"Grand piano" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... had built for herself and her grandchildren had not been created all at once, though the nucleus dating forty years back was a handsome building. She had added more rooms as necessity or fancy dictated, now a library with bedrooms over it, now a music room for Lady Lesbia and her grand piano—anon a billiard-room, as an agreeable surprise for Maulevrier when he came home after a tour in America. Thus the house had grown into a long low pile of Tudor masonry—steep gables, heavily mullioned casements, grey stone walls, curtained ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... musical taste tends to grow better and not worse, know also that any music is better than no music. A mechanical instrument which goes is better than a new concert grand piano that remains shut. ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler
... Mrs. Carey sold her grand piano, getting an old-fashioned square one and a hundred and fifty dollars in exchange. It had been a wedding present from a good old uncle, who, if he had been still alive, would have been glad to serve his niece now ...
— Mother Carey's Chickens • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... Betsey went down-stairs with me and covered my eyes in the hall and led me to the grand piano. Then I was permitted to look, and there was the most gorgeous set of books that my eyes ever beheld—a set of Smollett, in lovely brown calf, decorated with magnificent gold tooling! Yes, I love such things—who doesn't?—and I ...
— 'Charge It' - Keeping Up With Harry • Irving Bacheller
... at once that he would, provided I could satisfy him as to my efficiency. Thereupon he asked me a few questions about music, of which some I could answer and some I could not. Next he took me into the shop, set me a stool in front of a grand piano, and told me to play. I could not help trembling a good deal, but I tried my best. In a few moments, however, the tears were dropping on the keys; and, when he asked me what was the matter, I told him it was months since I had touched a piano. The answer ...
— The Vicar's Daughter • George MacDonald
... Pianisto was the best. It was also the most costly. But one of the conveniences of having six thousand pounds a year is that you need not deny yourself the best mechanical player because it happens to be the most costly. He bought a Pianisto, and incidentally he bought a superb grand piano and exiled the old cottage piano ...
— The Regent • E. Arnold Bennett
... The grand piano was a splendid instrument, the symphony was well performed. At least, so it seemed to Nekhludoff, who knew and liked that symphony. Listening to the beautiful andante, he felt a tickling in his nose, he was so touched by his ...
— Resurrection • Count Leo Tolstoy
... the growl and mutter of the rising storm. The leaves of the garden began to tremble. And then, ere that roll of distant thunder had died away, another sound came through the darkness—a sound that was almost terrifying in its suddenness, and the grand piano ...
— The Bars of Iron • Ethel May Dell
... occupied the attention of cartoonists as fully as Paderewski at a later date. Liszt, his hair floating wildly, was represented as darting through the air on wide-stretched pinions with keyboards attached—a play on Fluegel, the German for grand piano. Thalberg, owing to his dignified repose, was caricatured as posing in a stiff, rigid manner ...
— For Every Music Lover - A Series of Practical Essays on Music • Aubertine Woodward Moore
... half-started forward to take the honor of turning Paula's music, but saw in time that Dar Hyal had already elected to himself that office. Graham glimpsed the scene with quiet curious glances. The grand piano, under a low arch at the far-end of the room, was cunningly raised and placed as on and in a sounding board. All jollity and banter had ceased. Evidently, he thought, the Little Lady had a way with her and was accepted as a player of parts. And from this he was ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... a neighbouring squatter, and a couple of bicycle tourists turned up at Five-Bob that evening, and we had a jovial night. The great, richly furnished drawing-room was brilliantly lighted, and the magnificent Erard grand piano sang and rang again with music, now martial and loud, now soft and solemn, now gay and sparkling. I made the very pleasant discovery that Harold Beecham. was an excellent pianist, a gifted player on the violin, and sang with a strong, clear, well-trained tenor, which penetrated far ...
— My Brilliant Career • Miles Franklin
... when the last liquid ripples of a Chopin waltz had died away. "I don't see how you ever learned to play like that! But what in the world are you going to do now?" For Phyllis had jumped up with an impatient exclamation, laid back the cover of the grand piano, and was hunting frantically in the ...
— The Dragon's Secret • Augusta Huiell Seaman
... put it in English, a fixed idea. There can be no doubt that he was engaged in the terrible task of fitting the current coal dispute to fantastic verse when a brain-cell unhappily buckled, and he was found destroying the works of his grand piano with a coal-scoop. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, October 6, 1920 • Various
... I saw many things that were eloquent of these vanished people—glimpses through shattered windows and beyond demolished house-fronts; here a table set for dinner, with plates and tarnished cutlery on a dingy cloth that stirred damp and lazily in the wind, yonder a grand piano, open and with sodden music drooping from its rest; here again ...
— Great Britain at War • Jeffery Farnol
... sort of home we wanted, but we were willing to begin humbly. This was not because we were averse to starting at the top. Both Mother and I had then, and have now, a fondness for the best things of life. We should have liked a grand piano, and a self-making ice box, and a servant, and an automobile right off! But less than five hundred dollars capital and twenty-eight dollars a week salary do ...
— Making the House a Home • Edgar A. Guest
... one he went into one of the glass showrooms, a prettily furnished apartment whose most notable article of furniture was a grand piano in exquisitely matched Circassian walnut. Absorbed and radiant, Mark put back the cover, twirled the stool, and carefully opened a green book marked "Chopin." Then he sat down, and, with the sigh of a happy child falling upon a feast, he struck an ...
— The Story Of Julia Page - Works of Kathleen Norris, Volume V. • Kathleen Norris
... of the inquiries I had instituted at that time ultimately brought one forward, which has been secured by the curator of the Brussels Museum, M. Victor Mahillon. This instrument, with Stein's action and two unison scale, is dated 1780. Mozart's grand piano, preserved at Salzburg, made by Walther, is a nearly contemporary copy of Stein, and so also are the grands by Huhn, of Berlin, which I took notes of at Berlin and Potsdam; the latest of ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 385, May 19, 1883 • Various
... them taken by luckier fellows! You wouldn't have me marry Sally Warner, would you—or any of the other half-dozen Sally Warners? I might as well marry a gas chandelier, a grand piano, and a code of immorals—but the standard of such women is so different from the standard ...
— The Gray Dawn • Stewart Edward White
... be infused with this home spirit. It lacked that toleration and regard without which the home is nothing. There was fine furniture, arranged as soothingly as the artistic perception of the occupants warranted. There were soft rugs, rich, upholstered chairs and divans, a grand piano, a marble carving of some unknown Venus by some unknown artist, and a number of small bronzes gathered from heaven knows where, but generally sold by the large furniture houses along with everything else which goes to ...
— Sister Carrie • Theodore Dreiser
... harpsichord, which I bought cheap at a sale, and disembowelled into a species of deceptive bed. I think the hint might put "people about to marry" up to a dodge in the way of spare beds. Everybody now sees through the old chiffonier and wardrobe turn-up impositions, but the grand piano would beat them; only it should be kept locked, for fear any one given to harmony might commence playing a fantasia ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, December 25, 1841 • Various
... leaders of cavalry. . . . Yes, I know it sounds like a tale out of Ouida: but such things happen, and this thing happened. . . . Denistoun scaled the twenty steps of the Ionic portico, cleft his way through the cobwebs and briers that were living and dying for Dixie, kicked over the grand piano that Dinah's duster still reverentially spared, and carried off the enchanted Princess across the seas to Yorkshire: where in due course she bore him a daughter, Constantia, and, some years later, a son who eventually came into the property but ...
— Foe-Farrell • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... carriage-drive, hurried away, down the broad hall, and disappeared. Ariel dropped her parasol upon a marble-topped table near the door, and, removing her gloves, drifted into a room at the left, where a grand piano found shelter beneath crimson plush. After a moment of contemplation, she pushed back the coverlet, and, seating herself upon the plush-covered piano-stool (to match), let her fingers run up and down the key-board ...
— The Conquest of Canaan • Booth Tarkington
... read, but was unable. Then she went to the big salon and, seating herself at the grand piano, played snatches of Grand Opera. But she was too anxious, too impatient for midnight to come and ...
— The White Lie • William Le Queux
... Mahatma. Be a Mahatma, and save your postage expenses. But you must be discreet; and you must be exceeding vague. A Mahatma is nothing if he is not vague. You must also be elusive. Can you elude? It is no light matter to prove one's spiritual capacity by materialising a cigarette inside a grand piano. ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101. Sep. 12, 1891 • Various
... white curtains were drawn across the windows; black bearskins covered the floor; the furniture was dark, formal, much of it carved; here and there on the white panelling of the walls were black Wedgwood plaques; black Wedgwood china stood audaciously upon and inside cabinets. A large grand piano and the cheerful blaze of a wood fire mitigated the ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte
... the opulent car and watched Gilbert run it round to the side of the house. There was no garage and not even a shed to give it cover. Gilbert left it in the open, where it remained sulky and supercilious, like a grand piano in an empty kitchen. ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... seated before a grand piano, and Faith sat down under the shadow of her harp, both being arranged on a dais within an alcove at one end of the room. A screen of ivy and holly had been constructed across the front of this recess for the games of the children ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... Such a wonderful dinner as it must have been to them! Dora's face glowed and her eyes sparkled as she watched them. Then they all went together to the great, light, pleasant chapel, with its hanging baskets, and its white flower urns, and its creeping vines, and fragrant blossoms; its grand piano on the platform as perfect in finish and as sweet of tone as if it were designed to chime with the voices of more favored childhood. Dora's bright eye took in the scene in all its details with great delight and satisfaction, but she did not feel the solemn undertone of thanksgiving that ...
— Three People • Pansy
... lightly at a door and entered without waiting. The room was very light, with bowls of cut flowers everywhere and a pair of green love-birds billing eternally on a brass standard: they chirped softly now and then. A miniature grand piano filled one corner, and the light fell richly on the tooled leather of low book-cases, and slipped into reflected pools of violet, green and blood-red on the polished floor. A great tiger skin stretched in front of a massive, ...
— The Strange Cases of Dr. Stanchon • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... Sometimes Sam Pardee made sudden thousands. Mrs. Pardee would buy silver, linen, and other household furnishings ranging all the way from a grand piano to a patent washing machine. The piano and the washing machine usually were whisked away within a few weeks or months, at the longest. But she cannily had the linen and silver stamped—stamped unmistakably and irrevocably with a large, ...
— Gigolo • Edna Ferber
... what I say," she interrupted with a smile. "You are a good son, though terribly extravagant. You bought sealskin furs that I can't wear, and a grand piano on which I can't play. But——" and she went over and put her hands on his shoulders and looked into his eyes with ineffable fondness—"Jims, what you gave didn't matter because I knew that your ...
— Mixed Faces • Roy Norton
... yielded like moss to the footstep. Crimson velvet curtains, lined with white satin and fringed with gold, draped the windows and excluded every breath of the wintry blast. Many costly pictures, rare works of art, covered the walls. A grand piano-forte, a fine harp, a guitar, and a lute were at hand. Rich inlaid tables were covered with the best new books, magazines, and journals. Indian cabinets were filled with antique shells, minerals, ossifications, and ...
— Self-Raised • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... was coming back from Brinton with that bit of brill we've been eating, for they hadn't got an ounce of turbot, which I wanted, a luggage-train was standing at Riseholme station, and they had just taken out of it a case that could have held nothing but a grand piano. And if that's not enough for you, Colonel, there were two big dress-baskets as well, which I think must have contained linen, for they were corded, and it took two men to move each of them, so Mary said, and there's nothing so heavy as linen properly packed, unless it's plate, and there ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson
... it was. It was a dear little apartment that the girls shared, with a living-room chosen especially for having nice times in. It was lighted by tall candles, and had a gas grate that was almost human. There was a grand piano which took up more than its share of room, there was the davenport aforesaid, there were companionable chairs and taborets acquired by Lucille and kept by Marjorie in the exact places where they ...
— I've Married Marjorie • Margaret Widdemer
... a splendid vision had been somewhere just round the corner, only unfortunately missed. He allowed his artistic temperament to run loose during the holidays. He would go up to Bella Vista and play for hours on the Macleods' new grand piano, improvising beautiful airs, ...
— Monitress Merle • Angela Brazil
... bottom, the wires passing over sharp edges near both ends. The tuner is able, on turning a pin, to tension its strings till it gives any desired note. Readers may be interested to learn that the average tension of a string is 275 lbs., so that the total strain on the frame of a grand piano is anything ...
— How it Works • Archibald Williams
... room a man en blouse was seated at a piano playing the "Marseillaise" to an admiring audience (the "Marseillaise" had been forbidden in Paris for many years). Elsewhere a party of gamins were turning over a magnificent scrapbook. In the next room was a grand piano, on which four men were thumping at once. In another, a party of working-men were dancing a quadrille, while a gentleman played for them upon a piano. At every chimney-piece and before every work of art stood a guard, ...
— France in the Nineteenth Century • Elizabeth Latimer
... had brought forward little gilt chairs of a French design which seemed oddly out of place in this room of the East, and the three seated themselves. Out of place, too, seemed the grand piano which Arlee's eyes, roving now past her hostess, discovered ...
— The Palace of Darkened Windows • Mary Hastings Bradley
... standing before the fire in the great drawing room, but Jo's attention was entirely absorbed by a grand piano, which stood open. ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott
... could stand the strain no longer, and she rose and strayed about the room, examining the furniture, the curtains, the crystal pendants, faintly pink, that softened and diffused the light; and she paused before the grand piano ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... thousands of years old. It was the method by which tension was imparted to some of the earliest harps and lyres of which history is cognisant; and it is still to be found to-day in the most elaborate and costly grand piano, with but few alterations affecting its principle of action. The pianoforte of the future will be kept in tune by more exact and scientific methods, attaining a certain balance between the thickness of the ...
— Twentieth Century Inventions - A Forecast • George Sutherland
... what came over me, for supposing Signor Vanucci had been wrong, and I had no voice, she would have thought me mad, but truth to say, I simply did not feel I was risking anything when I turned, and looking at her across the big grand piano that fills up her little drawing-room, and said, "No, it is not true, I have not ...
— The Rebellion of Margaret • Geraldine Mockler
... King Billy was not a big mind; it would no more have taken in an abstract idea than his gunyah would have accommodated a grand piano. He was as simple as sunlight, and to resolve his intellect into seven colours would want the most ingenious spectroscope. But he could make an inference from a positive fact, and, having made it, he did not allow more remote deductions to trouble ...
— Stories by English Authors: Orient • Various
... littered with maps, books and journals; there was a secretaire book-case in Chippendale by the side of the enormous fire-place, in which a great coal fire burned; and above this was an ivory overmantel of exquisite work. A grand piano, open and bearing music, was the chief ornament of the left-hand corner; while another Chippendale cabinet, filled with a multitude of rare curiosities, completed an apartment which had many of the characteristics of a salon and not a few ...
— The Iron Pirate - A Plain Tale of Strange Happenings on the Sea • Max Pemberton
... may wind up the day with a smart shock of earthquake; and if he is equally sleepy and unintelligent (which Heaven forefend!), he may miss its keen relish by drowsily wondering what on earth they mean by moving that very heavy grand piano overhead at ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... all sizes and of all colours. The little ones, not bigger than a grand piano, were of flesh pink. Those half-grown were mottled with pink and black in blotches. The adults were almost invariably all dark, though a few of them retained still a small pink spot or so-a sort of persistence in mature years of the eternal boy-, I suppose. ...
— The Land of Footprints • Stewart Edward White
... he complains that you do not rise until eleven, smoke cigarettes in the dining-room before lunch, smash the grand piano in the drawing-room, lame his favourite cob in the Row, and upset all his documents in the study, what answer ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, April 8, 1893 • Various
... very ugly fashion it is. A lady does not know what to do with her two or three bouquets at a musicale or a dinner, so they are laid away on a table. The only thing that can be done is to sit after dinner with them in her lap, and the prima donna at a musicale lays hers on the grand piano. ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
... "Winter" in his hands. He can walk through a wood of pines, swinging in the tempest, and repeat Coleridge's "Ode to Schiller." He can, lying on a twilight hill, with twilight mountains darkening into night around him, and twilight fields and rivers glimmering far below, and one cataract, touching the grand piano of the silence into melancholy music, turn round and see in the north-east the moon rising in that "clouded majesty" of which Milton had spoken long before. He can take the "Lady of the Lake" to the same summit, while afternoon, the everlasting autumn of the day, is shedding ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]
... flooring, cupboards and bureaus had been broken open and their contents scattered, apparently in a search for money or valuables; many small articles of value were missing, pictures were slashed and torn, poor Dona Isolda's grand piano had but one leg left and was otherwise a complete wreck, and some priceless china vases and bowls that had been the glory of the drawing-room were lying on the floor, shivered to atoms. But a little closer inspection revealed that while an immense amount of damage had been ...
— The Cruise of the Thetis - A Tale of the Cuban Insurrection • Harry Collingwood
... grand piano, with her arms waving as she sang, repeating, by the expression of her eyes, the question she had asked and to which she had received no answer, she was singing the verses she considered nonsense with as much point as if she had understood ...
— Jacqueline, v2 • Th. Bentzon (Mme. Blanc)
... handsome than he was to-day. A pastel of the boys' lovely heads hung opposite it, between two windows, and photographs of Jim and Derry and their father were everywhere: on the desk, on the little grand piano, under the table lamp. This was Rachael's own domain, and in asking Magsie to come here she consciously chose the environment in which she would feel most ...
— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris
... Italy. The coupe of the diligence was secured, and on April 20th Mrs Jameson's "wild poets but wise people" arrived at Florence. An excellent apartment was found in the Via delle Belle Donne near the Piazza Santa Maria Novella, and for Browning's special delight a grand piano was hired. When Mrs Browning had sufficiently recovered strength to view the city and its surroundings her pleasure was great: "At Pisa we say, 'How beautiful!' here we say nothing; it is enough if we can breathe." They had hoped ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... of age, she made it her boudoir. Flowers and silks and silver lit up its stateliness. Beneath the influence of a grand piano and the soft-toned cretonnes upon the leather chairs, the solemnity of the chamber melted into peace. The walls of literature, once so severe, became a kindly background, wearing a wise, ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... each mirror, bowl, vase and incense holder, were rarely fine. Yet in the airy rooms there was no dreary look of the museum. On the contrary, they had an intimate, almost a homely air, in spite of their beauty. Books and magazines were allowed their place, and on a grand piano, almost in the middle of the largest room, which opened by long windows into an adroitly tangled rose garden where a small fountain purred amongst blue lilies, there was a quantity of music. The whole house was strongly scented with flowers. Dion ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... plan itself: The great square vestibule, or reception-room, with the office at one side—wouldn't you enjoy that, Jack?—then a few steps higher the big keeping-room, with a huge fireplace confronting you, and room enough for—anything. For games, for dancing, for a billiard table, for a grand piano, for ...
— The House that Jill Built - after Jack's had proved a failure • E. C. Gardner
... was only a question of practice to gain speed. Fingers that had learned nimbleness and accuracy of touch in other fields, did not lag long here. Hour after hour she sat at the machine, practising finger exercises as patiently as if the keys were the ivories of a grand piano. ...
— Mary Ware's Promised Land • Annie Fellows Johnston
... put in the front rank to be shot by the English, or made to dig trenches." The whole scene was so comic that I sat down and laughed, and the climax was reached when the cock-sparrow, who had always talked so big of what he was going to do and to say to the Boers, crawled under the old grand piano in the farther corner of the big room. I was forced to tell him that no American or Englishman could be found in such an ignominious position, should the house be searched, and I even assured the little gentleman that ...
— South African Memories - Social, Warlike & Sporting From Diaries Written At The Time • Lady Sarah Wilson
... the drawing-room and tried the grand piano, whose tones were as the music of the spheres. Still in vain. The listless fingers fell aimlessly ...
— The Unseen Bridgegroom - or, Wedded For a Week • May Agnes Fleming
... interview came to an end, the warrior turning his back as he left the room in order to hide his emotion. A few minutes after was heard on the floor below the sound of a grand piano which the Commissary had not been able to carry off, owing to the general's interposition. His voice was soon heard above the chords that he was playing. It was rather a lifeless baritone, but he managed to impart an impassioned tremolo to ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... of times in the diamond-shaped mirror ceiling and walls, and the effect was somewhat dazzling. The room had a partition, and on the other side was an ample couch for his Majesty to rest upon. In each reception room is to be seen a splendid grand piano, the music of which, when good, the Shah is said passionately to enjoy. One of his aides de camp—a European—is an ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... smallest detail. Mrs. Margaret J. Preston, the talented and well-known poetess, had drawn the designs for the furniture, and a one-armed Confederate soldier had made it all. A handsomely carved grand piano, presented by Stieff, the famous maker of Baltimore, stood alone in the parlour. The floors were covered with the carpets rescued from Arlington—much too large and folded under to suit the reduced size of the rooms. Some of the bedrooms were partially furnished, and ...
— Recollections and Letters of General Robert E. Lee • Captain Robert E. Lee, His Son
... April weather after Easter—it may be argued that they did not dislike each other's society. In case the afternoon should seem dull, his Excellency had engaged the services of Signor Strillone, the singer. From time to time he struck a few chords upon the grand piano, and gave forth a song of his own composition in loud and passionate tones, varied with, very sudden effects of extreme pianissimo, which occasionally surprised some one who was trying to make his conversation heard above ...
— Saracinesca • F. Marion Crawford
... grand piano, the only modern article in the room, save one of the portraits, presently to be described. On all this Evelyn gazed silently and devoutly: she had naturally that reverence for genius which is common to ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Book II • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... the rear drawing-room the grand piano sent upwards to Mrs. De Peyster its first strains, they were rapid, careless scales and runs. Quite as she'd expected. Then the player began Chopin's Ballade in G Minor. Mrs. De Peyster listened contemptuously; then with rebellious interest; then with complete absorption. That person ...
— No. 13 Washington Square • Leroy Scott
... I'll stay. (Lifts himself on to the shoulder of the grand piano and sits there swinging his legs ...
— The Philanderer • George Bernard Shaw
... stories in height. The rooms were large and lofty; perhaps at first they looked rather bare of furniture, but in hot climates people generally keep their rooms more bare than they do in colder ones. I missed also the sight of a grand piano or some similar instrument, there being no means of producing music in any of the rooms save the larger drawing-room, where there were half a dozen large bronze gongs, which the ladies used occasionally to beat about at random. It was ...
— Erewhon • Samuel Butler
... mingled. A log fire was burning on an open hearth, at right angles to which stood an immense sofa with a square back. This sofa was covered with dull blue stuff. Opposite to it was a large and low armchair, also covered in blue. A Steinway grand piano stood out in the middle of the room. It was open and there were no ornaments or photographs upon it. Its shining dark case reflected the flames which sprang up from the logs. Several dwarf bookcases of black wood were filled with volumes, ...
— The Woman With The Fan • Robert Hichens
... showy drawing-room up at the Manor Farm, thought over the event all day in her own critical way, and predicted evil as the result. There was an old Broadwood grand piano in the room where she sat, covered with a pile of old music—Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Haydn, and all the composers whose music Miss Sabina disliked. This music had belonged to Fred's mother, a fair and unfortunate creature, whose own story I shall some day write. Miss Sabina's performances upon ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 5, May, 1891 • Various
... starting; it is not to be expected that he will live in the meagre style of a man who means to be a poor curate all his life; and if the few hundreds Mr. Timpson advanced toward his daughter's fortune did not suffice for the purchase of handsome furniture, together with a stock of wine, a grand piano, and the laying out of a superior flower-garden, it followed in the most rigorous manner, either that these things must be procured by some other means, or else that the Rev. Mr. Stelling must go without them, ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... to by acclamation, and while one gentleman led her to the grand piano which stood between the front windows of the drawing-room, and another opened a music-book which she named, a set was quickly formed in the long apartment, the soberer portion of the crowd ranging themselves along the ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... soaked with a trampled conglomerate of mud and water, oil and filth, the debris left by the feet of the maddened, howling crowd, were entirely ruined; beds and bedding, mirrors, and smaller articles had been carried away, the grand piano had had a fire kindled on the key-board, as had the sofas and chairs upon their velvet seats, fires that were, none ...
— Woman's Work in the Civil War - A Record of Heroism, Patriotism, and Patience • Linus Pierpont Brockett
... exception is a big room on the right of the house as one looks at it from the main road. This room I see with great distinctness. It is large and low, papered with a white paper and with a parquetry floor, designed for a music room. There is a grand piano, but what I see most clearly are a good many books, rather inconveniently placed in low white bookcases which run round most of the room, under the windows, with three shelves in each. It seems to me to be a bad arrangement, because it would be necessary ...
— Escape and Other Essays • Arthur Christopher Benson
... in that small, barn-like structure, built of imported pine boards, and raised clear of the ground, was simply stunning. An instrumental uproar, screaming, grunting, whining, sobbing, scraping, squeaking some kind of lively air; while a grand piano, operated upon by a bony, red-faced woman with bad-tempered nostrils, rained hard notes like hail through the tempest of fiddles. The small platform was filled with white muslin dresses and crimson sashes slanting ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... Munich, despite Wagner, I was soon happy in the old haunts of the man whose music I adore. I went through the Mozart collection, saw all the old pictures, relics, manuscripts, and I reverently fingered the harpsichord, the grand piano of the master. Even the piece of "genuine Court Plaister" from London, and numbered 42 in the catalogue, interested me. After I had read the visitors' book, inscribed therein my own humble signature, after talking to death the husband ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... opened a window, and he stood looking out in thought while Pocket hurriedly completed his optical round. A set of walnut chairs were dreadfully upholstered in faded tapestry; but a deep, worn one looked comfortable enough, and a still more redeeming feature was the semi-grand piano. There were books, too, and in the far corner by the bow-window a glass door leading into a conservatory as minute as Pocket's study at school, and filled with geraniums. On the walls hung a series of battle engravings, one representing a bloody ...
— The Camera Fiend • E.W. Hornung
... altercation. Her knock was followed by a silence, and after a minute or two the door was opened by a handsome young man whose ruffled hair and general air of creased disorder led her to conclude that he had just risen from a long-limbed sprawl on a sofa strewn with tumbled cushions. This sofa, and a grand piano bearing a basket of faded roses, a biscuit-tin and a devastated breakfast tray, almost filled the narrow sitting-room, in the remaining corner of which another man, short, swarthy and humble, sat examining the ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton
... this congregation, however, even more so than the Sunday services, is the Friday evening meeting, which is held in the lecture-room. This room is plain and simple. It is provided with comfortable seats and a grand piano. There is no pulpit in it, but a small table and a chair are placed for the pastor on a low platform covered with green baize. The object is to banish every thing like formalism, and to make the meeting as free and unconstrained as a social gathering. ...
— Great Fortunes, and How They Were Made • James D. McCabe, Jr.
... filled with palms, and there was the unmistakable odor in the air of Russian cigarettes, and strange, dry scents that carried me back to the bazaars of Vladivostock. Near the front windows was a grand piano, and at the other end of the room a heavily carved screen of some black wood, picked out with ivory. The screen was overhung with a canopy of silken draperies, and formed a sort of alcove. In front of the alcove was spread the white skin of a polar bear, and set ...
— In the Fog • Richard Harding Davis
... whispering and pointing, the others scattered—to look up at a painting of a bishop of the Anglican Church, which hung above the mantel, to open the Bible on the small mahogany table that held the center of the room, to touch the grand piano with moist and marking finger-tips, and to gaze with awe upon two huge and branching candlesticks that flanked a marble clock above ...
— Apron-Strings • Eleanor Gates
... is a retinue of mouldy gigs and chaise-carts in the street; and herds of shabby vampires, Jew and Christian, over-run the house, sounding the plate-glass minors with their knuckles, striking discordant octaves on the Grand Piano, drawing wet forefingers over the pictures, breathing on the blades of the best dinner-knives, punching the squabs of chairs and sofas with their dirty fists, touzling the feather beds, opening and shutting all ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... door—hatted; hatted in henna, that being the season's chosen colour. A small dark foyer, overcrowded with furniture; a studio living-room, bright, high-ceilinged, smallish; one entire side was window. There were Japanese prints, and a baby grand piano, and a lot of tables, and a davenport placed the way they do it on the stage, with its back to the room and its arms to the fireplace, and a long table just behind it, with a lamp on it, and books, and a dull jar thing, just as you've seen it in ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various
... a favorite instrument at the time of Queen Elizabeth of England, and by some authorities is supposed to have been named in honor of the Virgin Queen, as she was called. The harpsichord, much in use during the last century, was shaped almost exactly like a modern grand piano. The honor of having invented the hammer which plays upon the strings of the piano now in use is claimed by several nations, but the credit is probably due to Italy, although the first pianos are said to have been made in Germany, probably in the city of Freyburg. The piano was first called the ...
— Harper's Young People, April 20, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... better to amputate your leg, once in a while than to risk getting too close to the outer edge of the trail in all this snow. He's an old warrior, is Spoons! He could carry a grand piano down this trail and never scrape the varnish. Look up, Enoch! We'll soon reach a broad bench where ...
— The Enchanted Canyon • Honore Willsie Morrow
... the beautiful possessions with which the refined home is adorned, none other is so indicative of the owner's culture and musical taste as a GRAND Piano. Those first impressions of discriminating taste, instantly aroused by the simple beauty of the Kranich & Bach Grand, are confirmed and enhanced by the exquisite tone ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... upon which are to be seen glasses, bric-a-brac and family mementos of various kinds. On the wall above hang family photographs. Between the oven and the door that leads to the outer hall stands an old-fashioned grand piano and an embroidered piano-stool. The keyboard of the instrument is turned toward the tile oven. Above the piano there are glass cases containing a collection of butterflies. In the foreground, to the right, a brightly polished roller-top desk of oak with a simple chair. Several such chairs are set ...
— The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume II • Gerhart Hauptmann
... pink silk curtains at all the windows, and loads of books, and flowers, and a cook who could make things like Mr. Farwell's cook can—and—and a grand piano, and an automobile, and a stable full of thoroughbreds and puppies—" She paused ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... wasn't peculiar to the Brule Indians, but was equally true of those in the Oklahoma reservation who boomed the luxury trades when oil was discovered on their land. There it was no uncommon sight to see a gaudy limousine parked outside a tepee and a grand piano ...
— Land of the Burnt Thigh • Edith Eudora Kohl
... laugh is fled from porch and lawn, And the bugle died from the fort on the hill, And the twitter of girls on the stairs is gone, And the grand piano is still. ...
— Complete Poetical Works of Bret Harte • Bret Harte
... wait in a lofty drawing-room with three long windows from floor to ceiling that were like three luminous and bedraped columns. The bent gilt legs and backs of the furniture shone in indistinct curves. The tall marble fireplace had a cold and monumental whiteness. A grand piano stood massively in a corner, with dark gleams on the flat surfaces like a somber and polished sarcophagus. A high door opened—closed. ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
... only beginning to be realised, even by musical people, that the clavecin music of, for instance, Bach, loses at least half its charm, almost its identity, when played on the modern grand piano; that the exquisite music of Rameau and Couperin, the brilliant and beautiful music of Scarlatti, is almost inaudible on everything but the harpsichord and the viols; and that there exists, far earlier than these writers, a mass of English and Italian music ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... Michael and Lady Audley in the drawing-room. My lady was sitting on a music-stool before the grand piano, turning over the leaves of some new music. She twirled upon the revolving seat, making a rustling with her silk flounces, as Mr. Robert Audley's name was announced; then, leaving the piano, she made her nephew a pretty, mock ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... started things. Next I knew they'd laid out a regular golf course, drivin' off from the rug in front of the desk, through the double doors into the drawin' room, then across the hall into the music room, around the grand piano to the left, through the back hall, into the lib'ry once more, and onto ...
— On With Torchy • Sewell Ford
... one, which, besides giving the effect of motion, causes an interruption in these clean-cut outlines, as also in the formal spaces on either side. The horizontal accent of dark through the centre of the canvas, suggesting a grand piano in the dim recesses behind, fulfills a like obligation from the linear as well ...
— Pictorial Composition and the Critical Judgment of Pictures • Henry Rankin Poore
... seated himself at the grand piano which completely filled one end of the dreary room. Now he drew a protesting arpeggio from the black keys and ...
— The Dominant Strain • Anna Chapin Ray
... the spinet, and of almost equal antiquity, was an instrument in the form of a grand piano, called in Italy the clavicembalo, and in England the harpsichord. In Germany it was called the flugel or wing, from its being shaped like the wings of a bird. These also, in the earlier times, were made very small, and were ...
— A Popular History of the Art of Music - From the Earliest Times Until the Present • W. S. B. Mathews
... failing, we must drop to the simplest form of existence: hut, hovel, or shanty; where my lord digs and is dirty, and her ladyship, guiltless of Italian, French, and the grand piano, cooks, scrubs, darns, and keeps the peace between the pigs and the children. Or else we must come to socialism, in the shape of Brook Farm communities, or phalansteres a la Fourier, or, worse than either, to mammoth hotels. American tastes incline that way. There we may live in huge gilded ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... Lady Winsleigh's "crush" came,—he looked regretfully round the lovely luxurious drawing-room with its bright fire, deep easy chairs, books, and grand piano, and wished he and his wife could remain at home in peace. He glanced at his watch—it was ten o'clock. There was no hurry—he had not the least intention of arriving at Winsleigh House too early. He knew what the effect of Thelma's entrance ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... indistinguishable from the pile of rugs amid which he sprawled by the table, and of Sir Lucien Pyne nothing was to be seen but the outstretched legs and feet which projected grotesquely from a recess. Seated, oriental fashion, upon an improvised divan near the grand piano and propped up by a number of garish cushions, Rita beheld Mrs. Sin. The long bamboo pipe had fallen from her listless fingers. Her face wore an expression of mystic rapture like that characterizing the ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer
... The grand piano stood out from the grey-green background of the walls beyond, there was a bronze statuette of Orpheus with his lute on a twisted Byzantine column of white and gold mosaic, and a long cushioned divan set on one side broke the long lines of ...
— Olive in Italy • Moray Dalton
... indeed, altogether join it, gave them a collective nod of greeting with a faint but special smile for her husband on the end of it and then deliberately seated herself with a "No, don't bother; this is all right," at the end of the little sofa that stood in the curve of the grand piano, ...
— Mary Wollaston • Henry Kitchell Webster
... "And a concert grand piano. Don't forget that. She tunes it herself, too. Did you notice the tools? A possible romance. You've quite a nose for such things, Sue. Couldn't you get anything ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... over the shining surface of the grand piano and looked remarkably like an owl, an owl that ...
— THE MISSES MALLETT • E. H. YOUNG
... walls, and the ceiling was brilliantly frescoed, while one of the wide bay-windows contained a stand filled with a superb array of wax flowers. Regina opened the elegant grand piano, but forbore to touch the keys, and at last when she had feasted her eyes sufficiently upon some lovely landscapes by Gifford and Bierstadt, she quitted the richly decorated parlours, and slowly went up the ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... council-meeting or a camp assembly, it was called the "Meeting-house." On Sundays it became the "tabernacle." Week-days it was known as the "schoolhouse," and at odd times it was spoken of as the "theatre," the "concert-hall," and the "Trigger Island court-house." In one corner stood the grand piano from the Doraine, regularly and laboriously tuned by the great Joseppi. Madame Careni-Amori gave vocal and instrumental lessons here every afternoon in the week, from three to six. Among the older children ...
— West Wind Drift • George Barr McCutcheon
... appealed to her, for Toni was emotional, with the quick, facile emotionalism of the South; but she was no musician herself, and the grand piano in the drawing-room was silent through these sunshiny days. She had rather a talent for housekeeping, and in a smaller establishment would doubtless have been a success; but at Greenriver there was little for ...
— The Making of a Soul • Kathlyn Rhodes
... were the hangings and prevailing colours; there were rugs, wide, comfortable chairs and lounges, bookcases, a picture or two in deep glowing colours, a baby-grand piano, and an open fire ...
— Athalie • Robert W. Chambers
... Judith, in extremely clinging vivid dresses, the former's hair piled high in an amber mass and Judith's drawn severely across her ears, were lovely. Linda thought of the tropical butterflies of the river Amazon, of orchids like those always on the dining-room table. A miniature grand piano stood against the drapery, and Judith often played. Linda learned to recognize some of the composers. Pansy liked best the modern waltzes; Judith insisted that Richard Strauss was incomparable; but Linda developed an overwhelming preference for Gluck. The older girl insisted ...
— Linda Condon • Joseph Hergesheimer
... one of the most promising of our recent English school"—vigorous entrance of the drums, etc.—the whole character of Jimson and his music arose in bulk before the mind of Gideon. What more likely than Jimson's arrival with a grand piano (say, at Padwick), and his residence in a houseboat alone with the unfinished score of Orange Pekoe? His subsequent disappearance, leaving nothing behind but an empty piano case, it might be more difficult ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... a storehouse with varied and almost irresistible windows enticed us and we went no farther. It was a mighty department store and we were informed that we need not pass its doors again until we had selected everything we needed from a can-opener to a grand piano. We didn't, ...
— The Van Dwellers - A Strenuous Quest for a Home • Albert Bigelow Paine
... frowned impatiently—but was silent. She led the way into the house—into the lofty cool drawing-room, whose wide windows opened out to the garden. Here all was the same as ever with the exception of one thing—a marble bust of myself as a boy had been removed. The grand piano was open, the mandoline lay on a side-table, looking as though it had been recently used; there were fresh flowers and ferns in all the tall Venetian glass vases. I seated myself and remarked on the beauty of ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... the parlour, in front of the samovar, pouring out tea. To the left of the divan was the old English grand piano, on which my dark-complexioned sister, Liubotchka, eleven years old, was painfully practising Clementi's exercises. Near her Marya Ivanova, with scowls on her face, was loudly counting, and beating time with her foot. She frowned still more disagreeably at Karl as he entered, but ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various
... light, returned to her place, and sat down in her favourite pose—Turkish fashion. Both kept silent. In the distance, several rooms away, a broken-down grand piano was tinkling; somebody's vibrating laughter floated in; while from the other side—a little song, and rapid, merry talking. The words could not be heard. A cabby was rumbling by somewhere through ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... friend Fischer by my readiness to abbreviate the score, which was excessively lengthy. His intentions in the matter were so honest that I gladly sat down with him to the wearisome task. I played and sang my score to the astonished man on an old grand piano in the rehearsing- room of the Court Theatre, with such frantic vigour that, although he did not mind if the instrument came to grief, he grew concerned about my chest. Finally, amid hearty laughter, ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... room was very dimly lighted by two standard electric lamps, one near the fireplace, the other in a distant corner where a grand piano stood behind a huge china bowl in which a pink azalea was blooming. There was a low armchair near the fire by a sofa. He sat down in it, and picked up a book which lay on a table close beside it. What did ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens
... accounts." The old lady led the way into the darkened parlour. It was small and rather stiff. As one's eyes became accustomed to the dim green light one noticed the incongruity of the furniture: the horsehair chairs and sofa, and large accountant's desk with ledgers; the large Pleyel grand piano; a bookcase, in which all the books were rare copies or priceless MSS. of old-fashioned operas; hanging against the wall an inlaid guitar and some faded laurel crowns; moreover, a fine engraving of a composer, twenty years ago the most popular man in Italy; lastly, an oil-colour ...
— Stories By English Authors: Italy • Various
... up a little, for Eileen was made to play and even sing from the scores of "Madame Angot" and other recent comic operas—a form of music that had not hitherto come her way, though it was the only form the music-racks held to feed the grand piano with. Not till the worthy couple had retired, could she permit herself her old Irish airs, or the sonatas and sacred pieces of ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... S. G. Budlong took all the gifts she had gleaned, and piled them on and around the baby grand piano in the back parlor. There was a piano lamp there, one of those illuminated umbrellas—about as large and as useful as ...
— Mrs. Budlong's Chrismas Presents • Rupert Hughes
... will be done as regards all pleasures not comprised in the necessaries of life. He who wishes for a grand piano will enter the association of musical instrument makers. And by giving the association part of his half-days' leisure, he will soon possess the piano of his dreams. If he is fond of astronomical studies he will join the association of astronomers, with its philosophers, ...
— The Conquest of Bread • Peter Kropotkin
... pictures. I remember Guido's Aurora, Michael Angelo's prophets, Raphael's sibyls, while all about were sketches, landscapes and crayon drawings, gifts from the most famous living painters, many of whom are friends of the house. A grand piano, opened and covered with music, indicated recent and ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... immediately inspired by a liking for this pretty, graceful, unaffected girl. Sophy, for her part, was delighted with this large, English-looking drawing-room, with chintz-covered furniture, quantities of flowers, books, an open grand piano, and a pile of music. The hostess, too, Mrs. Milward's cousin, attracted her and ...
— The Road to Mandalay - A Tale of Burma • B. M. Croker |
