ground-tone

And, once stirring, it was not to be silenced, but went on sounding like a ground-tone through all he did.

Australia Felix 2003

Suppose, for example, a golden-haired blonde chooses for the ground-tone of her toilet a deep shade of purple, such as affords a good background for the hair and complexion.

The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 Various

A century of growing historic consciousness has not passed over us in vain; and if any generic distinction is to be found between our recent, often penetrating and beautiful, poetry of the English countryside and the Nature description of Wordsworth or of Ruskin, it is in the ground-tone of passion and memory that pervades it for England herself.

Recent Developments in European Thought Various

Compared with the Nibelungenlied it possesses but little poetic merit and is written with distinctly Christian sentiment which is out of harmony with the ground-tone of the Germanic tragedy.

The Nibelungenlied Translated into Rhymed English Verse in the Metre of the Original George Henry Needler 1914

I overhear a young girl recounting what a perfectly lovely time she had last night, and how she simply couldn't stop dancing; but her foot drags a bit heavily and there sounds in her chatter and her vehemence the ground-tone of weariness.

The Patient Observer And His Friends Simeon Strunsky 1913

We hear, through all the varied music, the ground-tone of conventional life.

X. Essays. The Poet. 1844 1909

If the sound of hope is not heard as the ground-tone of these chapters, let it ring through all else at the end.

Woman and Womanhood A Search for Principles 1909

My feeling for religious music was then, as since, very deep; and the organ of Trinity gave satisfaction to this feeling; the tremulous ground-tone of the great pedal diapasons thrilling me through and through.

[Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White 1906

In the following chapter we shall have to study these fluctuating movements of his explicit and formulated thought, and to distinguish, if we may, the ground-tone of the deep waters from the more resonant roll of the shifting tides.

Robert Browning Herford, C H 1905

He is half “incapable of his own distress”; his strongest emotions are a flitting hope or a momentary pang, quickly dissolved into the ground-tone of mournful yet serene contemplation, which seems to float ghostlike in the void between grief and joy.

Robert Browning Herford, C H 1905