"Plinth" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... away beyond the bridge, the frowning mass of the Conciergerie—the towering turrets of Notre Dame—swelling like billows against the sky. Pale reflections came from the river. Do you see the picture, my little Asticot? And the young man clutched the railings that surround the plinth of the statue, and caught sight of the face of Henri Quatre, and Henri Quatre looked at him so kindly that he said: 'Mon bon roi, you are of the South like myself: I am leaving Paris to go into the wide world, but I don't know ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... Nave.[8]—The peculiar arrangements of the ancient monuments in two long rows on the continuous plinth that connects the bases of the pillars on each side of the nave is another of Wyatt's freaks during his terrible innovations in 1789. Not only did he sever the historical associations of centuries by these arbitrary removals, but paid ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Salisbury - A Description of its Fabric and a Brief History of the See of Sarum • Gleeson White
... the aisle is that of John Trehearne, servant to Queen Elizabeth and "Gentleman Portar" to James I. Flanked by two pilasters, carved in the Italian style, supporting a plainer canopy, the monument consists of three parts: first a plain base; then a plinth, on the front of which (in bas-relief) are the four children of the deceased in a kneeling posture; and, lastly, on the top of the tomb, the kneeling figures of Trehearne and his wife in the picturesque costume and ruff collars ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: Southwark Cathedral • George Worley
... extends from north to south 430 feet, with a depth, from east to west, including the two semicircular theatres, of about 200 feet. The elevation is at once classical and chaste, having a bold and rich portico in the centre, elevated on a plinth, to the height of the first story (19 feet,) and is approached by numerous steps, which are arranged to produce a fine effect. Twelve Corinthian columns support a flattened pediment, in the tympanum of which is to be a composition in basso-relievo, analogous to science ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 13, No. - 361, Supplementary Issue (1829) • Various
... opposite that containing the crucifix are the emblems of St. Peter and St. Paul. The remaining four panels are filled with the emblems of the four Evangelists. From this part of the base rises a richly moulded plinth, supporting the lower shaft, which is worked in diaper tracery. The knop of the shaft is encircled with eight elaborately wrought bosses, ornamented with garnets and sapphires in gold settings. Above the knop the shaft has simpler treatment, being ...
— Report Of Commemorative Services With The Sermons And Addresses At The Seabury Centenary, 1883-1885. • Diocese Of Connecticut
... the pedestal, which was interred 30 feet, was removed: it was composed of two parts, the ogee and basement being of the same mass, and the plinth of white marble. All the preparations were made for this last operation on the 10th of September, with the same solemnities; 140 horses and 800 men were employed. The pope selected this day for the solemn entrance of the duke of Luxembourg, ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects and Curiosities of Art (Vol. 3 of 3) • S. Spooner
... gigantic figure of a reclining bull, hewn from a single mammoth block of black granite, and supposed to be of great antiquity. It stands within an open space, raised some twelve feet above the surrounding court, upon a granite plinth of the same color, but how it could have been raised there intact ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... figures. This John, for example, bears no relation to his other Baptists; nor does the next figure represent David, as is generally supposed, but owes that error to the circumstance that when the David that originally stood here was moved to the north side, the old plinth bearing his name was left behind. This famous figure is stated by Vasari to be a portrait of a Florentine merchant named Barduccio Cherichini, and for centuries it has been known as Il Zuccone (or pumpkin) from its baldness. Donatello, according to Vasari, had a particular ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... Fraenkel, perhaps the most unscientific creature in the United States. He feeds her passion for details of English life in the most shameless way. On this particular evening he entranced her with a description of the Scottish custom of sitting on the plinth of St. Paul's Cathedral in London and welcoming the new year with bottles of whisky. Every Scotsman south of the Tweed was under oath to appear in the churchyard in kilts and tartan-plaid at midnight. Most of them, he added, wore red ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... as heretofore clouded with flour as with stale hoar- frost; the meal lodged in the corners of the window-sills, forming a soil in which lichens grew without ever getting any bigger, as they had done since his smallest infancy; the mosses on the plinth towards the river, reaching as high as the capillary power of the walls would fetch up moisture for their nourishment, and the penned mill-pond, now as ever on the point of overflowing into the garden. ...
— The Trumpet-Major • Thomas Hardy
... themselves were framed in oak, rising 10 ft. from the floor, thus—1 ft. 3.5 in. of plinth and frames, enclosing panelled gratings to allow the hot air to escape; on this the wooden bottoms of the range was built; then 3.5 in. and 3 in. frame at bottom and top, enclosing 7 ft. 6 in. space for glass, and 8 in. frieze moulding; the divisions of each were arranged to suit the ...
— Practical Taxidermy • Montagu Browne
... and universally respected as the honest head of the pugilistic profession. He died in 1848 at Woolwich; three years later a monument was erected to his memory by public subscription in Woolwich Churchyard. It represents "a British lion grieving over the ashes of a British hero," and on the plinth is the inscription, "Respect the ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... finial, so that there are five in all, one to each cusp and three to the pentagon. Beyond this moulding a plain flat band runs up the jambs and round the top cutting across the base of the cusps and of the pentagon. The bases of the shafts rest on a moulded plinth and are eight-sided, as are the capitals round which run small wreaths of leaves. Here the upright shafts at the sides are not twisted but run up in three divisions to Gothic pinnacles. ...
— Portuguese Architecture • Walter Crum Watson
... plain Doric column, surmounted with a colossal statue of the Duke of York. The pedestal and shaft are of fine granite. The plinth, or base of the pedestal, is 22 feet square, and the pedestal 18 feet; the circumference of the shaft is 11 feet 6 inches, decreasing to 10 feet 2 inches at the top; the abacus is 13 feet 6 inches square. The interior ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, No. - 582, Saturday, December 22, 1832 • Various
... When from the poet's plinth The amorous colocynth Yearns for the aloe, faint with rapturous thrills, How can he hymn their throes Knowing, as well he knows, That they are only ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert
... hundred feet of the spot where the conflagration began. It is of the Doric order, and rises from the pavement to the height of two hundred and two feet, containing within its shaft a spiral stair of black marble of three hundred and forty-five steps. The plinth is twenty-one feet square, and ornamented with sculpture by Cibber, representing the flames subsiding on the appearance of King Charles;—beneath his horse's feet a figure, meant to personify religious malice, crawls out vomiting ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, - Issue 479, March 5, 1831 • Various
... the entire side of the stone, which faces outwards, and may be effected either by a sloping cut which removes the right-angle from the edge, or by two cuts, one perpendicular and the other horizontal, which take out from the edge a rectangular bar or plinth. The Phoenician bevelling is of this latter kind, and is generally accompanied by an artificial roughening of the surface inside the bevel, which offers a strong contrast to the smooth and even surface of the bevel itself.[611] The style is highly ornamental ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson
... captive's breath,— The blistering sun on Hinnom's vale of death! Thrice on his cheek had rained the morning light, Thrice on his lips the mildewed kiss of night, Crouched by some porphyry column's shining plinth, Or stretched beneath the odorous terebinth. At last, in desperate mood, they sought once more The Temple's porches, searched in vain before; They found him seated with the ancient men,— The grim old rufflers of the tongue and pen,— Their bald heads ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... while the land of Egypt marched solemnly beside us on either hand. The river being low, we saw it from the boat as one long plinth, twelve to twenty feet high of brownish, purplish mud, visibly upheld every hundred yards or so by glistening copper caryatides in the shape of naked men baling water up to the crops above. Behind that bright emerald line ran the fawn-or tiger-coloured background of ...
— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling
... the ruined labyrinth 820 Which skirts the hoary caves of the green deep, Did Laon and his friend, on one gray plinth, Round whose worn base the wild waves hiss and leap, Resting at eve, a lofty converse keep: And that this friend was false, may now be said 825 Calmly—that he like other men could weep Tears which are lies, and could betray and spread Snares for that ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... a late Renaissance building, but contains some interesting things, including a picture by Girolamo Santa Croce of the Madonna enthroned, with SS. Nicholas and Joseph, and a child angel with a violin on the plinth, signed and dated 1537, but restored. The treasury contains a fine monstrance of silver, Gothic in design, with bands of pierced work and tabernacles at the sides on twisted columns. It has a spire-like top with windows and pinnacles between round its base, a feature which ...
— The Shores of the Adriatic - The Austrian Side, The Kuestenlande, Istria, and Dalmatia • F. Hamilton Jackson
... all men despised him in the streets, He hewed the living rock, with sweat and tears, And reared a God against the morning-gold, A terror in the sunshine, seen afar, And worshipped by the King; but, drunk with pride, Because the city fawned to bring him back, He carved upon the plinth: "Thus Gods are made, And whoso makes them otherwise shall die." And all the people praised him. . ...
— Verses 1889-1896 • Rudyard Kipling
... good condition. The beginning of the turret stair in the South-West tower is exposed, but the basement of the house unfortunately occupies the lower part of the northern one. The exterior of this is however easily accessible from an enclosure known as the Wood Yard, the much decayed spreading plinth and a few feet of walling above it not having been destroyed. Above this, grievous damage has been perpetrated by the casing and complete obliteration of the mouldings and arcading which remained. The towers were ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Churches of Coventry - A Short History of the City and Its Medieval Remains • Frederic W. Woodhouse
... being awakened, I made a pilgrimage to it the other day, and was shocked by its neglected condition. The coping has been badly cemented, and a crack extends from the upper right-hand corner to the base of the plinth, right across the inscription. Doubtless a few shillings would repair the damage; but may I suggest, Sir, that some worthier memorial is due to this pioneer of woman's higher activities? I have thought of a plain obelisk on Shakespeare's ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... Mackaye of Washington, D. C., then came forward to the end of the plinth to speak, and as she appeared, a man in the crowd handed her a twenty-dollar bill for the campaign in the Senate. This was the signal for others. Bills and coins were passed up. Instantly marshals ran hither and thither collecting ...
— Jailed for Freedom • Doris Stevens
... happened was that Dave had cut his head on the ornate plinth of that cast-iron post, his hands missing their grip as his legs caught the shaft, so that he turned over backwards and his occiput suffered. He showed a splendid spirit—quite Spartan, in fact—bearing in mind his uncle's frequent homilies on the subject of crying; a thing no little ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... in the foundations of a shrine of the god Hennu during the reign of Semti, or Hesepti, a king of the Ist dynasty. Another rubric in the same papyrus says that the text was cut upon the alabaster plinth of a statue of Menkaura (Mycerinus), a king of the IVth dynasty, and that the letters were inlaid with lapis lazuli. The plinth was found by Prince Herutataf, a son of King Khufu (Cheops), who carried it off to his king and exhibited it as a "most wonderful" thing. This composition was ...
— The Book of the Dead • E. A. Wallis Budge
... cite but a few glaring instances, there are assuredly few finer pages in the history of architecture than that facade where the three receding portals with their pointed arches, the carved and denticulated plinth with its twenty-eight royal niches, the huge central rose-window flanked by its two lateral windows as is the priest by his deacon and subdeacon, the lofty airy gallery of trifoliated arcades supporting a heavy platform upon its slender columns, and lastly the two dark and massive towers with their ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... suddenly reflecting that it would not be a bad idea to do something for the school in a small way, hied him to the nearest jeweller's and purchased another silver cup, vast withal and cunningly decorated with filigree work, and standing on a massive ebony plinth, round which were little silver lozenges just big enough to hold the name of the winning house and the year of grace. This he presented with his blessing to be competed for by the dozen houses that made up the school of Wrykyn, and it was formally established ...
— The Gold Bat • P. G. Wodehouse
... called his name a statue. Stern and vast It rests enthroned upon the mighty past: Fit plinth for him whose image in the mind Looms up as that of one by God designed! Fit plinth in sooth! the mighty past for him Whose simple name is Glory's synonyme! E'en Fancy's self, in her enchanted sleep, Can dream no future which may cease ...
— A Wreath of Virginia Bay Leaves • James Barron Hope
... diameter, and when cased with marble, as was intended, would have been at least 85 feet in diameter, or nearly double that of the Kutb Minar, which is 48 feet 4 inches. The total height of the column as it now stands is about 75 feet above the plinth, or 87 feet above the ground level. (A.S.R., vol. i, p. 205; vol. iv, p. 62, pl. vii; Thomas, Chronicles, p. 173, citing original authorities.) Carr Stephen (p. 67) gives the circumference as 254 feet, and the ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... we adjourned to a little sitting-room whose walnut furniture was covered with yellow Utrecht velvet. An ornamental clock between two candelabra decorated the mantelpiece, and on the top of its black plinth, and protected and covered by a glass globe, was a red egg. I do not know why, once having observed it, I should have examined it so attentively. Children have such unaccountable curiosity. However, I must say that the egg was of a most wonderful and magnificent colour. It had ...
— Balthasar - And Other Works - 1909 • Anatole France
... grain running lengthwise, and the other crosswise. These are glued together by their faces, so as to form a piece five inches long, three fourths of an inch broad, and one third of an inch thick, which is stuck by its lower end into a little plinth of wood, presenting their edge to the view. The fibres of the wood you know are dilated, but not lengthened by moisture. The slip, therefore, whose grain is lengthwise, becomes a standard, retaining always the same ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... footstep of that iron crag," and traversing the seventh and last gate reached the ruined Ambarkhana or Elephant-stable on the hill top. It is a picture of great desolation which meets the eye. The fragment of a wall or plinth, covered with rank creepers, an archway of which the stones are sagging into final disruption, and many a tumulus of coarse brown grass are all that remain of the wide buildings which once surrounded the Ambarkhana. The latter, gray and time-scarred, ...
— By-Ways of Bombay • S. M. Edwardes, C.V.O.
... whose number all but forbade our passage through the street, with the noise of their feet and voices, there were, far beyond counting, those short, stubbed girls and women as typically cockney still as the costers ever were. They were of a plinth-like bigness up and down, and their kind, plain, common faces were all topped with narrow-brimmed sailor-hats, mostly black. In their jargoning hardly an aspirate was in its right place, but they looked as if their hearts were, and if ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... there had been taken a gigantic image of Lucien Apleon, and it had been reared upon a plinth of dark green marble, upon the tessellated platform within ...
— The Mark of the Beast • Sidney Watson
... post, shaft, obelisk; file, line, row; pilaster; pl. peristyle, portico, colonnade. Associated Words: entablature, frieze, architrave, triglyph, cornice, base, shaft, capital, plinth. ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... figure ascribed to the jolly god rather exaggerated, and an owl sitting upon his head between two huge horns, which support stands for lamps. Another represents a flower-stalk, growing out of a circular plinth, with snail-shells hanging from it by small chains, which held the oil and wick. The trunk of a tree, with lamps suspended between the branches. Another, a naked boy, beautifully wrought, with a lamp ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, No. - 581, Saturday, December 15, 1832 • Various
... dynasty, situated to the west of the Great Pyramid, and preserved in the Gizeh Museum. It was not a work entirely of the XXIst dynasty, as Mr. Petrie asserts, but the inscription, barely readable, engraved on the face of the plinth, indicates that it was remade by a king of the Saite period, perhaps by Sabaco, in order to replace an ancient stele of the same import which had fallen ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 2 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... are cleaner than might be supposed after taking into consideration the dirtiness of the clothes and persons of those who inhabit them. They are as a rule substantial thatched cottages with plank or stone walls, and raised on a plinth some 2 to 3 ft. from the ground. The only window is a small opening on one side of the house, which admits but a dim light into the smoke-begrimed interior. The beams are so low that it is impossible for a person of ordinary stature to stand erect within. The fire is always burning ...
— The Khasis • P. R. T. Gurdon
... impartial indifference towards either: it is all nothing to the real point in hand. The subject of the whole play is not the exile's revolt, the rebel's repentance, or the traitor's reward, but above all it is the son's tragedy. The inscription on the plinth of this tragic statue ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... These tombs have pillars extremely like the two palace-pillars, only that these are round, and mine are square: for I chose it so: but the same band near the top, then over this the closed lotus-flower, then the small square plinth, which separates them from the architrave, only mine have no architrave; the tombs consist of a little outer temple or court, then comes a well, and inside another chamber, where, I suppose, the dead were, a ribbon-like astragal surrounding the walls, which are ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel |
