"Coliseum" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... whisper of the breeze through the silver birches, I've heard it with chilblains on my feet and bruises on my heart and henceforth when I want to see the shadows fall, I'll go and stand under Cheops' pyramid or the Coliseum at Rome or some other edifice reared with human hands as the monument to human achievement that helped to build the world. When I die they'll once more lay me close to Nature's breast, and, being dead, I sha'n't object—but until that time I'll stay away—as far ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... graceful manners of the queen were in strong contrast to the arrogant and vulgar style of Isabella, whose character is so dark a stain upon Spanish royalty. Every seat of the large circular theatre was occupied. Open to the sky, it was not unlike what the Coliseum of Rome must have been in its glory, and held an audience, we should judge, of over seventeen thousand. Nearly all classes were represented, for a Spaniard must be poor indeed who cannot find a dollar to pay his way into the bull-ring. The better ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... the earthly substratum which supports his weight. With women he likes a hand that can remain an unnecessary moment within his own, an eye that can glisten with the sparkle of champagne, a heart weak enough to make its owner's arm tremble within his own beneath the moonlight gloom of the Coliseum arches. A dash of sentiment the while makes all these things the sweeter; but the sentiment alone will not suffice for him. Mrs. Talboys did, I believe, drink her glass of champagne, as do other ladies; but with her it had no such pleasing effect. It loosened ...
— Mrs. General Talboys • Anthony Trollope
... vegetables? The thing is perfectly absurd. If I were rich, I think I would have my garden covered with an awning, so that it would be comfortable to work in it. It might roll up and be removable, as the great awning of the Roman Coliseum was, —not like the Boston one, which went off in a high wind. Another very good way to do, and probably not so expensive as the awning, would be to have four persons of foreign birth carry a sort of ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... this phrase is, all things are stripped and stunned. This is the force of the Greek words. The figure is that of an athlete in the Coliseum who has fought his best in the arena, and has at length fallen at the feet of his adversary, disarmed and broken down in helplessness. There he lies, unable to strike a blow, or lift his arm. He is stripped and stunned, ...
— Days of Heaven Upon Earth • Rev. A. B. Simpson
... with a little gesture of his right hand, "the theatre o' the woods! See the sloping hills, tree above tree, like winding galleries. Here is a coliseum old, past reckoning. Why, boy, long before men saw the Seven Hills it was old. Yet see how new it is—how fresh its colour, how strong its timbers! See the many seats, each with a good view, an' the multitude o' the ...
— Darrel of the Blessed Isles • Irving Bacheller
... but who appreciates Shakespeare! Lud! I thought such treasures were mythical. Flamby, I have a great idea. If you love Portia you will love Ellen Terry. I suppose her Portia is no more than a memory of the old Lyceum days, but it is a golden memory, Flamby. Ellen Terry is at the Coliseum. Shall we go to-night? Perhaps the Aunt would ...
— The Orchard of Tears • Sax Rohmer
... and Order League repeatedly addressed to the Mayor. Surely this will not be allowed to continue—the virtual payment of a bounty of a thousand dollars a year, the price of a saloon license, to the keeper of an indecent resort. Surely the First Ward debauch in the Coliseum will never be ...
— Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls - War on the White Slave Trade • Various
... the last generation does not remember Uhrig's Cave? nor look without regret upon the thing which has replaced it, called a Coliseum? The very name, Uhrig's Cave, sent a shiver of delight down one's spine, and many were the conjectures one made as to what might be enclosed in that half a block of impassible brick wall, over which the great trees stretched their branches. ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... Peter's, in the Capitol, in the Coliseum, in the Forum—I have even been in a cafe'-chantant, but did not derive from it the gratification I had expected. The weather is a drawback, it is raining. I am hot in my autumn overcoat, and cold in my ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... or Coliseum, was commenced by Vespasian, and completed by Titus, (A. D. 79.) This enormous building occupied only three years in its erection. Cassiodorus affirms that this magnificent monument of folly cost as much as would have been required ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects, and Curiosities of Art, (Vol. 2 of 3) • Shearjashub Spooner
... 128 of LITTLE FOLKS represents the ruins of the vast Flavian Amphitheatre, or, as it is also called, Coliseum. After a period of civil war and confusion, Vespasian began the Flavian dynasty, and entered upon his reign by filling up the spaces made by the demolitions of Nero, and by the fire, with large buildings, the most conspicuous and massive of them being the Coliseum. ...
— Little Folks (October 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... Shelley beseeches her to "bid the remorseless feeling flee" and "pity" if she "cannot love." We have just that as "evidence," and out of its meagre materials the biographer builds a cobhouse of conjectures as big as the Coliseum; conjectures which convince him, the prosecuting attorney, but ought to fall far short of ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... and with bragging drums— Bards and bardies laboring at a song. One lifts his locks, above the rest preferred, And to the buzzing flies of fashion thrums A banjo. Lo him follow all the herd. When Nero's wife put on her auburn wig, And at the Coliseum showed her head, The hair of every dame in Rome turned red; When Nero fiddled all Rome danced a jig. Novelty sets the gabbling geese agape, And fickle fashion follows like an ape. Aye, brass is plenty; gold is scarce and dear; Crystals abound, ...
— The Feast of the Virgins and Other Poems • H. L. Gordon
... heart of a young man and an artist! And when he goes forth into the open air, the sun is going down, and the gray ruins of an antique world receive him. From the Palace of the Cesars he looks down into the Forum, or towards the Coliseum; or westward sees the last sunshine strike the bronze Archangel, which stands upon the Tomb of Adrian. He walks amid a world of Art in ruins. The very street-lamps, that light him homeward, burn before some painted or sculptured ...
— Hyperion • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... studied theology, earning so great a reputation that, at the death of Leo IV., she was chosen his successor. Her sex was discovered by the birth of a child, while she was going to the Lateran Basilica, between the Coliseum and the church of St. Clement. Pope Joan died, and was buried, without honors, after a pontificate of two years and five months ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... through the Porta San Giovanni and had arrived at the Coliseum. Scorpa gave Sansevero little chance to answer, but with a friendly good-by, he turned toward the Monte Quirinal. Sansevero pursued his way along the foot of the Palatine. He was disturbed; but he could not bring himself to read into the ...
— The Title Market • Emily Post
... one of the Parthenon," said Caspar negligently, putting his hand within his wife's arm, and leading her from one picture to another. "The Coliseum you see: not quite so clear as it might be. These frames were made by one of the men in the buildings—given as a present to the club. Not bad taste, are they? And ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... Lanuvium, through the music of whose lines one seems to hear again the murmur of the Mantuan bees straying down from their own green valleys and inland streams to find what honeyed amber the sea-flowers might be hiding; or the poem written In the Coliseum, which gives one the same artistic joy that one gets watching a handicraftsman at his work, a goldsmith hammering out his gold into those thin plates as delicate as the petals of a yellow rose, or drawing it ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... conventional explanation—"he could not rest until he had made an effort to get to the bottom of it." He treated old subjects with an originality which rejuvenated them, and decked them again with the charm of novelty. He bade us, with a copy of Martial in our hands, accompany him to the Coliseum and be, in imagination, one of the sixty thousand spectators who thronged to behold the strange Africans, Sarmatians, and others who are gathered together from the four quarters of the Roman world to take part in the Saturnalia. He asked us to watch with Propertius whilst the slumbers of ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... place, young ladies, think you? On an apple tree, or on a ceiling? When is ivy in the right place?—when wallflower? The ivy has been torn down from the towers of Kenilworth; the weeds from the arches of the Coliseum, and from the steps of the Araceli, irreverently, vilely, and in vain; but how are we to separate the creatures whose office it is to abate the grief ...
— Proserpina, Volume 1 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... abhors, the experiments that she has failed in? What do I think of the Forum? An archway and two or three pillars. Well, but St. Peter's? Alas, Bernini has filled it with sculpture! No one can cavil, I grant, at the size of the great Coliseum. Doubtless the notion of grand and capacious and massive amusement, This the old Romans had; but tell me, is this an idea? Yet of solidity much, but of splendor little is extant: "Brickwork I found thee, and marble I left thee!" ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 • Various
... men and women worked together. On October 27 the Woman's Bryan League held a rally of the Silver Parties and a reception to U. S. Senator Teller at the Coliseum. The same evening the Woman's Republican League gave a reception to their candidates at Windsor Hall. Women seem to have an unsuspected gift for managing large meetings. The Denver Times (Republican) said: "The women have shown an ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... now an end. I must begin a new wandering, and perhaps in ten days more I shall have a better place for thought, among the mountain-chambers of the everlasting Alps. I look forward to the journey with romantic, enthusiastic anticipation, for afar in the silvery distance, stand the Coliseum and St. Peter's, Vesuvius and the lovely Naples. Farewell, friends who have so long ...
— Views a-foot • J. Bayard Taylor
... poet should follow her as a mistress, not use her as a handmaid. To such following of Nature, Shelley felt no call. He saw in her not a picture set for his copying, but a palette set for his brush; not a habitation prepared for his inhabiting, but a Coliseum whence he might quarry stones for his own palaces. Even in his descriptive passages the dream-character of his scenery is notorious; it is not the clear, recognisable scenery of Wordsworth, but a landscape that hovers athwart the heat and haze arising from his crackling fantasies. ...
— Shelley - An Essay • Francis Thompson
... ascended, in appearance similar to a boy's top. The Chinese have a startling prophecy connected with it, which is, that when it shall fall, the present dynasty of China will also decline; reminding one of the Latin saying, "When falls the Coliseum, Rome shall fall." But Rome has fallen, and the Coliseum still stands! Will the parallel hold good between this rock and China? The island of Koo-lung-Seu, when the British made the attack upon Amoy, appears to have been well fortified, but the Chinese ...
— Kathay: A Cruise in the China Seas • W. Hastings Macaulay
... scene lies in the Coliseum amphitheatre; (I mean the older one, anterior to Vespasian's:) bloody games pictured behind, and those "human torches" at fiery intervals. Nero, enthroned in side front, surrounded by a brilliant court, amongst whom are some of the conspirators: at other side Publius and ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... fishbait price. But if you offered them a free, 'take-one' chance—holy keewhiz!—I can just see it now! The Garden ain't half big enough in the first place. There's enough Take-One'ers in these parts to fill the old Coliseum. And they'd make the wild animals look like a cage of rabbits or ...
— Colonel Crockett's Co-operative Christmas • Rupert Hughes
... brain may be cut off without producing any pain. 3. The Coliseum was once capable of seating ninety thousand persons. 4. Success generally depends on acting prudently, steadily, and vigorously. 5. You cannot fully sympathize with suffering without having suffered. (Suffering ...
— Higher Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... a vanished race? Why all this worry over the Coliseum or Parthenon? Why so eager to learn of these crumbling mounds and broken down embankments in our own land? Then as if we heard a voice from the shadowy past, rising from these silent ruins, we begin to gain their secret ...
— See America First • Orville O. Hiestand
... March, ten years ago, I was sitting alone on one of the crumbling ledges of the Coliseum: larks were singing above my head; wall-flowers were waving at my feet; a procession of chanting monks was walking slowly around the great cross in the arena below. I was on the highest tier, and their voices reached me only as an indistinct ...
— Saxe Holm's Stories • Helen Hunt Jackson
... Superman to Androcles; and Mr Charles Ricketts has not disdained to snatch moments from his painting and sculpture to design some wonderful dresses for us. We three unbent as Mrs Siddons, Sir Joshua Reynolds and Dr Johnson might have unbent, to devise a turn for the Coliseum variety theatre. Not that we would set down the art of the variety theatre as something to be condescended to, or our own art as elephantine. We should rather crave indulgence as three novices fresh from the awful legitimacy of the ...
— Annajanska, the Bolshevik Empress • George Bernard Shaw
... The rush that should have flooded my soul in the Coliseum did not come. But walking one day in the fields about the city, I stumbled over a fragment of broken masonry, and lo! the World's Mistress in her stone girdle—alta maenia Romae—rose before me and whitened my cheek with her pale shadow as never ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... earth was born in an instant; up from the sun smile of the prairie rose a shadow of fiends. The walls of the pit, large as the Coliseum, were lined with Redskins of the murder caste. Bow-strings twanged; dag-spears, long-handled, were driven with vengeful swish into the bellowing mob of crazed Buffalo. A sulphurous cloud of gun smoke settled over the pit. Of a verity it was a carnival of demons. Surely it was a mighty ...
— The Outcasts • W. A. Fraser
... kilos from the gates through the drive brings you to the Schloss. Entering a hall about the size of a modern theatre you journey to the ante-room, a vast apartment, which for space compares favourably with the Coliseum at Rome. A world-exhibition of pictures and tapestries covers the walls of the Schloss, while an acre or two of painted ceiling shows the chief events of German history, from the Creation to ...
— Punch, Volume 156, 26 March 1919 • Various
... the Corso, the Via Gregoriana, the Forum of Hadrian, the Forum of Rome, we saw the gates of Septimus Severus, and Constantine, the Via Pia, the Coliseum, but everything is still vague, I don't recognise myself. The drive on the Pincio is charming, the band was playing, but there were not many people when we were there. Statues, statues everywhere. What ...
— Marie Bashkirtseff (From Childhood to Girlhood) • Marie Bashkirtseff
... him gigantic aqueducts, prodigious sewers, and roads which we find still in use, after twenty centuries of traffic. They left him the Coliseum, for his Capuchins to preach in. They left him an example of an administration without an equal in history. But the heritage was accepted without the responsibilities attached ...
— The Roman Question • Edmond About
... the temples and other public buildings, seemed to array them in holiday splendor. And the people, too, soon come forth into the streets in their gayest attire, decked out with unusual richness. The various streams converge towards the Flavian amphitheater, now better known by the name of the Coliseum. Each one directs his steps to the arch indicated by the number of his ticket, and thus the huge monster keeps sucking in by degrees that stream of life, which soon animates and enlivens its oval tiers over tiers ...
— Journeys Through Bookland - Volume Four • Charles H. Sylvester
... in Rome, Rome, Rome! I have stood in the Forum and beneath the Arch of Titus, at the end of the Sacra Via. I have wandered about the Coliseum, the stupendous grandeur of which equals my dream and hope. I have seen the sun kindling the open courts of the Temple of Peace, where Sarah Clarke said, years ago, that my children would some time play. (It is now called Constantine's Basilica.) I have ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... the Maison Dore. Nor had our time always been unprofitably spent. Toward Easter we journeyed together to Rome, and stood side by side before the masterpieces of Raphael and Domenichino in the Vatican, strolled by moonlight amid the ruins of the Coliseum, and drank out of the same cup from the Fountain of Trevi; often visited Crawford's studio, where then stood the famous group which now adorns the frieze of the Capitol at Washington, and by actual observation agreed in thinking his Indian not unworthy of comparison ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 29. August, 1873. • Various
... yielded little to dispel her gloomy forebodings. The sound of the tea-bell terminated her reverie, and rising, she walked slowly to the dining-room, throwing her head as erect as possible, and compressing her mouth like some gladiator summoned to the fatal arena of the Coliseum. ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... the seemingly impossible, and, by attempting, prove that one, with God, can chase a thousand and two put ten thousand to flight. I can imagine that the early Christians, who were carried into the Coliseum to make a spectacle for spectators more cruel than the beasts, were entreated by their doubting companions not to endanger their lives. But, kneeling in the center of the arena, they prayed and sang until they were devoured. ...
— In His Image • William Jennings Bryan
... Parthenon. Retrace your steps as much as you like from the Palace of Versailles to the Castle of Heidelberg. From the Castle of Heidelberg to the Notre Dame of Paris. From the Notre Dame to the Alhambra. From the Alhambra to St. Sophia. From St. Sophia to the Coliseum. From the Coliseum to the Propyleans. You may recede with ages, you do not recede in art. The Pyramids and the Iliad stand on a fore plan. Masterpieces have the same level—the Absolute. Once the Absolute is ...
— Cobwebs of Thought • Arachne
... Zouaves! Infantry! when the one only sane thing to do," cried every cannoneer of Camp Callender—in its white lanes or on three-hours' leave at home on Bayou Road or Coliseum Square or Elysian Fields or Prytania street—"the one sane thing to do," insisted the growingly profane lads to their elders, and assented the secretly pained elders to them, "the one thing that, if only for shame's ...
— Kincaid's Battery • George W. Cable
... supposed to be exploded ideas of the past, the writer may recall an incident of his youth, while spending a few days in the convent of the Passionists, near the Coliseum at Rome. These worthy monks, after using a variety of arguments for his conversion, expressed the hope that a miraculous interposition would be vouchsafed to that end, and that the Virgin would manifest herself to ...
— The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century • Francis Parkman
... surprised into a moment of confidence, walking home in the moonlight from the Coliseum. En vrai militaire, he has begun at the right end, and written to Mr. Kinnaird to ask leave to come and try his luck; and cool as he looks, I believe he would rather prepare ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... XIII and XIV, Xenia and Apophoreta, are two collections of inscriptions for presents at the Saturnalia); also a Liber Spectaculorum on the opening of the grand Flavian amphitheatre (the Coliseum) begun by Vespasian ...
— Helps to Latin Translation at Sight • Edmund Luce
... modeled on the plan of the Coliseum of Rome, we witnessed performances that evinced the wonderful docility Mr. Hagenbeck's animals possess, and manifested the complete control their trainers have ...
— By Water to the Columbian Exposition • Johanna S. Wisthaler
... her, not yesterday) by asking 'if I had got as much money as I expected by any works published of late?'—to which I answered, of course, 'exactly as much'—e grazioso! (All the same, if you were to ask her, or the like of her, 'how much the stone-work of the Coliseum would fetch, properly burned down to lime?'—she would shudder from head to foot and call you 'barbaro' with good Trojan heart.) Now you suppose—(watch my rhetorical figure here)—you suppose I am going to congratulate myself on being so much for the better, en pays de connaissance, with ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... to court the soldiers by largesses; in short, he displayed a nobleness of disposition worthy of the most illustrious birth, and befitting the exalted station to which he had arrived. This prince was the founder of the noble amphitheatre, called the Coliseum, which remains to this day. Twelve thousand Jewish captives were employed in its erection, and it was capable of containing 80,000 spectators seated, and 30,000 standing. ...
— Pinnock's Improved Edition of Dr. Goldsmith's History of Rome • Oliver Goldsmith
... assembled in the great Coliseum Hall at Chicago on June 18, 1912. But for ten days the hosts had been coming in, one delegation after another; the hotels were packed; each committee had its special quarters; crowds of sight-seers, shouters, and supporters swelled the multitude. The Republican National Committee ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... different times and under ten different Roman emperors. Orders were given to put to death all the Christians wherever they could be found. Some were cast into prison, some exiled, some taken to the Roman Coliseum—an immense building constructed for public amusements—where they were put to death in the most terrible manner in the presence of the emperor and people assembled to witness these fearful scenes. Some were stripped of their clothing and left standing ...
— Baltimore Catechism No. 4 (of 4) - An Explanation Of The Baltimore Catechism of Christian Doctrine • Thomas L. Kinkead
... of Hope only as a fine Diana; and how, after evidently being struck with Abel Newt, he had merely exclaimed, with a kind of suppressed excitement, as if he saw what a striking picture he would make, "Manfred in the Coliseum!" ...
— Trumps • George William Curtis
... were trained to tight in the Coliseum were compelled to practice the most graceful postures of falling and the finest attitudes to assume in dying, in case they were vanquished. They were obliged to eat food which would make the blood thick in order that they should not die quickly when wounded, thus giving the spectators prolonged ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden
... into the hall for coffee—there was nothing further to be gained by having another tete-a-tete with Harietta, so he sat down by Stanislass and suggested that the other two should go on to the Coliseum without them, and Harietta was obliged to depart reluctantly with Ferdinand, having arranged that Stepan should let her know, directly he arrived in Paris, whither he was going in a ...
— The Price of Things • Elinor Glyn
... Shambles shoal. This bank, a hidden obstruction at the entrance of Portland roads, is not a barrier; it is an amphitheatre—a circus of sand under the sea, its benches cut out by the circling of the waves—an arena, round and symmetrical, as high as a Jungfrau, only drowned—a coliseum of the ocean, seen by the diver in the vision-like transparency which engulfs him,—such is the Shambles shoal. There hydras fight, leviathans meet. There, says the legend, at the bottom of the gigantic shaft, are ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... the breadth of the columns of St. Peter's, Tivoly, Vesuvius, Castellamare, and Cassines, the roses of Genoa, the Coliseum by moonlight. With her other ear Emma was listening to a conversation full of words she did not understand. A circle gathered round a very young man who the week before had beaten "Miss Arabella" and "Romolus," ...
— Madame Bovary • Gustave Flaubert
... succeeds wonder, and where no place is a mere repetition of another, Mary may well have been impressed by her first visit to the Eternal City. Here, in November, she was able to sit and sketch in the Coliseum with her child and her husband, who found the wonderful ruin a source of inspiration. But Rome was now only a resting-place on their road to still sunnier Naples; and on November 27 Shelley set out a day in advance of Mary and her child to secure ...
— Mrs. Shelley • Lucy M. Rossetti
... that whole amphitheatre, which seemed to me then more cruel than the Coliseum ever was, rang out with a cry of "Face, face!" I tried the counter-cry of "Shame! shame!" but I was in disgrace among my neighbors, and a counter-cry never takes as its prototype does, either. At first, on the stage, they affected not to hear or understand; then there ...
— The Man Without a Country and Other Tales • Edward E. Hale
... that of man; and in her starry shade Of dim and solitary loveliness, I learned the language of another world. I do remember me, that in my youth, When I was wandering,—upon such a night I stood within the Coliseum's wall,[166] 10 'Midst the chief relics of almighty Rome; The trees which grew along the broken arches Waved dark in the blue midnight, and the stars Shone through the rents of ruin; from afar The watch-dog bayed beyond the Tiber; ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron |
