Take any noble musical air, and you find, on examining it, that not one even of the faintest or shortest notes can be removed with...out destruction to the whole passage in which it occurs; and that every note in the passage is twenty times more beautiful so introduced, than it would have been if played singly on the instrument. Precisely this degree of arrangement and relation must exist between every touch and line in a great picture. You may consider the whole as a prolonged musical composition: its parts, as separate airs connected in the story; its little bits and fragments of colour and line, as separate passages or bars in melodies; and down to the minutest note of the whole--down to the minutest touch,--if there is one that can be spared--that one is doing mischief.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
For do but note a wild and wanton herd Or race of youthful and unhandled colts... Fetching mad bounds, bellowing and neighing loud, Which is the hot condition of their blood; If they but hear perchance a trumpet sound, Or any air of music touch their ears, You shall perceive them make a mutual stand, Their savage eyes turned to a modest gaze By the sweet power of music.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Old men who never cheated, never doubted, Communicated monthly, sit and stare... At the new suburb stretched beyond the run-way Where a young man lands hatless from the air.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
That air would disappear from the whole earth in time, perhaps; but long after his day. He did not know just when it had become so... necessary to him, but he had come back to die in exile for the sake of it. Something soft and wild and free, something that whispered to the ear on the pillow, lightened the heart, softly, softly picked the lock, slid the bolts, and released the prisoned spirit of man into the wind, into the blue and gold, into the morning, into the morning!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Wild air, world-mothering air, Nestling me everywhere,... That each eyelash or hair Girdles; goes home betwixt The fleeciest, frailest-fixed Snowflake; that's fairly mixed With, riddles, and is rife In every least thing's life.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The head withdraws into its hatch (a boy's), The engines rise to their blind laboring roar,... And the green, made beasts run home to air. Now in each aspect death is pure.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »