quote · Legacy record
I come under your windows, some fine morning, and play you one of my adagio movements, and some of you say,—This is good, play us so always. But, dear friends, if I did not change the stop sometimes, the machine would wear out in one part and rust in another. How easily this or that tune flows! you say, there must be no end of such melodies in him. I will open the poor machine for you one moment, and you shall look. Every note marks where a spur of steel has been driven in. It is easy to grind out the song, but to plant these bristling points which make it was the painful task of time.
I come under your windows, some fine morning, and play you one of my adagio movements, and some of you say,—This is good, play us so always. But, dear friends, if I did not change the stop sometimes, the machine would wear out in one part and rust in another. How easily this or that tune flows! you say, there must be no end of such melodies in him. I will open the poor machine for you one moment, and you shall look. Every note marks where a spur of steel has been driven in. It is easy to grind out the song, but to plant these bristling points which make it was the painful task of time.
Approximate author period: c. 1809 AD · industrial
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- Author or tradition
- Oliver Wendell Holmes
Attribution: attributed - Country attributed
- Not established
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- Approximate author period: c. 1809 AD · industrial
documented author birth year (1809)
An author lifetime, approximate period or collection date is not necessarily the date when these words were first written or spoken. - Recorded source
- The Optimist’s Good Morning (1911) (1911 AD)
Complete signed selection 289; printed byline: Oliver Wendell Holmes; Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1911; printed copyright 1907
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