Groove

“ From the Mystic Gulf, the symphony rose like a shaft of light, the notes transformed into rays of sunshine, born with the same joy as the blade of grass that pierces the earth, the opening flower, the budding branch, the insect unfolding its wings. ”

“ And the tops of the trees waving and whispering—the bushes answering in sighs—the brook singing its constant, yet ever new melody—the flowers moving like magic bells—the wild bird trilling his song! And when the sun is set, and the moon climbs the rocky verge and pours her soft silvery light on the scene,—or when dark clouds gather in the heavens, and hissing lightnings dart through them, and echo reverberates the thunder, and the swollen stream roars, and foams over the rocks and the crushed trees—all is to me, music! ”

“ Color and form are but half the landscape; it is sound that gives it life, and renders it companionable. What is winter, in one sense, but absence of sound, not merely the absence of bird and insect voices, but the rustling of leaves and grasses, the murmur of waters, the life and movement of growing vegetation!
Are not the first signs of spring conveyed through sound? Ere yet a song-bird can find an utterance, or grass-blade impart a sense of resurrected life I hear the 137cracking of the ice and the gurgling of the frost-freed rills. ”

“ The continuous singing of a skylark at a vast height above the green, billowy sun and shadow-swept earth is an etherealised sound which fills the blue space, fills it and falls, and is part of that visible nature above us, as if the blue sky, the floating clouds, the wind and sunshine, has something for the hearing as well as for the sight. And as the lark in its soaring song is of the sky, so the wood wren is of the wood. ”

“ Above, the trees hang, as if planted in the air, and throw a green, soft shade across the rich tints of the road, except where a gleam of sunshine breaking through, catches upon the salient points of the rock and chequers the deep shadows of the leaves with a dancing light. The silence to the ear has the same effect as the shade to the eye ”

“ It helps the sun to shine, and his rays fall on its page to illustrate it. It spends the mornings and the evenings, and makes such an impression on us over night as to awaken us before dawn, and its influence lingers around us like a fragrance late into the day. It conveys a new gloss to the meadows and the depths of the wood. ”

“ We can almost feel her smoothly undulating movements, her swift, but seductive, changes of pose, and those sharp, stolen side-glances, skilfully blended of shyness and fire, flashing from beneath her drooping black lashes, fascinating, but dangerous, like lightning gleams from a fringe of somber cloud. ”

“ Because the little brook eddies and purls round the stones, hitting them as it passes; sometimes the water falls down a large stone, and strikes against the water below; or sometimes it grates the little pebbles together as they lie in its bed. Each of these blows makes a small globe of sound-waves, which spread and spread till they fall on your ear, and because they fall quickly and regularly, they make a low, musical note. ”

“ The singing thou nearest is the lullaby the rain-children are singing to the drops. Thou knowest that the clouds are the rain-cradles, and when my children sing slumber songs and rock the clouds gently to and fro, the drops grow sleepy and forget to fall. ”

“ If the sun shines, his rays throw their gilding on the picture. If the rain-shower falls, the earth and the trees glisten with its reflexions. If the wind blows, the partially obliterated foliage will display the extent of its agitation. ”

“ As we sit in this wonderful air, many sounds—that of wood-chopping for one—come to our ears, agreeably blunted, or muffled even, like the drumming of a partridge, not sharp and rending as in winter and recently. ”

“ That theme takes up a large part of the play,—which is like a broad summer landscape strewn with many-coloured flowers that flash and glitter in the sun, while slowly a muttering thunder-storm gathers and lowers, and presently sweeps overhead, casting one black shadow as it passes, and leaving the fragrant and glistening plain all the brighter and sweeter for the contrast with its defeated menace and vanishing gloom. ”

“ Here in the very heart of the rock, cut and worn into weird and fantastic shapes, are halls, passages, and declivities, twistings and windings, amongst which the imagination runs riot and calls up the visions of strange, elfish, unearthly forms to people the uncanny surroundings. ”

“ That rhythmical sound which is like the last vibration of life gradually grew fainter and fainter, until it was hushed entirely, like the machinery of a clock that has stopped, and the dainty little girl was only an exquisite scrap of matter, inert, cold, and as white and transparent as the sublimated wax that burns on the altars. ”

“ As the smallest plot of garden ground possesses the capacity to receive and develop the germs of the most diverse forms of vegetation, from the violet to the oak, from the fragrant rose to the deadly poppy, so these modest little musical forms are replete with an almost boundless potentiality of suggestion. ”

“ This is the month of gracious shade of trees—dusky hair on the marble ground-chest invoking mortals' worship.
Here the composed wonder of the earth-canvas is divided by the proud black shade and virtuous white light. ”

“ It is our opinion that everything except man is laughing and rejoicing. Trees shake their leaves with a softer sound. Rocks look moist and soft, at least where the moss grows. Even the solitary old pine tree chords his harp, and sings soft and low melodies with plaintive undulations! ”

“ As we wind up the slope, the tinkling of multitudinous bells from the herd comes to us, which is also in the domain of poetry. All the way up we have found wild flowers in the greatest profusion; and the higher we ascend, the more exquisite is their color and the more perfect their form. ”

“ Look for example at the pine, how its branches, balancing each other, ray out from the tapering stem in stanza after stanza, how spray answers to spray, and leaf to leaf in ordered strophe and antistrophe, till the perfect tree stands an embodied ode, through which the unthinking wind cannot wander without finding the melody that is in it and passing away in music. ”

“ If you want to see a new and peculiar beauty, watch a golden sunset through 113 a grove draperied with gray moss. The swaying, filmy bands turn golden and rose-colored; and the long, swaying avenues are like a scene in fairyland. ”

“ The effect of the delicate leaves and feathery trees at the edge of the rock, relieved against the pale sky, is superb. A spirit of solemnity broods over the scene, fit feeling at so eventful a moment in the history of the past. ”

“ With a few brilliant and easily executed shadings he gives expression to the vibration of the atmosphere, the lustre of the sky at sunset, the massive structure of the ground, the blissful tremor upon the plain at sunrise. ”

“ For as the water in some shallow brook ripples over and between the stones dancing in the sunshine, so these curves of movement, now in light and now in shadow, flow between these figures and flow over them, until the whole composition is a woven mass of rhythmic undulations. Rhythmic? Yes, it is just because these ripples or festoons present such a beautiful example of rhythm, that I have dwelt upon them. In fact it is the rhythmic movement of the composition that gives to this painting its greatest charm. ”

“ A great symphony was that, the lullaby of the earth's infancy. After a long time and many changes, came the marsh reeds and the squashy moss plants that did for vegetation. It was all bog, wee frog—all. No wonder thy eyes grow big with wonder. ”

“ Under a bright sun, mixed up with glittering foliage, overtopped by graceful palms, and canopied by the most dazzling of skies, even roofs and chimneys combine with the beauty around them, and become part of it in their turn. ”

“ As the tree standing in the forest may be made into the violin music box of harmony, so my body, the material in the forest of matter, may be put in tune, become harmonious and be raised to perfection by the Master Musician, God—His mind within me. ”

“ As the girls grew used to the thunderous sounds they delighted to speculate from which bastion, or ledge, or flowering bush, would come that little puff of smoke, to be followed by the lightning and thunder of man's invention, scarcely less terrible than those of nature's cloud contests. ”

“ A grove of giant pines make music through this leafy vale, as the breezes sweep through their rustling branches; the carol of birds, the hum of insects, the rippling of waters, and the music of murmuring breezes, all combine to form a sweet harmony of sound, that, blending with the pure harmony of beautiful scenery, brings rest and peace to the souls of all who linger here. ”

“ I seem to see some of the life that is in the spring bud and blossom, more intimately, nearer its fountain head, the fancy sketches and designs of the artist. It is more simple and primitive growth; as if for ages sand and clay might have thus flowed into the forms of foliage, before plants were produced to clothe the earth. ”

“ All those, seen through the clear crystal water, the ripple of which gave motion and quick play of light and shadow to the whole, formed a scene of the rarest beauty, and left nothing to be desired by the eye, either in elegance of form or brilliancy and harmony of colouring. ”

“ Birds of the most brilliant plumage and enchanting melody fill all the summer groves, at early morn and eve, with their perfect music. Flowers of countless varieties, and most beautiful forms and hues, laden all the air with their ambrosial perfume. ”

“ Once, as they were carrying what I thought at first to be an enormous vase, as tall as a man, the moon, for just a second, came from behind a cloud, and its rays were reflected by the shiny surface of the strange object. ”

“ Smooth limbs, soft and white, that shine through the waters of the spring and amid the jewelled spray, or half revealed among the thickets of lustrous green, a slant ray of sunlight athwart the loosened gold of the hair--the vision floats before us as if conjured up by the strains of music rather than by actual words. ”

“ In wilful slumber, deepening every hour,
That draw their curtains closer round,
The nearer swells the trumpet's sound?
Lord; ere our trembling lamps sink down and die,
Touch us with chastening hand, and make us feel Thee nigh. ”

“ A storm, howling through a forest, makes a loud noise, but no music. Its notes do not synchronize with those contained in the limbs and leaves of the trees. But when the low, sad murmur of the evening winds gently strike the needles of the long-leaf pine there is music. ”

“ Sounds are not far heard on a mountain-top; they are lost in the abyss of vacant air. But amid these low, dense, dark spruces, which make a sort of canopied privacy of every square rod of ground, what could be more in keeping than this delicate musical whisper? ”

“ The very stones might burst into bloom, the pavements might ripple and surge and become as soft under foot as turf, the fogs and vapors of its chimney pots might become clouds of fragrance as in an orchard, or of incense as in a great cathedral. ”

“ One is reminded of great drops of rain pattering on a shingled roof, only the noise must exist in the imagination. Homely and plain as a crooked apple tree, and yet the very shade where it would be delightful to linger. ”

“ The shining drops, each one perfect in itself and changing colour with the shifting of the light, fall through the fingers back into the pool, with a faint suggestion of music in the sound. The circle widens outward, and presently the water is still again. ”

“ In the rise and fall of sensation and emotion the sequences of height and depth are as closely related as are the proportions of the crest and trough in the waves of the ocean, or those of the vibration of the strings of a musical instrument. ”

“ No earthly hand could plant those glowing masses and set them against the warm russets and golds of the lower crags, lifted up into this mighty sky world. The tenderness of the soft form and radiant colour of these little flowers in the cruel grasp of the rocks, yet softening them into grace with the short summer of their lives, is exquisitely touching. ”

“ Hence it is that, under certain conditions of atmosphere and cloud formation, we see at sunset painted upon the sky those wonderful combinations of colors, more beautiful and delicate in shading, more various in combination and purer of tone, than any artist, however cunning his fingers or brilliant his pigments, has ever been able to truthfully reproduce. ”

“ Once a grouse drummed,—one of the most restful of all natural sounds, to me at least, “drumming” though it be, speaking always of fair weather and woodsy quietness and peace; and once, to my surprise, I heard a clatter of crossbill notes, though I saw nothing of the birds,—restless souls, wanderers up and down the earth, and, after the habit of restless souls in general, gregarious to the last. ”

“ In purely decorative rhythm the lines flow harmoniously from side to side and from top to bottom on a given surface. In the greatest art the lines are bent forward and backward as well as laterally so that, by their orientation in depth, an impression of profundity is added to that of height and breadth. Thus the simple image of decoration is destroyed, and a microcosmos is created in its place. Rhythm then becomes the inevitable adjustment of approaching and receding lines, so that they will reproduce the placements and displacements to be found in the human body when in motion. ”

“ Within it lie ancient melodies.
Ancient melodies — weak and savourless,
Not appealing to present men's taste.
Light and colour are faded from the jade stops:
Dust has covered the rose-red strings. ”

“ But they oughtn’t to be gravel walks like these. Grass, Mr. Gardener—grass walks between your roses; gravel’s too hard for them. That’s a sweet pretty bed of white roses and blush roses. They always mix well together, don’t they? Here’s the white musk rose, Mr. Betteredge—our old English rose holding up its head along with the best and the newest of them. ”