"Masterpiece" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... great, silent, shadow-filled cathedral. The lights and sunshine of the out-of-doors made the contrast more impressive and in the wonder of the moment the girls drew closer together. Gone was all their levity now, buried deep beneath an overwhelming reverence for this great architectural masterpiece—exalted resting ...
— Lucile Triumphant • Elizabeth M. Duffield
... everything into some hiding-hole or other, which she calls its "place." Trivial things in their way, you may say, yet each levying so much toll on my brain and nervous system, and demanding incessant vigilance and activity. I calculated once that I wasted a masterpiece upon these mountainous little things about every three months of my life. Can I help thinking of them, then, and asking why I suffer thus? And can I avoid seeing at last how it is they ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... of the cause and for the sake of his own feelings, which had been much lacerated. Its production cost him a great deal of thought and labor; but he had his reward, as its perusal after completion proved to him that it was a masterpiece. ...
— The Candidate - A Political Romance • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... unfortunates that made him willing to risk everything in their behalf. It seemed to him that such a presentation of Philippine conditions would certainly arouse Spain, but his modesty forbade his saying that he was going to write a book like the French masterpiece. Still, from this time his recollections of his youth and the stories which he could get from his companions were written down and revised, till finally the half had been prepared of what was finally the ...
— Lineage, Life, and Labors of Jose Rizal, Philippine Patriot • Austin Craig
... as you meet with here has a more telling effect upon one than a masterpiece of sculpture, literature or music, and infinitely surpasses man's most worthy efforts. Why cross the ocean or spend an over-amount of time in the art galleries of our own country, when we dwell so near Art's primal ...
— See America First • Orville O. Hiestand
... skill. The former is divided into a nave and four aisles, transepts, and a shallow chancel, by four rows of Corinthian columns, with a small dome over the intersection. The interior is very beautiful, and this church is generally considered to be Wren's masterpiece. S. Mary Abchurch, is nearly square in plan, has no columns and is covered with a domical ceiling, but so skilfully treated that the ...
— Our Homeland Churches and How to Study Them • Sidney Heath
... getting at the spelling of Chaucer himself — has been discarded for that of the reader's own day. It is a poor compliment to the Father of English Poetry, to say that by such treatment the bouquet and individuality of his works must be lost. If his masterpiece is valuable for one thing more than any other, it is the vivid distinctness with which English men and women of the fourteenth century are there painted, for the study of all the centuries to follow. But we wantonly balk the artist's own purpose, and discredit ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... chin, and blew out clouds of smoke, and looked more than usually grey and dishevelled and in need of a bath. "In a way it's like that with Jeffries. He rubs his beastly old thumb over my rottenest charcoal sketch, and it's a masterpiece." ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie
... his Review of Soame Jennings's Essay on the Origin of Evil; a masterpiece of composition, both for vigour of ...
— A Poetical Review of the Literary and Moral Character of the late Samuel Johnson (1786) • John Courtenay
... opinion of that examination paper? It was Thucydides, Book II, with the few easy parts left out. It was Thucydides, Book II, with special home-made difficulties added. It was—well, in its way it was a masterpiece. Without going into details—I dislike sensational and realistic writing—I may say that I personally was not one of those who required an extra ten minutes to finish their papers. I finished mine at half-past two, and amused myself for the remaining hour and a half by writing neatly on several ...
— Tales of St. Austin's • P. G. Wodehouse
... put in Agar, "you are going to play it for him. It is a little masterpiece, and I am sure you will make ...
— My Double Life - The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt • Sarah Bernhardt
... visited what is left of that famous Whitehall, so tragically memorable of the death of Charles I. The existing edifice is only the noble remnant of that ancient palace of the English kings which the fire of 1697 spared, as if such a masterpiece of Inigo Jones would be the fittest witness of its highest, saddest event. Few, if any, of the tremendous issues of history are so nearly within seeing and touching as that on which the windows of Whitehall still look, and I must count ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... of becoming depressed, she exclaimed joyfully, "Oh, then, you can write your book!" and a little later, pulling open a drawer, showed him a considerable sum of money that she had been saving all unknown to him. Thus it became possible for him to devote himself to the work that proved to be his masterpiece, The Scarlet Letter, published in 1850. The unusual excellence of the romance brought to the writer far-spread praise and popularity, and he became at length recognized as a foremost American man ...
— Journeys Through Bookland - Volume Four • Charles H. Sylvester
... initial impulse to the whole modern movement which has given Germany a new dramatic literature; and the leaders of the movement, whether authors or critics, were one and all ardent disciples of Ibsen, who regarded Gespenster as his typical masterpiece. In Germany, then, the play certainly did, in Ibsen's own words, "move some boundary-posts." The Prussian censorship presently withdrew its veto, and on, November 27, 1894, the two leading literary theatres of Berlin, the Deutsches Theater and the Lessing Theater, gave simultaneous performances ...
— Ghosts • Henrik Ibsen
... wonders of the human frame, and attempted to fathom the very process by which Nature assimilates all her precious influences from earth and air, and from the spiritual world, to create and foster man, her masterpiece. The latter pursuit, however, Aylmer had long laid aside in unwilling recognition of the truth—against which all seekers sooner or later stumble—that our great creative Mother, while she amuses us with apparently working in the ...
— Little Classics, Volume 8 (of 18) - Mystery • Various
... day they sent for the two young men and their work. Labakan came first and spread out his kaftan before the eyes of the astonished king. 'See, father,' he said; 'see, my honoured mother, if this is not a masterpiece of work. I'll bet the court tailor ...
— The Crimson Fairy Book • Various
... you a picture of marriage: two little husks bowing metronomically in a vacuum and anointing each other with pompous adjectives. Draw them a little flattened in the rear from sitting down too much and you'll have a masterpiece. It's amusing to remember that Mr. and Mrs. Jalonick were once in love with each other!" Dorn laughed good-naturedly. "Fancy them on a June night ten years ago before their eyes had become cotton, holding hands and trying to give a ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... and who was in ecstasies at the mere mention of the word "tulban," which (as we are assured by the "Floriste Francaise," the most highly considered authority in matters relating to this flower) is the first word in the Cingalese tongue which was ever used to designate that masterpiece of floriculture which ...
— The Black Tulip • Alexandre Dumas (Pere)
... my room in the same beautiful house there was a powerful cartoon of Peter's crucifixion, head downwards, for his Master's sake. The masterpiece of Filippino Lippi I felt to be an excellent illustration also of Rutherford's letter to James Guthrie and the rest of the ministers and elders who were imprisoned in the Castle of Edinburgh for daring to remind Charles Stuart of the contents of the Covenant to which both he and the whole ...
— Samuel Rutherford - and some of his correspondents • Alexander Whyte
... 'meditate while at stool' or cut my finger I will get new material with much less hardship. The last thing a composer or writer or painter needs is material; it is from excess of material he is the besotted creature he is. He may lack leisure or energy or ability or an active colon, but no masterpiece ever was or conceivably could be thwarted from ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... made you! Without him what would you be?" "What am I?" She did not reply for she was gazing at the portrait over the fireplace. "A neglected genius," she mused. "He was forced to conduct operas to support his life—and mine. Yet he composed a masterpiece. He composed 'The Iron Virgin.'" "Could he have done it without me?" Madame Patel turned upon him: "You ask such a question, you?" Chardon paced between table and piano. He stopped to look at the Munch picture and bit his ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... never came across such a Beethoven enthusiast, and he felt sure something would come of it. We know something did come of it. Weinlig had taught him the principles of musical form as well as harmony and counterpoint, and thus made the grasping of the plan of each masterpiece an easier task; and to Weinlig the world owes a huge debt of gratitude. Richard acknowledged the debt; and after Weinlig's death in 1842 he dedicated The Love-feast of the ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... Purcell Society, and those amongst us who live to the age of Methuselah will probably see all the accessible works printed by this body. Some half century ago Messrs. Novello published an edition of the church music, stupidly edited by the stupidest editor who ever laid clumsy fingers on a masterpiece. A shameful edition of the "King Arthur" music was prepared for the Birmingham Festival of 1897 by Mr. J.A. Fuller-Maitland, musical critic of "The Times." A publisher far-sighted and generous enough to issue ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman
... the letters were composed and written. Betty was satisfied with my letter; and her own, which she translated for my benefit, was a perfect masterpiece of sensibility, which seemed to me ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... allegorical papers in the 'Rambler,' Labour and Rest was his favourite; but Scrotinus, the man who returns late in life to receive honours in his native country, and meets with mortification instead of respect, was by him considered as a masterpiece in the science of life and manners. The character of Prospero in the fourth volume Garrick took to be his; and I have heard the author say that he never forgave the offence. Sophron was likewise a picture drawn from ...
— Anecdotes of the late Samuel Johnson, LL.D. - during the last twenty years of his life • Hester Lynch Piozzi
... early wild flowers that came after the spring floods, and her voice was the sweetest sound that had ever fallen upon their ears. So these men thought when Cummins first brought home his wife, and the masterpiece which each had painted in his soul and brain was never changed. Each week and month added to the deep-toned value of that picture, as the passing of a century might add to a Raphael ...
— The Honor of the Big Snows • James Oliver Curwood
... magnificent Holyhead Road. This wonderful highway he carried through the very midst of the Welsh mountains, at a comparatively level height for its whole distance, in order to form a main road from London to Ireland. On this road occurs Telford's masterpiece of engineering, the Menai suspension bridge, long regarded as one of the wonders of the world, and still one of the most beautiful suspension bridges in all Europe. Hardly less admirable, however, in its own way is the ...
— Biographies of Working Men • Grant Allen
... in our own day! Mistral's name has long been European, and other English writers have charmingly described the Feux Floraux of the olden time and the society of Lou Felibrige with its revival of Provencal literature. But forty years ago, and twenty years before his masterpiece had found a translator here, he was known and highly ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... majority of English readers the name of that strange and forceful personality, Romain Rolland, is known only through his magnificent, intimate record of an artist's life and aspirations, embracing ten volumes, Jean-Christophe. This is not the place in which to discuss that masterpiece. A few biographical facts concerning the author may not, however, be out ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... precious charge to heaven. The mausoleum was adorned with a variety of little seraphs who supported an illuminated shrine, which was fixt to the top of the cupola. Nothing so magnificent or so well imagined was ever seen; it is Le Brun's masterpiece. The whole church was adorned with pictures, devices, and emblems, which all bore some relation to the life, or office of the chancellor; and some of his noblest actions were represented in painting. Madame de Verneuil offered to purchase all the ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... upon the shelves of which the books stood closely packed in double ranks, the varied colors of the rows in sight wooing the eye by their harmonious arrangement. A pedestal in one corner supported a half-size copy of the Venus of Milo, that masterpiece of sculpture; in its faultless amplitude of form, its large life-giving loveliness, and its sweet dignity, the embodiment of the highest type of womanhood. In another corner stood a similar reduction of the Flying ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... Athena. Having mounted the steps, the visitor passed through the superb entrance gate, or Propylaea, which was constructed to resemble the front of a temple with columns and pediment. Just beyond the Propylaea stood a great bronze statue of the Guardian Athena, a masterpiece of the sculptor Phidias. ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... these cameos of romance should suffer the same fate as Mr. Lang's version of Aucassin et Nicolete, which has been swept off the face of the earth by the Charge of the Six Hundred, who were lucky enough to obtain copies of the only edition of that little masterpiece of translation. Mr. Morris has, therefore, consented to allow his versions of the Romances to be combined into one volume in a form not unworthy of their excellence but more accessible to those lovers of books whose purses ...
— Old French Romances • William Morris
... sense of the comic in the scene in St. Ursula's history, where the 11,000 virgins are hurrying in single file along a winding road which disappears out of the picture. In the principal scene in the life of St. George, Carpaccio again achieves a masterpiece. The force and vivacity of the saint in armour charging the dragon, lingers long in the memory. The long, decorative lines of lance and war-horse and dragon throw back the whole landscape. The details ...
— The Venetian School of Painting • Evelyn March Phillipps
... the filmy and amethyst haze that closed each forest vista, came a milk-white horse, stepping high over the fallen leaves. The rider, not tall, black-bearded, with a pale, handsome face, sat like a study for some great sculptor's equestrian masterpiece. In a land where all rode well, his was superb horsemanship. The cape of his grey coat was lined with scarlet, his soft wide hat had a black plume; he wore long boots and white gauntlets. The three beneath the beech saluted. He spoke in a pensive and musical voice. "A prisoner, Cuninghame? ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... history can give. In this connection we naturally think of Homer's Iliad and its influence on the Greeks. It was their storehouse of history, morals, religion, aesthetics, and rules for the practical guidance of life, as well as their literary masterpiece. ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: History • Ontario Ministry of Education
... a great warrior and an eminent poet; several specimens of his writings are given in the Archaiology of Wales, published by the late patriotic Owain Jones Myfyr. His poem called the Hirlas Horn (the long blue horn,) is a masterpiece. It used to be the custom with the prince, when he had gained a battle, to call for the horn, filled with metheglin, or mead, and drink the contents at one draught, then sound it to show that there was no deception; each of his officers ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 13 Issue 364 - 4 Apr 1829 • Various
... 18, 1821, came the first performance of Weber's masterpiece, "Der Freischuetz." The theater was beseiged for hours by eager crowds, and when the doors were at last opened, there was a grand rush to enter. The whole house from pit to galleries was soon filled, and when the composer entered the orchestra, there ...
— The World's Great Men of Music - Story-Lives of Master Musicians • Harriette Brower
... century and to write the one standard work on Botticelli. Connoisseur in several arts, he had designed a little church in the manner of Inigo Jones for a burial ground near the Marble Arch. Though I now think his little church a masterpiece, its style was more than a century too late to hit my fancy at two or three and twenty; and I accused him of leaning towards that ...
— Four Years • William Butler Yeats
... Wren's great masterpiece was commenced in 1675, and completed in 1710, and its building therefore covers a period of 35 years, carrying us through the reigns of James II., William III. and Mary, and well on to the end of Anne's. The admirable work which he did during this time, ...
— Illustrated History of Furniture - From the Earliest to the Present Time • Frederick Litchfield
... public which had at once accepted his earlier work as that of a master of English. As already stated, it was Will o' the Mill, a charmingly written story of still life, with a quiet philosophy all its own, that Mr Hamerton had pronounced a masterpiece of style. Markheim was a graphic, but very unpleasant, story of a murder; Olalla, a horrible, but powerfully written, sketch of hereditary insanity, with a beautiful setting of Italian scenery to ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • Margaret Moyes Black
... these six stories four have been published in Collier's Weekly during the past two years, and elsewhere I have had occasion to comment upon their excellence. These narratives may be regarded as separate cantos of a war epic, which is fairly comparable for its vividness of portrayal to Stephen Crane's masterpiece, "The Red Badge of Courage." Few writers, other than these two, have been able to portray the naked ugliness of warfare, and the passions which warfare engenders, with more brutal power. Time alone will tell whether ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... were great differences between the duke and myself as to the reward to be given me for the statue of Perseus, during which the duchess and the sculptor Bandinello interposed. Bandinello declared that the work had proved so admirable a masterpiece, that, in his opinion, it was worth 16,000 gold crowns and upwards. When the duke was informed of this decision he was highly displeased, and down to the close of the year 1566 I received no more than 3,000 gold crowns, given to me monthly by payments of 25, 50, ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... expression of complete satisfaction with himself, and prepared now to show the masterpiece of his work, the contract with Antonio ...
— The Black Wolf's Breed - A Story of France in the Old World and the New, happening - in the Reign of Louis XIV • Harris Dickson
... considerable architectural merit. Situated very near each other, on the culminating point of a great plateau of rock, they dominate the country far and wide, and attract the eye from a long distance. One seems to have been in much simpler and better taste than the other. M. Renan calls it "a real masterpiece, in respect of proportion, of elegance, and of majesty."[675] It is built altogether in three stages. First, there is a circular basement story flanked by four figures of lions, attached to the wall behind them, and only showing in front of it their heads, their shoulders, and their ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson
... aisles [121], what arrests the awe and wonder of the crowd! Seated on a throne of ebon and of ivory, of gold and gems—the olive-crown on his head, in his right hand the statue of Victory, in his left; wrought of all metals, the cloud-compelling sceptre, behold the colossal masterpiece of Phidias, the Homeric dream imbodied [122]—the majesty of the Olympian Jove! Enter the banquet-room of the conquerors—to whose verse, hymned in a solemn and mighty chorus, bends the listening Spartan—it ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... eyebrows that they seemed night-blue with their long black fringe of lashes. His face was square and strong and gentle, and the collar of his gray flannel shirt was open so that I could see that his head was set on his wide shoulders with lines like an old Greek masterpiece. Gray corduroy trousers were strapped around his waist by a wide belt made of some kind of raw-looking leather that was held together by two leather lacings, while on his feet were a kind of sandal shoes ...
— The Golden Bird • Maria Thompson Daviess
... we parted on the best of terms. So it is all over, and except from the point of view of dollars and cents, I am very glad. Only the remembrance that you had set your heart on my making this my masterpiece, prevented me from throwing over the contract weeks ago. Tell me, Selma mia, that you approve of what I have done and congratulate me." He pulled forward his chair so that he might see her face without ...
— Unleavened Bread • Robert Grant
... That masterpiece of fiction, "the Prospectus,"* diffused its gorgeous light far and near, lit up the dark mine, and showed the minerals shining and the jewels peeping; shone broad over the smiling fields, soon to be plowed, reaped, and mowed by ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade
... Even Beranger could not escape the malady of his generation. Do you remember"—his swift glance embraced us all—"Longfellow's criticism of European poets of that epoch, in his prose masterpiece, Hyperion? He refers to Salis and Matthisson, but Lamartine and people of his kidney come in—'Melancholy gentlemen' pardon, my dear Elodie, if I quote it in English—'Melancholy gentlemen to whom life was only a dismal swamp, upon whose margin they walked ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... the masterpiece of the great artist, expecting to be joyous in the joy with which she would receive it. But something strange occurred. Madame de Nailles sprang back a step or two, stretching out her arms as if repelling an apparition, her face was distorted, her ...
— Jacqueline, v1 • Th. Bentzon (Mme. Blanc)
... and lifeless his work would be! But if such a thing were possible that the spirit of Raphael should enter into the man and obtain the mastery of his mind and eye and hand, it would be entirely possible that he should paint this masterpiece; for it would simply be Raphael reproducing Raphael. And this in a mystery is what is true of the disciple filled with the Holy Ghost. Christ, who is "the image of the invisible God," is set before him as his divine pattern, and Christ by the Spirit dwells within him as a divine life, and Christ ...
— The Ministry of the Spirit • A. J. Gordon
... to deny that the polity of the Church of Rome is the very masterpiece of human wisdom. In truth, nothing but such a polity could, against such assaults, have borne up such doctrines. The experience of twelve hundred eventful years, the ingenuity and patient care of forty generations of statesmen, have improved that polity to such perfection that, among the contrivances ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... contention is, that as the pacific philosophy of Herder and Kant, of Goethe and Lessing, provides the key to the old Germany described in Madame de Stael's masterpiece, even so the military philosophy of Mommsen and Treitschke, of Bismarck and Nietzsche, gives us the key of modern Prussianized Germany. The whole German people have become Bismarckian, and believe that it is might which creates right. The whole of the younger ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... penknife. That's my masterpiece. I made it, as well as this larger knife, out of an old iron candlestick." The penknife was sharp and keen as a razor; as for the other knife, it would serve a double purpose, and with it one could cut ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... Mr. Land. And trust me on this: for the time being, get rid of these notions of taking over the Nautilus or escaping from it. This boat is a masterpiece of modern technology, and I'd be sorry to have missed it! Many people would welcome the circumstances that have been handed us, just to walk in the midst of these wonders. So keep calm, and let's ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... eyes inserted in a mounting of bronze. The mummy is that of a thin elderly man, well preserved; the face was covered by a mask made of linen smeared with pitch, but when this was raised by means of a chisel, the fine kingly head was exposed to view. It was a masterpiece of the art of the embalmer, and the expression of the face was that of one who had only a few hours previously breathed his last. Death had slightly drawn the nostrils and contracted the lips, the pressure ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 5 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... good reasons. In the Chronique everything is heavy, occasionally meaningless, and nearly always insipid. Can the same man have written the Chronique and Gargantua, replaced a book really commonplace by a masterpiece, changed the facts and incidents, transformed a heavy icy pleasantry into a work glowing with wit and life, made it no longer a mass of laborious trifling and cold-blooded exaggerations but a satire on human life of the highest genius? Still ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... nothing but praise for Mr. Sydney Brooks book on The New Ireland.... A masterpiece of clear statement and comprehension ... he is always brilliant, thoughtful, and persuasive. Everybody, both in England and Ireland, ought to read this ...
— Ireland and the Home Rule Movement • Michael F. J. McDonnell
... verandah]. Pray, madam, have you read the official charge? A masterpiece of literary style. [Takes a book from his pocket. Which I shall now proceed to cite ...
— Love's Comedy • Henrik Ibsen
... quiver in distraction. And no thought of impurity came to him on beholding that lily, snowy whiteness. All candour and all nobility as she was, that virgin shocked him no more than some sculptured masterpiece of genius. ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... the garrisons of Potsdam and of Rinfueld; he gives the order for boots and saddles, which naturally leads to innumerable accidents. Next day you will find him issuing a decree that, a play written by one of his proteges, entitled The New Saviour, is a masterpiece, which he would compel the public to applaud. The best he can do with it is to prevent its being hissed off the stage. Another day he has a room prepared for himself at the Headquarters of the General Staff, where he interferes ...
— The Schemes of the Kaiser • Juliette Adam
... frankness the issue of religious differences and alluded specially to the recent Papal decrees over which so much controversy had raged. The Bishop of Raphoe rose to reply and expounded, as an ex-professor of Canon Law, the true bearing of these documents. His speech was a masterpiece; its candour and its lucidity commended itself to all hearers, but most of all to the Ulstermen, who applauded at once Lord Oranmore's comment that the odium theologicum had been replaced by divina caritas; and at a very late stage in ...
— John Redmond's Last Years • Stephen Gwynn
... must be compared with the later S. Sophia and SS Sergius and Bacchus of Constantinople. These, however, are works more assured and more gracious than S. Vitale, and yet in its plan at least S. Vitale is a masterpiece, and altogether the one great sanctuary of Byzantine art of the time of Justinian that we have in the West. Every part of it is worthy of the strictest and most eager attention, from the ambulatory, which was covered in 1902 with old marble slabs and where ...
— Ravenna, A Study • Edward Hutton
... Rome contained so many fine works of ancient sculpture as this, for its master had been distinguished by his love of such things in a time when few cared for them. Some he had purchased at a great price; more than one masterpiece he had saved from oblivion amid ruins, or from the common fate of destruction in a lime-kiln. Well for him had he been content to pass his latter years with the cold creations of the sculptor; but he turned his eyes upon consummate beauty in flesh and blood, and this, ...
— Veranilda • George Gissing
... found The Deacon's masterpiece strong and sound. Eighteen hundred increased by ten;— "Hahnsum kerridge" they called it then. Eighteen hundred and twenty came;— Running as usual; much the same. Thirty and forty at last arrive, And then come ...
— Selections From American Poetry • Various
... to those who have aught that is rare and beautiful to dispose of. Before one column stands a Jew with antiquities raked from the ruins of Babylon or Thebes—displaying their coins, their mutilated statuary, or half legible inscriptions. At another, you see a Greek with some masterpiece of Zeuxis—nobody less—which he swears is genuine, and to his oaths adds a parchment containing its history, with names of men in Athens, Antioch and Alexandria, who attest it all. At the foot of another, sits a dealer in manuscripts, remarkable ...
— Zenobia - or, The Fall of Palmyra • William Ware
... the most reliable. I am sure when I pick up your magazine that I shall find therein consistently interesting stories. I have yet to find a story that failed to hold my attention; on the other hand, I have yet to find a masterpiece. Of all the Editors, you have shown yourself the shrewdest judge of public taste, but also the least interested in the ...
— Astounding Stories, March, 1931 • Various
... Science as the Word that is God, Spirit, and Truth. This Word cor- [25] rects the philosopher, confutes the astronomer, exposes the subtle sophist, and drives diviners mad. The Bible is the learned man's masterpiece, the ignorant man's dictionary, the ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy
... the contorted positions of the bodies—every muscle either on the stretch or relaxed into a flaccid limpness,—the foreshortened limbs twisted into every kind of unnatural posture, and the complicated interweaving of the whole, one realises that it is indeed his masterpiece, not only for the mood of terror and awe it induces by its imaginative power, but for its marvellous rendering of tumultuous movement, and the ease with which enormous technical difficulties have ...
— Luca Signorelli • Maud Cruttwell
... of talk pleased Hugh immensely. He felt more than ever satisfied with the magnificent result of that clever little scheme of his. Reading Hugo's masterpiece had brought it about, too, and he would always have occasion to remember this when handling that volume recording the wonderful achievements of the one-time ignorant convict and human beast ...
— The Chums of Scranton High at Ice Hockey • Donald Ferguson
... painter whose enthusiasm for his art knew no bounds—craved to produce a masterpiece. This dreamer could be seen daily ferreting around the Quarter for a studio always bigger than the one he had. At last he found one that exactly fitted the requirements of his vivid imagination—a studio with a ceiling thirty feet high, with windows like the ...
— The Real Latin Quarter • F. Berkeley Smith
... has a mutual desire for copulation in every creature, for the increase and propagation of its kind, and more especially in man, the lord of creation and the masterpiece of Nature, in order that such a noble piece of divine workmanship should not perish, something ought to be said concerning it, it being the foundation of everything that we have hitherto been treating of, since without copulation there can be no generation. Seeing, therefore, so much ...
— The Works of Aristotle the Famous Philosopher • Anonymous
... came to the frontier, And King met King. The folk of Kembajat Were all astonished at the young King's face, As beautiful as painter's masterpiece. The old King looked with smiles on all. His joy Was great. The King of Indrapura bowed Respectfully, and made them bring to him The elephant that bore 'neath gay payong His consort's father. "Son, where goest thou?" ...
— Malayan Literature • Various Authors
... through city and through wilderness, to the Black River and the Shining Gate. He had found out—as most people would have said, by accident; as he would doubtless have said, by the guidance of Providence—where his powers lay. He had no suspicion, indeed, that he was producing a masterpiece. He could not guess what place his allegory would occupy in English literature, for of English literature he knew nothing. Those who suppose him to have studied the "Fairy Queen," might easily be ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... they were sold to Cardinal Richelieu, and are now in the Musee du Louvre. They were all of allegorical subjects, dictated by the Marchesa herself, and the "Parnassus" of her court painter, Andrea Mantegna, is a masterpiece. But that of the Perugian master is far less satisfactory, and was indeed found so by that very keen critic, the Marchesa Isabella herself. She wrote to him on June 30 of the year 1505: "The picture has reached me safely, and, ...
— Perugino • Selwyn Brinton
... by the statutes of his guild, he might present himself for examination for the teaching license. This was a public trial, and took the form of a public disputation on some stated thesis, in the presence of the masters, and against all comers. It was the student's "masterpiece," analogous to the masterpiece of any other guild, and he submitted it to a jury of the masters of his craft. [13] Upon his masterpiece being adjudged satisfactory, he also became a master in his craft, was now able to define ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... never seen a single good picture, and set him before one of the greatest in the world, and I doubt if he would receive any genuine pleasure from it. A fortiori, an uneducated person, one who could appreciate the first masterpiece he ever saw the first time he ever saw it, would be a prodigy only second to him who could produce one without preliminary study. The picture which I think calculated to appeal most powerfully and universally is Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper, where the grouping ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... an American youth spending twelve years with Michael Angelo, studying anatomy that he might create the masterpiece of all art; or with Da Vinci devoting ten years to the model of an equestrian statue that he might master the anatomy of the horse. Most young American artists would expect, in a quarter of that time, to sculpture an Apollo Belvidere. While Michael Angelo ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden
... the Virgin, which hung from the roof of St. Lorenz? With such an example before him, what might not the boy hope to achieve through talent and persevering labor? And Gabriel felt his own heart burn as he looked with wistful eyes upon that masterpiece of ...
— In the Yule-Log Glow, Book II - Christmas Tales from 'Round the World • Various
... the triumphant vividness of the adjective "wrinkled," transporting the reader at once to a great height above the plain of the sea, the complete absence of any touch of the "poetic" (surely the beautiful word azure may be admitted in modern company), make this poem a masterpiece without date or time. It is as "new" as the latest Imagist anthology. And, be it noted, I have quoted it correctly, I feel confident, from memory. My copy of Tennyson is in storage, and I have not read the fragment probably in ten or a dozen years. ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... to whom he could pour out his plans and his innermost longings. Otherwise his life was as solitary as it was cloistered. He confined himself to his room for days at a time, working fiercely at the manuscript of the play, Cromwell, which he felt to be a masterpiece. ...
— Women in the Life of Balzac • Juanita Helm Floyd
... recount the many activities in which Gerald engaged during the next twenty-two years. They have been recounted with humorous and affectionate appreciation by Dr. Henry Owen in his monograph on "Gerald the Welshman," a little masterpiece of biography which deserves to be better known. {4} In 1183 Gerald was employed by the astute king to settle terms between him and the rebellious Lord Rhys. Nominally as a reward for his successful diplomacy, ...
— The Itinerary of Archibishop Baldwin through Wales • Giraldus Cambrensis
... not a means; life is an end. That is what we must tell ourselves in order really to live in this world. Hence the obligation to perfect life, to make it high and beautiful, to make a masterpiece of it. Hence too our contempt and hatred for those who wish to tarnish life, either by their ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 4, July, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... thou rotting masterpiece from the pencil of Beelzebub, thou glowing picture of an earthly Eden, which has dizzied the brain of so many philosophers! Get the old rents in thy canvas reglued; the holes and cracks refilled with varnish; wrap thyself in the magic webs of hazy clouds and glittering ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 3, September 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... elementary human moods. The few with minds touched by nature or right cultivation to the finer issues, admire the supreme genius which takes some poor Italian tale, with its coarse plot and gross personages, and shooting it through with threads of variegated meditation, produces a masterpiece of penetrative reflection and high pensive suggestion as to the deepest things and most secret parts of the life of men. But to the general these finer threads are indiscernible. What touches them in the Shakesperean poetry, and most rightly touches them and us all, are topics eternally ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Volume I (of 3) - Essay 4: Macaulay • John Morley
... was of an age when the mind responds acutely to exterior impressions, some well-meaning uncle, or other fool, gave me a pessimistic book to read. This was a work of fiction which the British Public had hailed as a masterpiece of humour. It represented, with an utter fury of pessimism, the spiritual inadequacies ...
— A Chair on The Boulevard • Leonard Merrick
... capacity for pleasure was entirely physical. He got more enjoyment out of a good dinner and a fragrant cigar than many intellectual men get out of the study of a literary masterpiece, or a philanthropist out of the contemplation of ...
— Square Deal Sanderson • Charles Alden Seltzer
... Raffaelle's Transfiguration was worshipped in that spot; how it was carried away by the French in 1809, and restored to the pope by the Allies in 1814. As you have already in all probability admired this masterpiece in the Vatican, allow him to expatiate, and search at the foot of the altar for a mortuary slab, which you will identify by a cross and the single word, Orate; under this gravestone is buried Beatrice Cenci, whose tragical story cannot ...
— The Cenci - Celebrated Crimes • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... trembling fingers drew one of her husband from an antique cabinet, and descanted on the manly beauty of the deceased original, and the graceful genius of the young and lamented artist. Hazlitt wrote an ingenious essay on "A Portrait by Vandyck," which gives us an adequate idea of what such a masterpiece is to the eye and mind of genuine artistic perception and sympathy. Few sensations, or rather sentiments, are more inextricably made up of pleasure and sadness than that with which we contemplate (as is not infrequent in some old gallery of Europe) a portrait which deeply ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 • Various
... masterpiece of man is to live to purpose; all other things: to reign, to lay up treasure, to build, are but little appendices and props. I take pleasure in seeing a general of an army, at the foot of a breach he is presently to assault, give ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... restless aesthetic curiosity, and yet he would have made a most ineffective reformer and a very indifferent artist. It seemed to him that the glow of happiness must be found either in action, of some immensely solid kind, on behalf of an idea, or in producing a masterpiece in one of the arts. Oftenest, perhaps, he wished he were a vigorous young man of genius, without a penny. As it was, he could only buy pictures, and not paint them; and in the way of action, he had to content himself with making a rule to render scrupulous moral justice to handsome examples ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... Coming of Summer," which I sometimes dream about when I've been hitting it up a shade too vigorously. It's all dots and splashes, with a great eye staring out of the middle of the mess. It looks as if summer, just as it was on the way, had stubbed its toe on a bomb. He tells me it's his masterpiece, and that he will never do anything like it again. I should like ...
— Death At The Excelsior • P. G. Wodehouse
... World's Way Thomas Bailey Aldrich For My Own Monument Matthew Prior The Bishop Orders His Tomb at Saint Praxed's Church Robert Browning Up at a Villa—Down in the City Robert Browning All Saints' Edmund Yates An Address to the Unco Guid Robert Burns The Deacon's Masterpiece Oliver Wendell Holmes Ballade of a Friar Andrew Lang The Chameleon James Merrick The Blind Men and the Elephant John Godfrey Saxe The Philosopher's Scales Jane Taylor The Maiden and the Lily John Fraser The Owl-Critic James Thomas Fields ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 3 (of 4) • Various
... man had a Gilbert Stuart for sale, and what was more to the point he had a customer for the masterpiece: Morlon, the collector, of unlimited means and limited wall space, would buy it provided Adam Gregg, the distinguished portrait painter, Member of the International Jury, Commander of the Legion ...
— Colonel Carter's Christmas and The Romance of an Old-Fashioned Gentleman • F. Hopkinson Smith
... Barnard, by natural affinity of talent, has, to my thinking, done some of the best art work that has been done at all in connection with Dickens. His Character Sketches, especially the lithographed series, are admirable. The Jingle is a masterpiece; but all are good, and he even succeeds in making something pictorially acceptable of ...
— Life of Charles Dickens • Frank Marzials
... fully symbolized by its own colossal crudity the moral ugliness of that most ghastly phenomenon of human life. Let us pray that in the event of final victory Prussia will not commission the architects of the Leipzig monument, or the imperial designer of the Sieges-Allee to rebuild that Gothic masterpiece, the Rheims Cathedral. That day in Leipzig an Alsatian cartoonist, Hansi, had been sentenced to one year's imprisonment for a harmless cartoon in a book for children, in which the most supersensitive should have found occasion for ...
— The Evidence in the Case • James M. Beck
... words, the smouldering fire in the other's wretched heart leaped up again, and he cried, furiously: "You lie! It is not a masterpiece!—Even Zaremba said that every idea in it had been stolen from me!—The thing shall never be played ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... rising foam—the marks of promised safety fading from sight, and with them the hope they nourished—the ledge which the sufferers gained with difficulty—on the one side, a raging sea, and on the other, a barrier that forbade retreat! Guy Mannering contains another masterpiece—the night attack of Portanferry, witnessed by Bertram. We feel as though we were that person—we see and hear all of which his eyes and ears had cognizance; and the impression is the more strong, because the writer has told only that, and left the rest ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 550, June 2, 1832 • Various
... the artist o' that there masterpiece. The Spittin' Devil! I done it on a rainy mornin'. Genius is queer. (Then ...
— Wappin' Wharf - A Frightful Comedy of Pirates • Charles S. Brooks
... that the imagination may set it before us again in all its rich vitality. It is well also as we read to insist on seeing the picture as well as the words. It is as easy to see the bloodless duke before the portrait of "My Last Duchess," in Browning's little masterpiece, to take in all the accessories and carry away with us a vivid and lasting impression, as it is to follow with the eye the succession of words. In this way we possess the poem, and make it serve the ends ...
— Books and Culture • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... should have resented the suggestion of M. Duplessis that his wife pose in the nude for the statuettes which were to hold the sconces on the king's desk; and Riesener left in a fine youthful frenzy, vowing he would never return while the maitre lived. The latter, unable to complete the masterpiece which he loved more than anything else on earth, sought death, and perished in the crimson waters of ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... three shells; the group of "Peace" received only the fragment of one. Here and there, in the bas-relief representing the "Passage of the Bridge of Areole," and the "Taking of Alexandra," some traces of balls are visible. On the whole, no irremediable hum is done here. Rude's masterpiece, "The Marseillaise," is untouched. ...
— Paris under the Commune • John Leighton
... blackboard, on which I scrawled and blotted out hypotheses; comparing each with the pictorial records in my memory: cyphering with pictures. In the course of this tense mental exercise I recalled and studied the faces of one memorial masterpiece, the scene of the saloon; and here I found myself, on a sudden, looking in ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... allowing him to come every Sunday, she answered that she never would hurt the child's feelings by telling him not to come where his mother was; that people who did not love her children did not love her; and that, if Hippy went, she went. We thought it a masterpiece of firmness to rejoin that Hippolyto must go in any event, but I am bound to own that he did not go, and that his mother stayed, and so fed us with every cunning, propitiatory dainty, that we must have been Pagans to renew our threat. In fact, we begged Mrs. Johnson to go into the country with us, ...
— Masterpieces Of American Wit And Humor • Thomas L. Masson (Editor)
... as "the celebrated Madam Bennet." We further learn, from the "Spectator" (No. 266), that she was the Lady B. to whom Wycherley addressed his ironical dedication of "The Plain Dealer," which is considered as a masterpiece of raillery. It is worthy of remark that the fair sex may justly complain of almost every word in the English language designating a woman having, at some time or another, been used as a term of reproach; for we find Mother, Madam, Mistress, and Miss, all denoting women ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... reproduce the exact contour of a cheek, or the precise shadow of an unbeautiful nose, they would hardly have transferred their attention from the most ill-favoured model to the last and greatest Whistler masterpiece. ...
— A Bookful of Girls • Anna Fuller |
