"Stringed" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the prows resting on the beach; having done this, they place the mast lengthwise across the prow and the poop, and spread the sail over it, so as to form a tent; beneath these tents they sing their songs, drinking wine freely, and accompanying their voices with the lyre, or three-stringed viol. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XIX. No. 532. Saturday, February 4, 1832 • Various
... to his tiny room off the kitchen, where, as was his evening custom for half an hour, he coaxed an amazing number of squealing or whining notes from his two-stringed fiddle. I pictured him as he played. He would be seated in his wicker armchair beside a little table on which a lamp glowed, the room tightly closed, window down, door shut, a fast-burning brown-paper cigarette to make the atmosphere more ...
— Ma Pettengill • Harry Leon Wilson
... into my tent, played on his one-stringed fiddle, and sang an extempore song for the protection of the Consul. I gave him a handkerchief. It appears that he is ...
— Narrative of a Mission to Central Africa Performed in the Years 1850-51, Volume 1 • James Richardson
... said: "You must not grow so furious, for we are very glad that you came here." And after that Jeronimus gave the chief two knives, two pairs of scissors, and a few awls and needles that we had with us. And in the evening the savages suspended a band of seawan, and some other stringed seawan that the chief had brought with him from the French savages as a sign of peace and that the French savages were to come in confidence to them, and he sang: "Ho schene jo ho ho schene I atsiehoewe atsihoewe," after which all the savages shouted three ...
— Narratives of New Netherland, 1609-1664 • Various
... Christ spread over all a halo of purity and holiness; large monasteries filled with pious monks, and convents of devout and pure virgins abounded; bishops and priests in the churches chanting psalms, each accompanying himself with a many-stringed harp, gave forth sweet harmony, unheard at the time in any other part of ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... has been remitted to this woman. See, you invited Me to your house, your servants have filled the room with the scent of roses, although fresh air comes in through the window. My ear has been charmed with the strains of sweet bells, and stringed instruments, although the clear song of birds can be heard from without. You have given Me wine in costly crystal goblets, although I am accustomed to drink out of earthen vessels. But that My feet might feel sore after the long wandering ...
— I.N.R.I. - A prisoner's Story of the Cross • Peter Rosegger
... additional musicians, and at the same time gave him to understand that he should look for an increase in the number of performances. The Prince himself played the baryton, or viola di bardone—a stringed instrument of sweet, resonant tone, which, like the viol da gamba, to which it bore some resemblance, has long since ceased to be heard. As the Prince prided himself on his playing, Haydn was required ...
— Story-Lives of Great Musicians • Francis Jameson Rowbotham
... travel 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
... impersonal and prophetic: IT shall go, and you also. A cry—before it is a song, then song and accompaniment together—perfectly done; and the march 'towards the field of Mars. The two hundred and fifty thousand—they to the sound of stringed music—preceded by young girls with tricolor streamers, they have shouldered soldier-wise their shovels and picks, and with one ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... suddenly, loudly, mightily, as the blast of the trumpet upon the hush of the grave, rose a single voice. All started—all turned—all looked to one direction; and they saw that the great voice pealed from the farthest end of the hall. From under his gown the gigantic stranger had drawn a small three-stringed instrument—somewhat resembling the ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... upon the 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 ...
— Cyclopedia of Telephony & Telegraphy Vol. 1 - A General Reference Work on Telephony, etc. etc. • Kempster Miller
... so,"—and in anger rebuked the Rakshasa. The mighty-armed Bhima then tore up in haste a tree of the length of ten Vyasas and stripped it of its leaves. And in the space of a moment the ever-victorious Arjuna stringed his bow Gandiva possessing the force of the thunderbolt. And, O Bharata, making Jishnu desist, Bhima approached that Rakshasa still roaring like the clouds and said unto him, "Stay! Stay!" And thus addressing the cannibal, and tightening the cloth around his waist, and rubbing ...
— Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa Bk. 3 Pt. 1 • Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa
... 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: he had a good knowledge ...
— Pan Tadeusz • Adam Mickiewicz
... first, and then turn to the point and strip off the strings. If not quite fresh, have a bowl of spring-water, with a little salt dissolved in it, standing before you, and as the beans are cleaned and stringed, throw them in. When all are done, put them on the fire in boiling water, with some salt in it; after they have boiled fifteen or twenty minutes, take one out and taste it; as soon as they are tender take them up; throw them into a colander ...
— The Cook's Oracle; and Housekeeper's Manual • William Kitchiner
... the music, bending and rising together in slow waves and ripples. Then it ceased; and the silence was broken by a quick storm of applause; while the dancers waited for the lutes. Then all the instruments broke out together in quick triple time; the stringed instruments supplying a hasty throbbing accompaniment, while the shrill flutes began to whistle and the drums to gallop;—there was yet a pause in the dance, till the Queen made the first movement;—and then the whole whirled off on the wings of ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson
... gayly forth like two school children out for a lark. He ushered her into a quiet little cafe that had an air of pronounced elegance about it. In a secluded corner behind some palms came the subdued notes of stringed instruments. Derry seemed to be well known here, and his waiter viewed his approach ...
— Amarilly of Clothes-line Alley • Belle K. Maniates
... to a piano, it will now be well for you to begin training the ear to perceive the pulsations. If you cannot use a piano, you can train very well by the use of a mandolin, guitar, violin, zither, or any stringed instrument. An instrument with metal strings, however, is better, as the vibrations ...
— Piano Tuning - A Simple and Accurate Method for Amateurs • J. Cree Fischer
... dull surfaces but rendered exquisite ornaments, is a work of art. Everywhere we encounter friezes and carvings in relief, representing in quaint colour harmonies flowers and birds, or heavenly spirits playing upon flutes and stringed instruments." ...
— The Empire of the East • H. B. Montgomery
... 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 soon grew soft and melodious. "Come, ...
— Weird Tales, Vol. II. • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... 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 the body and made tight with little wedges. ...
— Negritos of Zambales • William Allan Reed
... drift with every passion till my soul Is a stringed lute on which all winds can play, Is it for this that I have given away Mine ancient wisdom and austere control? Methinks my life is a twice-written scroll Scrawled over on some boyish holiday With idle songs for pipe and virelai, Which do but mar the secret of the whole. Surely there was a ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... brown-and-yellow grasshoppers crackled over the parched fields, and the locusts rasped their one-stringed fiddles in the trees, and the shrunken little river complained faintly in its bed, and all nature was sighing, not for fire, but for water and cool shade. But still the ardent voice continued its ...
— Days Off - And Other Digressions • Henry Van Dyke
... the woods—for the ears of love are sharp - Stealthily, quietly touched, the note of the one-stringed harp. {2d} In the lighted house of her father, why should Taheia start? Taheia heavy of hair, Taheia tender of heart, Taheia the well-descended, a bountiful dealer in love, Nimble of foot like the deer, and kind of eye like the dove? Sly and shy as a cat, with never ...
— Ballads • Robert Louis Stevenson
... illiteracy is complete; his speech is notoriously incorrect; his songs, if not of a silly, meaningless character, are often obscene; sometimes they betray the existence of a poetic sentiment. These songs are usually accompanied by the music of a stringed instrument of the guitar kind made by the musician himself, to which is added the "gueiro," a kind of ribbed gourd which is scraped with a small stick to the measure of the tune, and produces a noise very trying to the nerves of a ...
— The History of Puerto Rico - From the Spanish Discovery to the American Occupation • R.A. Van Middeldyk
... disproportion to the 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 sweetness, and in alighting they perceived ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... that, not infrequently, and not with any blameworthy intention, or in any spirit of heartless forgetfulness, this remarkable company of world-wanderers drifted, in the moonlight, above the universal watery grave of the drowned millions, with the harmonies of stringed instruments stealing out upon the rippling waves, and the soft sound of swiftly shuffling feet ...
— The Second Deluge • Garrett P. Serviss
... someone in blue fatigues like his own was bent over a stand of some sort. The figure straightened at the same time a tinkle of music filled the room. He recognized the red-gold hair of the young woman he had seen beside the pool. She was wielding two mallets to play a stringed instrument that lay on its side supported ...
— Operation Haystack • Frank Patrick Herbert
... to the genii of the planets we mention the seven days of the week, the seven stories of the tower of Babylon, the seven gates of Thebes, the seven piped flute of Pan, the seven stringed lyre of Apollo, the seven books of fate, the book of seven seals, the seven castes into which the Egyptians and East Indians were divided, and the jubilee of seven times seven years. Among the dedications ...
— Astral Worship • J. H. Hill
... 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 ...
— The Delights of Wisdom Pertaining to Conjugial Love • Emanuel Swedenborg
... 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? ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... especially, a star of the sixth magnitude, double and changeable, to be found near the large star in Lyra) in a telescopic scrutiny of which I have been made aware of the feeling. I have been filled with it by certain sounds from stringed instruments, and not unfrequently by passages from books. Among innumerable other instances, I well remember something in a volume of Joseph Glanvill, which (perhaps merely from its quaintness—who shall say?) never failed to inspire me with the sentiment: "And the ...
— Famous Modern Ghost Stories • 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 ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... 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 ...
— The Shih King • James Legge
... ceremonies with a 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 music, ...
— Life of Schamyl - And Narrative of the Circassian War of Independence Against Russia • John Milton Mackie
... 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 creature ...
— The Lamp in the Desert • Ethel M. Dell
... 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 ...
— The Lost Ten Tribes, and 1882 • Joseph Wild
... law, without 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
... at a short distance behind the men, and imitating all their movements. A horrible noise arose; this was intended for a song, the singers at the same time distorting their features frightfully. One of them performed on a kind of stringed instrument, made out of the stem of a cabbage-palm, and about two feet, or two feet and a half, in length. A hole was cut in it slantwise, and six fibres of the stem were kept up in an elevated position at each end, by means of a small bridge. The fingers played upon these as upon ...
— The Story of Ida Pfeiffer - and Her Travels in Many Lands • Anonymous
... keyboard. The instrument was old, and though the notes rang true, they were faint and jingly. A lesser artist might have endeavoured to amplify the chords, but Wilhelmine played her accompaniment in thin arpeggios, making the clavichord sound like a stringed instrument, and achieving a charming effect. She sang a gay little sixteenth-century song, such a one as perchance Chastelard may have sung to Marie of Scots in their happy days in France—a light melody, with a sudden change to the minor in the refrain, like a sigh following ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... genuine old Dalesman of a type passed away. His spirits really never survived the abolition of the stringed instruments in the western gallery with its galaxy of village musicians. "I hugged bass fiddle for many a year," he once told me. Peace ...
— The Parish Clerk (1907) • Peter Hampson Ditchfield
... requested the Khan to write for me one of his artistic songs in remembrance. He nodded with an approving look, and promised to write the most beautiful song that ever the mouth of man had uttered; a song in praise of his Fatima, playing on her stringed instrument. ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... upon the big platters that were set before us and incased in the long, coarse-fibred leaves in which they had been baked, were portions of beef, pork, veal, fish, chickens and other viands usual to a banquet in our own land. Bands of native boys with stringed instruments played continuously' during the feast, making music of a peculiar character, that rose and fell as the busy hum of conversation and mingled with the joyous laughter of the men and maidens that were ...
— A Ball Player's Career - Being the Personal Experiences and Reminiscensces of Adrian C. Anson • Adrian C. Anson
... herself into a half frenzied condition. "I must stop it," she told herself. "I am like a stringed instrument on which the strings have been tightened too much." She put her ...
— Triumph of the Egg and Other Stories • Sherwood Anderson
... 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 ...
— The Smoky God • Willis George Emerson
... silent in the 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 ...
— Joyce's Investments - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... the piano and stringed instruments rose a fresh, flexible woman's voice, chanting the mystic words of the master with such expression and power as would have given even him delight. Camors, himself a musician, was capable of appreciating the masterly execution of the piece; ...
— Monsieur de Camors, Complete • Octave Feuillet
... have praised Hazlitt's simplicity have often given the impression that his prose is a single-stringed instrument, and have failed to suggest the range comprised between the simple hammer-strokes of the essay on Cobbett and the magnificent diapason in which he unrolls the panorama of Coleridge's mind. In both passages there is the same sentence-norm. In the first, the periods, not bound ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... 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 girl and a man come out into the centre and begin ...
— A Hero of Our Time • M. Y. Lermontov
... was too low to permit a man of average stature to stand upright; but it did not seem at all so to these enthusiastic pleasure-seekers in Gizhiga, and night after night they would go hopping around a seven-by-nine room to the music of a crazy fiddle and a two-stringed guitar, stepping on one another's toes and bumping their heads against the ceiling with the most cheerful equanimity imaginable. At these dancing parties the Americans always received a hearty welcome, and were fed with berries, ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... 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 ...
— Terry - A Tale of the Hill People • Charles Goff Thomson
... man denies the existence of sounds because he has never heard them. I put before his eyes a stringed instrument and cause it to sound in unison by means of another instrument concealed from him; the deaf man sees the chord vibrate. I tell him, "The sound makes it do that." "Not at all," says he, "the string itself is the cause of the vibration; to vibrate in that way is a quality ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... pipes, tinkling lyres and many-stringed citharas, not to forget herdsmen's reed flutes, cymbals, and tambours, all made melody and noise together. An imposing procession that must have crammed the courtyard wound ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... Judithe saw a flutter of white where the shadows were heaviest under the dense green shrubbery. She glanced about her; no one was in hearing. The veranda, for the instant, was deserted, and past the windows the dancers were moving. The music of stringed instruments and of laughter floated out to her. She saw Masterson in the hallway; he was watching Monroe. She saw Kenneth McVeigh speaking to his mother and glancing around inquiringly; was he looking for her? She realized that her moments alone now would be brief, ...
— The Bondwoman • Marah Ellis Ryan
... account. Who the unhappy youth was, no one knew. We had seen 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, short trousers, ...
— A Voyage round the World - A book for boys • W.H.G. Kingston
... they have eaten what is unclean or unlawful, not only suffer distress and grief in their imagination, but even their very body is upset by the notion, and violent retchings and vomitings follow.[223] I fear I should seem to be introducing merely novel and enticing arguments, if I were to enumerate stringed instruments and lyres, and harps and flutes, and other harmonious musical instruments, which, although inanimate, yet speak to man's passions, rejoicing with him, and mourning with him, and chiming in ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... masters, carry on all the foreign trade, making frequent voyages to town in canoes loaded with oysters, buttermilk and cabbages. They are great astrologers, predicting the different changes of weather almost as accurately as an almanac; they are, moreover, exquisite performers on three-stringed fiddles; in whistling they almost boast the far-famed powers of Orpheus' lyre, for not a horse nor an ox in the place, when at the plough or before the wagon, will budge a foot until he hears the well known whistle of his black driver and companion. ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... be at as I. Who but I would have known how so soon to win the love of a lady like that? Lucky indeed might they deem themselves, if they did it, those young gallants that go about, day and night, up and down, a strumming on the one-stringed viol, and would not know how to gather a handful of nuts once in a millennium. Mayst thou be by to see when I bring her the rebeck! thou wilt see fine sport. List well what I say: I am not so old as I look; and she knows it right well: ...
— The Decameron, Vol. II. • Giovanni Boccaccio
... present 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 eat with relish, but ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Rachel's dress betokened the limit of the luxury allowed by the Pragmatic—a second-hand silk dress with a pin at the throat set with only a single pearl, a bracelet on one arm, a ring without a bezel on one finger, a single-stringed necklace round her neck, her hair done ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... in with his arms full of tea-chests, and bestows them, with his blessing, upon the happy couple. As this play is to run four months longer, however, and as my time is limited, I go away at the close of the second act, while the orchestra is performing an overture on gongs and one-stringed fiddles. ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 4 • Charles Farrar Browne
... The stringed lamps wove a wavering luminous ribbon without end; a breeze laden with the wet fragrance of London drove great gusts of rain in stringing showers through the broken window. Turns and twists grew more frequent, apparently ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... 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
... 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 it should be ...
— The Head Voice and Other Problems - Practical Talks on Singing • D. A. Clippinger
... not play stringed instruments, or such as were suitable for a ball-room, looked disappointed; and Sergeant Brumpton, as he sat with his huge instrument between his legs, looked down into its great brass ...
— The Queen's Scarlet - The Adventures and Misadventures of Sir Richard Frayne • George Manville Fenn
... ** Some stringed instruments of music, and two or three kinds of flutes and flageolets, are designated in Egyptian by names borrowed from some Semitic tongue—a fact which proves that they were imported; the wooden framework of the harp, decorated with sculptured heads of Astarto, ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 5 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... night the sound of a stringed orchestra floated out on the breeze as the door of the gymnasium swung back and forth to admit disguised sophomores, who each whispered the countersign to the doorkeeper, after running the gauntlet of the ...
— Grace Harlowe's Plebe Year at High School - The Merry Doings of the Oakdale Freshmen Girls • Jessie Graham Flower
... trellis, pilaster, balcony, window, shutter, turret, porch, Hoe, rake, pitchfork, pencil, waggon, staff, saw, jack-plane, mallet, wedge, rounce, Chair, tub, hoop, table, wicket, vane, sash, floor, Work-box, chest, stringed instrument, boat, frame, and what not, Capitols of States, and capitol of the nation of States, Long stately rows in avenues, hospitals for orphans, or for the poor or sick, Manhattan steamboats and clippers, taking the measure of ...
— Poems By Walt Whitman • Walt Whitman
... time. Yet his learning should be always held in reserve, to give brilliancy and flavor to his wit, and not brought forth for merely erudite parade. He must have a practical acquaintance with music and dancing; it would be well for him to sing and touch various stringed and keyed instruments, so as to relax his own spirits and to make himself agreeable to ladies. If he can compose verses and sing them to his own accompaniment, so much the better. Finally, he ought to understand the arts of painting ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... had been my intention to stop and rest here, 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 wife, Marianne. Both gave us ...
— An Enemy To The King • Robert Neilson Stephens
... 1821, to crown all previous efforts, a conservatorium was opened, the programme of which might almost have satisfied a Berlioz. The department of instrumental music not only comprised sections for the usual keyed, stringed, and wind instruments, but also one for instruments of percussion. Solo and choral singing were to be taught with special regard to dramatic expression. Besides these and the theoretical branches of music, the curriculum included dancing, Polish literature, French, ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... daughter of Besso, pensive and abstracted, played with her beads in the pavilion of her grandfather. Two of her maidens, who had attended her, in a corner of this inner compartment, accompanied the wild murmur of their voices on a stringed instrument, which might in the old days have been a psaltery. They sang the loves of Antar and of Ibla, of Leila and of Mejnoun; the romance of the desert, tales of passion and of plunder, of the rescue of women and the capture of camels, of heroes ...
— Tancred - Or, The New Crusade • Benjamin Disraeli
... golden sprigs; a chaste neckerchief much in vogue at that day, representing a preserve of lilac pheasants on a buff ground; pantaloons so highly decorated with side-stripes that each leg was a three-stringed lute; and a hat of state very high and hard. When the prudent Mrs Chivery perceived that in addition to these adornments her John carried a pair of white kid gloves, and a cane like a little finger-post, surmounted by an ivory hand marshalling him the way that he should ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... cadence of the music came to her, soft-stringed and sleepy; she could hear the shuffle of dancing feet. Laughter rippled with the rhythmic thrum of the ship, voices rose and fell beyond the lighted windows, and as the old captain looked at her, there was something in her face ...
— The Alaskan • James Oliver Curwood
... was the English girl of our company, and she sang many times, accompanied by the stringed instruments of the musicians, much to the delight of the assembled passengers. When she sang, one evening, in her clear sympathetic voice the selection, "Oh, Where Is My Wandering Boy Tonight," there was not a dry eye in the room, and the mind of many a man went back to his ...
— A Woman who went to Alaska • May Kellogg Sullivan
... beautifully do they minister to many arts! For, such is the flexibility of the joints, that our fingers are closed and opened without any difficulty. With their help, the hand is formed for painting, carving, and engraving; for playing on stringed instruments, and on the pipe. These are matters of pleasure. There are also works of necessity, such as tilling the ground, building houses, making cloth and habits, and working in brass and iron. It is the business of the mind to invent, the senses to perceive, and the ...
— Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... 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 he, that its sound ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 483, April 4, 1885 • Various
... here, and Mrs. Quackenboss there, and Mrs. Quackenboss the other place, till, for Amelia's sake, I was glad she was not on board to witness it. Long before we sighted Sandy Hook, I will admit, I was fairly sick of Charles's two-stringed harp—Mrs. Quackenboss and ...
— An African Millionaire - Episodes in the Life of the Illustrious Colonel Clay • Grant Allen
... gloves suitable to be worn at my first party, and I had committed so many blunders that the great man had roared the word "Swelled!" in a furious tone. Now, however, when the sound of a waltz, played softly on stringed instruments, fell on my ears, my nervousness departed as quickly as it had come. The big mahogany doors swung open before us, and as I passed with George, into the brilliantly lighted hall, where the perfume of roses filled the air, I managed to move, if not with grace, at least with the necessary ...
— The Romance of a Plain Man • Ellen Glasgow
... Instruments. — 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], ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... for piano and stringed instruments. Sostenuto assai, Allegro ma non troppo. Schumann Miss Alice Schmidt, piano; Mr. Clifford Schmidt, first violin; Mr. Louis Schmidt, Jr., viola; Mr. Ernest ...
— Sixty Years of California Song • Margaret Blake-Alverson
... when disgraced invariably rips up his bowels; the English legislator is invariably in disgrace, but has no bowels to rip up. With some other nations the unsuccessful leader gets bow-stringed and comfortably sown up in a sack; our great man is satisfied with getting the sack, having previously bagged as much as lay in ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... 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
... produce a 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 ...
— Italian Harpsichord-Building in the 16th and 17th Centuries • John D. Shortridge
... under the prosperous rule of the Protector, and his boyhood had been spent in the guardianship of a most watchful and serious-minded mother. He had been somewhat over-cosseted and apron-stringed, it may be, in that tranquil atmosphere of the rich widow's house; but not all Lady Warner's tenderness could make her son a milksop. Except for a period of two years in London, when he had lived under the roof of the great Republican, a docile pupil to a stern but kind master, Denzil ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... sweet Their hearts and ears did greet, As never was by mortall finger strook, Divinely-warbled voice Answering the stringed noise, As all their souls in blisfull rapture took The Air such pleasure loth to lose, With thousand echo's still prolongs ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... harmonies make no striking progressions; strong emphasis and accents are sparingly used, and yet the soft flow of the music is made suggestive of the consuming glow of passion. The instrumentation is here of a very peculiar effect and quite a novel coloring; the stringed instruments are muted, and clarinets occur for the first time, and very prominently, both alone and in combination ...
— A Book of Operas - Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... like ,the mingled benediction of wood and sea on the tired spirits of weary travelers. It had in it nothing of "pride or passion," but contained the same serene harmony that vagrant breezes draw from the myriad-stringed pines; something of the melodies breathed from the ocean. It proved to be the ...
— See America First • Orville O. Hiestand
... 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 to the united honking ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum
... with myself, mourning, rejoicing, suffering, triumphing—are but as a Divina Commedia of a superhuman—O bear with me, if I say—Ventriloquist;—that the royal harper, to whom I have so often submitted myself as a MANY-STRINGED INSTRUMENT for his fire-tipt fingers to traverse, while every several nerve of emotion, passion, thought, that thrids the flesh-and-blood of our common humanity, responded to the touch,—that this SWEET PSALMIST OF ISRAEL was himself as mere an instrument as his harp, an AUTOMATON ...
— Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit etc. • by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... splendor of 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 the ...
— Babylonian and Assyrian Literature • Anonymous
... 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
... the greatest strength of testimony. When the common feeling of danger, and the animating burst of enthusiasm, act on the feelings of many men at once, their minds hold a natural correspondence with each other, as it is said is the case with stringed instruments tuned to the same pitch, of which, when one is played, the chords of the others are supposed to vibrate in unison with the tones produced. If an artful or enthusiastic individual exclaims, ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott
... will sit in 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 ...
— The Happy Prince and Other Tales • Oscar Wilde
... which overlooked the river, and dropping into a chair gazed out into the vast expanse of the heavens spread before him through the open window. The house on the opposite bank was profusely lighted, and gay strains of music, largely from stringed instruments, were borne across the river even ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... 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
... marine is a stringed instrument having a triangular- shaped body or chest and a long neck, a single string raised on a bridge and running along the body and neck. It ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... 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
... look out over the blue expanse of water. But the hamlet and church close by on her left hand were hidden by the wood, though sounds issuing from it could be heard occasionally—shouts and bursts of laughter, and at times the music of a stringed instrument and a voice singing. These sounds came from her armed guard and other attendants who were speeding the idle hours of waiting in their own way, in eating and drinking and in games and dancing. Only two women remained to attend to ...
— Dead Man's Plack and an Old Thorn • William Henry Hudson
... Moore, an elder of my church, had been honoured by the selection of some of his music to be rendered on that occasion. I accompanied him to the jubilee. Forty thousand people sat and stood in the great Colosseum erected for that purpose. Thousands of wind and stringed instruments; twelve thousand trained voices! The masterpieces of all ages rendered, hour after hour, and day after day—Handel's "Judas Maccabaeus," Spohr's "Last Judgment," Beethoven's "Mount of Olives," ...
— T. De Witt Talmage - As I Knew Him • T. De Witt Talmage
... changed. He beheld an amazing palace; under the shade of its domes of giddy height, tropical trees and flowers were planted by tepid pools; monkeys sported there, hanging in bunches to the boughs, while long-drawn, insinuating melodies were scraped on stringed instruments, and the rattle of tambourines made the eyed plumes quiver in the ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... vines, the hum of the bee and the bird in the air—I looked down over a wonderful collection of nearly 200 rare palms and listened to the music that floated up from their waving branches like that of a thousand silken-stringed eolian harp; and there came into my mind visions of a people that shall be strong with the strength of great hills, calm with the calm of a fair sea, united as are at last the palm and the pine, mighty with the presence ...
— The California Birthday Book • Various
... framed gentleman in the lace collar seemed to open his eyes more widely; he with the flowing locks and turn-up mustachios to part his lips; he in the armour, who was so much like Captain De Stancy, to shake the plates of his mail with suppressed laughter; the lady with the three-stringed pearl necklace, and vast expanse of neck, to nod with satisfaction and triumphantly signify to her adjoining husband that this was a ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... the slayer of a man to his own wounding, who is said to be the "father of all such as play on the harp and guitar" (Kinnor and Ugab). Another of Lemech's sons was the first artificer in every article of copper and iron, the inventor of weapons of war, as the former was the inventor of stringed instruments. Both used brass, the one to sing, the other to fight. So music sprang from sorrow and combat. Song and roundelay, timbrels and harp, accompanied our forefathers on their wanderings, and ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... of the elaborate ancient sun figures is represented. As in modern symbols, the tail-feathers of the periphery of the disk are arranged in the four quadrants, and in addition there are appended to the same points curved figures which recall the objects, identified as stringed feathers, attached to the blanket of the maid (plate CXXIX, a). The design on the disk is different from that of any sun emblem known to me, and escapes my interpretation. I have used the distribution of the feathers on the four quadrants ...
— Archeological Expedition to Arizona in 1895 • Jesse Walter Fewkes
... when played upon the "Kerotong" (a two-stringed bamboo harp) makes Rimau the Tiger drowsy, but only a few old people know it. One evening two men were sitting together and playing in a hut in the jungle when ...
— The Talking Beasts • Various
... Harland—"She's floating from the mysterious yacht." It was a music full of haunting sweetness and rhythmic melody, and I was not sure whether it was evolved from stringed instruments or singing voices. By climbing up on the sofa in my sitting-room I could look out through the port-hole on the near sea, rippling close to me, and bringing, as I fancied, with every ripple a new cadence, ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... flower-decked bandstand an orchestra of stringed instruments was playing very softly—fairy-music that seemed to fill the world with magic to the brim. It was like a drug to the senses, alluring, ...
— Charles Rex • Ethel M. Dell
... 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 ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy
... 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 some wandering Jewish lost link ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 28. July, 1873. • Various
... speak of, whose changes make us well or ill, whose lack or excess blasts, whose even balance revives? What are all those influences that are about us in the atmosphere, that keep playing over our nerves like fingers on stringed instruments, and call forth now a sweet note, and now a wail—now an exultant swell, and anon the ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... 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 ...
— The Doctor - A Tale Of The Rockies • Ralph Connor
... leaning back in his chair and mopping a perspiring brow. "Phew-w. but it's hot in here! I expect to see several of those crazy dances go all to pieces on our account. That Highland Fling! Mind you keep up a ripping time on that. It ought to be piped, not stringed." ...
— The Second Violin • Grace S. Richmond
... 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, owing to the influence which the music in his worship exercised ...
— Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece and Rome • E.M. Berens
... lights and the clamor—a stringed orchestra playing in this open front, and a hot-dog vender declaiming in this open front; a moving-picture entrance brilliantly illuminated, and a constant movement of folk up and down the streets in free-and-easy fashion, and he almost forgot the cumulative hazards of their companionship ...
— The Ridin' Kid from Powder River • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... music-room?" said Vaura, "opening as it does into the conservatory; and see Euterpe, standing in her niche, with flute and cornet at her feet, violin and guitar on either side, and the perfection of pianos, with this sweet-stringed harp;" and, sinking into the low chair beside it, she drew ...
— A Heart-Song of To-day • Annie Gregg Savigny
... clusters of grapes, intermingled 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
... a speech in my life," said Ellis, glowering about him, "and you fellows know it. But last night I read this in Plutarch: 'Themistocles said that he certainly could not make use of any stringed instrument; could only, were a small and obscure city put into his hands, make ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... poor 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 across on ...
— Tanglewood Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... models and portraits representing Professors of getting up at eight, shaving close at a quarter past, breakfasting at nine, going to the City at ten, coming home at half-past five, and dining at seven. Music; a respectable performance (without variations) on stringed and wind instruments, sedately expressive of getting up at eight, shaving close at a quarter past, breakfasting at nine, going to the City at ten, coming home at half-past five, and dining at seven. Nothing else ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... from a morbid acuteness of 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 ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... Hood's Garland in England, are each, as I understand, the well-edited 'Select Beauties' of an immeasurable waste imbroglio of Heroic Ballads in their respective centuries and countries. Think what strumming of the seven-stringed heroic lyre, torturing of the less heroic fiddle-catgut, in Hellenic Kings' Courts, and English wayside Public Houses; and beating of the studious Poetic brain, and gasping here too in the semi-articulate windpipe of Poetic men, before ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... 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 an old Italian ...
— Gambara • Honore de Balzac
... date. Hermes' lyre has seven strings and the invention of the seven-stringed lyre is ascribed to Terpander (flor. 676 B.C.). The hymn must therefore be later than that date, though Terpander, according to Weir Smyth [1116], may have only modified the scale of the lyre; yet while the burlesque character precludes an early date, this feature is far ...
— Hesiod, The Homeric Hymns, and Homerica • Homer and Hesiod
... can be no consonances either in the case of the notes of stringed instruments or of the singing voice, between two intervals or between three or six or seven; but, as written above, it is only the harmonies of the fourth, the fifth, and so on up to the double octave, that have boundaries ...
— Ten Books on Architecture • Vitruvius
... 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, ...
— The House of Pride • Jack London
... earth-lights in abundance, flaring torches, smoking lamps and lanterns. And there was noise—the noise of words and of wailing Indian music. For up near the closed doors which open on the shrine within which the idol sat surrounded by a thousand lights, there was a band of musicians playing upon stringed instruments; sometimes they broke out excitedly and banged their drums and made ...
— Lotus Buds • Amy Carmichael
... The simplest 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; in which a ...
— Journal of a Voyage to Brazil - And Residence There During Part of the Years 1821, 1822, 1823 • Maria Graham
... early critical notices of all important New Music for Stringed Instruments, with numbers to show the grade ...
— The Repairing & Restoration of Violins - 'The Strad' Library, No. XII. • Horace Petherick
... adipose Saxon, and it vibrates to the slightest breath of emotion. Mind, I talk of the 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 ...
— As We Sweep Through The Deep • Gordon Stables
... old-fashioned ideas removed, and fresher ones put in their place. I have expressed this intention once before in print, perhaps not so vehemently. I should like to elaborate. I want a Metropolitan Opera for my project. An orchestra of that size for the larger concerted groups, numbers of stringed instruments for the wirewalkers and jugglers, a series of balanced woodwinds for others, and so on down the line, according to the quality of the performer. There should be a large stage for many elephants, ponies, dogs, tigers, seals. The ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley
... precipitates itself towards its South-west extremity, spade on shoulder. Streams of men, without order; or in order, as ranked fellow-craftsmen, as natural or accidental reunions, march towards the Field of Mars. Three-deep these march; to the sound of stringed music; preceded by young girls with green boughs, and tricolor streamers: they have shouldered, soldier-wise, their shovels and picks; and with one throat are singing ca-ira. Yes, pardieu ca-ira, cry the passengers on the streets. All corporate Guilds, and ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... great 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 known in Javanese language as the gambang, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various
... A human figure, with curly hair and the legs of a bear; the paws laid, with great sculptural skill, upon the foliage. It plays a violin, shaped like a guitar, with a bent double-stringed bow. ...
— Stones of Venice [introductions] • John Ruskin
... joined in, remaining, however, at some little distance in the rear of the men, and making the same awkward movements. They now began a most horrible noise, which was intended for a song, at the same time distorting their features in a frightful manner. One of them stood near, playing upon a kind of stringed instrument, made out of the stem of a cabbage-palm, and about two feet, or two feet and a half, in length. A hole was cut in it in a slanting direction, and six fibres of the stem had been raised up, and kept in an elevated position at each end, by means ...
— A Woman's Journey Round the World • Ida Pfeiffer
... this rock of earth over-much worn by the brushing of that feather- mantle, the feathery skirt of the stars: rarely, how rarely. There is a magic song from the east, the voices of many and many: and flute and shae, filling the space beyond the cloud's edge, seven-stringed; dance filling and filling. The red sun blots on the sky the line of the colour- drenched mountains. The flowers rain in a gust; it is no racking storm that comes over this green moor, which is afloat, as it would seem, in these waves. Wonderful is the sleeve ...
— Certain Noble Plays of Japan • Ezra Pound
... 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
... little stringed instrument that her mother loved, with which she sometimes accompanied ...
— The First Soprano • Mary Hitchcock
... her lover cannot brook to leave her and return home. A maiden is joyful, When hushing the pan-pipe and double pipe, a stringed instrument she thrums. ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... 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; ...
— Familiar Spanish Travels • W. D. Howells
... heaven" fallen down? Was it the ocean? They came near it, tasted it. It was fresh and sweet as a fountain-rill. They looked at it from the hill-tops, and, seeing its outline, called it "the lake of the four-stringed lute." Others, proud of their new possession, named it ...
— Japanese Fairy World - Stories from the Wonder-Lore of Japan • William Elliot Griffis
... 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 |
