Life and growth are an attuning, death and decay are an untuning; both involve a succession of greater or smaller attunings and untunings; organic life is "the diapason closing full in man"; it is the fulness of a tone that varies in pitch, quality, and in the harmonics to which it gives rise; it ranges through every degree of complexity from the endless combinations of life-and-death within life-and-death which we find in the mammalia, to the comparative simplicity of the amoeba.
"Luck or Cunning?"
Samuel Butler
The river gradually filled up the channel nearly bank high, while the living cataract travelled onward, much slower than I had expected to see it; so slowly, indeed, that more than an hour after its first arrival, the sweet music of the head of the flood was distinctly audible from my tent, as the murmur of waters, and the diapason crash of logs, travelled slowly through the tortuous windings of the river bed.
"Journal of an Expedition into the Interior of Tropical Australia In Search of a Route from Sydney to the Gulf of Carpentaria (1848) by Lt. Col. Sir Thomas Livingstone Mitchell Kt. D.C.L. (1792-1855) Surveyor-General of New South Wales"
Thomas Mitchell
No running brooks, no trees, no shade, no merry children frolicking to school, no music of Church bells, no decorous and well dressed people, wending their way to the edifice, where the organ's diapason and the solemn chant, in memory, rose with their stately swell, no cheerful faces of neighbors and friends, no kind voices to congratulate in good fortune and console in bad, surrounded and cheered the saddened pilgrims.
"The History of Peru"
Henry S. Beebe
