"Dissonance" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Slayback crying. On the contrary, she was inclined to laughter. A little too inclined to a high and brittle sort of dissonance over which she seemed ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... the multiplicity of the agents which act in the same manner. This harmony is founded upon the convergence or opposition of the movements. Thus the perfect accord is the consonance of the three agents,—head, torso and limbs. Dissonance arises from the divergence of ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... could be described neither as grunts nor squeaks nor roars nor howls nor barks nor yells nor screams nor croaks nor hisses nor mews nor shrieks, but only as something like all of them mingled in one horrible dissonance. Keeping in the shade, the watchers had a few moments to recover themselves before the hideous assembly suspected their presence; but all at once, as if by common consent, they scampered off in the direction of a great ...
— The Princess and the Goblin • George MacDonald
... Fashion, and Fancy were there, And the multitudes round such attractions preferr'd To a gambolling beast or a chattering bird. Now Envy first enter'd the fair feather'd race, And invective and dissonance rung round the place; Their pleasure, their pride, and contentment were o'er, And Discord presided where Peace ...
— The Peacock 'At Home' AND The Butterfly's Ball AND The Fancy Fair • Catherine Ann Dorset
... and cut off all hope till dawn. Before sunrise he was there again, and on 1 July the watchman in the maintop gave the glad shout. The pilgrims flocked up on deck and sang Te Deum with bounding joy. It was a tumult of harsh voices; but to Fabri in his happiness their various dissonance made ...
— The Age of Erasmus - Lectures Delivered in the Universities of Oxford and London • P. S. Allen
... Cybele traveling about in her car drawn by roaring lions mourning her lover's death. A crowd of worshipers followed her through woods and thickets, mingling their shouts with the shrill sound of flutes, with the dull beat of tambourines, with the rattling of castanets and the dissonance of brass cymbals. Intoxicated with shouting and with uproar of the instruments, excited by their impetuous advance, breathless and panting, they surrendered to the raptures of a sacred enthusiasm. Catullus has left us a dramatic description ...
— The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism • Franz Cumont
... usually guarded, irresponsive countenance. A painfully humiliating sense of her own personal incompetence to arouse the feeling, so legibly printed on her lover's features, jarred upon Leo's heart like a twanging dissonance breaking the harmonious flow of minor chords; but a noble pity strangled this jealous thrill, and she softly approached ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... and grouped with a multitude of others,[44] in which the mere insertion of a consonant makes such wide difference of sentiment as between 'dear' and 'drear,' or 'pear' and 'spear.' The Greek root, on the other hand, has persisted in retaining some vestige of its excellent dissonance, even where it has parted with the last vestige of the idea it was meant to convey; and when Burns did his best,—and his best was above most men's—to gather pleasant liquid and labial ...
— Proserpina, Volume 1 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... Plato alone of all the ancients, has been celebrated by a chorus of the greatest writers of the renovated world; and the music has penetrated the caverns of society, and its echoes still drown the dissonance of arms and superstition. At successive intervals, Ariosto, Tasso, Shakespeare, Spenser, Calderon, Rousseau, and the great writers of our own age, have celebrated the dominion of love, planting as ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... without precisely knowing why, or, at least, without troubling to put the reason into words. But the events of the past few days had, imperceptibly, wrought a change in their relations. An impalpable veil had come between them, a subtle dissonance in point of view. They were pledged, as it were, ...
— Affairs of State • Burton E. Stevenson
... science.—Again, the New Theology is the religion of science. It is the denial that there is, or ever has been, or ever can be, any dissonance between science and religion; it is the recognition that upon the foundations laid by modern science a vaster and nobler fabric of faith is rising than that world has ever before known. Science is supplying the facts which ...
— The New Theology • R. J. Campbell
... on Artha, on Dharma, and on Kama. Those who have listened to his history can never bear to listen to others, as, indeed, they who have listened to the sweet voice of the male Kokila can never hear the dissonance of the crow's cawing. As the formation of the three worlds proceedeth from the five elements, so do the inspirations of all poets proceed from this excellent composition. O ye Brahman, as the four kinds of creatures ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa - Translated into English Prose - Adi Parva (First Parva, or First Book) • Kisari Mohan Ganguli (Translator)
... so earnestly about my welfare; hold open still the hospitable door for me. Truly Concord, which I have sought out on the Map, seems worthy of its name: no dissonance comes to me from that side; but grief itself has acquired a harmony: in joy or grief a voice says to me, Behold there is one that loves thee; in thy loneliness, in thy darkness, see how a hospitable candle shines from far over seas, how a friendly heart watches! ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, - 1834-1872, Vol. I • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... a type of the other idyls of love which form so large a part of the Dramatis Personae. The note of dissonance, of loss, which they sound had been struck by Browning before, but never with the same persistence and iteration. The Dramatic Lyrics and Men and Women are not quite silent of the tragic failure of love; but it is touched lightly in "swallow flights of song," like the Lost Mistress, ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... the yelling dissonance descending crescendo from floor to floor. Then an avalanche of children and dogs poured down the hall-stairs in pursuit of a rumpled and bored cat, tumbling with yelps and cheers and thuds among the ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers
... in assonance and dissonance (of which 'Strange Meeting' is the finest example) may be left to the professional critics of verse, the majority of whom will be more preoccupied with such technical details than with the profound humanity of the self- revelation manifested in such magnificent lines as those at the end ...
— Poems • Wilfred Owen
... an immense number of discrepancies and contradiction in the New Testament which the acumen of learned Christians has of late discovered, and pointed out to the world. And Mr. Evanson, in his work on "the Dissonance of the four Evangelists," has collected a mass enough, I should think, to terrify the most determined Reconciliator that ever lived. It is a little remarkable, that Mr. Evanson has asserted, and has proved, the spuriosness of the Gospel ascribed ...
— The Grounds of Christianity Examined by Comparing The New Testament with the Old • George Bethune English
... drunk to Otto Thostrup's health. I raised the glass, and drank the health. The friendship's dissonance YOU has dissolved itself into a harmonious THOU, and thou thyself hast given the accord. All at home speak of thee; even the Kammerjunker's Mamsell chose lately thee, and not her work-box, as a subject of conversation. The evening as thou ...
— O. T. - A Danish Romance • Hans Christian Andersen
... persuaded that he has leaped down Dover cliff but has been miraculously preserved. Imagine this incident transferred to Othello, and you realise how completely the two tragedies differ in dramatic atmosphere. In Othello it would be a shocking or a ludicrous dissonance, but it is in harmony with the spirit of King Lear. And not only is this so, but, contrary to expectation, it is not, if properly acted, in the least absurd on the stage. The imagination and the feelings have been worked upon with such ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... music-maker perfected a style so saturated with personality—there are far fewer derivations in his art than in the art of Strauss, through whose scores pace the ghosts of certain of the greater dead. All that Wagner could teach him of the potency of dissonance, of structural freedom and elasticity, of harmonic daring, Debussy eagerly learned and applied, as a foundation, to his own intricately reasoned though spontaneous art; yet Wagner would have gasped alike at the novelty ...
— Debussy's Pelleas et Melisande - A Guide to the Opera with Musical Examples from the Score • Lawrence Gilman
... the insufficiency of the palpable and appreciable is paramount; still the everlasting dolor interposes: the appetite is satiated, the aroma palls upon the nostrils, the nerves are affected by irritability, the harmony merges into dissonance; even the beautiful becomes so far an abomination that man is 'mad for the sight of his eyes that he did see.' Such is the sterile and repulsive penalty of the searcher after happiness. Happiness! O delusive phantom of humanity, how ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... mutter of the basses. The celesta, an instrument with keyboard and bell tone, contributes fascinating effects, and the xylophone is used;—utterances that are lascivious as well as others that are macabre. Dissonance runs riot and frequently carries the imagination away completely captive. The score is unquestionably the greatest triumph of reflection and ingenuity of contrivance that the literature of music can show. The invention that has been expended ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... poem—it has longueurs, though it is not long; it has those inadequacies, those incompetences of expression, which are so oddly characteristic of its author; and his elaborate simplicity, though more at home here than in some other places, occasionally gives a dissonance. But it is a great poem—one by itself, one which finds and keeps its own place in the foreordained gallery or museum, with which every true lover of poetry is provided, though he inherits it by degrees. No one, I suppose, will deny its pathos; I should be sorry for any one who fails to perceive ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... I cannot explain, or an inner activity concealed in her nature. There is no suavity about the movements of women who have no soul in them. Our wills were opposed, and we did not keep step together. Words are wanting to describe this outward dissonance between two beings; we are not accustomed to read a thought in a movement. We instinctively feel this phenomenon of our nature, but ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... not there. Elly's golden head, the back-ground of austere French Protestants, is sketched with a flowing water-colour brush, I do not know if it is true, but true or false in reality, it is true in art. But the jarring dissonance of her marriage is inadmissible; it cannot be led up to by chords no matter how ingenious, the passage, the attempts from one key to the other, is impossible; the true end is the ruin, by death or lingering life, of Elly and the remorse of ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... morbid, as a rule, though he is occasionally in a more cheerful mood. It seems as though music has said all it can say along consonant lines, and regular rhythms. We must look for its advancement in the realm of Dissonance; not only in this but in the way of variety in Rhythm. How these modern composers vary their rhythms, sometimes three or four different ones going at once! It is the unexpected which attracts us in musical and literary art, as well ...
— Piano Mastery - Talks with Master Pianists and Teachers • Harriette Brower
... Business men, although Home Rulers, agree that the destinies of the country should not be trusted to either or any of the jarring factions, which like unclean birds of evil omen hover darkling around, already disputing with horrid dissonance possession of the carcase on which they hope to batten. At the Station Hotel, Limerick Junction, a warm Nationalist said to me, "The country will be ruined with those blackguards. We have a right to Home Rule, an abstract right to manage our own affairs, and I believe in the principle. ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... season, to the light-hearted chant, may be inclined to suggest that there can be no such thing as music in the panting bellows of a North Queensland frog. But music "is of a relative nature, and what is harmony to one ear may be dissonance to another." The Chinese opera proves that "nations do not always express the same passions by the same sounds." If one obtains music from the clang and clamour of full-throated frogs, may it not be because his ears are more attuned to natural than to artificial harmonies, not because, ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... Though all the fierce and drunken passions wove 45 A dance more wild than e'er was maniac's dream! Ye storms, that round the dawning east assembled, The Sun was rising, though ye hid his light!" And when, to soothe my soul, that hoped and trembled, The dissonance ceased, and all seemed calm and bright; 50 When France her front deep-scarred and gory Concealed with clustering wreaths of glory; When, insupportably advancing, Her arm made mockery of the warrior's ramp; While timid looks of fury glancing, 55 Domestic treason, crushed beneath her fatal ...
— Coleridge's Ancient Mariner and Select Poems • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... satisfaction and, when over-used, inertia. The genius of the composer is shown in establishing just the right proportion between these two elements; but if there is to be any disproportion let us have too much rather than too little dissonance, for then, at any rate, the music is alive. Since Beethoven the whole development of music as a human language shows the preponderating stress laid on dissonance; to this fact a knowledge of the works ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... While some essayed to frame the words of prayer, Or to articulate the stern command, And one, in most supreme authority, Declaimed a ponderous regal ordinance, But heard a sea of unfamiliar sounds, Confused and desultory turbulence, and dissonance of harsh, discordant tones, Instead of due attention and applause; Nor were his words and usual forms of speech Respected by the idle, wondering craft, Which ...
— Mountain idylls, and Other Poems • Alfred Castner King
... once more took up the narrative; "a girl in a tennis skirt with a gay scarf about her waist—quite dead in a second. The clothes still fluttered on the line. You see," he ended, "nothing instructive, tragic—only a crude dissonance." ...
— Wild Oranges • Joseph Hergesheimer
... smell of orchard blossoms blown through the open window, of the odour of the pomegranate in the hedge; but his eyes were fascinated by the crouching passion of the figure before him and the dissonance of the low, unhuman voice. There was no pause in the broken, turgid torrent, which was like a muddy flood pouring over ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... the young magicians, To the dames and to their daughters, To the maidens, silver-tinselled, To the singers of Wainola. When the young men touched the harp-strings, Then arose the notes of discord; When the aged played upon it, Dissonance their only music. Spake the wizard, Lemminkainen: "O ye witless, worthless children, O ye senseless, useless maidens, O ye wisdom-lacking heroes, Cannot play this harp of magic, Cannot touch the ...
— The Kalevala (complete) • John Martin Crawford, trans.
... are cruel guile or loud resentment, But calm contentment, fresh and fruitful cheer; Not here loud force or dissonance distressful, But music melting ...
— A Celtic Psaltery • Alfred Perceval Graves
... stood isolated, and outside the laurelled forests and porous cliffs soaked up the dissonance as a ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... and don't find out the mistake till they come to the finale; with occasionally a psalm crooned by worthy sexagenarians, guiltless alike of ear and voice, but who, seeming to think it a duty to add their mite to the inexpressible dissonance, perform the same to the unmixed ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... discourse from passengers still abroad, and now and then the braggart flourish of a trumpet resounded from the royal masquing at the palace,—breaking upon the holiness of the night with the harsh dissonance of a discord in some solemn harmony.—And as he was meditating on many things, and grieving in spirit at the dark fate of poor Scotland, and the woes with which the children of salvation were environed, he was startled by the apparition of a great ...
— Ringan Gilhaize - or The Covenanters • John Galt
... The dissonance and pain That mortals must endure, Are changed in thine immortal strain To something ...
— The Poems of Henry Van Dyke • Henry Van Dyke
... wildly-throbbing human heart, even in the midst of the incomparable splendor of external nature. This contrast is sustained by a fusion of tones, a softening of gloomy hues, which prevent the intrusion of aught rude or brusque that might awaken a dissonance in the touching impression produced, which, while saddening joy, soothes and softens ...
— Life of Chopin • Franz Liszt
... a voice, that nature had made up of dissonance and horror, into the most gentle and soothing accent of which it was capable, and hanging over his couch, "wherefore this sorrow? What is it that has seemed to mar a happiness so enviable? Art thou not possessed"—"Talk not to me of possessions," ...
— Imogen - A Pastoral Romance • William Godwin
... And solitude; yet not alone, while thou Visitest my slumbers nightly, or when morn Purples the east. Still govern thou my song, Urania, and fit audience find, though few. But drive far off the barbarous dissonance Of Bacchus and his revellers, the race Of that wild rout that ...
— Life of John Milton • Richard Garnett
... From ev'ry palace bursts a mingled clamour, The dreadful dissonance of barb'rous triumph, Shrieks of affright, and waitings of distress. Oft when the cries of violated beauty Arose to heav'n, and pierc'd my bleeding breast, I felt thy pains, ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... Friar John. He is my man; this is the very fellow I looked for. I will send him a challenge immediately. This is, said Pantagruel, a strange and monstrous sort of man, if I may call him a man. You put me in mind of the form and looks of Amodunt and Dissonance. How were they made? said Friar John. May I be peeled like a raw onion if ever I heard a word of them. I'll tell you what I read of them in some ancient apologues, ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... of to-day are pale, Shall clang of armorers riveting our mail Rise in harsh dissonance where now the song In surging music sweeps the land along? No, Brothers, no! The Providence on high Stretches above us like the arching sky; As o'er the world that broad empyrean field, So o'er the nation ...
— A Wreath of Virginia Bay Leaves • James Barron Hope
... dark-wing'ed demons of care? Was it their magical tone that for many a shadowless day (So faith once believed) swept the clouds and the black-boding tempests away? Ah! never may Fate with their music a harsh-grating dissonance blend! Sure an evening so calm and so bright will glide peacefully on to the end. Sure the course of his life, to its close, like his own native river must be, Flowing on through the valley of flowers to its home ...
— Poems • Denis Florence MacCarthy
... who soars and sings, Young Love should teach Time, in his own gray style, 55 All that thou art. Art thou not void of guile, A lovely soul formed to be blessed and bless? A well of sealed and secret happiness, Whose waters like blithe light and music are, Vanquishing dissonance and gloom? A Star 60 Which moves not in the moving heavens, alone? A Smile amid dark frowns? a gentle tone Amid rude voices? a beloved light? A Solitude, a Refuge, a Delight? A Lute, which those whom Love has taught to play 65 Make music on, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... Cow's began ringing for Ritualistic morning-service, with a sound as of some incontinently rambling dun spinster of the lacteal herd—now near at hand in cracked dissonance, as the wind blows hither; now afar, in tinkling distance, as the wind blows hence—MONTGOMERY PENDRAGON was several miles away from Bumsteadville upon his walking-match, with head already bumped like a pineapple, and face curiously swelled, from amateur ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 22, August 27, 1870 • Various
... than in "Addio, del passato," and "Gran Dio! morir so giovane"? Is it within the power of instruments, no matter how great their number, or harmony with all the poignancy which it has acquired through the ingenious use of dissonance, or of broken phrase floating on an instrumental flood, to be more dramatically expressive than are these songs? Yet they are, in a way, uncompromisingly formal, architectural, strophic, and conventionally Verdian in their repetition of rhythmical motives and their melodic formularies. ...
— A Book of Operas - Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... sad," he said, sighing. "But after all, it is no fault of ours. There was a dissonance in our married life from the start, and for that reason there never could be any genuine harmony between us. This dissonance—well, at the present hour I may confess it to you, too—this dissonance simply was the fact that I ...
— LOUISA OF PRUSSIA AND HER TIMES • Louise Muhlbach
... 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 time I might have trod The sunlit heights, and from life's dissonance Struck one clear chord to reach the ears of God. Is that time dead? Lo, with a little rod I did but touch the honey of romance, And must I lose ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... asserts and demonstrates it. Man, intelligent and free, is an animal wholly unpremeditated upon this planet. Produced by unexpected combinations and haphazard transformations, in the midst of a general subordination of matter, he figures as a dissonance and a revolt! ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... always to read with the microscope of criticism, and employ their whole attention upon minute elegance, or faults scarcely visible to common observation. The dissonance of a syllable, the recurrence of the same sound, the repetition of a particle, the smallest deviation from propriety, the slightest defect in construction or arrangement, swell before their eyes into enormities. ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson - Volume IV [The Rambler and The Adventurer] • Samuel Johnson
... guardian and guide of my youth, the unchanging friend of my riper years. The different dispositions of various associates sometimes perplex the mind which seeks direction; but in the disinterested affection of the maternal breast we fear no dissonance of passion, no jarring interests, no disunion of love. In this seat of felicity is every enjoyment which fancy can form, or friendship, with affluence, bestow; but still my mind frequently returns to the happy shades of my nativity. I wish there ...
— The Coquette - The History of Eliza Wharton • Hannah Webster Foster
... 1G just tuned, to a perfect octave. Remember that all octaves should be left perfect—all waves tuned out. Now try 2G with 2C. If your octaves are perfect, this upper fifth will beat a little faster than the lower one, but the dissonance should not be so great as to be disagreeable. Proceed to your next fifth, which is 2D, then its octave, 1D, then its fifth and so on as per directions on the system card. You can make no chord trials until you have tuned E, an interval of a major ...
— Piano Tuning - A Simple and Accurate Method for Amateurs • J. Cree Fischer
... column on column, until the entire country seemed flowing forward in steady streams. Sandy River awoke, restlessly listening; lights glimmered behind darkened windows; a heavier, vaguer rumor grew, hanging along the hills. It increased to a shaking, throbbing monotone, like the far dissonance ...
— Special Messenger • Robert W. Chambers
... clutched at her petticoats. "Soft soap! Lord! I makes my own soft soap. I has plenty to clean with. I don't want no soft soap. I want money." She laughed loud and long, a ringing, mocking peal. Madame Griggs's loud sobbing united with it. The dissonance of unnatural mirth and ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... sky dirty, and threatening a continuance of what our transatlantic descendants would term a pretty-considerable-tarnation-strong blast of wind. The top-gallant-yards are on deck, the masts are struck, the guns double-breeched, and the bulwarks creaking and grinding in most detestable regularity of dissonance as the vessel scuds and lurches through a cross and heavy sea. The main-deck is afloat: and, from the careless fitting of the half-ports at the dockyard, and neglect of caulking in the cants, my fore-cabin is in the same predicament. A bubbling brook changing its course, ...
— The King's Own • Captain Frederick Marryat
... difficult shook the artificial brain, but since this evidently was not an intelligent life form, else it would not have reacted in such a manner, the Challonari increased in intensity its fear-reluctance impulse. The mental shielding of the intruder blazed and crackled with increasing dissonance, radiating pain, fear and panic, but no decipherable intelligent thought. It drew nearer, erratically, apparently running, then swiftly lapsed into unconsciousness. That was when the bewildered Challonari had ...
— The Short Life • Francis Donovan
... idle detraction. She remembered, too, that she had often reproached herself for her irrational prejudice against the man,—that she was forever finding something false and sinister in the face that every one else said was eminently handsome, and ugly dissonance in the voice that all Hendrik praised for its music. Was he on both sides of that card?—Ah, well! it might be just nothing, after all; the poor lady might be ill, or vexed past endurance at home; or some unhappy love affair ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... to have another chance of beholding",[10] night fell upon the virtually defeated Huns. The Gothic king had lost his life, but Attila had lost the victory. All night long the Huns kept up a barbarous dissonance to prevent the enemy from attacking them, but their king's thoughts were of suicide. He had prepared a huge funeral pyre, on which, if the enemy next day successfully attacked his camp, he was determined to slay himself ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin
... refreshing, soothing harmony. He undrew the curtain, opened the shutter, and looked into the court, where he saw some figures standing. As soon as the light shone from the window, the carol was resumed, and the familiar tones were louder and harsher, but he loved them, with all their rudeness and dissonance, and throwing up the window, called the singers by name, asking why they stood out in the snow, instead of coming ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... expression came over his face as I spoke. We were sincerely attached to each other in spite of the jarring dissonance of character. Later that same morning when I was sitting beside Lucia as we drove to the Academy, I studied her closely in the sharp morning light, and I was alarmed at the pallor and exhaustion of her face. I am not an admirer of ill-health in any form. The hectic flush of phthisis, ...
— To-morrow? • Victoria Cross
... be rising. All newspapers were full of it, sounding the universal alarm. And Civilisation merely stared at the scarlet flood—gawked stupidly and unstirring—while the far clamour of massacre throughout Russia grew suddenly to a crashing discord in Berlin, shaking the whole world with brazen dissonance. ...
— The Crimson Tide • Robert W. Chambers
... Europe so long. That system was the outcome of a conception of the universe which set man apart from the remainder of nature, placed him in a category of his own, and pretended that he was both the center and the object of creation. For it called man the consonance and nature the dissonance. The octave and the fifth, the bases of the system, are of course, to be found only in the human voice. They are, roughly, the difference between the average male and the average female voice, and the difference between the average ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... dream of heaven I had, And still the vision haunts me oft; I see the saints in white robes clad, The martyrs with their palms aloft; But hearing still, in middle song, The ceaseless dissonance of wrong; And shrinking, with hid faces, from the strain Of sad, beseeching eyes, full of remorse ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... imagining, and the sense of a flowing symbolism in Nature, which our own time brings to them. To make Homer alive to this age,—what an expenditure of imagination, of pure feeling and penetration does it demand! Let the Homeric heart or genius die out of mankind, and from that moment the "Iliad" is but dissonance, the long melodious roll of its echoes becomes a jarring chop of noises. What chiefly makes Homer great is the vast ideal breadth of relationship in which he establishes human beings. But he in whose narrow brain is no space for high Olympus and deep Orcus,—he whose ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... of the People, and consider that the Delicacy of Hearing, and Taste of Harmony, has been formed upon those Sounds which every Country abounds with: In short, that Musick is of a Relative Nature, and what is Harmony to one Ear, may be Dissonance ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... Chopin are the most outspoken individualities of the age—he forgets Wagner—Chopin himself the finest flowering of a morbid and rare culture. His music is a series of psychoses—he has the sehnsucht of a marvellously constituted nature—and the shrill dissonance of his nerves, as seen in the physiological outbursts of the B minor Scherzo, is the agony of a tortured soul. The piece is Chopin's Iliad; in it are the ghosts that lurk near the hidden alleys of the soul, but here come out to leer ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... flies that light the sparkling corn; Or pirate hawks that haunt Rome's lawless sky, Or the fell fevers Pontine plains supply; The locust legions count; or say as soon What hoarse Cicadae stun the sultry noon With ringing dissonance; what flow'rets fair In early spring inebriate the air: Or count the gems in every dazzling shower That Roman rockets detonating pour, Dropping their liquid light o'er Hadrian's glowing tower: Or tell ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 367, May 1846 • Various
... we?" he goes on, in a low voice—"most miserable! and it seems to me that every day we grow more so, that every day there is a greater dissonance between us! For my part, I have given up the hope that we can ever be happier! I have wondered that I should have entertained it. But, at ...
— Nancy - A Novel • Rhoda Broughton
... (when my way takes me into our surface or elevated cars or into ferry boats and local trains) is the utter dissonance between the outfit of most of the women I meet and their position and occupation. So universal is this, that it might almost be laid down as an axiom, that the American woman, no matter in what walk of life you observe her, or what the time or the place, ...
— Worldly Ways and Byways • Eliot Gregory
... or moral, bears among many different tribes, spread over many and far-distant regions, will be considered as the best evidence of one common origin. Disagreement in a similar case, accompanied with a great variety of terms of considerable dissonance, will be equally conclusive as to the object being indigenous or of a ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... particularly fond of those suspensions and inversions in which the intervals of the second clash passionately, strongly compelling resolution. For all his gracefulness and lyricism, he makes a sturdy and constant use of dissonance; in his song "Herbstgefuehl" the dissonance is fearlessly ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... is a work of surpassing beauty; but there is a dissonance between music and libretto which gives the impression of something lacking; there is not the harmony which we expect in a work of this kind. Wagner has taught us better on these points. The music of Fidelio has force and grandeur; some of it has a sensuous beauty ...
— Beethoven • George Alexander Fischer
... the unconscious one. For herself, the tide that bore her on was too deep to let these things hurt her, she looked down and saw the soreness and humiliation of them pictorially, at the bottom, gliding smoothly over. They brought no stereotype to her smile, no dissonance to what she found to say. When at last she and Arnold sat down together her standpoint was still superior, and she herself was so aloof from it all that she could talk about it without bitterness, divorcing the personal pang from a social ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... heard delicious strains of melody, Such as his highest muse had ne'er attained, Float in the air, while in the distance rang, Harsh and discordant, jarring with those tones, The gallop of his frightened horse's hoofs, Clattering in sudden freedom down the pass. A voice that made all music dissonance Then thrilled through heart and flesh of that prone knight, Triumphantly: "The gods need but appear, And their usurped thrones are theirs again!" Then tenderly: "Sweet knight, I pray thee, rise; Worship me not, for I desire thy love. Look on me, follow me, for I am fain Of thy fair, human face." ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... hot, {69a} now silent, now resounding with the roaring of cataracts falling and quenching the fires, and anon of the fire bursting out and burning up the water. Thus, there was neither order nor completeness, nor life nor form: nought but this dazing dissonance, this mysterious stupor which would have made me for ever blind, had not my friend laid bare once more his vesture of heavenly sheen. By the light he gave I saw before me to the left the Land of Oblivion, and the borders of the Wilds of Destruction; ...
— The Visions of the Sleeping Bard • Ellis Wynne
... round the feast they dance, And sing to the notes of a rude bassoon, And never a pause or a dissonance In the merry dance or the merry tune. Brown-bosomed and fair as the rising moon, When she peeps o'er the hills of the dewy east, Wiwaste sings at the Virgins Feast; And bright is the light in her luminous eyes; They ...
— Legends of the Northwest • Hanford Lennox Gordon
... for a writer to attribute all faults, whether of omission or commission, to the luckless printer. Byrd, on the other hand, solemnly warns us that "in the expression of these songs either by voices or instruments, if there be any jar or dissonance," we are not to blame the printer, who has been at the greatest pains to secure accuracy. Then the composer makes a modest appeal on behalf of himself, requesting those who find any fault in the composition "either with courtesy to let the same be concealed," ...
— Lyrics from the Song-Books of the Elizabethan Age • Various
... only light up an abyss of misery—a vault of darkness peopled by demons. He is already cut off from among the living, by the doom of inevitable fate, and while we pity him we fear him. His coming seems attended with monstrous shapes; he diffuses dissonance; his voice is a cry of anguish or a wail of desolation; his existence is a tempest; there can be no relief for him save death, and the death that ends him comes like the blessing of tears to the ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... he cleaves yon ether clear Notes from the unattempted Sphere He scatters to the enchanted ear Of earth's dim throng, Whose dissonance doth more endear The ...
— The Poems of William Watson • William Watson
... and morbid view of poetry entertained by the Swedish Romanticists (the so-called Phosphorists). Tegner here declares that the poet "with heavenly joy embraces life," that "he knows no weak lament" (at its misery), "no dissonance which is not dissolved" (in harmony). His temple stands in light and flame; and at its base a fountain gurgles, a draught from which is an elixir of strength and a panacea for ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... of paramount importance is a consideration of the horoscope of the parties. Were the boy and girl born under astrological conditions which harmonize; or does her horoscope so conflict with his that their dissonance would bring evil and misery to the family? In the latter case, a marriage will be impossible, even though all other conditions ...
— India, Its Life and Thought • John P. Jones
... riddle of human nature to be explained? Only in one way—by a recognition of the truth taught by religion, that human nature is fallen from its true estate, that man is a dethroned king. And how is the dissonance in man's nature to be overcome? Only in one way—through union with God made man; with Jesus Christ, the centre in which alone we find our weakness and the divine strength. Through Christ man is abased and lifted up—abased without despair, ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... third person, presently swings into an exhaustive psychological discussion by the mythical Marlow, then goes into a brisk narrative at second (and sometimes at third) hand, and finally comes to a halt upon an unresolved dissonance, a half-heard chord of the ninth: "And that's the end. He passes away under a cloud, inscrutable at heart, forgotten, unforgiven, and excessively romantic." "Falk" is also a story within a story; this time the narrator is "one who had not ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... her and the light, and the unmistakable expression of annoyance and impatience which was passed over it was spared her. There was, however, still enough dissonance in his manner to affect her quick feminine sense, and when she drew nearer to him it was with ...
— Snow-Bound at Eagle's • Bret Harte
... spectacle, that a humble working man, comparatively uneducated, should have evoked the tumultuous applause of a brilliant assembly of intelligent ladies and gentlemen. It was indeed something extraordinary. Some said that he declaimed like Talma or Rachel, nor was there any note of dissonance in his reception. The enthusiasm was general and unanimous amongst the magistrates, clergy, scientific men, artists, physicians, ship-owners, men of business, and working people. They all joined in the applause when Jasmin had ...
— Jasmin: Barber, Poet, Philanthropist • Samuel Smiles
... towards its divine object, with ardor, but the will not concurring, causes dissonance and swooning, or impetuous transports. I call this momentary ecstasy; it cannot long endure without separating the ...
— Letters of Madam Guyon • P. L. Upham
... not necessary is to avail ourselves of the hearty co-operation of our allies, and to secure and invigorate that co-operation by the firmness and vigour of our own conduct. The honourable gentleman then comes back upon me, and presses me upon the supposed dissonance between our views and those of our allies. But surely there may allowably exist in the minds of different men different means of arriving at the same security. This difference may, without breaking the ties of effective union, exist even in this house; ...
— The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - 1838 • James Gillman
... Henry V. the dissonance of character between the poet and his soldier-puppet jars upon the ears, and this dissonance is generally characteristic. For example, in the third act Shakespeare, through King Henry, expressly charges his soldiers that "there be nothing compelled ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... Weird Sisters preserve me from another such experience! I was walking in the Park in the evening, and the first warm odours of spring floating up from the earth troubled me with a feeling of vague unrest. Some jarring dissonance between the death in my heart and the new promise of life all about me ran along my nerves and set them palpitating harshly. Then I came upon a pair of lovers lingering in the shadow of a tree, holding to each other with outstretched hands. As I approached them I saw the woman was weeping quietly. ...
— The Jessica Letters: An Editor's Romance • Paul Elmer More
... it is compelled strictly to isolate the work, in order to make it self-consistent and a world in itself; since for this form of Art there is no higher unity, in which the dissonance of particulars should be melted ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... restrained. A rare exhibition of beauty may thrill the soul for a moment, yet in general the enjoyment of it is far removed from the excitement of passion. On the other hand, aesthetic pleasure is pure enjoyment. Even when a disagreeable element is present, as in a musical dissonance or in the suffering of a tragic hero, it contributes to a higher measure of enjoyment. It is, moreover, free from the painful elements of craving, fatigue, conflict, anxiety and disappointment, which are apt to accompany other kinds of ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... cavern. Every moment increased the violence of the gale that howled and bellowed as it swept around the echoing roof of that rock-ribbed prison; while the hoarse dash of the approaching waves, and the shrill screams of the sea-birds that filled the cavern, formed a concert of terrible dissonance, well suited for the requiem, of the hapless wretch who had been enclosed in that living grave! But the love of life, which makes us cling to it in the most hopeless extremity, was strong in Frank Costello's breast; his firmness and presence of mind gradually returned, ...
— Thrilling Adventures by Land and Sea • James O. Brayman
... rests on the hillside, serene in the afterglow of its one hundred and eighty-four years. The spotless white walls, the green blinds, the graceful Colonial spire, are meetly set in an environment which strikes no note of dissonance. On either side are quaint, narrow streets, lined with decent door-yards and houses almost as old as the church. Within the cool interior the cottagers, and representatives of a native aristocracy—direct descendants of the English of the sixteenth and seventeenth ...
— Prince or Chauffeur? - A Story of Newport • Lawrence Perry
... Jesus was meditating whether he should confide all he saw and heard to his disciples. He waited, tremulous with expectation, watching the thin scrannel throat out of which rose a voice to which the ear became attuned quickly and was gratified as by a welcome dissonance. It rose up among the silence of the pines, and the delight of listening to it, Joseph thought, was so near to intoxication that he would have pressed forward if he had not remembered suddenly that he was a new-comer into the community; one who might at any moment be driven out of it because he ...
— The Brook Kerith - A Syrian story • George Moore
... judgment, reason, and acts of prudence, and tossed by the discordant tempest, like those who, having violated certain laws of the divine Adrastia, are condemned to be scourged by the Furies, in order that they may be excited by a dissonance as corporeal through seditions, destructions, and plagues, as it is spiritual, through the forfeiture of harmony between the perceptive and enjoying powers; but it is aglow kindled by the intellectual sun in the soul, and a divine impetus which lends it wings, ...
— The Heroic Enthusiasts,(1 of 2) (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... my purpose to dwell here on the great and unchanging demands of the human soul which make His sovereignty a necessity of our well-being alike as citizens, and as individuals of His world. Unless the Lord is King, all must be confusion, dissonance, and disaster. The supreme fact in human life after all is, that our God is "the creator, preserver, and governor of ...
— Our Master • Bramwell Booth
... their equivalents up to the twelfth and double octave. What a glow of tone-color there is in all this harmonic re-enforcement, and who would now say that the pedals should never be used? By their proper use, the student's ear is educated to a refined sense of distinction of consonance and dissonance, and the intention and beauty of ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 385, May 19, 1883 • Various
... all parts of it, and not for everyone, and most certainly not with any guarantee that it is going to stay a good place to be of its own accord, without any help. It is no privileged wonderland removed from the dissonance and change of ...
— The Nation's River - The Department of the Interior Official Report on the Potomac • United States Department of the Interior
... the many began following the eyes of the few, until a brief lull settled down on the dissonance, and everyone was staring at the girl who stood inside the door, dressed as a man, but holding their gaze with the lodestone of her ...
— A Pagan of the Hills • Charles Neville Buck
... incompetence of the vapour to absorb luminous rays is shared by water and ice—in fact, by all really transparent substances. Their transparency is due to their inability to absorb luminous rays. The molecules of such substances are in dissonance with luminous waves; and hence such waves pass through transparent bodies without disturbing the molecular rest. A purely luminous beam, however intense may be its heat, is sensibly incompetent to melt ice. We can, for example, ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... formula of 1809) was out of the question; the realities of life always fell short of the ideals which Pons created for himself; the world without was not in tune with the soul within, but Pons had made up his mind to the dissonance. Doubtless the sense of beauty that he had kept pure and living in his inmost soul was the spring from which the delicate, graceful, and ingenious music flowed and won him reputation between ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... called symbolism or impressionism, they go in deeper and become more entangled, losing artistic equilibrium, common sense, and serenity of the soul. Often they fall into the former corruption as far as the essence is concerned, and almost always into dissonance with one's self, because they have an honest sentiment that they must give to the world something new, ...
— So Runs the World • Henryk Sienkiewicz,
... must be such a harmony in a gilding wheat-field. Wheat is good; even its husk is good; beauty and order and service have come to it. There is dissonance from chaos; the song clears as the order begins. Order should have a Capital too. All rising life is a putting of surfaces and deeps in Order. The word Cosmos means Order.... Wheat has come far, and one does well to be alone for a time in a golden ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort
... tone, like the wildly weeping voice of Rachel; tragical, painful, gone quite to falsetto and above pitch; but with a melody in its dissonance like the singing of the stars. My ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVIII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Seven-Years War Rises to a Height.—1757-1759. • Thomas Carlyle
... came at the appointed time in the appointed way—there was no terror save her own fear. Outside herself was a mass of circumstance beyond her control, but, within herself, was the power of adjustment, as, when two dominant notes are given, the choice of the third makes either dissonance or harmony. ...
— Master of the Vineyard • Myrtle Reed
... way, and with the same kind of mental result, you can easily imagine the meats a little tough; a suspicion of smoke somewhere in the sauces; too much pepper, perhaps, or too little salt; or there might be the graver dissonance of claret not properly attempered, or a choice Rhenish below the average mark, or the spilling of some of that Arethusa Madeira, marvellous for its innumerable circumnavigations of the globe, and for being as dry as the conversation ...
— Prue and I • George William Curtis
... aptly enough compared to two fiddles playing in concert: if the one can sound no higher than Tweedle-dum, and the other no lower than Tweedle-dee, there never can be any thing but a perpetual jarring discord and dissonance betwixt them. In the same manner the difference in religious sentiments would have been a great allay in the felicity of ...
— Critical Remarks on Sir Charles Grandison, Clarissa, and Pamela (1754) • Anonymous
... of terrific sound, filling with horror the quiet noontide. The roaring and yelling of lion, tiger, and leopard, the laughter of hyena, the howling of jackal, and the snarling of bear, mingled in hideous dissonance with the cries of monkeys and parrots; while certain strange gurgles made Clare's heart, lover of animals though he was, quiver, and his blood creep. The same instant, however, he woke to the sense that he might do something: he ran to ...
— A Rough Shaking • George MacDonald
... the highest part of the highest organisms are more mobile than the lower. Environment can do little, comparatively, in the direction of inducing variation in the body of a child: but how plastic is its mind! How infinitely sensitive is its soul! How infallibly can it be turned to music or to dissonance by the moral harmony or discord of its outward lot! How decisively indeed are we not all formed and moulded, made or unmade, by external circumstance! Might we not all confess ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... states it never attained to more than a fluctuating and temporary realisation. The inherent contradiction was too extreme for the attempted reconciliation; the inequalities refused to blend in a harmony of divergent tones but asserted themselves in the dissonance of ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... when, by magic, every little dissonance in all the town seemed blended into a harmony of silence, as it might be the very death of self ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... him, and as his footsteps sounded on the stair she felt as if she were doomed and hearing her own death-knell. What had she done? What would he do now? She stood there a dissonance of despair, and when the lower door clicked moved her hand out of the ...
— Jennie Gerhardt - A Novel • Theodore Dreiser
... one would think the house were on fire, and no time to be lost; the black mittens and the white now Rob-Royishly invade each other's territory; each snatches up something and carries it off, like the old marauders of the Border country; and reprisals are made, and lines of discord and dissonance are establishing, which require the police, the magistrate, and the riot act. Bravo! bravo! bravo! and the battle ceases, and the babble commences. Place for the foreign train, the performers par metier! Full of confidence ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... There is a tumult of noise—the brazen clang of the furnace doors as they are flung open or slammed shut, the grating, teeth-gritting grind of steel against steel, of crunching coal. This clash of sounds stuns one's ears with its rending dissonance. But there is order in it, rhythm, a mechanical regulated recurrence, a tempo. And rising above all, making the air hum with the quiver of liberated energy, the roar of leaping flames in the furnaces, the monotonous throbbing ...
— The Hairy Ape • Eugene O'Neill
... of the officers was of a very pale red; but there was one hirsute Volunteer of Liberty who acted as chief warder, and took a delight in the occupation. He rattled his bunch of keys as if their metallic dissonance were music, grumbled at the urbanity of his superiors, and bore himself altogether as if their politics were suspicious; and he, a pure of the pure, were there as warder over that too. I nicknamed him the hyena in my own mind; but I could ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea
... interval, say, 500:547, the effect is of a disagreeable roughness of tone, and this we call discord. In other words, any tones which do not produce beats are harmonious, or harmony is the absence of discord. In the words of Helmholtz, consonance is a continuous, dissonance an ...
— The Psychology of Beauty • Ethel D. Puffer
... gardens are the true household gates. Here and there may be a small strip of quay, with the soil and grime of industry—perhaps the blackness of coal-dust; but the prevalent flavour is domestic. Higher up the river there may be more dissonance, where the steamboats are being laden with china-clay and stone; there is a clang of cranes, a rattle of machinery, a bustle out of unison with the placid water beneath, the dense woodland behind. Maritime doings seem to lose much of their beauty when they are dependent on steam—they cannot ...
— The Cornwall Coast • Arthur L. Salmon
... Peel and Lord Byron had no ear for music, and neither vocal nor instrumental music gave them the slightest pleasure. To the poet Rogers it gave actual discomfort. Even the harmonious Pope preferred the harsh dissonance of a street ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... May morning! All about Sweet influences of earth, and air, and sky, Harmoniously accordant. I alone, The troubled spirit that had driven me forth, In dissonance with that fair frame of things So blissfully serene. God had not yet Let fall the weight of chastening that makes dumb The murmuring lip, and stills the rebel heart, Ending all earthly interests, and I call'd (O ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... and the young Huron warriors, mounting their palisades, sang their war-songs all night, with the utmost power of their lungs, in order that the enemy, knowing them to be on their guard, might be deterred from an attack. The night was dark, and the hideous dissonance resounded far and wide; yet, regardless of the din, two Iroquois crept close to the palisade, where they lay motionless till near dawn. By this time the last song had died away, and the tired singers had left their posts or fallen asleep. One of the Iroquois, with the silence ...
— The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century • Francis Parkman
... taken from the pleasures of the senses when these are mingled with that which borders on pain, to prove that there is something of like nature in intellectual pleasures. A little acid, sharpness or bitterness is often more pleasing than sugar; shadows enhance colours; and even a dissonance in the right place gives relief to harmony. We wish to be terrified by rope-dancers on the point of falling and we wish that tragedies shall well-nigh cause us to weep. Do men relish health enough, or thank God enough for it, without having ever been sick? ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz
... were continually abusing the Reviewers, because they honestly told the one that obscenity was not wit, and obscurity was not sense; and the other that dissonance in poetry did not excel harmony, and that his rhymes were frequently prose lines of ten syllables cut into verse. They applauded their happier efforts. Notwithstanding all this, it is certain that so little discernment exists among common ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... import. The wesleyans, and the society of friends, entertain some opinions at variance with these symbols; but in their ordinary teaching, all parties employed nearly the same theological and devotional terms. Their views of church government, and of ritual observances, were the chief points of dissonance; but in scattered settlements of recent formation these distinctions were rather matters of recollection than of practice. There were no diocesan, no presbyterial or other courts. In the towns the denominations maintained their exclusive forms and separate teachers; but controversial ...
— The History of Tasmania, Volume I (of 2) • John West
... the accident, and this murderous attack impaired his intellectual force, for when he again resumed his duties under President Johnson, he supported the President's reconstruction policy, becoming at dissonance with the party he had so satisfactorily served, until now. At the close of his official term in March, 1867, he retired from public life, and soon made an extended tour through California, Oregon and Alaska; the latter having been ...
— Hidden Treasures - Why Some Succeed While Others Fail • Harry A. Lewis
... unfinished opus Multitudinous harmony obeys, Evil is a dissonance not a discord, Soon to be resolved ...
— Behind the Arras - A Book of the Unseen • Bliss Carman
... at the spot, where, crouched around their camp- fire, La Salle and his companions kept their vigil. The howlings of the wolves filled the frosty air with a fierce and dreary dissonance. More deadly foes were not far off, for before nightfall they had seen fresh Indian tracks. The cold, however, forced them to make a fire; and while some tried to rest around it, the others stood on the watch. La Salle could not sleep. Anxiety, anguish, fears ...
— France and England in North America, a Series of Historical Narratives, Part Third • Francis Parkman
... latent there, for his praise and thanksgiving ascended, without voice or instrument, essential harmony, to the ear that hears thought, and the heart that vibrates to every chord of feeling in the hearts it has created. Ah! what is it we send up thither, where our thoughts are either a dissonance or a sweetness and a grace? Alone in the dusky church, the curate's ascended like a song of the angels, for his heart was all a thanksgiving—not for any perfected gift, but for many a lovely hope. He knelt down by the organ and ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald
... book which, they think, contradicts the plainest and the most unequivocal disclosures they have made in the bowels of the earth, or among the stars of the sky. To all these we answer, as we have already indicated, there is not the least dissonance between God's written book and the most mature discoveries of geological science. One thing, however, there may be: there may be a contradiction between the discoveries of geology and our preconceived interpretations of the Bible. But this is not because the Bible is wrong, but because our interpretation ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... just reached that passage in Nathaniel's song where a triumphant ascending scale in G rings out. She faltered and played D-flat instead of D-natural, the first dissonance that night—would it had been the last! Quickly she turned on the music-stool and on him, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, April 18, 1917 • Various
... vaguely disturbing like the presage of a storm. As they traversed a region of hotels and apartment houses, Frank and Bertha noted many open windows; men and women staring out half dreamily. They passed a livery stable, out of which there came a weird uncanny dissonance of horses neighing ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman
... with white with peculiar loveliness. It is discordant when standing with orange only, requiring to be joined or accompanied by their proper contrast, to resolve or harmonize the dissonance. In landscapes, &c., abounding with hues allied to green, a red object properly placed as regards light, shade, or distance, conduces wonderfully to the life, beauty, harmony, and connexion of ...
— Field's Chromatography - or Treatise on Colours and Pigments as Used by Artists • George Field
... another man in all the world to whom I can speak with clear hope of getting adequate response from him. Truly Concord seems worthy of the name: no dissonance comes to me from that side. Ah me! I feel as if in the wide world there were still but this one voice that responded intelligently to my own: as if the rest were all hearsays ... echoes: as if this alone were true and alive. My blessings on you, ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... him in consternation when the audience rose to go. Afterwards he read long dissertations about each symphony before he went, and he would note down the important points and watch for them. The critic would expatiate upon "the long-drawn dissonance forte, that marks the close of the working-out portion"; and Thyrsis would watch for that long-drawn dissonance, and be wondering if it was never coming—when suddenly the whole symphony would come to ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... books in various European languages; also on medicine and anatomy, this being his favourite study, to assist him in which he had an ivory skeleton. He returned the visit in great state, with six elephants, two of enormous size, going before him, and accompanied by his troops, with a wild, horrid dissonance of cannon and native music. Two thousand persons escorted the Rajah to the Bishop's tent, where he conversed very sensibly on various subjects, especially English history, or as he called it, "the Generations of English Kings." He was keeping up the good ...
— Pioneers and Founders - or, Recent Workers in the Mission field • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... of great happiness in his marriage with her, in spite of the singularity of its conditions; but that now, while Milly could never satisfy his fastidious nature, she herself had grown to be a hinderance, a dissonance in his life. Could she strike a blow which would sever him from her, he would suffer cruelly, no doubt; but it would send him back again to the student's life, the only life that could bring him honor, and in the long run satisfaction. And that life would not be lonely, because Tony, so completely ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods
... treats of the impressions of beauty produced by the great, sublime, and powerful; the third considers the relation to the imagination, of the apprehension of nature by the understanding, and shows that it is only imperfect culture and ignorance which can suppose any dissonance between the two. He shows that the progress of science enriches, aggrandizes, and elevates the imagination. The fourth essay is, perhaps, the most interesting of all. Its theme is, "Superstition and Skepticism in their ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... necessarily companionable, far from it; but moods truly meet, to part in violent dissonance; or to move parallel in happy harmonic intervals; or, more poignant and more satisfying still, to pass gradually along some great succession of alien chords—common contemplation, say, of a world grievous or pleasant to ...
— Hortus Vitae - Essays on the Gardening of Life • Violet Paget, AKA Vernon Lee
... and dissonance of war, our trio preserved a strict neutrality, and before the arrival of the mediating powers, had regained their position in the piazzas, where they waited the result of ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... then, as if spurred on irresistibly from behind in all parts of the field, the whole dingy-gray mass broke from the "common time" step into that "dog-trot" known in the tactics of the present day as the "double-quick." At the same moment they broke into those shrieks of horrible dissonance, remarked in the fight of the morning, rising even above the din of the opening artillery, and more resembling the whoops of the copper-skinned warriors of the renegade Albert Pike, than soldiers of what is called a Christian nation, led on by a commander ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... sounded the roaring dissonance of an elevated train; on either side of her phantom shapes swarmed—figures which moved everywhere around her, now illumined by shop windows, now silhouetted against them. And always through the deafening confusion in her brain, ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers
... of C major. With Schoenberg, freedom in modulation is not only permissible, but is an iron rule; he is obsessed by the theory of overtones, and his music is not only horizontally and vertically planned, but, so I pretend to hear, also in a circular fashion. There is no such thing as consonance or dissonance, only imperfect training of the ear (I am quoting from his Harmony, certainly a bible for musical supermen). He says: "Harmonie fremde Toene gibt es also nicht"—and a sly dig at the old-timers—"sondern nur dem Harmoniesystem fremde." ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker |
