harp-strings

Strands of a cobweb glinted like harp-strings in the sunlight, and, as I looked more closely, something else that Linnaeus had written returned to my thoughts. next »

Excerpt: A Visible Darkness by Michael Gregorio 2009

The Sophie Sutherland was plunging into the huge head-seas and wallowing tremendously, the tense steel stays and taut rigging humming like harp-strings to the wind.

Chris Farrington, Able Seaman 2010

Women found it difficult to resist him, for he had a handsome face, a fine imperial Guardsman's figure, magnificent blue eyes, the flaxen hair of an angel, perfect self-confidence, a boundless experience with women, and a voice more melodious than harp-strings ...

Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine 2004

Women found it difficult to resist him, for he had a handsome face, a fine imperial Guardsman's figure, magnificent blue eyes, the flaxen hair of an angel, perfect self-confidence, a boundless experience with women, and a voice more melodious than harp-strings ...

Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine 2004

Gwilym been so dead to every feeling of gratitude and honour as to play the part which the story makes him play, he would have deserved not only to be emasculated, but to be scourged with harp-strings in every market-town in Wales, and to be dismissed from the service of the Muse.

Wild Wales : Its People, Language and Scenery 2004

And here the poles are nowise regularly set like harp-strings, but lie crosswise at all angles like a cobweb.

A Wanderer Plays on Muted Strings 2003

The other weaver was weaving a plain white serape with blue and natural-black ends, throwing the spool of yarn from side to side, between the white harp-strings, pressing down each thread of his woof heavily, with the wooden bar, then treddling to change the long, fine threads of the warp.

The Plumed Serpent 2003

The squally gusts make the metal shrouds vibrate like harp-strings; and unless we were on our guard to keep our clothes wrapped tightly to us, they would have been torn off our backs in shreds.

The Survivors of the Chancellor 2003

On its surface pleasure boats lay at their moorings by jetties and boatsheds; groups of stiff-necked swans sailed or ducked and straddled; while shady walks followed the banks, where the whiplike branches of the willows, showing shoots of tenderest green, trailed in the water or swayed like loose harp-strings to the breeze.

Australia Felix 2003

Wordsworth's concept of the mind "voluntarily" experimenting with words in order to capture or elicit a "spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings" closely resembles Shelley's image of Aeolian harp-strings being adjusted until harmony is produced, although Wordsworth is describing poetic creation and Shelley a harmonizing of the Gestalt of perception and emotional experience.

Re-collecting Spontaneous Overflows 1998