"Spinet" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... other thing. Your uncle, or great-uncle Thomas, started a subscription for a chime of bells. The family all loved music—that is what makes your father play the violin. Your Great-uncle Thomas loved music in the air. You may be able to buy a spinet for Jenny some day. ...
— True to His Home - A Tale of the Boyhood of Franklin • Hezekiah Butterworth
... strongly, yet fall into plane behind the figure in white satin—quite a different quality of white, and warmer and brighter than the wall. The bodice is a steely blue silk, which is repeated in the velvet seat of the chair; while the blue and white landscape upon the open lid of the spinet repeats the blue and white landscape on the wall, and the blue and white motive is subtly re-echoed in a subdued key in the little tiles lining the base of the wall. The floor is a chequer of black and white ...
— Line and Form (1900) • Walter Crane
... drum, but instead of increasing each particular noise, it decreased it, so that the sound of the zither seemed tiny, as if a diminutive zither were playing somewhere, and it seemed the piano must be a small one, like a little spinet. ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... its heat when we entered her house, and when my eyes fell upon her seated at her spinet in front of a latticed window that brought out her gentle figure in all its sweet simplicity, I felt like clutching, and flinging back over the threshold, which his desecrating foot should never have crossed, the hollow-hearted being at my side, who could ...
— The Forsaken Inn - A Novel • Anna Katharine Green
... to sing tastefully and truly; her little feet step lightly, easily, and gracefully, she can always make an easy graceful courtesy. She has had no singing master but her father, no dancing mistress but her mother; a neighbouring organist has given her a few lessons in playing accompaniments on the spinet, and she has improved herself by practice. At first she only wished to show off her hand on the dark keys; then she discovered that the thin clear tone of the spinet made her voice sound sweeter; little by little she recognised the ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... those days were more at home in a kitchen than a drawing-room. They did better execution at a tub than at a spinet, and could handle a rolling-pin more satisfactorily than a sketch-book. At a pinch, they could even use a rake or fork to good purpose in field or barn. Their finishing education was received at the country school along with their ...
— The Ontario Readers: Fourth Book • Various
... rushing in here when I was composing or thinking out a sketch would inevitably drive every single idea from my head," and we went upstairs together. Here in the drawing-room he set himself down to a spinet which bore the date of 1770, and he struck a few exceedingly sweet-sounding, if slightly tinkling, chords from it. "And this," said he, "is the oldest Broadwood in England. You can see for yourself the date—1795." Downstairs he showed me a beautiful model of a steam engine, ...
— The Idler, Volume III., Issue XIII., February 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly. Edited By Jerome K. Jerome & Robert Barr • Various
... the legs of the old spinet?" I returned, laughing. "Worse than that." "Played upon it, then!" "No, sir. He has lied to me!" "I can't believe that of Andy." "Lied to me, sir," repeated Mr. Jaffrey, severely. "He pledged me his word of honor that he would give over his climbing. The way that boy climbs sends a chill down ...
— Miss Mehetabel's Son • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... race, if not to another region of existence; we had, too, some of the last new songs, (at least half a century old, but which were not the less touching,) and a duet of Geminiani, performed by the two elder proficients on a spinet which might have been among the "chamber music" of the Virgin Queen; all slight matters to speak of, and yet which contributed to the quietude of a mind longing for rest—sights of innocence and sounds of peace, which, like ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... people.[70] This development was furthered by the perfecting of two groups of instruments: The violins, by the great Italian masters; and those precursors of our modern pianoforte, the harpsichord, clavichord and spinet. We find, consequently, the Italians—of whom Corelli was most prominent—combining these dances into groups called Sonate da Ballo: and the French composers Couperin and Rameau, developing the possibilities of keyed stringed instruments in graceful pieces to which fantastic ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... environment in the way of musical instruments of adequate tonal powers. Such instruments never existed in the history of the art until about the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The organ, the violin and the predecessor of the pianoforte, the spinet, came to practical form at nearly the same time. At the same time the instruments of plucked strings—the guitars, lutes and other instruments which until then had occupied the exclusive attention of ...
— A Popular History of the Art of Music - From the Earliest Times Until the Present • W. S. B. Mathews
... seems to have been conscious of her deficiencies in this direction or at least to have disliked writing, for not infrequently the General acted as her amanuensis. But she was well trained in social and domestic accomplishments, could dance and play on the spinet—in short, was brought up a "gentlewoman." That she must in youth have possessed charm of person and manners is indicated by her subjugation of Daniel Parke Custis, a man of the world and of much greater ...
— George Washington: Farmer • Paul Leland Haworth
... drawing-room she found a harpsichord, a spinet, and a piano, all tuned expressly for her. This amused her, as she had never seen either of the two older instruments in her life. She played on them ...
— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade |
