“Their heavenly harps a lower strain began, and in soft music mourn the fall of man.”

— John Dryden

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John Dryden 196

English poet and playwright of the XVIIth century 1631–1700

Robertson Davies (1913–1995) Canadian journalist, playwright, professor, critic, and novelist

Harper of the Stones (1986).
Context: Again he struck the harp and began the jig. But this time it was such music as never came from a harp. It was the wildest, strangest music you ever heard, full of the sound of birds and the cries of animals and the wind and the rain, and the thunder and the lightning, and the dashing of huge waves against the shores of a great cold ocean that was formed from ice that had made its way slowly down from Ultima Thule. It was the sound of a world before mankind. It was the sound of the great merriment God must have known during the long days of Creation.

“To high-born Hoel's harp, or soft Llewellyn's lay.”

Thomas Gray The Bard

I. 2. line 28
The Bard (1757)

“As when in harp and song adept, a bard
Unlab'ring strains the chord to a new lyre.”

Homér The Odyssey (Cowper)

XXI. 406–407 (tr. William Cowper).
Odyssey (c. 725 BC)

“No other language than some soft sweet sounds
She had caught from the voices of the birds
When singing to the morning, and the notes
Sent from the waterfall, when, like a harp,
It held discourse in music with the wind.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

The London Literary Gazette, 1823

“That heavenly music! what is it I hear?
The notes of the harpers ring sweet in mine ear.
And, see, soft unfolding those portals of gold,
The King all arrayed in his beauty behold!”

William Augustus Muhlenberg (1796–1877) United States Anglican Episcopal clergyman

I would not live alway (published 1826), reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

“Soft as church music.”

Dan Patrick (1956) American sportscaster

Catch Phrases

“From harmony, from heavenly harmony,
This universal frame began:
From harmony to harmony
Through all the compass of the notes it ran,
The diapason closing full in Man.”

John Dryden (1631–1700) English poet and playwright of the XVIIth century

St. 1.
A Song for St. Cecilia's Day http://www.englishverse.com/poems/a_song_for_st_cecilias_day_1687 (1687)
Context: From harmony, from heavenly harmony,
This universal frame began:
When nature underneath a heap
Of jarring atoms lay,
And could not heave her head,
The tuneful voice was heard from high,
'Arise, ye more than dead!'
Then cold, and hot, and moist, and dry,
In order to their stations leap,
And Music's power obey.
From harmony, from heavenly harmony,
This universal frame began:
From harmony to harmony
Through all the compass of the notes it ran,
The diapason closing full in Man.