Jaap Kool writes already in the beginning of his book on the saxophone that it is understandable from the nineteenth century's way of making music – which was involved in interpreting feelings from outside the realm of music – that musical instruments were characterized by metaphors, but that it is not in any way clarifying. It can be true that the lower saxophones have "something plaintive" in their upper reaches and "a priestly calm" in their lower, as Berlioz puts it in his first and famous comment, but he might as well have said something quite different. Moreover, saxophones nowadays are mostly used for a type of music in which those virtues would rather act as a parody.
And because this faulty way of characterizing the sonority of an instrument is still in use, he goes on by giving a really too flowery example from the Berlioz/Strauß textbook on instrumentation, the horn:
"...ob es aus dem übervollen Herzen Siegfrieds den Jubel sonnigster Lebenskraft in Germaniens Urwald hinausschmettert – ob es als letzter heiserer Schrei des dem Tode nahen Kosakenfürsten in der endlosen Steppe – ob es der kindlichen Sehnsucht Siegfrieds das Bild der nie gekannten Mutter hervorzuzaubern sucht –"
[sorry, can't translate this one.. M.P.]
A beautiful comparison that teaches us nothing about the sonority of the instrument – here we quite agree with Jaap Kool – and which doesn't specify if and where we could use the instrument to good purpose..