Echo

An echo are a reflection of sound, arriving at the listener some time after the direct sound. Typical examples are the echo produced by the bottom of a well, by a building, or by the walls of an enclosed room. A true echo is a single reflection of the sound source. The time delay is the extra distance divided by the speed of sound.

Quotes

Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations

Quotes reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 215.

• Let echo, too, perform her part,
  Prolonging every note with art;
  And in a low expiring strain,
  Play all the comfort o'er again.
  • Joseph Addison, Ode for St. Cecilia's Day.

• Hark! to the hurried question of Despair
  "Where is my child?"—An echo answers—"Where?"
  • Lord Byron, Bride of Abydos (1813), Canto II, Stanza 27.

• I came to the place of my birth and cried: "The friends of my youth, where are they?"—and an echo answered, "Where are they?"
  • From an Arabic manuscript. quoted by Rogers, Pleasures of Memory, Part I.

• Even Echo speaks not on these radiant moors.
  • Barry Cornwall, English Songs and Other Small Poems, The Sea in Calm, Part III.

• Mysterious haunts of echoes old and far,
  The voice divine of human loyalty.
  • George Eliot, The Spanish Gypsy (1868), Book IV, line 149.

• Echo waits with art and care
  And will the faults of song repair.
  • Ralph Waldo Emerson, May-day, line 439.

• Multitudinous echoes awoke and died in the distance.
  * * * * * *
  And, when the echoes had ceased, like a sense of pain was the silence.
  • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie (1847), Part II, line 56.

• Sweetest Echo, sweetest nymph, that liv'st unseen
  Within thy airy shell,
  By slow Meander's margent green,
  And in the violet-embroidered vale.
  • John Milton, Comus (1637), Song.

• How sweet the answer Echo makes
  To music at night,
  When, roused by lute or horn, she wakes,
  And far away, o'er lawns and lakes,
  Goes answering light.
  • Thomas Moore, Echo.

• And more than echoes talk along the walls.
  • Alexander Pope, Eloisa to Abelard (1717), line 306.

• But her voice is still living immortal,
  The same you have frequently heard,
  In your rambles in valleys and forests,
  Repeating your ultimate word.
  • John Godfrey Saxe, The Story of Echo.

• The babbling echo mocks the hounds,
  Replying shrilly to the well-tun'd horns,
  As if a double hunt were heard at once.
  • William Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus (c. 1584-1590), Act II, scene 3, line 17.

• Lost Echo sits amid the voiceless mountains,
  And feeds her grief.
  • Percy Bysshe Shelley, Adonais, Stanza 15.

• Never sleeping, still awake,
  Pleasing most when most I speak;
  The delight of old and young,
  Though I speak without a tongue.
  Nought but one thing can confound me,
  Many voices joining round me,
  Then I fret, and rave, and gabble,
  Like the labourers of Babel.
  • Jonathan Swift, An Echo.

• I heard * * *
  * * * the great echo flap
  And buffet round the hills from bluff to bluff.
  • Alfred Tennyson, Golden Year, line 75.

• And a million horrible bellowing echoes broke
  From the red-ribb'd hollow behind the wood,
  And thunder'd up into Heaven.
  • Alfred Tennyson, Maud; A Monodrama (1855), Part XXIII.

• Our echoes roll from soul to soul,
  And grow for ever and for ever.
  Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying,
  And answer, echoes, answer, dying, dying, dying.
  • Alfred Tennyson, The Princess (1847), IV, Bugle Song.

• What would it profit thee to be the first
  Of echoes, tho thy tongue should live forever,
  A thing that answers, but hath not a thought
  As lasting but as senseless as a stone.
  • Frederick Tennyson, Isles of Greece, Apollo, line 367.

• Like—but oh! how different!
  • William Wordsworth, Yes, it Was the Mountain Echo.

• The melancholy ghosts of dead renown,
  Whispering faint echoes of the world's applause.
  • Edward Young, Night Thoughts (1742-1745), Night IX.