curious quibble; ... Henry's fustian roar Which frights away that sleep he invocates;[13] Wronged Valentine's [14] unnatural haste to yield; Too-silly shifts of maids that mask as men In faint disguises that could ne'er disguise— Viola, Julia, Portia, Rosalind;[15] Fatigues most drear, and needless overtax Of speech obscure that had as ...
— Poets of the South • F.V.N. Painter

... story of Old Madrid, with full page illustrations. Originally played with great success by Viola Allen. ...
— At the Time Appointed • A. Maynard Barbour

... that of a woman of sixty-two, who, though bald, developed a beard before the climacteric. Her structural proportions were feminine in character, and it is said that her mother, who was sane, had a beard also. A curious case was that of a woman of twenty-three (Mrs. Viola M.), who from the age of three had a considerable quantity of hair on the side of the cheek which eventually became a full beard. She was quite feminine was free from excessive hair elsewhere, her ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould

... candida leucoia et flaventia lumina caltae narcissique comas et hiantis saeva leonis ora feri calathisque virentia lilia canis, nec non vel niveos vel caeruleos hyacinthos, tum quae pallet humi, quae frondens purpurat auro, ponatur viola et nimium rosa plena ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler

... is an open question whether the performer's instrument really changed. It must either have been wrongly classified at one of the two periods, or the vocal keyboard—so to speak—transposed a little higher or lower. The character of the instrument remains the same; a viola strung as a violin would still retain its viola ...
— Style in Singing • W. E. Haslam

... the Bicentennial buildings so beautiful? At best we have exchanged the fraudulent wooden ramparts of Alumni Hall for the equally fraudulent inside columns of these newer buildings. It is a mercy that there is no style and changing fashion in elm trees. As Viola might have remarked about the Campus: it were excellently done, if God ...
— Chimney-Pot Papers • Charles S. Brooks

... taking delight in such a coarse and farcical amusement. For my part, I am rather disposed to believe, that the practice was dropped from the difficulty in finding fools able to do full justice to their parts: [Footnote: See Hamlet's praise of Yorick. In The Twelfth Night, Viola says:— This fellow is wise enough to play the fool, And to do that well craves a kind of wit; He must observe their mood on whom he jests, The quality of the persons, and the time; And like the haggard, check at every feather That comes before his eye. This is a practice As full of labour as ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black

... plasticity of youth, may be regarded as typical adolescents." His list is as follows: Romeo, Juliet, Hamlet, Ophelia, Imogen, Perdita, Arviragus, Guiderius, Palamon, Arcite, Emilia, Ferdinand, Miranda, Isabella, Mariana, Orlando, Rosalind, Biron, Portia, Jessica, Phebe, Katharine, Helena, Viola, Troilus, Cressida, Cassio, Marina, Prince Hal, and Richard of Gloucester. The proof of the youth of these characters, as set forth, is of various kinds, and Libby holds that besides these, the sonnets and poems perhaps show a yet greater, more ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall

... We skirted Viola Lake, cresting the high hill, and descending to a shaded valley where the lapping waters plashed upon the roadside: then mounted another hill, among thick clustering oaks and giant pines, to where three ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, September 1880 • Various

... between the threads swollen from damp, begrimed and repeatedly washed by repairers, presents anything but a pleasing spectacle even when the interior of a fine "Strad" or Joseph is laid bare. Many years ago a friend owning a fine Cremonese viola asked me to open it and find out the cause of some buzzing or rattling within that had not been evident till that time. After an examination, finding that opening it would be absolutely necessary, I asked him whether ...
— The Repairing & Restoration of Violins - 'The Strad' Library, No. XII. • Horace Petherick

... alike speak of violets as growing in meadows (or dales). But the Greeks did so because they could not fancy any delight except in meadows; and Milton, because he wanted a rhyme to nightingale—and, after all, was London bred. But Viola's beloved knew where violets grew in Illyria,—and grow everywhere else also, when they can,—on a bank, facing ...
— Proserpina, Volume 2 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin

... little table, a writing-desk on another; a shelf of books hung on the wall. The room had really been made ready for a dear young cousin of Lady Anne's, who had not lived to enjoy it. If Mary had only known, she owed something of Lady Anne's interest to the fact that her eyes were grey, like Viola's, her cheek ...
— Mary Gray • Katharine Tynan

... cudwort), Hieracium Umbellatum (narrow-leaved hawk weed), Alnus Glutinosa (common alder), Juncus Acutiflorus (sharp-flowered rush), Anagallis Pallida (pale-coloured pimpernel), Pedicularitis Sylvatica (dwarf red rattle), Pinguicola Vulgaris (common butter-wort), Viola Flavicornis, also called V. Ericetorum (yellow-horned violet). {31} The Cichorium (succory) and Parnassia Palustris (grass of Parnassus) are found in the neighbourhood. The Myrica (“Gale” or bog-myrtle) is very abundant, and a useful preventive against the moth if placed ...
— Records of Woodhall Spa and Neighbourhood - Historical, Anecdotal, Physiographical, and Archaeological, with Other Matter • J. Conway Walter

... me Viola, after her mother, and Father wanted to call me Abigail Jane after his mother; and they wouldn't either one give in to the other. Mother was sick and nervous, and cried a lot those days, and she used to sob out that if they thought they ...
— Mary Marie • Eleanor H. Porter

... after a long struggle, and the unexpected, inexplicable manner in which she had abandoned it. It was to recall, too, the delightful evenings I had spent under her influence, the pleasure I had had in the passion of her "Juliet," the poetic charm of her "Viola"; the graceful witchery of her "Rosalind"; how I had smiled with her "Portia"; laughed with her "Beatrice"; wept with her "Camille"; in fact how I had yielded myself up to her magnetism with that ecstatic pleasure in which one gets the best joys ...
— Told in a French Garden - August, 1914 • Mildred Aldrich

... year out in a small country town was in no way provincial, for all her life she had been free of the company of the immortals. The Elizabethans she knew by heart, poetry was as daily bread. Rosalind in Arden, Viola in Illyria, were as real to her as Bella Bathgate next door. She had taken to herself as friends (being herself all the daughters of her father's house) Maggie Tulliver, Ethel Newcome, Beatrix Esmond, Clara Middleton, ...
— Penny Plain • Anna Buchan (writing as O. Douglas)

... minor, op. 8, is more alluring. It was published March, 1833, and dedicated to Prince Anton Radziwill. Chopin later, in speaking of it to a pupil, admitted that he saw things he would like to change. He regretted not making it for viola, instead of ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker

... was owing to the criminal secrecy with which Viola conducted her affairs. The Minor Canon wrote to me as if I had seduced, or was about to seduce, his daughter. (He had upset himself by rushing up to take her back to Canterbury, and finding that she wouldn't go with him.) I think, in his excitement, he ordered me to give her up. ...
— The Belfry • May Sinclair

... The choice of colours includes marone, blue, green, and gold. The ornaments, as usual, consist of sprays of ivy leaf and grounds filled in with treillages of natural flowers, among which are the daisy, viola tricolor, thistle, cornbottle, and wild stock. Fruits and vegetables also, as grapes, field peas, and strawberries. The miniatures include a few rather ...
— Illuminated Manuscripts • John W. Bradley

... English:—Polygonum, Quercus, Sonchus, Gnaphalium, Cratagus, Lobelia, Lactuca, Hydrocotyle, Saponaria, Campanula, Bidens, Rubus, Oxalis, Artemisia, Fragaria, Clematis, Dioscorea, Potamogeton, Chara, Veronica, Viola, Smilax.] ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker

... This was spoken of "honest little Emma." A purer woman never lived. I knew that he was lying and told him so, but he was ready with a tale of time, place and circumstance and brazened it out. In like manner I have been told tales of Mary Anderson and Modjeska and Viola Allen—all of them lies. They were the tributes which my gentle friends, male and female, paid to success in their beautiful ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann

... wit she had originally owned several years before, when her youngest daughter, aged four, died. All the babies that had arrived since had not consoled her for the death of that little lamb, by name Viola May, nor restored her full measure of under-wit. Poor Sarah Thomas had spied adorable little Lucy separated from her mates by chance for a few minutes, picking wild flowers, and had seized her in forcible but loving arms and carried her home. Had ...
— The Copy-Cat and Other Stories • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

... sufficiently accurate idea, both of the sizes and the use of viols, if he will consider the treble viol to have corresponded closely with our modern violin, the tenor viol to the modern viola [which is also called Alto, Tenor, or Bratsche—i.e., braccio, 'arm' fiddle], and the bass-viol, or viol-da-gamba [so called because held between the knees], to ...
— Shakespeare and Music - With Illustrations from the Music of the 16th and 17th centuries • Edward W. Naylor

... deserve mention, also Acacia caesia, Pueraria tuberosa, Vallaris Heynei, Porana paniculata, and several vines, especially Vitis lanata with its large rusty leaves. Characteristic herbs are the sweet-scented Viola patrinii, the slender milkwort; Polygala Abyssinica, a handsome pea, Vigna vexillata, a borage, Trichodesma Indicum, a balsam, Impatiens balsamina, familiar in English gardens, the beautiful delicate little blue Evolvulus alsinoides, the showy purple convolvulus, Ipomaea ...
— The Panjab, North-West Frontier Province, and Kashmir • Sir James McCrone Douie

... notice the method of the mechanism and quite forgot that he was looking upon a fiction and a shadow. That her personation of Imogen, though more exalted in its nature than any of her works, excepting Isabella, would rival in public acceptance her Juliet, Viola, or Rosalind, was not to be expected: it was too much a passive condition—delicate and elusive—and too little an active effort. She woke into life the sleeping spirit of a rather repellant drama, and was "alone ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter

... too good, except for sarcasm, to be wasted on Sir Andrew and Sir Toby. The critics neglected to note what the Duke says about "Come away, come away, Death," and they prattled in their blindness as to whether this must not really have been sung by Viola, all the while insensible to the poignant dramatic value of it as warbled by the ironic Clown in the presence of the blinded pair. But indeed the whole of Twelfth Night is burdened with melody; behind every garden-door a lute is tinkling, and at each change of scene some ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse

... I might say, throughout the state. I recall a few years ago coming off of the Cumberland Plateau down in Warren County into the cove there around Viola and seeing a beautiful grove of pecans along a stream. I hadn't been through that country before, but I had known a family that lived there, and I stopped at a house to see just what those pecans meant. And there was an old lady on the porch who owned the property, ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Incorporated 39th Annual Report - at Norris, Tenn. September 13-15 1948 • Various

... plays with those of the comedies immediately preceding the Hamlet period. In the latter plays we find the heroines, by their sweet womanly guidance and gentle but firm control, triumphantly bringing good out of evil in spite of adverse circumstance. Beatrice, Rosalind, Viola, Helena, and Isabella are all, not without a tinge of knight-errantry that does not do the least violence to the conception of tender, delicate womanhood, the good geniuses of the little worlds in which their influence is made to be felt. Events must inevitably have gone tragically ...
— Elizabethan Demonology • Thomas Alfred Spalding

... that Lord Cobham did was at thy instigation, thou viper, for I thou thee, thou traitor". And when Sir Toby Belch in Twelfth Night is urging Sir Andrew Aguecheek to send a sufficiently provocative challenge to Viola, he suggests to him that he "taunt him with the licence of ink; if thou thou'st him some thrice, it shall not be amiss". To keep this in mind will throw much light on one peculiarity of the Quakers, and give a certain dignity to it, as once maintained, which at present it is ...
— English Past and Present • Richard Chenevix Trench

... to have a "chest of viols," which consisted of six, viz., two trebles, two tenors, and two basses (see note in North's "Memoirs of Musick," ed. Rimbault, p. 70). The bass viol was also called the 'viola da gamba', because it was held between ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys

... plays in one without much connection. The Viola play is improbable. Why did Shakespeare omit that part of the story which tells us that Silla (Viola) had seen the Duke when he was shipwrecked on Cyprus where she lived, and had fallen in love with him? In the ...
— More Pages from a Journal • Mark Rutherford



Words linked to "Viola" :   herbaceous plant, viola da gamba, Viola rostrata, Violaceae, Viola blanda, Viola tricolor hortensis, Viola odorata, Viola sylvatica, Viola canina, Viola striata, Viola pedata, family Violaceae, viola d'amore, Viola tricolor, herb, Viola conspersa, pink of my John, genus Viola, violet, Viola pubescens, horned violet, dilleniid dicot genus, field pansy, tufted pansy, Viola cornuta, Viola arvensis, bowed stringed instrument, Viola canadensis, pansy, Viola ocellata, heartsease, string, Johnny-jump-up, violet family



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