From hence they went up a wide staircase, that groaned and creaked as they trod, every step making its particular note, like the key of a harpsichord.
"Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists"
Washington Irving
A few quiet streets, unbroken by shop-fronts and unfrequented by vehicles, lead up to that quarter; streets of low white-washed convent walls overtopped by trees, of silent palaces, of unpretending little houses of the seventeenth or eighteenth century, from behind whose iron window-gratings and blistered green shutters one expects even now, as one passes in the silence of the summer afternoons, to hear the faint jangle of some harpsichord-strummed minuet, the turns and sudden high notes of some long-forgotten song by Cimarosa or Paisiello.
"The Countess of Albany"
Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
Turn from Robert Bridges's poems of outdoor life-the noble old English style-to Yeats's dim visions, or to Arthur Symons's harpsichord dreaming through the room, and you have the difference between yesterday and to-day.
"Life and Writings of Maurice Maeterlinck"
Jethro Bithell