Chapter MOUTH to MUSIC of Index by Grocott's Quotations - Alpha

Goldsmith.—She Stoops to Conquer, Act IV. (Tony Lumpkin to Mrs. Hardcastle.)

MUSE.—O, for a muse of fire, that would ascend
The brightest heaven of invention.

Shakespeare.—King Henry V. Chorus.

MUSIC.—Music has charms to soothe a savage breast,
To soften rocks, or bend a knotted oak.

Congreve.—Mourning Bride, Act I. Scene 1.

The man that hath no music in himself,
Nor is not mov’d with concord of sweet sounds,
Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils;
The motions of his spirit are dull as night,
And his affections dark as Erebus:
Let no such man be trusted.

Shakespeare.—Merchant of Venice, Act V. Scene 1.

Of a sweet nature, goat-herd, is the murmuring of yon pine, which tunefully rustles by the fountains: and sweetly too do you play on the pipe.

Banks’ Theocritus, Idyll I. Verse 8.

MUSIC.—In some still evening, when the whispering breeze
Pants on the leaves, and dies upon the trees.

Pope.—Pastoral IV. Lines 79-80.

Thyrsis, the music of that murmuring spring
Is not so mournful as the strains you sing.

Pope.—Pastoral IV. Lines 1, 2; Banks, supra.

Sweeter, good shepherd, is thy melody, than you resounding water pours down from the rock above.

Banks’ Theocritus, Idyll I. Verse 8.

Nor rivers winding through the vales below,
So sweetly warble, or so sweetly flow.

Pope.—Pastoral IV. Lines 3, 4.

If music be the food of love, play on,
Give me excess of it; that, surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken, and so die.
That strain again;—it had a dying fall:
O, it came o’er my ear like the sweet sound
That breathes upon a bank of violets,
Stealing and giving odour.

Shakespeare.—Twelfth Night, Act I. Scene 1.

The murmur that springs
From the growing of grass.

Poe.—Al Aaraaf, 115.

[Poe says he met with this idea in an old English tale which he was unable to obtain, and quoted from memory: —“The verie essence, and, as it were, springeheade and origine of all music, is the verie pleasaunte sounde which the trees of the forest do make when they growe.”]

The streams with softest sound are flowing,
The grass you almost hear it growing,
You hear it now, if e’er you can.

Wordsworth.—The Idiot Boy, Vol. I. 214.