This song of the waters is audible to every ear,
but there is other music in these hills,
by no means audible to all....
On a still night,
when the campfire is low and the Pleiades have climbed over rimrocks,
sit quietly and listen...
and think hard of everything you have seen and tried to understand.
Then you may hear it -
a vast pulsing harmony -
its score inscribed on a thousand hills,
its notes the lives and deaths of plants and animals,
its rhythms spanning the seconds and the centuries.

-Aldo Leopold

Romance

Or bid the soul of Orpheus sing
Such notes as, warbled to the string,
Drew iron tears down Pluto's cheek.

-Milton, Il Penseroso

Hymn

As a white candle in a holy place,
So is the beauty of an aged face.

-Joseph Campbell,
The Old Woman

Poem

A poem should not mean
But be.

-Archibald MacLeish, Ars Poetica

Pianissimo

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear'd,
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone.

-Keats, Ode on a Grecian Urn

Fortissimo

Not marble nor the gilded monuments
Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme.

-Shakespeare, Sonnets, LV

Sonata

In notes, with many a winding bout
Of linked sweetness, long drawn out.

-Milton, L'Allegro

Ode

By fairy hands their knell is rung;
By forms unseen their dirge is sung.

-William Collins,
Ode Written in the Year 1746

Fantasia

When Music, Heav'nly Maid, was young,
While yet in early Greece she sung,
The Passion oft, to hear her shell,
Throng'd around her magic cell.

-William Collins, The Passions