"Foreground" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... upon French landscape art that is felt at the present time. His advice to Frith was: 'Never do anything without nature before you if it be possible to have it. See those weeds and the dock leaves? They are to come into the foreground of this picture. I know dock leaves pretty well, but I should not attempt to introduce them into a picture ...
— East Anglia - Personal Recollections and Historical Associations • J. Ewing Ritchie
... masonry that surrounds the entrance trap door and its ladder (see Pl. LXXXVII). Frequently in such cases the surface of the ground shows no evidence of the outlines or dimensions of the underlying room. Examples of such subterranean kivas may be seen in the foreground of the general view of a court in Oraibi (Pl. XXXVIII), and in the view of the dance rock at Walpi (Pl. XXIV). But such wholly subterranean arrangement of the ceremonial chamber is by no means universal even at Tusayan. Even when the kiva was placed within the village ...
— Eighth Annual Report • Various
... push herself into the foreground. My idea is that what artists call middle distance is better suited to her colouring. Seriously, I resent her putting you up to appeal to me—over Anita's head. ...
— The Second Latchkey • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... enter 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 ...
— Marie Antoinette And Her Son • Louise Muhlbach
... turns its back on the voyager who there seeks refuge. The sea-wall curving like a half-moon round the bay, and the pebbled esplanade above it, occupy all the foreground. The principal street of Oban skirts this artificial quay, where the shipping of the place lies at anchor, and on its farther side the buildings all front the sea. Thus the whole place smiles a welcome; its white garniture—for everything in Oban seems ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various
... they always consist in stopping short of nature, not in falsifying nature; and thus in Giotto's foliage, he stops short of the quantity of leaves on the real tree, but he gives you the form of the leaves represented with perfect truth. His foreground also is nearly always occupied by flowers and herbage, carefully and individually painted from nature; while, although thus simple in plan, the arrangements of line in these landscapes of course show the influence of the master-mind, and sometimes, where the story requires it, we ...
— Lectures on Architecture and Painting - Delivered at Edinburgh in November 1853 • John Ruskin
... beautiful and widest far or near, and we were treated like most new-comers. During the ascent our eyes were bandaged, and when the handkerchief was removed a marvellous picture appeared before our astonished gaze. In the foreground, toward the left, rose the wooded height crowned by the stately ruins of the Blankenburg. Beyond opened the beautiful leafy bed of the Saale, proudly dominated by the Leuchtenburg. Before us there was scarcely any barrier to ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... defences at once. They have a lot of irregulars whom the Chinese General won't be able to keep in hand. He won't mind their being wiped out either. I see you've made a good job of clearing the foreground. You haven't left them much cover. So you blew up our poor old Mess ...
— The Elephant God • Gordon Casserly
... the statement that I had seldom spent an hour in conversation with a Southerner without hearing some mention of the Civil War, and that I had heard other Northerners remark upon this matter, and express surprise at the tenacity with which the war holds its place in the foreground of the southern mind. ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... and double-basses behind the second violins; the trumpets, cornets, trombones, and tubas behind the violas; the rest of the violoncellos and double-basses behind the wooden wind instruments; the harps in the foreground, close to the orchestral conductor; the kettle-drums, and other instruments of percussion behind or in the centre of the brass instruments; the orchestral conductor, turning his back to the public, at the base of the orchestra, ...
— The Orchestral Conductor - Theory of His Art • Hector Berlioz
... grotesque sculpture. There is a powerful sun; the somewhat rigid folds in the dress of coarse stuff are well marked; one half the face is in deep shade, the other in strong light; the churchyard wall throws a broad shadow behind, while in the foreground there is a gracefully chequered breadth of intermingled dark and light in the form of a mass of rank grass and foliage. Had an old thin man of striking figure and features been selected, and some study-worn scholar introduced in front of him, the result would have been a design ready for ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... 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 still a ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... poets in whom we begin to feel that the background begins to be almost as important as the figures of the foreground; Spenser is genuinely interested in his stories of chivalry and honour, and in his moral allegory, but we sometimes wonder whether the most important thing in his poetry is not the chequered light and shade of his forests, the picturesque splendour of his castles, and the gloom of his caverns ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various
... it is so slight that it can hardly be called a story, but each of these sketches conveys a distinct atmosphere of the country and the people, and shows the individuality of each writer. The unhappy state of Poland for more than 150 years has placed political and social problems in the foreground of Polish literature. Writers are therefore judged and appraised by their fellow-countrymen as much by their patriotism as by ...
— Selected Polish Tales • Various
... pretentious than the others, in which the priests lodged. The whole aspect of the place was peculiarly desolate and depressing, facing that vast waste of water, the black forest shadows behind, and those rotting stumps in the foreground. ...
— Beyond the Frontier • Randall Parrish
... castle from the river, as a foreground, one has a lovely breastwork of trees, the castle resting on the crown of the hill like some splendid jewel. Its grayness makes its strong, bold outlines appear the more distinct against the melting background of the faint blue and white English ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume I. - Great Britain and Ireland • Various
... its early existence can be adduced he ascribes to its origin in the infancy of the race; and the histories of Rome and Sparta and Venice seem to him proof that the theory is somehow demonstrable by facts. More important than origins, he seems to deem its implications. He has placed consent in the foreground of the argument; and he was anxious to establish the grounds for its continuance. Can the makers of the original contract, that is to say, bind their successors? If legitimate government is based ...
— Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham • Harold J. Laski
... games, and the historian and poet offered to the gods the products of human genius. In the religion of the Greeks, however, the moral element, although not passed over and in the Greek epic and tragedy not seldom expressed in grand characters, stood nevertheless too little in the foreground, so that the worship of the divine, as in the older nature-worship, especially in the feasts in honor of Dionysus and Aphrodite, was marked by immoral practices. The conception of a future life, which ...
— A Comparative View of Religions • Johannes Henricus Scholten
... the external world was again in existence, and found lively expression in the minstrelsy of different nations, which gives evidence of the sympathy felt with all the simple phenomena of nature—spring with its flowers, the green fields, and the woods. But these pictures are all foreground, without perspective. Even the crusaders, who travelled so far and saw so much, are not recognizable as such in these poems. The epic poetry, which describes armor and costumes so fully, does not attempt more than a sketch of outward nature; and even the great Wolfram von ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... end that evolution is in every direction placing woman to-day in the foreground and quickening her to make new demands upon the resources of intelligence and ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... westward across the plain was the clay-cliff barrier, looking under the sunset like a narrow black ribbon. In the hollow itself was the camp, giving impression in the background of a scattering of ghostly mules, a half-circle of wagons, ill-defined forms of recumbent vaqueros, and then in the foreground of Sam with his gleaming semicircle of utensils, and his pathetic little pile of fuel which would not be induced to gleam ...
— Blazed Trail Stories - and Stories of the Wild Life • Stewart Edward White
... promoted to the Veteran Corps of the iron-legged Dancing Men and the insatiable Diners-Out. He would eat on his Friends about six Nights in each Week, and repay them every Christmas by sending a Card showing a Frozen Stream in the Foreground, ...
— Knocking the Neighbors • George Ade
... sit opposite to me, Frau Bertha, or here beside me, if you would care to look at the pictures with me? Now we come to a Falkenborg—wonderful, isn't it? In the extreme foreground, though, it seems so void, so cramped. Yes, nothing but a peasant lad dancing with a girl, and there's an old woman who is cross about it, and here is a house out of the door of which someone is coming ...
— Bertha Garlan • Arthur Schnitzler
... their battlements jewelled with fine mosaic work of lichens, their feet in the young grass of April starred with cowslips and late primroses. Near the old wooden door two cypresses stood sentinel, and the gnarled olives in the foreground loomed ancient and unresponsive as the walls themselves. The light wind of the morning had dropped with the sun; and the lake, far below them, showed delicately blurred mirages of townlets, hills, and sky. Southward, toward Como and Lecco, all was saturated in the magical blue atmosphere, ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... dismounted to look at the dead beast the cornet solo, "Take a pair of sparkling eyes," began. There was such a startling incongruity between an almost untrodden virgin jungle in Assam, with a dead leopard lying in the foreground, and that familiar strain of Sullivan's, so beloved of amateur tenors, that it gave a curious sense of unreality to ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... was rewarded by a most glorious view of the snows, one of the finest I have ever seen. Between me and them were four or five ranges of lower hills, the deepest richest blue conceivable, and many of their valleys were filled with shining seas of rolling sunlit cloud. Against this foreground rose a quarter-circle sweep of the snows, wreathed and garlanded with cloud wracks here and there, but for the most part silhouetted sharply in the morning sun. The grandest mass was in the centre: Nanda Devi, 25,600, which is the highest mountain in the Empire, and Trisoul, over ...
— Letters from Mesopotamia • Robert Palmer
... brown against the gray and green of the prairie, the wheat loam rolled away, back to the ridge, over it, and on again. It was such a breadth of sowing as had but once, when wheat was dear, been seen at Silverdale, but still across the foreground, advancing in echelon, came lines of dusty teams, and there was a meaning in the furrows they left behind them, for they were not plowing where the wheat had been. Each wave of lustrous clods that rolled from the gleaming shares was so much rent from the virgin prairie, and a ...
— Winston of the Prairie • Harold Bindloss
... leading part was a remarkably clean-cut little person, with a golden sweep of eyelashes—I wished that Juliet could have had a more comfortable time of it. Instead of a yawning sepulchre, with Romeo and Juliet dying in the middle foreground, and that luckless young Paris stretched out on the left, spitted like a spring-chicken with Montague's rapier, and Friar Laurence, with a dark lantern, groping about under the melancholy yews—in place of all this costly piled-up woe, I would have liked a pretty, mediaeval chapel ...
— A Midnight Fantasy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... 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
... S. Ambrogio in Nemo. Here the Madonna and Child are enthroned in the centre of the picture; the four Fathers of the Church, Ambrose, Augustine, Jerome, and Gregory, stand on either side; and in the foreground, kneeling at the foot of the throne, are the Duke and Duchess of Milan, with their two children. The Christ-child turns towards Lodovico, and St. Ambrose, the protector and patron saint of Milan, lays his hand on the shoulder of the duke, as, clad in rich brocades and wearing a massive ...
— Beatrice d'Este, Duchess of Milan, 1475-1497 • Julia Mary Cartwright
... below from the valleys behind; wreathed and weltered about the great black teeth of the crater; and then sinking among them, and below them, shrouded the whole cone in purple darkness for the day; while in the foreground blazed in the sunshine broad slopes of cane-field: below them again the town, with handsome houses and old-fashioned churches and convents, dating possibly from the seventeenth century, embowered in mangoes, tamarinds, and palmistes; and along the beach a market ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... 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
... a crater, a ring-mountain, the scene of the impact of something terrible and huge. It was a chasm with circular, broken rocky walls. There was a fallen tree in the foreground, near the spot from which the sketch seemed to have ...
— Long Ago, Far Away • William Fitzgerald Jenkins AKA Murray Leinster
... 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 ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... I don't want to," says Mabel, whimpering and hiding her eyes. "Oh, I don't like it; it's a horrid picture! What's that man doing there in the corner?" peeping through her fingers at a dead man in the foreground. "He is dead! I know ...
— April's Lady - A Novel • Margaret Wolfe Hungerford
... The landscape stretches, in the form of an immense treeless upland, towards a long mountain lake. Beyond the lake rises a range of peaks with blue-white snow in the clefts. In the foreground on the left a purling brook falls in severed streamlets down a steep wall of rock, and thence flows smoothly over the upland until it disappears to the right. Dwarf trees, plants, and stones along the course of the brook. In the foreground on the right a hillock, with a stone bench ...
— When We Dead Awaken • Henrik Ibsen
... burns his fingers, cuts his hand, scalds his tongue, and in this way learns the conditions of his physical well being. This is Nature's way of proceeding, and it is wonderful what progress her pupil makes. His enjoyments for a time are physical, and the confectioner's shop occupies the foreground of human happiness; but the blossoms of a finer life are already beginning to unfold themselves, and the relation of cause and effect dawns upon the boy. He begins to see that the present condition of things is not ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... the waltz succeeds the schottish, the scene presents one bewildering maze of flaunting gossamers and girating bodies, now floating sylph-like into the foreground, then whirling seductively into the shadowy vista, where the joyous laugh dies out in the din of voices. The excitement has seized upon the head and heart of the young,—the child who stood trembling between the first and second downward step ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... nearly as conspicuous in the greater part of her productions; where we scarcely meet with any striking sentiment that is not ushered in by some such symphony of external nature—and scarcely a lovely picture that does not serve as an appropriate foreground to some deep or lofty emotion. We may illustrate this proposition, we think, by the following exquisite lines, on a palm-tree in an ...
— The Young Lady's Mentor - A Guide to the Formation of Character. In a Series of Letters to Her Unknown Friends • A Lady
... 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 prosaic display of kitchen-stuff, ...
— The Days Before Yesterday • Lord Frederick Hamilton
... under the net-work of ingratiating wrinkles, looked aside, from self-consciousness, out of the coach window at a velvet lawn with a cherry-tree and a dark fir side by side, and a Japanese quince in the foreground. ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... 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 ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... 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 Dossi's Circe. She ...
— The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Part 1 (of 10) • Edith Wharton
... hut which stood in the foreground, the boys imagined they heard a cry from within. Possibly it was a lure, and the Professor advised them not to ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: The Tribesmen • Roger Finlay
... watercourse, now dry, and then through old Austrian trenches, elaborately blasted in the Carso rock and captured a year ago. The Nad Logem is part of the northern edge of the Carso, and from our O.P. a great panorama spread out north, east and west, with the sinuous Vippacco in the foreground, fringed with trees. From here I had pointed out to me the various features of the country. The play of light and shade in the distance was very wonderful. Our target that afternoon was a point in the Austrian front line on a long, low, brown hill lying right below us, known officially as Hill ...
— With British Guns in Italy - A Tribute to Italian Achievement • Hugh Dalton
... above Buffalo Lake, upon a lofty bank, with the Heart River in the foreground; and the great meadows, threaded by creeks and inlets, stretching for miles to the south of them, are one of the finest sights of the ...
— Through the Mackenzie Basin - A Narrative of the Athabasca and Peace River Treaty Expedition of 1899 • Charles Mair
... for once: that army was found, and was all cut to pieces in the desert. Heavens, gentlemen, what a sublime picture! The Roman legions—the wilderness—Jerusalem in the distance—an army of murderers in the foreground!" ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... gentlewoman, with a dash of the easy French coquetry, which renders her piquante.—But Monsieur her husband, whom nature never dreamed of casting in either the mould of a gentleman or lover, makes but an aukward figure in the foreground of ...
— Posthumous Works - of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman • Mary Wollstonecraft
... garden. He sat for a while on the balustrade of the terrace, looking out over the green campagna, over which the moon now rose large and red, while the towers and domes of the city stood, dark and solemn, in the foreground. The bells of Santa Maria Maggiore were tolling slowly and pensively, and the sound lingered with long vibrations in the still air. A mighty, shapeless longing, remotely aroused or intensified by the sound of the bells, shook ...
— Ilka on the Hill-Top and Other Stories • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... a few seconds 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, to ...
— The Wall Between • Sara Ware Bassett
... tell my wife anything about it. I did not care to have her with me. In all such adventures I find her more useful as a sentimental figure in the background—I, of course, allow no sentiment in the foreground—than ...
— The War of the Wenuses • C. L. Graves and E. V. Lucas
... In the foreground of his dream (rich parqueterie) three figures went to and fro, one adorable in plum color and point lace; one, the one with the red hair, still beautiful in green; and one, not beautiful, but—well—elegant in pink. ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... who some centuries earlier had built Rudham Court, had been wiser than the generation in which he lived in his choice of a site. Instead of a valley he had chosen the side of a hill, and the sloping foreground had been levelled into a succession of terraces, giving the impression of an almost mountainous ascent to the house from the road which lay beneath. The house, not beautiful in itself, was softened by the hand of time into a dull red that contrasted ...
— The Village by the River • H. Louisa Bedford
... through the howling, rum-crazed horde. At every lashing blow of his fist, every kick of his high-laced boot, men went down. Others reeled drunkenly from his path screaming aloud in their fright; while across the open space in the foreground four or five men could be seen dashing frantically for the protection of the timber. MacNair ripped the gun from the hand of a reeling Indian and, throwing it to his shoulder, fired. Of those who ran, one dropped, rose ...
— The Gun-Brand • James B. Hendryx
... flapped back, with a croak, and dropped on the horse's skull again. Hearing that bodeful sound the doctor paused a moment, knocking the ashes out of his pipe, and looking round at the bird at its ugly work, set as foreground to that pure glory of the sunrise, and the vast noble landscape, misty valley, dewy grassland, far ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... picture of a breaker, a savage thing. In the foreground, lifted somewhat from the turmoil, was a black rock. It was a precarious foothold, a place to shrink from in terror. The sea reached for it; the greater waves boiled over and sucked it bare. It was wet, slimy, overhanging death. ...
— Harbor Tales Down North - With an Appreciation by Wilfred T. Grenfell, M.D. • Norman Duncan
... to droop their branches, as if in sympathy with the gray aspect of the day, while afar, across the green, the sylvan guardians of the place had either receded altogether in the gray haze or stood forth like shadowy ghosts. In the foreground, not far from the main entrance, a number of sheep and their young nibbled contentedly the wet and delectable grass, and as some bright gown paused or whisked past, the juxtaposition of fine raiment and young lamb suggested soft, shifting Bouchers ...
— Half A Chance • Frederic S. Isham
... brush-work. Come naturally, at the right emotional angle, upon a canvass of Gainsborough, who painted ladies like landscapes, as great and as unconscious with repose, and you will note how subtly the artist gives to a dress flowing in the foreground something of the divine quality of distance. Then you will understand another faded phrase and words spoken far away upon the sea; there will rise up quite fresh before you and be borne upon a bar of music, like words you have never heard ...
— A Short History of England • G. K. Chesterton
... purple and crimson with the pleasant homespun of colonial story; and, ere the reader has ceased to smile over the antics, adventures and sports of the odd specimens of early Yankee character that fill the foreground, he is charmed into silence by the poetic pomp of Indian tradition and the fiery display of Indian ...
— The Knight of the Golden Melice - A Historical Romance • John Turvill Adams
... these sheaves," he continued, "and look again. Let us reject not a single one of the little facts that build up the reality of which I have spoken. Let us permit them to depart of their own accord into space. They cumber the foreground, and yet we cannot but be aware of the existence behind them of a great and very curious force that sustains the whole. Does it only sustain and not raise? These men whom we see before us are at least no longer the ferocious animals of whom La Bruyere speaks, the wretches who talked in ...
— The Life of the Bee • Maurice Maeterlinck
... to-day for sure!" cried Baptiste, rising with his eyes fixed on three pines in the foreground of the distant timbered ridge. He saw that the line did indeed run clear of trees for two miles along one side of the long, ...
— Old Man Savarin and Other Stories • Edward William Thomson
... extended for leagues, and vast marshy meadows, where storks, herons, and ibis were gathered, with flocks of cormorants and darters on the sand-bars, and stilts, skimmers, and clouds of beautiful swaying terns in the foreground. About noon we passed the highest point which the old Spanish conquistadores and explorers, Irala and Ayolas, had reached in the course of their marvellous journeys in the first half of the sixteenth century—at a time when there was not a settlement in what is now the United States, and ...
— Through the Brazilian Wilderness • Theodore Roosevelt
... peacefully and joyously smoked, he studied every feature of them—each rock and swamp and barren slope, every hill and corrie and misty mountain-top; and he knew that while life remained to him he would never forget this memorable scene—with the slain stag in the foreground. No, nor how could he ever forget that wan glare of sunlight that had come along the plateau where the deer were quietly feeding?—he seemed to see again each individual blade of grass close to his ...
— Prince Fortunatus • William Black
... across the gallery to a picture which occupied a wall by itself at the further end. It represented a summer scene of deep repose. There was water in the foreground, in the back tall forest trees in the fresh, rich foliage of June. Overhead was a sunset sky, its saffron and rosy tints reflected in the water below. The master who ...
— A Sweet Girl Graduate • Mrs. L.T. Meade
... The foreground of the castle is formed of green and level meadows washed by the river Eden; and, in modern days, two fine stone bridges add to the beauty of the scene. The hanging banks are crowned with the village and church of Stanwix, and the mountains of Bewcastle ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume III. • Mrs. Thomson
... beside Half-moon Pond, and have "laid our course," as the sailors say, by our map and the sun, straight through the Scrub to visit Lake Ella, we come out upon the heights above Lake Hutchinson. The dark greens of the foreground soften into deep-blue shadows in the middle distance. Lake Hutchinson sparkles, a vivid sapphire, against the distant silvery-gray of Lake Geneva, while far away the low blue hills melt, range behind range, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, September 1880 • Various
... in plain view. As the hills to the west are ascended the view broadens, until, from the extreme top of some of the higher points, there is, to the east, the valley stretching away to the Cascade Mountains, with its rivers, the Columbia and Willamette; in the foreground Portland, in the middle distance Vancouver, and, bounding the horizon, the Cascade Mountains, with their snow-clad peaks, and the gorge of the Columbia in plain sight, whilst away to the north the course of the Columbia may be followed for miles. To the west, ...
— Oregon, Washington and Alaska; Sights and Scenes for the Tourist • E. L. Lomax
... perspective, linear and aerial. The former has to do with the manner in which horizontal lines appear to converge as they recede from the foreground, and so produce the effect of distance. The latter has to do with the effect of distance, which is due to the successive gradations of gray in color noticeable in objects farther and farther away ...
— The Painter in Oil - A complete treatise on the principles and technique - necessary to the painting of pictures in oil colors • Daniel Burleigh Parkhurst
... draw up plans for promoting the objects of 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 instrument ...
— The Life of William Carey • George Smith
... there were 270 in Cordova alone). Christian, too, is a certain cruelty toward one's self and toward others; hatred of unbelievers; the will to persecute. Sombre and disquieting ideas are in the foreground; the most esteemed states of mind, bearing the most respectable names, are epileptoid; the diet is so regulated as to engender morbid symptoms and over-stimulate the nerves. Christian, again, is all deadly enmity to the rulers ...
— The Antichrist • F. W. Nietzsche
... What perspective did was to insist that all objects in a picture should be drawn in relation to one fixed centre of vision. And whereas formerly each object was painted to a hard focus, whether it was in the foreground or the distance, impressionism teaches that you cannot have the focus in a picture at the same time on the foreground ...
— The Practice and Science Of Drawing • Harold Speed
... 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, ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... scheme of 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 snapping at the flies, and at the end of the station, perched on boxes or leaning ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... softness, and the shadows creep through the trees in the Park, and the lights in half the windows up that white cliff wall begin to gleam in golden squares, the great building becomes curiously ethereal, the pine limb flung into the foreground of the design catches the eye, the reflection in the water is as real as the reality. The Plaza, monstrous tons of steel and stone, floats between two elements. Then darkness gathers, the reflected lights in the blackening water grow more golden, and suddenly, perhaps, a duck swims across a tenth ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... in a carriage three miles, to the foot of the hill, and on pony-back as much more up it, through a dense tropical vegetation which reminded me of my Jamaica days. At the end of the ride we arrived at the Government bungalow, and found one of the most magnificent views I ever witnessed; in the foreground this tropical luxuriance, and beyond, far below, the glistening sea studded with ships and boats innumerable, over which again the Malay peninsula with its varied outline. I had hardly begun to admire the scene, when a ...
— Letters and Journals of James, Eighth Earl of Elgin • James, Eighth Earl of Elgin
... loomed large and gracious in the foreground of her thoughts. She longed for the refuge of her kindly arms until she could gather herself together in the new era ...
— In Apple-Blossom Time - A Fairy-Tale to Date • Clara Louise Burnham
... the slushy road over Ballinrobe Fair Green, the illuminated tents light up the foreground pleasantly, while the moon tinges the tree-tops and the river Robe with silver. All is beautiful enough were it not for the persistent rattle of the sabre and the jingle of the spur. So far as can be ascertained at ...
— Disturbed Ireland - Being the Letters Written During the Winter of 1880-81. • Bernard H. Becker
... many small subsidiary figures, which in a painting might have been given their proper value, being in the marble of the same relief and distinction as the major characters, give a somewhat absurd effect. The little goddess who sits in the foreground, for instance, is smaller than the dog. Again, there is less of the motive shown than in the Laocoon. The group is seized at the moment preceding the frightful catastrophe, but that moment is as ...
— TITLE • AUTHOR
... petrifactions which boys would love to collect. And it is also curious to notice that the rocks which crop up in all directions become sunburnt, and limestone, naturally of a dazzling white, often assumes a variety of tints under the influence of the powerful sun, as may be seen in the foreground of my picture of ...
— Peeps at Many Lands: Egypt • R. Talbot Kelly
... 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 ...
— The Wolf's Long Howl • Stanley Waterloo
... the rain, which set in between five and six o'clock, the expedition to Harchester passed off with considerable eclat. Such, in any case, was Theresa's opinion, she herself having figured conspicuously in the foreground. During the inspection of the Cathedral the Dean paid her quite marked attention; thanks, in part, to her historical and archaeological knowledge—of which she made the most, and to her connection with the Verity family—of which she made the most also. In precisely what that ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... 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 ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... Jarvo; he took it for granted that Jarvo had grasped that Olivia must be taken back to her aunt and her friends at the palace; and afterward he knew only, for an indeterminate space, that the car was moving across some dim, heavenly foreground to some dim, ultimate destination in which he found himself believing with ...
— Romance Island • Zona Gale
... spared on the setting, which was acknowledged to be very beautiful even by people who shared his acquaintance with the Opera houses of Paris and Vienna. The foreground, to the footlights, was covered with emerald green cloth. In the middle distance symmetrical mounds of woolly green moss bounded by croquet hoops formed the base of shrubs shaped like orange-trees but studded with large pink and red roses. Gigantic ...
— The Age of Innocence • Edith Wharton
... complexion. There was a smooth stone bench set into the wall of the church, on which Longueville had rested for an hour, observing the composition of the little picture of which I have indicated the elements, and of which the parapet of the terrace would form the foreground. The thing was what painters call a subject, and he had promised himself to come back with his utensils. This morning he returned to the inn and took possession of them, and then he made his way through a labyrinth of empty streets, lying on the edge of the town, within ...
— Confidence • Henry James
... domestic atmosphere is undisturbed. A newspaper printed on a hand-press, and distributed by the winds for aught I know, has its office in the main lane of the village; its society column creates no scandal. A solitary bicycle that flashes like a shooting star across the placid foreground is our nearest approach to an ...
— Over the Rocky Mountains to Alaska • Charles Warren Stoddard
... death. And yet in point of fact the elementary things remain much as they have always been before, and if they appear to have acquired new meaning it is simply because they have been moved into the foreground and are no longer ...
— The Fight For The Republic In China • B.L. Putnam Weale
... I had never seen a boy with anything approaching the muscular development of the epileptic youth in the centre. The thing in the picture that I most approved of was the end of the log in the little pool, in the foreground; it looked true ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... 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 of the housekeeper ...
— The Human Chord • Algernon Blackwood
... been invaded, and the invasion of those rights has 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 towers above the ...
— President Wilson's Addresses • Woodrow Wilson
... politically much attached, and of Mr. Spring Rice, afterwards Lord Monteagle, he also had a high opinion; but no friendship nor influence was sufficient to retard what may be called his retrograde course: like his friend, Lord Stanley, he became less and less a Whig, and finally stood in the foreground of Conservatism. He was a warm supporter of the Irish Roman Catholics, but did not appear ever to have understood their political tactics. His sympathy for what is termed Pusey-ism may have accounted for his leanings to the Irish Romanist party, although in this respect, according ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... dragged it between two trees and thereby uprooted them. The cowherds, led by the bearded Nanda, Krishna's foster-father, have hurried to the scene and Balarama, Krishna's half-brother, is excitedly pointing out that Krishna is safe. In the foreground, emerging from the earth are two crowned figures—Nala and Kuvara, the sons of the yaksha king, Kubera, who, as a consequence of a curse had been turned into the two trees. Doomed to await Krishna's intervention, they have now been ...
— The Loves of Krishna in Indian Painting and Poetry • W. G. Archer
... people have done for you; to ignore what the world owes you, and to think what you owe the world; to put your rights in the background, and your duties in the middle distance, and your chances to do a little more than your duty in the foreground; to see that your fellow-men are just as real as you are, and try to look behind their faces to their hearts, hungry for joy; to own that probably the only good reason for your existence is not what you are going to get ...
— The Spirit of Christmas • Henry Van Dyke
... show her 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 ...
— Jean of the Lazy A • B. M. Bower
... 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 in ...
— The Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... with equal effect, to Mr. Oakhurst and Mother Shipton, who was actually relaxing into amiability. "Is this yer a d——d picnic?" said Uncle Billy, with inward scorn, as he surveyed the sylvan group, the glancing firelight, and the tethered animals in the foreground. Suddenly an idea mingled with the alcoholic fumes that disturbed his brain. It was apparently of a jocular nature, for he felt impelled to slap his leg again and cram his ...
— The Short-story • William Patterson Atkinson
... and impatience, which he found hard to bear. He was extremely uneasy at the idea of his father being left without companion or nurse. This uneasiness formed, as it were, the background of his thoughts, while a variety of less reasonable, but more vivid, anxieties held a complete revel in the foreground. He had not even his old refuge against troublesome fancies; for work, real absorbing work, of any kind was out of the question now. His attendance on his grandfather, though often fatiguing enough, was no occupation ...
— A Canadian Heroine, Volume 2 - A Novel • Mrs. Harry Coghill
... "Falootin" style so popular over the Atlantic, of those grand-sounding periods about freedom and love of country, was not to be lost by a set of people who, in all their enthusiasm for Garibaldi, are intently bent on making themselves foreground figures in the tableau that should have been filled by ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever
... and both the background of the Old Testament and the foreground of the New become dull, sunless, colourless. Reinstate that central Figure, and book after book, roll after roll, volume after volume, becomes ...
— The Church: Her Books and Her Sacraments • E. E. Holmes
... he had seen, one in particular was touching in its simplicity. It represented Christ on the Cross, and the drops of blood from His side and His feet were made by little splashes of red silk on the cloth of gold, while in the foreground was Mary, ...
— The Dream • Emile Zola
... ornamented the cover with gilding and enamel. The illustration of book binding, published by Amman in his Book of Trades, puts before us many of the implements still in use. The forwarder, with his customary apron of leather, is in the foreground, making use of a plow-knife for trimming the edges of a book. The lying press, which rests obliquely against the block before him, contains a book that has received the operation of backing-up from a queer shaped ...
— Bibliomania in the Middle Ages • Frederick Somner Merryweather
... fishing section, and this was the background depicted by the artist who drew the wrapper for the first serial issue of "The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club." Putney Church is seen in the distance, with its Henry VIII. Chapel, and in the foreground Mr. Pickwick is found dozing in his traditional punt,—that curious box, or coffin-like, affair, which, as a pleasure craft, is ...
— Dickens' London • Francis Miltoun
... shallow depressions, lying arid and scored between swelling wooded ridges. He had not met in all the journey a better locality for the study of glacial effects than here. The sides of the channel show these traces throughout their whole length. In this same neighborhood, as a conspicuous foreground on the shore of Indian Reach, to the south of Lackawanna Cove, is a large moraine resembling the "horse-backs," in the State of Maine, New England. The top was as level as a railroad embankment. The anchorage ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz
... would say, "a 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 ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... matters, 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 ones. ( 2, 14.)(155) On the other hand, in over-cultivated ages, ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... pedestal, and by this he found her. Her back was towards him as she faced the western horizon, where clouds of rose and gold were sailing in a sky of warm apple-green which toned above them to a luminous silvery blue. On the edge of the slope in the foreground some cypresses were silhouetted in purplish bronze. She turned as she heard his footsteps, her face so wondrously fair in the half light that his heart ached afresh at the sight of her. "I'd quite given up expecting you, ...
— In Brief Authority • F. Anstey
... he had arrived upon a camel horizontally, and had been buried about fifty yards from the site of our camp. His grave was beneath a clump of mimosas that shaded the spot, and formed the most prominent object in the foreground of our landscape. Thither every Friday the women of the village congregated, with offerings of a few handfuls of dhurra in small gourd-shells, which they laid upon the grave, while they ATE THE HOLY EARTH in small pinches, which they scraped like rabbits, from a hole they had burrowed toward the ...
— In the Heart of Africa • Samuel White Baker
... proposition on the foreground, because we have reason to believe that a very different impression prevails in certain quarters, associated in some cases with the hope, in others with the apprehension, that the advances which have been ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan |
