"Foreground" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... manor-house shuttered and unlighted, outlined against a pale sunset: in front a large, but neglected, garden. To the right, in the foreground, the porch of a chapel, with coloured windows lighted. ...
— The Wild Knight and Other Poems • Gilbert Chesterton
... able to comprehend them. Philosophy represents the phase or aspect of the truth which the conditions of thought at the time demands and emphasizes, which will co-ordinate the data at present in the foreground of consciousness. Thus they conceive of the facts of Christian Theology as the goal towards which philosophy is (often unconsciously) striving, but at which it can never arrive without the "leap of faith." Once this leap is taken, however, ...
— The Basis of Early Christian Theism • Lawrence Thomas Cole
... point of observation on a hillside above St. Mihiel the great battlefield on which a German army endeavoring to break through the line of barrier forts between Verdun and Toul and the opposing French forces could be surveyed in its entirety. In the foreground lay the level valley of the Meuse, with the towns of St. Mihiel and Banoncour nestling upon the green landscape. Beyond and behind the valley rose a tier of hills on which the French at this writing obstinately hold an intrenched position, checking the point of the German wedge, while ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol 1, Issue 4, January 23, 1915 • Various
... bits of twigs for the branches, which now showed more than hitherto, and he added a glimpse of the sky by neatly dovetailing the petals of some bluebells into a mosaic. He had turned back the long sleeves of his coat, and had with difficulty kept the tail of it from doing damage to his foreground, and had perseveringly kept the pigs at bay, when, as he returned with a last instalment of bluebells to finish his sky, he saw a man standing on the path, with his back to him, completely blotting out the view by his very broad body, ...
— Jan of the Windmill • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... been in those times, that world died in a pretty tableau, after the manner of Watteau's paintings; it meant little and accomplished little, and though its bright colouring brings it for a moment to the foreground, it has really not much to do with the Rome we know nor with the Rome one thinks of in the past, always great, always sad, always tragic, as no other city in ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 1 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... the picture that met his eyes was in dingy blacks and grays. The building that held the ticket, telegraph, and train despatchers' offices was a miserably old ramshackle affair, standing well in the foreground of this scene of gloom and desolation. Its windows were so coated with smoke and grime that they seemed to have been painted over in order to secure secrecy within. Here and there a lazy cur lay drowsily ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... awake in the Oran hotel, with windows open to the moonlight, Stephen was forced to admit that the picture was blurred because Victoria had gone out of it. Her figure had been in the foreground when first he had seen the moving panorama, and all the rest had been only a magical frame for her. The charm of her radiant youth, and the romance of the errand which had brought her knocking, when he knocked, at the door of the East, ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... not wish to put myself in any way in the foreground," Beric said. "I am still but a boy, and have no wish to raise my voice in the council of chiefs; but what I have learned of Roman history and Roman laws I would gladly explain to those who, ...
— Beric the Briton - A Story of the Roman Invasion • G. A. Henty
... locks from their eyes that they might watch him also. The papooses were chewing gum and staring at him solemnly. Old Mrs. Ghost-Dog, she of the ponderous form and plaid blanket that Luck had used with such good effect in the foreground of his atmosphere scenes, lifted up her voice suddenly, and wailed after him in high-keyed lament that she would see his face no more; and Luck felt a sudden contraction of the throat while he waved his hand to them and ...
— The Phantom Herd • B. M. Bower
... his horses in good order by the fosse; whilst they themselves on foot[364], arrayed with their armour, rushed forth; and an inextinguishable clamour arose before morning. And they[365] were marshalled in the foreground with the cavalry at the trench; the cavalry followed at a little interval; but the son of Saturn aroused a dreadful tumult, and sent down dew-drops, moist with blood, from the air above, because he was about to hurl many brave souls on ...
— The Iliad of Homer (1873) • Homer
... attacks, and her escapes. She darts round the lovely little girl, with the same momentary touch that the swallow skims over the water, and has exactly the same power of flight, the same matchless ease and strength and grace. What a pretty picture they would make; what a pretty foreground they do make to the real landscape! The road winding down the hill with a slight bend, like that in the High Street at Oxford; a waggon slowly ascending, and a horseman passing it at a full trot—(ah! Lizzy, Mayflower will certainly ...
— Our Village • Mary Russell Mitford
... Europe was openly arming against him, he had leisure for the affairs of the negroes? This display of philanthropy was set down universally for a stage-trick; and men quickened their eyes, lest such unsubstantial shows in the distant horizon might be designed to withdraw their attention from the foreground. ...
— The History of Napoleon Buonaparte • John Gibson Lockhart
... usually unimportant factor; the chief part is played by perverse psychic mechanisms. It is the business of psychoanalysis to straighten these out, and from the bisexual constitution, which is regarded as common to every one, to bring into the foreground the heterosexual elements, and so to reconstruct a normal personality, developing new sexual ideals from the patient's own latent and subconscious nature. Sadger has especially occupied himself with the psychoanalytic treatment of homosexuality and claims many successes.[253] ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... gazes fiercely before him. He has noticed a good deal, but can remember nothing. Moreover, he has no very clear idea what a foreground may be. ...
— The First Hundred Thousand • Ian Hay
... supercilious and enigmatic smile to the Camel (suggested by Kipling's wonderful creation). But if a gesture were given to each of the animals, the effect would become monotonous, and the minor characters would crowd the foreground of the picture, impeding the action and leaving little to the imagination of the audience. I personally have found it effective to repeat the gestures of these animals as they are leaving the stage, but less markedly, as it is only a ...
— The Art of the Story-Teller • Marie L. Shedlock
... long to choose. In the foreground stood a magnificent brown colt, that caught and held the attention, as it watched every movement with ears shot forward, and nostrils quivering; and as I pointed it out Jack's boyish face lit up ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn
... forest, with still pools of water lying between the Fern-trees, which, much as they affect damp, swampy grounds, seem scarcely able to find foothold on the dripping earth. Their trunks, as well as those of the Club-Moss trees which make the foreground of the picture, stand up free from any branches for many feet above the ground, giving one a glimpse between them into the dim recesses of this quiet, watery wood, where the silence was unbroken by the song of birds or the hum of insects. We shall find, it is true, when we give ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... blasted through solid rock. And then we reached the summit of this ridge, and like a flash the superb panorama of the Hudson burst upon us. At our feet lay the broad bosom of the Tappan Zee, its waters glistening in the sunlight, the spires of a village in the foreground, and the distance blue-girt with cliffs, ...
— John Henry Smith - A Humorous Romance of Outdoor Life • Frederick Upham Adams
... himself. He was too inexperienced to understand that one is never able to see clearly the exact condition of present experiences. There is then no perspective, and the good and evil, the large and small, are strangely confused. It is like the figures in a Chinese picture wherein the background and foreground, the little and the big, are much the same in their proportions. Only when a man looks back and beholds the events of the bygone days in their true perspective is he able to form a correct estimate of the relative values. Even Will Phelps would not have believed that there ...
— Winning His "W" - A Story of Freshman Year at College • Everett Titsworth Tomlinson
... the mission, founding and managing schools, raising subscriptions, and other things of a like nature; so that he has taken a more active part than Brother Ward or myself in these public acts of the mission. These things placed him in the foreground, and it has been no uncommon thing for him to bear the blame of those acts which equally belong to Brother Ward and myself, merely because he was the ...
— The Life of William Carey • George Smith
... trees. Then the shining, slippery iron of the railway running like a knife through the verdant bosom of the land almost hurts the eyes, and the accessories of station-sheds, coal-trucks, and the like, affront the taste like an ill-done foreground in an otherwise pleasing picture. A slight sense of depression and foreboding came like a cloud over the mind of poor little lonely Innocent, as she alighted at the station at last, and with uplifted wistful eyes tendered a ...
— Innocent - Her Fancy and His Fact • Marie Corelli
... faculties of Macaulay's mind that set his work far apart from other work in the same field,—the faculties of organization and illustration. He saw things in their right relation and he knew how to make others see them thus. If he was describing, he never thrust minor details into the foreground. If he was narrating, he never "got ahead of his story." The importance of this is not sufficiently recognized. Many writers do not know what organization means. They do not know that in all great ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... is, to be sure, very often in the foreground. Those who say, "My conscience tells me that this is wrong," often mean little more than, "I feel ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton
... to have had some representation, some vital recognition, in her share of the pageant? If the Queen had come in state to the Horse-Guards to review the elite of her military forces, no one would doubt that "the Duke" should figure in the foreground, with a brilliant staff of Generals and Colonels surrounding him. So, if she were proceeding to open Parliament her fitting attendants would be Ministers and Councillors of State. But what have her "Gentleman Usher of Sword ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... perseverance of the third earl, who resided for some years at Florence. Only a few of the pictures can be named here: Madonna, by Raphael (1508); Holy Family, by Fra Bartolommeo; Mountainous Coast (fishermen in foreground), by Salvator Rosa; Nativity, by Carlo Dolce; Virgin Enthroned, by Paul Veronese; Third Earl Cowper and His Family; First Earl Cowper, by Sir Godfrey Kneller; Francis Bacon, by Van Somer; Turenne, by Rembrandt; Charles Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, by Janssens. The whole ...
— Hertfordshire • Herbert W Tompkins
... foreground and its background: and it is principally in the management of its perspective that one artist differs from another. Some events must be represented on a large scale, others diminished; the great majority will be lost in ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... panorama, which sweeps three-fourths of the horizon, beginning with the Fishkill mountains, and ending with the Catskills, is exceedingly fine. The eastern view embraces the Vassar Female College, the noble gift of Matthew Vassar, Esq., to the cause of female education. In the foreground and middle distance are the rich rolling landscapes of Dutchess and the fertile hillsides of Ulster counties, the glittering spires of Poughkeepsie, the lordly Hudson, and southerly are seen the famous Beacons and ...
— Woodward's Country Homes • George E. Woodward
... her box and a few minutes later was in a ramshackle cab clattering stationwards. She left a note for Theo, but she was sincerely glad that time was too short for her to make any attempt to see either him or Joyselle. They had faded into the background of her mind, and in the foreground stood, piteous and appealing, ...
— The Halo • Bettina von Hutten
... large painting by Professor Holzhalb, representing a scene at Oeningen as it may have appeared in Miocene times, showing a lake with abundant vegetation on its shores, and appropriate animals in the foreground. Numerous glass-covered cases contain the magnificent series of fossils, both plants and animals. Dr. Albert Heim, professor of geology and director of the Geological Museum, was most kind in showing us all we wanted to see, and giving advice concerning ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... humanity there," rejoined Mrs. Falchion. "Nature is never complete without man. All that would be splendid without the mills and the machinery and Boldrick's cable, but it would not be perfect: it needs man—Phil Boldrick and Company in the foreground. Nature is not happy by itself: it is only brooding and sorrowful. You remember the mountain of Talili in Samoa, Mr. Roscoe, and the valley about it: how entrancing yet how melancholy it is. It always seems to be haunted, for the natives never live in the valley. There is a tradition that once one ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... who concentrates his attention upon the digestive tract, this part of his body occupies the foreground of all his thoughts. He exaggerates its delicacy of structure and the serious consequences of disturbing it even by an attack of indigestion. A patient to whom a certain fruit was suggested said he could not eat it. Asked what the effect would be, he answered that he did not know, ...
— Why Worry? • George Lincoln Walton, M.D.
... cane-colored beard." His lady is seated on the opposite side of the picture in wide ruff and long stomacher, and the children have a most venerable stiffness and formality of dress. Hounds and spaniels are mingled in the family group; a hawk is seated on his perch in the foreground, and one of the children holds a bow, all intimating the knight's skill in hunting, hawking, and archery, so indispensable to an accomplished gentleman in ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... generals, colonels, captains, majors, first and second lieutenants, sergeant-majors, sergeants, corporals and high privates who were engaged in that battle; and by the consummate skill of the artist, each one of them, to the great gratification of himself and his family, is placed prominently in the foreground. Such distinguished success should meet appropriate reward, and it is now rumored that the artist will soon be commissioned by Congress to paint for the Rotunda of the Capitol a grand picture of our late ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 2, No. 29, October 15, 1870 • Various
... right hand rested lightly on a Sheraton table; in the immediate background was a portion of a low ornamental garden wall, in the distance was a ruin principally composed of Ionic columns in various positions—presumably the devastating work of the warrior in the foreground, "Look on that," he said bitterly, and as I returned it, "and on this, the backbone of the British Army," smiting his manly breast. I looked, and in the bronzed, unshaven face and raggedly-apparelled figure before me, recognised a certain semblance to ...
— A Yeoman's Letters - Third Edition • P. T. Ross
... eyes were closed she smiled amidst the golden shower that fell around her. In the background, two other women, one fair, and the other dark, wrestled playfully, setting light flesh tints amidst all the green leaves. And, as the painter had wanted something dark by way of contrast in the foreground, he had contented himself with seating there a gentleman, dressed in a black velveteen jacket. This gentleman had his back turned and the only part of his flesh that one saw was his left hand, with which he was ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... foreground of that scene, On a soft bank of living green Sate a young nymph with her lap full Of the newly gathered flowers, o'er which She graceful leaned intent to cull All that was there of hue most rich, To form a wreath such as the eye Of her young lover ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... other hill, the view of which I described the 27th, and went to Colonel Huffy's monument, from whence the scene is different from the rest; the foreground is a gentle hill, intersected by hedges, forming several small lawns. There are some scattered trees and houses, with Mucruss Abbey half obscured by wood, the whole cheerful and backed by Turk. The lake is of a triangular form, Ross Island and Innisfallen ...
— A Tour in Ireland - 1776-1779 • Arthur Young
... years of rule. Back of her the Prince of Wales and the Prime Minister, who in later years I found myself always comparing to little Mr. Carnegie, the Viscount Curzon with his royal look, and in the foreground Sir S. Ponsonby-Fane, in white silk stockings, pumps and buckles, with sword and gold lace, and high-collared swallow-tailed coat. I admired the queen's black moire dress, her headdress of priceless lace, her diamonds, ...
— The Log-Cabin Lady, An Anonymous Autobiography • Unknown
... often stand in the foreground of the disease, and in that case it may be left to the special needs whether we deal with them as psychical or as physical changes. Even the patient may be made to see them in one or the other way ...
— Psychotherapy • Hugo Muensterberg
... do not here speak of artistical merits, but the play of the light among the lower shafts is also singularly beautiful in this sketch of Prout's, and the character of the wild and broken leaves, half dead, on the stone of the foreground. ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin
... the sky and of its winds. It is the cloud that, holding the sun's rays in a sheaf as a giant holds a handful of spears, strikes the horizon, touches the extreme edge with a delicate revelation of light, or suddenly puts it out and makes the foreground shine. ...
— The Colour of Life • Alice Meynell
... out in tasteful pencil sketches and good line engravings. We approached it this day from the shore in the direction in which the eminence it stands upon assumes the pyramidal form, and itself the tower-like outline. The acclivity is barren and stony,—a true desert foreground, like those of Thebes and Palmyra; and the huge square shadow of the tower stretched dark and cold athwart it. The sun shone out clearly. One half the immense bulk before us, with its delicate vertical lining, lay from top to bottom ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... moment. It was all so beautiful,—the red rock, the green fields, the warm brown sand of the road and bare places, the mighty mountains, the rugged cedars and sage-brush spicing the warm air, the blue distance and the fleecy clouds. Oh, I wish I could paint it for you! In the foreground there should be some cows being driven home by a barefooted boy with a gun on his shoulder and a limp brown rabbit in his hand. But I shall have to leave that to your imagination and move on ...
— Letters on an Elk Hunt • Elinore Pruitt Stewart
... wring his heart; but he should not ask any youth to imitate the conduct of the great poet. Carlyle said very profoundly that new morality must be made before we can judge Mirabeau; but Carlyle never put his hero's excesses in the foreground of his history, nor did he try to apologize for them; he only said, "Here is a man whose stormy passions overcame him and drove him down the steep to ruin! Think of him at his best, pardon him, and imitate, in your weak human fashion, the infinite Divine Mercy." ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... was a time of religious struggles. In the following century political and economic interests pressed into the foreground of historical movement. The democratic institutions of the colonies were repeatedly in opposition to those of the mother-country, and the ties that bound them to her lost more and more of their significance. ...
— The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of Citizens • Georg Jellinek
... choosing threepennyworth of flowers at the same stall, whom should they both see, walking all alone across the empty corner by the Bank, but Sophia Baines! The Square was busy and populous, and Sophia was only visible behind a foreground of restless, chattering figures. But she was unmistakably seen. She had been beyond the Square and was returning. Constance could scarcely believe her eyes. Mrs. Baines's heart jumped. For let it ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... the traditional abomination of desolation, for there was a touch of bloodthirsty and hungry life. Up away from the sea arose a stretch of dreary sand, and in the far distance were hills covered with snow and dotted with stunted pine, and bleak and forbidding, though not tenantless. In the foreground, close to the turbid waters which washed this frozen almost solitude, a great, gaunt wolf sat with his head uplifted to the lowering skies, and so well had the artist caught the creature's attitude, that looking upon it one could almost seem to hear ...
— The Wolf's Long Howl • Stanley Waterloo
... the mountains, of which I had lost sight for a time, rose up before me in sublime strength, no longer of translucent purple, but revealing, under the direct light, their rugged solidity. On my right, in the foreground, were lofty black cliffs, made darker by being seen lying in their own shadow. On my left, green hills, in varying forms, stretched almost an interminable distance, varying also in their color and depth of shade. At the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... the most subtle gradation of tone tells with a force in some measure lost in oil. As a consequence, the colour of the lightest tints in the distance must be as true as that of the deepest shades in the foreground, and hence the warmth or coldness of the pale washes of a pigment ...
— Field's Chromatography - or Treatise on Colours and Pigments as Used by Artists • George Field
... foreground always, and the parental grief so wild and loud—with that deeper, deadlier, infinitely more cruel private social wrong interwoven with all the political representation, and overpowering it everywhere, ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... face has taken on an expression of great astonishment. She has withdrawn. LOTH sits down on one of the chairs that stand around the table in the foreground. ...
— The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume I • Gerhart Hauptmann
... King halted sharply, shot up his ears, and whistled. Lucy was startled. That from the King meant something. Hastily, with keen glance she swept the foreground. A mile on, near the monument, was a small black spot. It seemed motionless. But the King's whistle had proved it to be a horse. When Lucy had covered a quarter of the intervening distance she could distinguish the horse ...
— Wildfire • Zane Grey
... Poulter's private sitting-room. This was a homely apartment furnished with much-worn horsehair furniture, together with many framed and unframed flashlight photographs of various "Terpsichorean Festivals," in all of which, conspicuous in the foreground, was Mr Poulter, wearing a big white rosette on the lapel of his ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte
... a water-mill, old, thatched, and with an unprotected wheel, like the one in the valley below. Some gnarled willows stretched across the water, whose trunks seemed hardly less time- worn and rotten than the wheel below. This foreground subject was in shadow, and strongly drawn, but beyond it, in the sunlight, lay a bit of delicate distance, on the rising ground of which stood one of those small wooden windmills known as Post-mills. An old woman and a child were just ...
— Jan of the Windmill • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... stare of the gold eyes in a peacock's tail. Windows of the Riviera Palace on the hill above were like orange-coloured lanterns hung against an indigo curtain; and in the Place itself bunches of vivid yellow lights, in globes like illuminated fruit set on tall lamp posts, lit the foreground of the strange picture with unnatural brilliance. Grass and trees were a vivid, arsenical green, almost vicious yet beautiful, and the flowers gleamed like resting butterflies. The summer warmth of ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... and proceeded: "This is an Australian sketch: you see those curious-looking trees, they are blue and red gums: there is the wattle, too, with its almond-scented flowers, and the native lilac. That cottage in the foreground was put up by an enterprising colonist, who went out from England some fifteen years ago; you see how lovely its situation is with its background of hills. I was out late one evening with a young companion, and we were rather jaded with walking, when we came upon this cottage. We stood upon ...
— Nearly Lost but Dearly Won • Theodore P. Wilson
... An image, the foreground presents to my sight, Which shed o'er my pathway its radiant light; An image of him who first held my soft hand, And shouted with joy ...
— The Snow-Drop • Sarah S. Mower
... an intuitive and a perfectly trained eye for the character and beauty of distant mountain lines, the solemnity of rocky gorges, the majesty of a single mountain rising from a base of plain or sea; and he was equally exact in rendering the true forms of the middle distances and the specialties of foreground detail belonging to the various lands through which he had wandered as a sketcher. Some of his pictures show a mastery which has rarely been equalled over the difficulties of painting an immense plain as seen from a height, reaching straight away from the eye of the spectator ...
— Nonsense Books • Edward Lear
... savage and unrelieved desert might be part of some cold and burned-out planet rather than of this fertile and bountiful earth. Away and away it stretched to die into a soft, violet haze in the extremest distance. In the foreground the sand was of a bright golden yellow, which was quite dazzling in the sunshine. Here and there, in a scattered cordon, stood the six trusty negro soldiers leaning motionless upon their rifles, and each throwing a shadow which ...
— The Tragedy of The Korosko • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the funny people and the pretty people acting out their little drama in the foreground—there is the scene in which they act, and the middle distance, and the background beyond, and the sky itself; beautiful rough landscapes and seascapes and skyscapes, winds and weathers, boisterous or sunny seas, rain and storm and cloud—all the poetry of nature, ...
— Social Pictorial Satire • George du Maurier
... bow!" shouted the second mate from the crow's-nest. Still on we sailed, till we saw it clearly from the deck. Lofty black rocks were peeping out from amid snow-capped heights, and eternal glaciers glittering in the sunbeams. In the foreground were icebergs tinged with many varied hues. Deep valleys appeared running up far inland; and above all, in the distance, were a succession of towering mountain ranges, reaching to the sky. Still ...
— Peter the Whaler • W.H.G. Kingston
... of the Libertad district. It edged away from the Amerrique range on our right. To our left, about three miles distant, rose the dark sinuous line of the great forest of the Atlantic slope. Only a fringe of dark-foliaged trees in the foreground was visible, the higher ground behind was shrouded in a sombre pall of thick clouds that never lifted, but seemed to cover a gloomy and mysterious country beyond. Though I had dived into the recesses of these mountains again and again, and knew that ...
— The Naturalist in Nicaragua • Thomas Belt
... northwest, lies lie de Villenoy, like a toy town, where the big bridge spans the Marne to carry the railroad into Meaux. On the horizon line to the west the tall chimneys of Claye send lines of smoke into the air. In the foreground to the north, at the foot of the hill, are the roofs of two little hamlets,—Joncheroy and Voisins,—and beyond them the trees ...
— A Hilltop on the Marne • Mildred Aldrich
... up, disclosing the elevated rear stage with a skyey background of dark blue, on which appear the horn of the crescent moon and the silver points of stars. Trees in the foreground, with two rope swings entwined with garlands of flowers. Flowers everywhere in profusion. On the extreme left the mouth of a dark cavern dimly seen. Boys representing the ...
— The Cycle of Spring • Rabindranath Tagore
... setting together of a nearer and a much more remote future, with little prominence given to the interval between, our Lord is but bringing His prophecy into line with the constant manner of the older prophets. They and He paint the future in perspective, and the distance, seen behind the foreground, seems nearer than it really is. The spectator does not know how many weary miles have to be traversed before the distant blue hills are to be reached, nor ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... said Ethel, 'I was really pleased and touched in spite of Mrs. Ledwich's devotion to her, till I found out a certain manoeuvring to put herself in the foreground, and not let her sorrow hinder her from any enjoyment ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... always there, Cousin Maria not having thought it in the least necessary, in order to put herself in accord with French traditions, to relegate her daughters to the middle distance. They occupied a considerable part of the foreground, in the prettiest, most modest, most ...
— A London Life; The Patagonia; The Liar; Mrs. Temperly • Henry James
... discretion. It was in this way that the "beards" dealt in dark deeds of conspiracy at the Cafe de Seville. At the hour for absinthe and mazagran a certain number of Fiesques and Catilines were grouped around each table. At one of the tables in the foreground five old "beards," whitened by political crime, were planning an infernal machine; and in the back of the room ten robust hands had sworn upon the billiard-table to arm themselves for regicide; only, as with all "beards," there were necessarily some ...
— A Romance of Youth, Complete • Francois Coppee
... St. Peter Martyr, or, indeed, in a score of other genuine productions, that the depth, the vigour, the authority of Titian himself are here to be recognised. The weak treatment of the great Titianesque tree in the foreground, with its too summarily indicated foliage—to select only one detail that comes naturally to hand—would in itself suffice to bring ...
— The Later works of Titian • Claude Phillips
... the Lollards, who were burnt just under you, look across to the city in the valley, with its heights all round, more resembling the Holy City, so travellers say, than any other city in the world. In the foreground is the cathedral, right beyond rises the castle on the hill; church spires, warehouses, public buildings, private dwellings, manufactories, chimneys' smoke, complete the landscape fringed by the green of the distant ...
— East Anglia - Personal Recollections and Historical Associations • J. Ewing Ritchie
... been attended by many deplorable circumstances which ought sometime, in the proper way, to be accounted for. But back of it all is the struggle of a people to come into its own, and while we look upon the incidents in the foreground let us not forget the great tragic reality in the background which ...
— President Wilson's Addresses • Woodrow Wilson
... of London. Mr. Browne is a blameless personality who, enjoying indifferent health, brings an equally blameless old housekeeper with him. He is not a sportsman like Potter, but indulges in a pretty taste for landscape painting, with elaborate flowers and butterflies worked into the foreground. So they live, each in jealous seclusion, drinking tea at fixed hours, importing groceries from England, dressing for dinner, avoiding contact with the "natives" and, of course, pretending to be unaware of one another's ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... intelligent fellow—well informed on many subjects, and even professing to be something of an art critic. I showed him one or two of my pictures, and he was graciously pleased to approve of them, especially a sketch of the ruined castle from the south, with the Lady Tower in the foreground. ...
— Boycotted - And Other Stories • Talbot Baines Reed
... were all smooth, as though polished by art; in the foreground I only noticed one which was covered with wonderful forms of dried lava. A deathlike silence weighed on the whole country round, on hill and on valley alike. Every thing seemed dead, all round was barren and desert, so that the effect was truly Icelandic. The greater portion of Iceland ...
— Visit to Iceland - and the Scandinavian North • Ida Pfeiffer
... a wretched room on the third floor of a wretched house, and there we beheld a picture of the greatest misery. A woman and five children clothed in rags formed the foreground, and in the background was Bottarelli, in an old dressing-gown, writing at a table worthy of Philemon and Baucis. He rose as we came in, and the sight of him moved me to ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... tea and supped. The night was warm and quiet, the silence only interrupted by the occasional sharp cry of a wood-hen, and the rushing of the river, whilst the ruddy glow of the fire, the sombre forest, and the immediate foreground of our saddles and blankets, formed a picture to me entirely new and rather impressive. Probably after another year or two I shall regard camping out as the nuisance which it really is, instead of writing about sombre forests and so forth. ...
— A First Year in Canterbury Settlement • Samuel Butler
... the struggling Rousseau, he bought, through Rouquin, a rather startling painting by the young artist, in which a herd of red cattle partook placidly of the skyline and a pallid windmill dominated the foreground. Later on, an expert informed him that the red cattle were rocks on the edge of a pool and the windmill was a lady making ready to dive into the water for a lonely swim. The painting was signed, but the name was not Rousseau. It was Fauret. Rouquin explained ...
— Mr. Bingle • George Barr McCutcheon
... the outlines of those magnificent mountains, the Victoria and Grampian ranges, that completed the distant part of the landscape, to the eastward, were distinctly defined against the clear morning sky; whilst, in the foreground, grassy round-topped hills, rose on either side of wide valleys sparingly dotted with trees, marking the course of the streams that meander through them, and the margin of the singular circular waterholes, with sides so steep as to render it necessary to cut through them to enable the ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 2 • John Lort Stokes
... Farther—Hezekiah could not be designated simply by [Hebrew: mlK] without the article. It is only by the utmost violence that the whole announcement can be limited to the events under Hezekiah, which everywhere form the foreground only. We might rather, with Vitringa, think of Jehovah, with a comparison of ver. 22: "For the Lord is our judge, the Lord is our lawgiver, the Lord is our King; He will save us," and of Ps. xlviii. 3, where he is called [Hebrew: mlK rb]. To Jehovah, ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions. Vol. 2 • Ernst Hengstenberg
... in Switzerland, is fully as reprehensible as any dairy custom could well be. In Fig. 7 the arrangement in vogue for the disposal of the whey is shown. The hot whey is run out through the trough from the factory into the large trough that is placed over the row of barrels, as seen in the foreground. Each patron thus has allotted to him in his individual barrel his portion of the whey, which he is supposed to remove day by day. No attempt is made to clean out these receptacles, and the inevitable result ...
— Outlines of Dairy Bacteriology, 8th edition - A Concise Manual for the Use of Students in Dairying • H. L. Russell
... in the mountains. Only some scrub wood is left, which will disappear within a half century. Yet another shows the effect of one of the washouts, destroying an arable mountain side, these washouts being due to the removal of all vegetation; yet in this photograph the foreground shows that reforestation is ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... the large particulars, then, were these: the foreground, the middle distance and the background made a synthetic whole, logically consistent, rational even—when you allow for the artist's make-up. That he will leave a full statement before the end, I venture to prophecy. His egregious vanity demands it. Nothing ...
— The Red Redmaynes • Eden Phillpotts
... whom none but Signorelli realised. The composition of this picture is hazardous, and at first sight it is even displeasing. The figures seem roughly scattered in a vacant space. The dead Christ has but little dignity, and the passion of S. Jerome in the foreground is stiff in spite of its exaggeration. But long study only serves to render this strange picture more and more attractive. Especially noticeable is the youthful angel clad in dark green who sustains Christ. He is a young man in the bloom of strength ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... souls that hereafter, till the end of time, might inhabit the land, could discern within the spring-day horizon, the course of the Blackwater and the Boyne before they blend into one; the hills of Cavan to the far north; with the royal hill of Tailtean in the foreground; the wooded heights of Slane and Skreen, and the four ancient roads, which led away towards the four subject Provinces, like the reins of empire laid loosely on their necks. Since the first Apostle of the Gentiles had confronted the subtle Paganism of Athens, on the hill of Mars, none of those ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... voice of Bompard, which resounded under the vaulted roof like a cannon-shot. There, seated on the parapet, they contemplated that admirable view of the lake, the downward rush of the fir-trees and beeches pressing blackly together in the foreground, and farther on, the higher mountains with waving summits, and farther still, others of a bluish-gray confusion as of clouds, in the midst of which lay, though scarcely visible, the long white trail of a glacier, winding through the hollows ...
— Tartarin On The Alps • Alphonse Daudet
... pressure of necessity, the concrete state religion in all its details, which must be preserved among the lower classes in the interest of the state and of society. The state religion was thus a matter of expediency and of usefulness. But once this idea of its usefulness was put into the foreground, it was natural that the question should immediately be asked: Was this state religion as useful after all as it might be? Could it not be put to greater uses? If religion existed in general for its political effects, why should it ...
— The Religion of Numa - And Other Essays on the Religion of Ancient Rome • Jesse Benedict Carter
... the kingdom of Kirke, daughter of the sun-god Helios, lies before us, bathed in glowing sunshine. The foreground is a luxurious garden whose groves of palms and fantastic southern trees extend in deepening shade into the background. {405} A colossal sphinx crouches at the gates of Kirke's palace on the left. Springs of water, represented ...
— The Standard Operaglass - Detailed Plots of One Hundred and Fifty-one Celebrated Operas • Charles Annesley
... view shows a portion of the diggings; a workman is bringing up a barrow-load of soil from one of the deep store chambers which the Children of Israel built more than three thousand years ago. In the foreground lie the fragments of a fallen granite statue, the head and face of which are intact. The other illustration is taken from the temple end of the excavations. The sculptured group of Rameses the Great seated between divinities is one of a pair that adorned the entrance; its companion ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 401, September 8, 1883 • Various
... and avulsion from their beds by the most powerful agents of nature, corroborate the impression. But the distant finishing which nature has given to this picture, is of a very different character. It is a true contrast to the foreground. It is as Placid and delightful as ...
— Mazelli, and Other Poems • George W. Sands
... strip to the fern-glade which lay midway between the height of land and Catharines-town; and there joined the large stream which flowed north. I could see in the darkness little of the secret and hidden valley called Yndaia, only the heights silhouetted against the stars, a vague foreground sheeted with mist, and the dark little house standing there ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... added some long strokes with a vigorous touch. He always drew the same landscape—large dishevelled trees in the foreground, in the middle distance a plain, and on the horizon an indented chain of hills. Liza looked over his ...
— Liza - "A nest of nobles" • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... over all the valley grew louder and stronger; but as yet we saw only the two men who at the first had confronted us—for we were in a deep recess in the mountain, whence the ground dropped away in front, so that the immediate foreground was hid from us, and we saw only some distant meadows, and then a broad lake, and over this more meadows and a sweep of heavy timber, and back of all great mountains rising ...
— The Aztec Treasure-House • Thomas Allibone Janvier
... of the world for the valley of Gettysburg. The bleeding sun went out in smoke. The smell of burning powder filled the land. Before us and behind us bursting caissons added to the hellish magnificence of this awful picture,—in its background a school of theology, and in its foreground the peaceful city ...
— Who Goes There? • Blackwood Ketcham Benson
... cove he met, and keep the poor man standing for public gaze, like chained innocence awaiting the nod of a villain. The picture would have been complete, if a monster in human form were placed in the foreground applying the lash, according to the statute ...
— Manuel Pereira • F. C. Adams
... would observe, in the—"Stand ho! Who is there?" Bernardo's inquiry after Horatio, and the repetition of his name and in his own presence indicate a respect or an eagerness that implies him as one of the persons who are in the foreground; and ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... master of millions, fat and good-natured and indolent, his brain a fever of faiths and aspirations which not he, but Andrew, so much more sparing in high hopes, has the tenacity to follow. These are in the foreground, and between and behind them are more and more, young men and women at every turn, crowding forward to take their places as the ...
— The Craft of Fiction • Percy Lubbock
... only difficulty that seems to remain is this, that the Synoptic Gospels are so often content to put the Jewish conception of Jesus as the Messiah, as the son of David and Abraham, and finally as the bodily son of God, in the foreground, and only hint at the leading and fundamental truth of Christ's teaching. We must never forget that the apostles were no philosophers, and the Logos idea in its full significance and historical development demands, for its correct understanding, a ...
— The Silesian Horseherd - Questions of the Hour • Friedrich Max Mueller
... of the wall; but all along the front of the Breche, on the French side, the glacier is scooped out into a deep fosse or cavity, by the action of the sun's rays pouring from the south through the opening. A wild world of mountains appeared to the south, those in the foreground covered with snow, and the more distant looming hazily over the plains of Saragossa. And this was Spain!—wondrous land, defying description, and in memory resembling, not realities, but fragments of tremendous dreams. Towards France, the scene is softer. Mountains there ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 456 - Volume 18, New Series, September 25, 1852 • Various
... coercion, and for the necessities of rest and coolness. The Spaniard, the Moor, or the Arab, has no merit in his temperance. The effort, for him, would be to form the taste for alcohol. He has a vast foreground of disgust to traverse before he can reach a taste so remote and alien. No need for resistance in his will where nature resists on his behalf. Sherbet, shaddocks, grapes, these were innocent applications to thirst. And the great republic of antiquity said ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... on Gardening," several artifices that he put in practice for increasing the apparent distance of objects, or for lengthening the perspective of an avenue by widening it in the foreground and planting it there with dark-foliaged trees, like yews and firs, "then with trees more and more fady, till they end in the almond-willow or silver osier." To have Lord Lyttelton bring in a party at the small, or ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... little or nothing of Tupman, who seems to have been thought a cypher. No doubt he felt that the girls could never look at him without a smile—thinking of the spinster aunt. In the picture of the scene, we find this "old Buck" in the foreground, on one knee, trying to pickup a pocket handkerchief and holding a young lady by the hand. Snodgrass and his lady are behind; Winkle and his Arabella on the other side; Trundle and his lady at the fire. Then who was ...
— Pickwickian Studies • Percy Fitzgerald
... good suppers are given; a picture drawn with white chalk on grey cardboard, dull and colourless, now that the bright silk dresses and gorgeously embroidered coats were no longer there to fill in the foreground, and now that the candles flickered sleepily ...
— The Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... incidents and compositions of life and character. We have STUNNINGTON, to be sure, whose traits of American expression, whether white or colored, are most true to the life; and there's BARLEYMOW, who will twist you an eclogue from the tail of his foreground pig. Others there be; but space has its limits, and ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 5, April 30, 1870 • Various
... thin white mist. A mile or so away, and lower down the valley, there was an opening in their shadowy masses, out of which rose the ringing of hammers and a long trail of smoke, for workmen from the cities were building the new wood-pulp mill there. In the foreground the river swirled by, frothing at flood level, for a week's fierce sunshine had succeeded a month of torrential rain, and the snow high up on a distant peak ...
— The Greater Power • Harold Bindloss
... depends. A more awkward, ungainly beast can hardly be imagined—a shambling collection of humps, bumps, knobs, protruding joints, and sprawling legs seemingly attached to a head and neck in the near foreground. But that shambling gait will carry a load three times as heavy as the stoutest pack mule can bear, and it will carry it twice as ...
— Wealth of the World's Waste Places and Oceania • Jewett Castello Gilson
... of a bright autumnal day. The softened lights streamed playfully athwart the grim and shadowy masses that lay on the chequered pavement, like the smiles of infancy sporting on the dark bosom of the tomb. The screen formed a rich foreground, in half-shadow, before the east window. The first beam of the morning, clothed in tenfold brightness, burst through the variegated tracery. Prophets, saints, and martyrs shone there, gloriously ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... now," snapped Burns, with some sarcasm and a good deal of exasperation. "You seem determined to get into the foreground somehow; get up and go through that scene and show us how a girl gets a saddle ...
— Jean of the Lazy A • B. M. Bower
... loose pieces of rock and washed them down into its bed. Here they were rolled over and over, and grated against each other, and were ground away till they became rounded pebbles, such as lie in the foreground of the picture (Fig. 25); while the grit which was rubbed off them was carried farther down by the stream. And so in time this became a little valley, and as the stream cut it deeper and deeper, ...
— The Fairy-Land of Science • Arabella B. Buckley
... beautiful spot, and at the same time, of great military value. The little town long ago forgot its role of fortress, but has been brutally reminded of it by the violence of the battles that have been fought in its neighborhood. In the foreground is the wide expanse of fields in the valley bottom; then a suburb of the town enclosed between two arms of the Marne. Across the river, scaling the slopes of a hill crowned by the ruins of a castle, the town rises, terrace-like, ...
— World's War Events, Volume III • Various
... lashed into storm incantations, stood now in quiet majesty, solitary though, at a respectful distance, surrounded. The frogs and whippoorwills were voiceful, and from the silvery foreground, shadow-blotted with cobalt, to the indigo-deep walls of the ranges, the earth spilled over ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... self-evidencing statement of this truth we are indebted solely to Christianity. The visible differences of race, color, culture, religion, and customs, are in themselves dissociating influences. Universal charity is impossible while these differences occupy the foreground. Slavery was a natural and congenial institution under Pagan auspices; nor have we in all ancient extra-Christian literature, unless it be in Seneca (in whom such sentiments may have had indirectly(3) ...
— A Manual of Moral Philosophy • Andrew Preston Peabody
... haunted by the suggestion of artistic intention, so happy is the composition of this extraordinary picture. The foreground is the dark, tremendous gulf of Merced Canyon, relieved by the silver shimmer of Vernal and Nevada Falls. From this in middle distance rises, in the centre of the canvas, the looming tremendous personality of Half Dome, here seen in profile strongly suggesting a monk with ...
— The Book of the National Parks • Robert Sterling Yard
... guidance of his man once more took to the wind-swept trail. We pursued a southwesterly course now, following the lead of the craggy red wall that stretched on and on for hundreds of miles into Utah. The desert, smoky and hot, fell away to the left, and in the foreground a dark, irregular line marked the Grand Canyon cutting ...
— The Last of the Plainsmen • Zane Grey
... away from the crimson blind," David murmured. "Still, I can quite imagine that to have been the name of the picture. That shutter or blind might have had a setting sun behind it, which would account for the tender warmth of the kitchen foreground and the deep gloom where the lovers are seated. By Jove, Bell, it is a magnificent piece of work. I've a special fancy for Rembrandt engravings, but I never saw one equal ...
— The Crimson Blind • Fred M. White
... formed where Marlborough House now stands. There are two ancient views of the park extant, in one of which the heads of Cromwell, Ireton and Bradshaw stuck upon poles at the end of Westminster Hall are visible, and in the other, a figure walking in the foreground is supposed to be Charles II. himself. The park was not opened to the public at this time, but those whose houses bordered it appear to have been allowed free entrance. Milton, the poet, certainly strolled here from his ...
— Westminster - The Fascination of London • Sir Walter Besant
... opposite side, behind Harlequin, are figures representing the bad clergy, lawyers, and doctors satirised in the Tragedy; and the whole is balanced by the emergence of the ghost in Hamlet, from a trap door in the foreground. Doggerel verses, at the foot of the print, celebrate the arrival of a bard, "from ye Great Mogul," bringing with him Wit, Humour, and Satyr, and receiving the Queen's "honest favour," in "show'rs ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden
... time the distant view from the chapel terrace was exceedingly beautiful, whilst the immediate foreground was uncompromisingly ugly. A vegetable garden then covered the space where now the steps of the "Slopes" run down through lawns and shrubberies, and rows of utilitarian cabbages and potatoes extended right up to the terrace wall. But beyond this ...
— The Days Before Yesterday • Lord Frederick Hamilton
... remarkable thing. The patterns, though all different, yet combined in some subtle fashion impossible of analysis to form a complete and well-proportioned Whole—a design—a picture. The patterns of the clergyman and the housekeeper provided the base and foreground, those of Miriam and the secretary the delicate superstructure. The girl's pattern, he noted with a subtle pleasure, was curiously similar to his own, but far more delicate and waving. Yet, whereas his was floral, hers was stellar in character; that ...
— The Human Chord • Algernon Blackwood
... me in my declining years. I cannot leave here. I have become greatly attached to this part of the country, and have no doubt that you will be, also. Sylvan scenes, with a dash of human savagery in the foreground, form the best relief for a too-extended assimilation of books. It has been like balm to me, and will prove so ...
— Mystery Ranch • Arthur Chapman
... a steel-colored river wound through a pale calcareous landscape; while to the left, on a lonely peak, a crucified Christ hung livid against indigo clouds. The central figure of the foreground, however, was that of a woman seated in an antique chair of marble with bas-reliefs of dancing maenads. Her feet rested on a meadow sprinkled with minute wild-flowers, and her attitude of smiling majesty recalled that of Dosso ...
— The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Part 1 (of 10) • Edith Wharton
... finely the next morning; the sky a pretty pale blue, and the sea calm and beautiful. The bay stretching boldly round on either side; the city clustering on the shores and up the slopes of the hills, the busy harbour lying in the foreground, terraced gardens all around;— ...
— Fair Italy, the Riviera and Monte Carlo • W. Cope Devereux
... the room of her trusted waiting-maid, that it is against etiquette. I know that indeed, but these are days, my good Campan, when etiquette has no power over us, and when, behind the royal purple, the poor human heart, in all its need, comes into the foreground. This is such a day for me, and as I know you are true, I have come to you. Did you not tell me, Campan, that you should receive the news as soon as the sentence ...
— Marie Antoinette And Her Son • Louise Muhlbach
... fundamental importance and widest reach in our knowledge of nature, in that it has come nearer to a knowledge of this cosmic ether, and has forced the question of its essence, its structure, and its motion into the foreground of monistic nature-philosophy. Only a few years ago the cosmic ether was to the majority of scientists an imponderable something, of which, strictly speaking, absolutely nothing was known, and which could ...
— Monism as Connecting Religion and Science • Ernst Haeckel
... the composer, the portrait painter of the people—their faith, their cry, their anger, and their love shall be in him. In him shall be seen the panorama of the crowd, focused into a single face. In him there shall be put in the foreground of this nation's countenance the things that belong in the foreground. And the things that belong in the background shall be put in the background, and the little ideas and little men shall look little in it, and the big ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... just springing into vigorous life and preparing to put forth its might, majesty and strength, in Trade, Commerce, and Enterprise. The man of 1801 can scarcely believe his eyes in 1862. The distant view is still there, from the top of Everton church tower, but how wonderfully is all the foreground changed. ...
— Recollections of Old Liverpool • A Nonagenarian
... though not extravagantly pretty, switchback road of fair surface stretching before us, roughly parallel with the sea, giving glimpses here and there of landlocked harbours with colliers and trampships at anchor. There was a far background of snow mountains and a changing foreground of spring grass and spring blossoms; interlacing branches embroidered with new leaves of that pinky yellow which comes ...
— The Car of Destiny • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... buildings, retains the original groinings of the roof, which in our English church have been sacrificed, to make room for large pointed windows; while in the church of the Trinity they have given place to a spacious dome, painted with a representation of the Assumption. In the foreground of this picture, is seen the royal foundress of the abbey; and, according to common tradition, the portrait of a female dressed in the habit of a nun, on the north side of the high altar, is also intended for her. But traditions of this nature are too ...
— Architectural Antiquities of Normandy • John Sell Cotman
... column passed him up the one shown in the immediate foreground of our sketch, and it was quite enough for ...
— Cobwebs From an Empty Skull • Ambrose Bierce (AKA: Dod Grile)
... railway for sake of five-and-twenty miles, and so the entire journey of sixty miles was to be made by the post road—the pleasantest travelling, if the mind were free. The grander and more distant features of the landscape we may see well enough from the window of the railway-carriage; but it is the foreground that interests and instructs us, like a pleasant gossiping history; and that we had, in old days, from the post-chaise window. It was more than travelling picquet. Something of all conditions of life—luxury and misery—high ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu
... a sign of unfriendliness. Their chief interest seems to be centred in two large black mounds that are visible in the foreground of the camp; what they are I am unable to make out — there is not light enough for that — but I am probably not far wrong in guessing that they are seals. They are rather hard eating, anyhow, for I can hear them crunching ...
— The South Pole, Volumes 1 and 2 • Roald Amundsen
... the landing of Caesar seem, by comparison, a contemporary occurrence. Now this inconceivably remote prehistoric era furnishes not merely arrowheads and stone chisels and burial mounds, but also other objects that are the background of that "picture of time" of which the book of to-day is the foreground. ...
— The Booklover and His Books • Harry Lyman Koopman
... took place another plot to assassinate Peter, and once again Sophia's friends, the Imperial Guard, were in the foreground. Some of the soldiers, however, were faithful to the young Czar and warned him in time to fly for his life, and once again he and his mother took refuge in the monastery that had sheltered him when he ...
— A Treasury of Heroes and Heroines - A Record of High Endeavour and Strange Adventure from 500 B.C. to 1920 A.D. • Clayton Edwards
... poised there for the mere survey of a new gown, but after a moment of dwelling on her own reflection she found herself considering it only as an object in the foreground of a picture. That picture, seen through the open door, reflected in the glass, was all of a bright, hard glitter, all a high, harsh tone of newness. In its paneled oak, in its glare of cut-glass and silver, in the shining vacant faces of its floors and walls, there was not ...
— The Coast of Chance • Esther Chamberlain
... selves, and for no one else—that little phrase by Vinteuil which was, so to speak, the national anthem of their love. He began, always, with a sustained tremolo from the violin part, which, for several bars, was unaccompanied, and filled all the foreground; until suddenly it seemed to be drawn aside, and—just as in those interiors by Pieter de Hooch, where the subject is set back a long way through the narrow framework of a half-opened door—infinitely remote, in colour quite different, velvety ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... who looked at them knew they were native kraals. He drew in his breath sharply, and the fold between his eyebrows deepened, as he scanned the clumsy drawing on the slate. Without those rude lines in the foreground to the right of the house, enclosing a little kopje of boulders and a low, irregular grave-mound, the drawing would have meant nothing at all, even to the eye of a practised scout, except a tavern on the lonely veld. The grave at the ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... dressing in the corner farthest from the looking-glass, in a dismal room you would scarcely use for your housemaid's brooms and dusters at home, you may stand for a few moments in the background of some scene, and watch the leading lady making the hit in the foreground. Will these few, well-dressed, well-lighted, music-thrilled moments repay you for the loss of home love, home comfort, ...
— Stage Confidences • Clara Morris
... of them bare to the summits, while others were robed in folds of glistening snow and looked like white curtains drawn part way up the sky. The whitey-gray of the alkali-patches, the brown of the dry earth and the rusty green of the sagebrush filled the foreground, melting in the distance into a purple-gray. The wondrous dryness and clearness of the air lent to these modest tints a tone and dazzling brilliance that surprised the eye with a revelation of possibilities never before suspected in them. But the mountains were ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, November, 1878 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... by an eastern window, and the rare Pettybaw sunshine filters through the branches of a tree, shines upon the dusty window-panes, and throws a halo round David's head that he well deserves and little suspects. In my foreground sit Meg and Jean and Elspeth playing with thrums and wearing the fruit of David's loom in their gingham frocks. David himself sits on his wooden bench behind the maze of cords ...
— Penelope's Progress - Being Such Extracts from the Commonplace Book of Penelope Hamilton As Relate to Her Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... in its mother's lap, nestles this tiny lakelet babe in the mountains. It shines like a plate of silver or beautiful mirror. It is a gem worth crossing a continent to see, especially as there runs between the lake and the point of view a little valley dressed in bright, grassy green as a kind of foreground in the rear. There is thus a silvered lake, a lovely valley, with bright and warm green shades, and rich, dark-black forests in the rear. No one can gaze upon such a combination and contrast without being impressed, ...
— My Native Land • James Cox
... hills, winding roads, with maybe an animal or two grazing in the field, and beyond all this vista, an ocean with pretty vessels passing on their unmindful way, and more often than not, many species of bright flowers in the foreground to heighten the richness of memory and the sentimental ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley
... music you can—do not miss any of the pianists either good or bad; there is always something to be learned, even from a poor player—if it is only what to avoid! Study great works, but even in those there are some figures and phrases which need not be brought into the foreground, lest they attain too ...
— Piano Mastery - Talks with Master Pianists and Teachers • Harriette Brower
... admit that Stonehenge looked far more impressive when apparently deserted, than with one or two tourists, however genial and guileless, in a high holiday humour in the foreground. At the same time, as we walked back to the car, I felt that I owed it to myself to lodge a grave protest against the indecent and involving methods my brother-in-law had seen fit ...
— The Brother of Daphne • Dornford Yates
... balanced in the making of the book,—type, margin, binding, and what we are now specially considering, illustration. How full of atmosphere are the landscapes, and how clear and perfectly kept their values! Look at the exquisite little wood scene on page 123, with the foreground in shadow, and a bar of sunshine lying across the middle distance. And here, in a totally different subject, a view of Stamboul, where the engraver has had to deal with land, water, and sky,—how cleverly he has managed to bring each ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 1, January 1886 - Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 1, January, 1886 • Various
... your people had respect for art, they invariably subscribed to a publication called the Cosmopolitan Art Magazine, and you received a steel engraving of Shakespeare and his Friends, with Sir Walter Raleigh very much in the foreground, wearing a beautifully puffed doublet and very well-fitting hose, and another steel engraving of Washington at Lexington. If your people were interested in literature, they frequented the book auctions. My father had a great respect for ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan
... She had always dimly guessed him to be in touch with important people, involved in complicated relations—but she felt it all to be so far beyond her understanding that the whole subject hung like a luminous mist on the farthest verge of her thoughts. In the foreground, hiding all else, there was the glow of his presence, the light and shadow of his face, the way his short-sighted eyes, at her approach, widened and deepened as if to draw her down into them; and, above all, the flush of youth and tenderness ...
— Summer • Edith Wharton
... took a little book with white leaves out of his pocket: he was a painter, and with a pencil he drew the smoking house, the charred beams, and the toppling chimney, which now hung over more and more. But the large and blooming rose-tree, quite in the foreground, afforded a magnificent sight; it was on its account alone that the ...
— A Christmas Greeting • Hans Christian Andersen
... with illiteracy, superstition and the needs of a benighted and down-trodden people, knotty questions in theology no longer vexed him, for he recognized that there was but one all-sufficient solvent for the dark problems which thrust themselves into the foreground, and that was the redemptive power of the Gospel of Christ. Men may be puzzled and perplexed concerning the theory of sunshine, but there are no questionings on the subject that can override the practical ...
— The American Missionary, Volume 42, No. 12, December, 1888 • Various
... the Infant in her left arm and a globe in her right hand. She stood between two shields of arms, which were suspended by bundles of nightshade, and on each of which were represented the three Lions of England, each shield being supported from the bottom by a monk in his full dress and cowl. In the foreground in front of each monk was a plant of the deadly nightshade, and over his head a sprig of the same, while in the lower part was the figure of a wivern—i.e. a viper or dragon with a serpent-like tail—this being the device of Thomas Plantagenet, the second Earl of ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... return from the captivity a second judgment would be inflicted, by which the national independence should be destroyed. This judgment is described with remarkable clearness and distinctness by the post-exilic prophets, inasmuch as, to them, it appeared already more in the foreground; compare the remarks on Zech. v. and xi.; Dan. ix. The only plausible argument against this reference is this,—that the capture of the city by the Romans was subsequent to the appearance of the Messiah, and that it is, after all, the latter ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions, v. 1 • Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg
... for which ages of inferior cultivation, our own middle ages for instance, are now praised and now blamed, was really a rare exception even during these ages.(154) Other kinds of acquisition and enjoyment then occupied the foreground; but there never was a time, when gain and enjoyment in general were not favorite objects of pursuit, and held in high esteem. The physical wants of uncultured men cry out much louder than intellectual ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... unfamiliar to me, but which I nowadays know to be Australian eucalyptuses. On the steps of the verandah sat a lady in deep mourning. A child played by her side, and a collie dog lay curled up still and sleepy in the foreground. The child, indeed, stirred no chord of any sort in my troubled brain; but my heart came up into my mouth so at sight of the lady, that I said to myself all at once in my awe, "That must surely be ...
— Recalled to Life • Grant Allen
... of gear," as Ardan said, like those of a man blind from his birth and suddenly restored to sight. They could not adjust them so as to be able to realize the different plains of vision. All things seemed in a heap. Foreground and background were indistinguishably commingled. No painter could ever transfer a lunar ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne
... arrival at a little table spread with a red and blue check cloth, the lime blossoms dropping into our soup, and the bees humming in the scented shadows overhead. I have a picture of the house by my side as I write, done from the lake in old times, with a boat full of ladies in hoops and powder in the foreground, and a youth playing a guitar. The pilgrimages to this place were those ...
— Elizabeth and her German Garden • "Elizabeth", AKA Marie Annette Beauchamp
... later Melvina, accompanied by the stranger and the wondering Portuguese boy, entered the patient's room, it was Mr. Benton who stepped into the foreground and who came obsequiously forward, pen in hand, ...
— The Wall Between • Sara Ware Bassett
... Lightenhome calculated. He saw that if he were saved the buying of the groceries for himself, he could eke out his small hoard till after Christmas. The poorhouse receded a little from the foreground of his vision as he gazed into the eyes of the boy opposite him at the table. He did not know that his own eyes spoke eloquently of his deliverance, but Elnathan choked as he ...
— Stories Worth Rereading • Various
... ask me so prettily, Fraeulein, I shall paint your beloved abbey," he replied. "But why not in sunlight, with your own sweet face in the foreground?" ...
— Hero Tales and Legends of the Rhine • Lewis Spence
... in like manner thrown together by a similarity of construction in which the personality of the doer is put in the foreground, and the emphasis of the commandment is rested on the manner in which the grace is exercised. The reason for that may be that in these three especially the manner will show the grace. 'Giving' is to be 'with simplicity.' There are to be ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren |
