Date: 1817, 1818

"With ever-changing notes it floats along, / Till on my passive soul there seemed to creep / A melody, like waves on wrinkled sands that leap"

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

Date: 1820

"Only a sense / Remains of them, like the omnipotence / Of music, when the inspired voice and lute / Languish, ere yet the responses are mute, / Which through the deep and labyrinthine soul, / Like echoes through long caverns, wind and roll."

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

Date: w. 1821, 1840

"Man is an instrument over which a series of external and internal impressions are driven, like the alternations of an ever-changing wind over an Aeolian lyre, which move it by their motion to ever-changing melody."

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

Date: 1998

"But belligerence was a poor aid to concentration, as were the three gins and a bottle of wine, and three hours later he was still staring a the score on the piano, in a hunched attitude of work, with a pencil in his hand and a frown, but hearing and seeing only the bright hurdy-gurdy carousel of...

— McEwan, Ian (b. 1948)