"Obelisk" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Great Church were other objects which could be readily converted into bronze, and the destruction of which was irreparable. The immense hippodrome was crowded with statues. Egypt had furnished an obelisk for the centre, Delphi had given its commemoratory bronze of the victory of Plataea. Later works of pagan sculptors were there in abundance, while Christian artists had continued the traditions of their ancestors. The cultured inhabitants of Constantinople appreciated these works ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume VI. • Various
... dome, and arch, column, and spire, and obelisk, and lofty terraces, and many-windowed palaces, rose in all directions from a mass of building which appeared to him each instant to grow more huge, till at length it seemed to occupy the whole horizon. The sun lent additional lustre to the dazzling ...
— The Voyage of Captain Popanilla • Benjamin Disraeli
... to know, that is, nosco. But this is most false, for, if this could be, those things which were most named and best known in their species would in their species be the most noble. Thus the obelisk of St. Peter would be the most noble stone in the world; and Asdente, the shoemaker of Parma, would be more Noble than any one of his fellow-citizens; and Albuino della Scala would be more Noble than Guido da Castello di Reggio. Each one ...
— The Banquet (Il Convito) • Dante Alighieri
... formerly, upon the leafless summit of a venerable chestnut-tree, on our farm, directly in front of the house, at the distance of less than half a mile. The withered trunk and boughs, surmounted by the coarse-wrought and capacious nest, was a more picturesque object than an obelisk; and the flights of the hawks, as they went forth to hunt, returned with their game, exercised themselves in wheeling round and round, and circling about it, were amusing to the beholder, almost from morning till night. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 486 - Vol. 17, No. 486., Saturday, April 23, 1831 • Various
... fifty English men and women, when he obtained possession of Calcutta in 1756—confining them in a narrow and noisome cell, which poisoned them with its malarious atmosphere, so that by morning only a few remained alive—is now part of a warehouse. But an obelisk stands at the entrance, inscribed with the names ...
— The Story of Ida Pfeiffer - and Her Travels in Many Lands • Anonymous
... front of the monument is on the south side, the statue of Lincoln being on that side of the obelisk, over Memorial Hall. On the east side are three tablets, upon which are the letters U. S. A. To the right of that, and beginning with Virginia, we find the the abbreviations of the original thirteen States. Next comes Vermont, ...
— Lincoln's Yarns and Stories • Alexander K. McClure
... Huss when he went to the Council of Constance with the Emperor's safe-conduct in his belt; or as a condemned heretic would have been in the old days, if he had gone and stood in that little dingy square outside the palace of the Inquisition at Rome, and there, below the obelisk, preached his heresies! Christ had been condemned in the council of the nation; but there were plenty of hiding-places among the Galilean hills, and the frontier was close at hand, and it needed a long ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... By the obelisk. In the language of my home Came to me the chatter of news. The mirror-poem which I had polished For masculine minxes Had been smeared at home By splutterings ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... has frequently been open to this duplicate interpretation, that is, the upright pillar. The Egyptian obelisk, the pillars of "Irmin" or of "Roland," set up now of wood, now of stone by the ancient Germans, the "red-painted great warpole" of the American Indians, the May-pole of Old England, the spire of sacred edifices, the staff planted on the grave, the terminus of ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... fall visibly from the white man's lips. "Sofala," Captain Whalley repeated; and suddenly his heart failed him. He paused. The shores, the islets, the high ground, the low points, were dark: the horizon had grown somber; and across the eastern sweep of the shore the white obelisk, marking the landing-place of the telegraph-cable, stood like a pale ghost on the beach before the dark spread of uneven roofs, intermingled with palms, of the native ...
— End of the Tether • Joseph Conrad
... He showed black against the background of the sky. The moon was shining behind him, and his shadow, which was of extravagant size, looked in the distance like an obelisk proceeding across ...
— Salammbo • Gustave Flaubert
... embellish the spot. The blood-stained guillotine, from which crimson rivulets were ever flowing, then occupied the space upon which one of these fountains has been erected; and a clay statue to Liberty reared its hypocritical front where the Egyptian obelisk now rises. Madame Roland stood for a moment upon the elevated platform, looked calmly around upon the vast concourse, and then bowing before the colossal statue, exclaimed, "O Liberty! Liberty! how many crimes are committed in ...
— Madame Roland, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott
... not many trees that assume the shape of an obelisk, or a long spire; but Nature, who presents to our eyes an ever-charming variety of forms as well as hues, in the objects of her creation, has given us the figure of the obelisk in the Chinese Juniper, in the Balsam Fir, in the Arbor-Vitae, and lastly in the Lombardy Poplar, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... the Lagoons III Carnival IV Moonlight Symphony in White Major Coquetry in Death Heart's Diamond Spring's First Smile Contralto Eyes of Blue The Toreador's Serenade Nostalgia of the Obelisks: I The Obelisk in Paris II The Obelisk in Luxor Veterans of the Old Guard, December 15 Sea-Gloom To a Rose-Coloured Gown The World's Malicious Ines de las Sierras — To Petra Camara Odelet, After Anacreon Smoke Apollonia The Blind Man Song ...
— Enamels and Cameos and other Poems • Theophile Gautier
... of an early Monet. The Bois lay about us in the stillness of a holiday evening, and the lawns of Bagatelle were as fresh as June. Below the Arc de Triomphe, the Champs Elysees sloped downward in a sun-powdered haze to the mist of fountains and the ethereal obelisk; and the currents of summer life ebbed and flowed with a normal beat under the trees of the radiating avenues. The great city, so made for peace and art and all humanest graces, seemed to lie by her river-side like a princess guarded by the watchful ...
— Fighting France - From Dunkerque to Belport • Edith Wharton
... the eyes of Maieddine than the foolish faith of Christians, who, at least, were not backsliders. He would not even point out to Victoria the strange minaret of the Abadite mosque at Berryan, which tapered like a brown obelisk against the shimmering sky, for to him its very existence was ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... Christmas work charmingly; and at any rate it was delightful only to look at them. She tried to get her thoughts a little in order. For Norton, she would make the watch guard; that was one thing fixed. A delicate bronze paperweight, a beautiful obelisk, had greatly taken her fancy, and Norton had been describing to her the use of its originals in old Egypt; it was not very costly, and Matilda thought she would like to give that to Mrs. Laval. But she would not decide till she saw more; and for her sisters, and ...
— The House in Town • Susan Warner
... and was obliged to part with large tracts of his possessions, till now there is little left but the ruinous mansion and the ground immediately around it. His tomb stands near the house,—a spacious receptacle, an iron door at the end of a turf-covered mound, and surmounted by an obelisk of the Thomaston marble. There are inscriptions to the memory of several of his family; for he had many children, all of whom are now dead, except one daughter, a widow of fifty, recently married to Hon. John H——. There is a stone fence round ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various
... Jerusalem of the Phoenicians. The city stood on a height beside the sea, and contained a great sanctuary of Astarte, where in the midst of a spacious open court, surrounded by cloisters and approached from below by staircases, rose a tall cone or obelisk, the holy image of the goddess. In this sanctuary the rites of Adonis were celebrated. Indeed the whole city was sacred to him, and the river Nahr Ibrahim, which falls into the sea a little to the south of Byblus, bore in antiquity the name of Adonis. This was the kingdom of Cinyras. From the earliest ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... raising, by subscription, a proper National Monument on the Field of Mollwitz, and so closing his old career. Subscriptions did not take, in that April, 1841, nor in the following months or twelve-months: the zealous Doctor, therefore, indignantly drew his own purse; got a big Obelisk of Granite hewn ready, with suitable Inscription on it; carted his big Obelisk from the quarries of Strehlen; assembled the Country round it, on Mollwitz Field; and passionately discoursed and pleaded, That at least the ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... alignements and cromlechs. Several of these attain to a great size. That to Locmariaquer (Morbihan), now unfortunately fallen and broken, measured over 60 feet in height, being thus not much shorter than the Egyptian obelisk which stands in the Place de la ...
— Rough Stone Monuments and Their Builders • T. Eric Peet
... Trieste and the Adriatic spread out like a map below, with hill and valley and dale waning faintly blue in the distance, and far away the Carnian Alps topped with snow. There was an old inn called Daneus's, close to an obelisk. They took partly furnished rooms, and brought up some of their own furniture to make up deficiencies and give the place a homelike air. It was their wont to come up to Opcina from Saturday to Monday, and get away from Trieste and worries. They always kept some literary work on hand there; and ...
— The Romance of Isabel Lady Burton Volume II • Isabel Lady Burton & W. H. Wilkins
... road from the Gate to the Fort and the Jama Masjid is rich in memories of the Mutiny. It has on its left S. James' Church, with memorial tablets within and outside the shot-riddled globe which once surmounted its dome. Further on are the obelisk to the telegraph officers who stuck to their posts on the fatal 11th of May, and on a gateway of the Old Magazine a record of the heroism of the nine devoted men, who blew it up, losing five of their number in the explosion. Passing under the railway ...
— The Panjab, North-West Frontier Province, and Kashmir • Sir James McCrone Douie
... is over one hundred and thirty-five steps, planned with considerable skill, so as to mask the steepness of the Pincian, and forming the chief feature of the Piazza. Various landings and dividing walls break up their monotony; and a red granite obelisk, found in the gardens of Sallust, crowns the upper terrace in front of the church. All day long, these steps are flooded with sunshine, in which, stretched at length, or gathered in picturesque groups, models of every age and both sexes bask away the hours ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... went on: and taking one or two turns through the tortuous lanes in the neighbourhood, arrived at a spot where a small obelisk, of no very graceful form or great dimensions, planted in the middle of the road, marked the boundary of four distinct parishes. She paused there for a moment, and leaned upon the landmark, as if from fatigue, weakness, or agitation. ...
— The King's Highway • G. P. R. James
... rough heap of granite, a cairn, gray with lichens, in the centre of which stood, or rather leaned, a tall square block of granite, like a dolmen. So great was the age of this strange obelisk that the lichens had encrusted it to the top. The stone had once stood upright; but it now leaned toward the marsh, the cairn having slowly yielded on the ...
— The King's Men - A Tale of To-morrow • Robert Grant, John Boyle O'Reilly, J. S. Dale, and John T.
... as far as the Obelisk with the O'Kelly and the Signora, who were then living together in Lambeth. Till that morning I had not seen the O'Kelly since my departure from London, nearly two years before, so that we had much to tell each other. For the third time now ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... statue of Washington in a sitting posture, to be placed on a high pedestal in the centre of the rotunda of the Capitol. The Washington National Monument Association, after consultation with men of acknowledged artistic taste, selected from among the numerous designs submitted a simple obelisk, five hundred feet in height, for the erection of which the American people began at once ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... encumbering mass of reports, letters, pamphlets and books, a man had cleared a space for himself where he was now seated, clutching his hair impatiently from time to time, as he endeavored to decipher a page of notes, compared to which the hieroglyphics on the obelisk of Luxor, would have been transparently intelligible. Just as the secretary's impatience was approaching desperation, the door opened and a young officer wearing an ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas
... machinery made no noise. There was no more vibration than on a sail-boat. And there was the whole panorama of the Nile spread before my eyes, with all its romance and all its mystery bathed in an enchanting radiance. Occasionally a raven croaked. Sometimes a jackal howled. An obelisk made an exclamation-point against the sky, or the ruins of a temple fretted the horizon. It was the land of Ptolemy, of Rameses, of Hathor, of Horus, of Isis and Osiris, of Herodotus and Cleopatra, of Pharaoh's daughter and Moses. It was the silence of the ages which ...
— As Seen By Me • Lilian Bell
... conspicuous from its size and height, rises a mound of earth shaped into the semblance of an urn or vase, crusted thickly with bits of rock, moss, and pebbles, and overgrown with a tangle of tiny vines. Surmounting this picturesque pedestal is an obelisk of black-veined marble on a granite base, the whole rising some seven feet from the ground. On the polished surface of this memorial pillar is inscribed, in large black capitals, the following classic and touching ...
— The Aldine, Vol. 5, No. 1., January, 1872 - A Typographic Art Journal • Various
... seat is Heliopolis or "On," where Joseph's master Potiphera, or "Priest of Ra," lived. Heliopolis is the "house of the obelisk," the obelisk being a representation of the sun. First a kindly old king, he is later a warrior; he has to contend with the serpent Apep, the dragon of darkness who appears pierced by the shafts of Ra. But as Ra sinks in the conflict he is comforted ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies
... were anxious to see them, we had kept more in mid-channel than we should otherwise have done. We now hauled up for Portsmouth Harbour. Far off, on the summit of the green heights of Portsdown Hill, we could see the obelisk-shaped monument to Nelson, an appropriate landmark in sight of the last spot of English ground on which he stepped before sailing to fight the great battle of Trafalgar, where he fell. We could also ...
— A Yacht Voyage Round England • W.H.G. Kingston
... central obelisk. It is set on top of a rock hollowed out like a cavern, in the mouth of which a lion is seen. Afterwards they looked at the fountains at the ends ...
— Caesar or Nothing • Pio Baroja Baroja
... sun for a quarter of a century. Travellers stopped to gaze, to moralize, and to pilfer; postilions and poets scraped off skulls and thigh-bones.... At last, in 1822, the vestiges were swept together and resepulchred, and a simple obelisk of marble was erected, to commemorate a victory well deserving of its fame as a military exploit, but all unworthy to be ranked with earlier triumphs, won by hands pure as well as strong, defending freedom ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... cut shows the position of this obelisk as it appeared when standing near the city of ...
— New National Fourth Reader • Charles J. Barnes and J. Marshall Hawkes
... obelisk in the garden, erected by Pope to the memory of his mother, he placed the ...
— Flowers and Flower-Gardens • David Lester Richardson
... miles from Lampsher the road ran over the rounded summit of the heath, a lonely spot marked by an obelisk of granite, setting forth the gratitude of some great lady of the eighteenth century who had been set upon by highwaymen at this spot and delivered from death just as hope seemed lost. In summer it was a pleasant place, for ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... those which belong to the apocryphal books; (3) that the measure of the golden statue of Dura, sixty cubits by six, is irreconcileable with any theory of proportion suited to the human figure, and still more so with the canon of Assyrian art, as seen in their sculpture, and can apply only to an obelisk; (4) that Daniel has made honourable mention of himself; (5) that the position of the book in the third part of the Jewish canon, the Cethubim or Hagiographa, shows that it was ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... that better civilization, which, amid the conflicts and fall of political and ecclesiastical systems, has been constantly advancing towards perfection in every succeeding age. If there had been no such common Humanity, then the dark and massive Egyptian obelisk would not have everywhere reappeared in the sepulchral architecture of our own times, and the light and graceful orders of Greece and Italy would not as now have been the models of our villas and our dwellings, nor would the simple and ...
— Autographs for Freedom, Volume 2 (of 2) (1854) • Various
... vertebral column, but chiefly on the lower side—the column sending out its diminished vertebrae to the extreme termination of the fin. All the forms testify of a remote antiquity. The figures on a Chinese vase or an Egyptian obelisk are scarce more unlike what now exists in nature than are the fossils of the ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... flattened. Let us call the cube thus flattened No. 1. Starting with No. 1 as a new mass, let the pound weight be laid upon it. We have a more flattened mass, No. 2.... Apply this to squeezed rocks, to those, for example, which form the base of an obelisk like the Matterhorn,—the conclusion seems inevitable that the mountain is sinking by its own weight," etc., etc. Similarly the Nelson statue must be gradually flattening the Nelson column, and in time Cleopatra's needle will be as flat as ...
— The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century - Two Lectures delivered at the London Institution February - 4th and 11th, 1884 • John Ruskin
... An obelisk is a quadrangular, taper, high spire or pyramid, raised perpendicularly, and terminating in a point, to serve as an ornament to some open square; and is very often covered with inscriptions or hieroglyphics, that is, with mystical characters or symbols used by the Egyptians to conceal ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... the time of Thothmes III. (about 1600 years B. C.), when, also, it was set up in the temple of Karnak, at Thebes. It is a tall, rectangular pillar, tapering from the base to near the top, where it is pointed like a flattened pyramid; its sides are inscribed with hieroglyphics. The obelisk was taken to Alexandria by Queen Cleopatra, and was named after her. Some think that Cleopatra's Needle was another stone, quarried by order of Ramesis II., and set up in Heliopolis, the City of the Sun; but several obelisks have borne the name, and this may have caused uncertainty about them. The ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, V. 5, April 1878 - Scribner's Illustrated • Various
... express-wagon; a sullen Southerner contrasts with a grinning Gaul, a darkly-vested bishop with a gayly-attired child, a daintily-gloved belle with a mud-soiled drunkard; a little shoe-black and a blind fiddler ply their trades in the shadow of Emmet's obelisk, and a toy-merchant has Montgomery's mural tablet for a background; on the fence is a string of favorite ballads and popular songs; a mock auctioneer shouts from one door, and a silent wax effigy gazes from another. Pisani, who accompanied Prince Napoleon in his yacht-voyage to America, calls ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 110, December, 1866 - A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics • Various
... irrigation, and in course of time most of their heavy stone buildings have sunk into the soft ground and become completely covered by deposits of mud. So, as at Memphis, all that now remains of ancient Heliopolis, or On, is one granite obelisk, standing alone in the fields; while at other places, such as Tamai or Bete-el-Haga near Mansurah, practically nothing now ...
— Peeps at Many Lands: Egypt • R. Talbot Kelly
... piazza itself, it had not yet, as the reader will understand from the foregoing explanation, either the fine colonnade of Bernini, or the dancing fountains, or that Egyptian obelisk which, according to Pliny, was set up by the Pharaoh at Heliopolis, and transferred to Rome by Caligula, who set it up in Nero's Circus, where it remained till 1586. Now, as Nero's Circus was situate on the very ground where St. Peter's now stands, and the ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... sort of small square temple, built of Arcueil stone and marble. Corinthian fluted pillars formed its general decoration, and enshrined the four fulminatory inscriptions. Independently of the obelisk, the cupola of this temple bore eight allegorical statues, of which the one was France in mourning; the second, Justice raising her sword, and the others the principal virtues of the King. On the principal side these words occurred: "Passer-by, whosoever thou be, abhor Jean Chatel, and ...
— The Memoirs of Madame de Montespan, Complete • Madame La Marquise De Montespan
... him. It was the hour when Paris sits at small green tables in front of the cafes and sips its absinthe or cassis; when the boulevards are thronged, and the rich equipages come and go. There was not a cloud in the tender blue sky against which the reddish obelisk of Luxor looked like a column of jet; the fountains were playing in the Place de la Concorde, and in the Tuileries gardens beyond the breeze dreamily stirred the foliage which hid from Lynde's view ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... of the Vatican. The spot of the apostles' execution was indicated "by immemorial tradition" as between the two goals (inter duas metas) of Nero's Circus, which spot Signor Lanciani tells us is exactly the site of the obelisk now standing in the piazza of St. Peter. A little chapel, called the Chapel of the Crucifixion, stood there in the early ages, before any great basilica or splendid ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 8 - The Later Renaissance: From Gutenberg To The Reformation • Editor-in-Chief: Rossiter Johnson
... concourse of people of all ranks and nations had never been seen at any public ceremony on the Bosphorus as that which, on July 24, accompanied the remains of Hobart Pasha to their last resting place in the English cemetery at Scutari, not far from the spot where a tall granite obelisk records the brave deeds and glorious death of those heroes who perished ...
— Sketches From My Life - By The Late Admiral Hobart Pasha • Hobart Pasha
... fell. That erected by the Austrians is much more massive than its rival; and professes to commemorate rather the merits of the commander than the valour of the troops. The Prussian is a small, but singularly neat obelisk, and bears this inscription, "A grateful king and country honour the heroes who fell." There is a third in progress, of which the Emperor of Russia is the founder; but it is not yet completed. It ought to be ...
— Germany, Bohemia, and Hungary, Visited in 1837. Vol. II • G. R. Gleig
... the historic landmarks which bear the names of some of these brave men. But these are very few in number. Pike's Peak lifts its snowy head to heaven in silent commemoration of the early traveler whose name it bears. Simpson's Rest, a lofty obelisk, commemorates the mountaineer whose life was for the most part passed upon its rugged slopes, and whose last request was that he should be buried on its summit. Another cloud-capped mountain-height bears the name of Fisher's Peak, and thereby hangs ...
— Last of the Great Scouts - The Life Story of William F. Cody ["Buffalo Bill"] • Helen Cody Wetmore
... or in London when we return, the bragging, boasting blasphemies of this or that conquering king, all to the same tune—'I came, I saw, I conquered; I slew so many thousands of the people—I took so many thousands into captivity—I built this temple to the gods—I raised this obelisk or that pyramid'—and all by hand labour, with the miserable, belaboured slaves dying by their thousands upon thousands under their taskmasters' lashes, to be cast afterwards into the Nile, or left to the jackals ...
— In the Mahdi's Grasp • George Manville Fenn
... of a large mining village in the Midlands. A man addressing a small gang of colliers from the foot of a stumpy memorial obelisk. Church bells heard. Churchgoers passing along ...
— Touch and Go • D. H. Lawrence
... small would the matters have been which, even with their best efforts applied in conjunction, they could have attempted or accomplished. Now (to pause while upon this example and look in it as in a glass) let us suppose that some vast obelisk were (for the decoration of a triumph or some such magnificence) to be removed from its place, and that men should set to work upon it with their naked hands; would not any sober spectator think them mad? And if they should then send for more people, ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... him to his feet, set him by his obelisk to face me. I loaded his piece for him, put it into his hands, then stepped back, facing him always, till I was fifteen yards away. "Drop your glove when you are ready," I told him, "and ...
— The Fool Errant • Maurice Hewlett
... cairn was not allowed to remain, there has lately been erected, within sight of the Castle of St. Andrews, a granite obelisk, to commemorate the names of the more eminent Scotish Martyrs. It bears the ...
— The Works of John Knox, Vol. 1 (of 6) • John Knox
... yet to be surpassed. The largest buildings elsewhere erected by man are smaller than their pyramids; which are also the oldest human works still remaining, the beauty of whose masonry, says Wilkinson, has not been surpassed in any subsequent age. An obelisk of a single stone now standing in Egypt weighs three hundred tons, and a colossus of Ramses II. nearly nine hundred. But Herodotus describes a monolithic temple, which must have weighed five thousand tons, and which was carried the whole length of the Nile, to the Delta. And there is a roof ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... laughed.... But it's no rumor that he disappeared. He's gone, all right, and nobody knows where he went, and nobody seems to want to know. Officially they said he was drowned out swimming—or lost in a sandstorm riding in the desert—or spiked on top of an obelisk or something equally reasonable—but, privately, people say other things.... No international law intrudes into ...
— The Palace of Darkened Windows • Mary Hastings Bradley
... technically perfect, the largest, and the most mysterious. Ages come and go, empires rise and fall, philosophies flourish and fail, and man seeks him out many inventions, but they stand silent under the bright Egyptian night, as fascinating as they are baffling. An obelisk is simply a pyramid, albeit the base has become a shaft, holding aloft the oldest emblems of solar faith—a Triangle mounted on a Square. When and why this figure became holy no one knows, save as we may conjecture that it was one of those sacred stones which gained its sanctity in ...
— The Builders - A Story and Study of Masonry • Joseph Fort Newton
... Boulevards, Rues, &c. Arcades and Passages Palais Royal Its Diamond Windows The Cafe—A Characteristic Feature of Modern Civilization Champs Elysees Palais de l'Industrie or the Exhibition Buildings Place de la Concorde and the Obelisk of Luxor Garden of the Tuileries The Arch of Triumph Other Triumphal Arches The Tomb of Napoleon I Artesian Wells Notre Dame Cathedral The Pantheon The Madeleine The Louvre Theaters and Operas ...
— The Youthful Wanderer - An Account of a Tour through England, France, Belgium, Holland, Germany • George H. Heffner
... garret, busy imitating in wood one of those indescribable bits of ivory, composed of crescents, of spheres hollowed out one within the other, the whole as straight as an obelisk, and of no use whatever; and he was beginning on the last piece—he was nearing his goal. In the twilight of the workshop the white dust was flying from his tools like a shower of sparks under the hoofs of a galloping ...
— Madame Bovary • Gustave Flaubert
... with distinction and maintained their reputation right up to the end of the siege. Visitors to Mafeking may now see near the obelisk in front of the pretty town hall of the famous siege town, a five-pounder gun "captured by the Cape Police during the siege". This gun was seized by the coloured Sergeant Bell and two other subalterns of the "Cape Boys" ...
— Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since • Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje
... of Sesostris, Ramestes the Great, who slew the Israelite infants, and of the inscription on his obelisk, containing, in my opinion, one of the oldest records of mankind, see Essay on the Old Test. Append. p. 139, ...
— The Antiquities of the Jews • Flavius Josephus
... Sniff, bore away by his servile disposition, had drored up his leg with a higher and a higher relish, and was now discovered to be waving his corkscrew over his head. It was at this moment that Mrs. Sniff, who had kep' her eye upon him like the fabled obelisk, descended on her victim. Our Missis followed them both out, and cries was heard in the ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... and tried to forget. He read of the swallows that fly in and out of the little cafe at Smyrna where the Hadjis sit counting their amber beads and the turbaned merchants smoke their long tasselled pipes and talk gravely to each other; he read of the Obelisk in the Place de la Concorde that weeps tears of granite in its lonely sunless exile, and longs to be back by the hot lotus-covered Nile, where there are Sphinxes, and rose-red ibises, and white vultures with gilded claws, and crocodiles, with ...
— The Picture of Dorian Gray • Oscar Wilde
... an important influence in preventing St. Leger from effecting a junction with Gen. Burgoyne, which would have materially assisted the latter's intention to cut off New England from the rest of the colonies. An obelisk on the hill to the left marks the spot ...
— The Greatest Highway in the World • Anonymous
... Port Louis were laid flat—wrecked. During a minute and a half the wind blew 123 miles an hour; no official record made after that, when it may have reached 150. It cut down an obelisk. It carried an American ship into the woods after breaking the chains of two anchors. They now use four-two forward, two astern. Common report says it killed 1,200 in Port Louis alone, in half an hour. Then came the lull of ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... from which he preached. A bas-relief in white marble by the American sculptor, Story, commemorating the work of Wyclif, has been placed in the church at a cost of more than ten thousand dollars, and just outside a tall granite obelisk has been erected in his honor. In cleaning the walls recently, it was discovered that under several coats of paint there were some remarkable frescoes which, being slowly uncovered, were found to represent scenes in the life of the great ...
— British Highways And Byways From A Motor Car - Being A Record Of A Five Thousand Mile Tour In England, - Wales And Scotland • Thomas D. Murphy
... to give great effect to the large enclosed space of an antique hall. Against the walls are several marble monuments; one to the Earl of Chatham, a statue of white marble, with various allegorical contrivances, fronting an obelisk or pyramid of dark marble; and another to his son, William Pitt, of somewhat similar design and of equal size; each of them occupying the whole space, I believe, between pavement and ceiling. There is ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Hill a national monument is in progress, which, when completed, will form an obelisk of fine granite, according to the published plan, thirty feet square at the base, two hundred and twenty feet high, and fifteen feet square at the summit. After considerable progress had been made in this most durable memorial, the funds ran out and the work stood ...
— Impressions of America - During the years 1833, 1834 and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Tyrone Power
... Palma was regarded as a large-brained, nimble-witted, marble-hearted man, of vast ambition and tireless energy in the acquisition of his aims; but his colleagues and clients would as soon have sought chivalric tenderness in a bronze statue, or a polished obelisk of porphyry. To-day as he curiously watched the quivering yet proud little girlish face, her brave struggles to meet the emergency touched some chord far down in his reticent stern nature, and he suddenly stooped, and took her hand, folding it ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... on the way to them I should make friends with the various quarters. Everything, old or new, would have the charm of the unexpected; no lurking ruin would escape me; no monument, whether column or obelisk, statue, "storied urn or animated bust" or mere tablet, would be safe from my indirect research. Before I knew it, I should know Rome by heart, and this would be something to boast of long ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... that stands up like an obelisk in the midst of the plain beyond the deserted Matabele village. I passed the low clumps of dry karroo-bushes by the rocky kopje. I passed the fork of the rubbly roads where I had parted from Hilda. At last, I reached the long, rolling ridge which looks down upon Klaas's, and ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen
... interesting fact that the striking and beautiful forms in inorganic nature are not as a rule the result of a building-up process, but of a pulling-down or degradation process. A natural bridge, an obelisk, caves, canals, the profile in the rocks, the architectural and monumental rock forms, such as those in the Grand Canon and in the Garden of the Gods, are all the result of erosion. Water and other aerial forces are the builders and sculptors, and the nature and structure ...
— Under the Maples • John Burroughs
... and two hundred and forty feet high." We are assured by Forlong that Solomon's temple was like hundreds observed in the East, except that its walls were a little higher than those usually seen, and the phallic spire out of proportion to the size of the structure. "The Jewish porch is but the obelisk which the Egyptian placed beside his temple; the Boodhist pillars which stood all around their Dagobas; the pillars of Hercules, which stood near the Phoenician temple; and the spire which stands beside the ...
— The God-Idea of the Ancients - or Sex in Religion • Eliza Burt Gamble
... the centre of the churchyard, and nearly abreast of the obelisk commemorating Father Nash, stands somewhat apart the rugged tombstone of Scipio, an old slave. Aside from the graves of Fenimore Cooper and his father, the founder of the village, not forgetting the grave of Jenny York,[117] which is the joy of the churchyard, no tomb ...
— The Story of Cooperstown • Ralph Birdsall
... towards the ruins of old Heliopolis, which is all that remains of the great seat of learning, the biblical City of On. And the sky lightened way down in the east as she drove along the outer edge of the fort to the Obelisk, known to the Arab ...
— The Hawk of Egypt • Joan Conquest
... Men-er-Groach, or stone of the fairies. It is the largest menhir known, but it has been broken into three pieces, some say by thunder. Put together, it measures about 67 feet in length, and is 16 feet in diameter. The wonder is how it was placed there, for it is little less than the obelisk of St. Peter's, which took 800 to 900 men and 70 horses nearly a year to raise,—a work which was the great triumph of Fontana the engineer. The menhir is estimated to be one-third the height of Notre Dame ...
— Brittany & Its Byways • Fanny Bury Palliser
... (1888). At the east end of Union Street is the bronze statue of Queen Victoria, erected in 1893 by the royal tradesmen of the city. Near the Cross stands the granite statue of the 5th duke of Gordon (d. 1836). Here may also be mentioned the obelisk of Peterhead granite, 70 ft. high, erected in the square of Marischal College to the memory of Sir James M'Grigor (1778-1851), the military surgeon and director-general of the Army Medical Department, who was thrice elected lord rector of the ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... The obelisk generously presented by the Khedive of Egypt to the city of New York has safely arrived in this country, and will soon be erected in that metropolis. A commission for the liquidation of the Egyptian debt has lately concluded its work, and this Government, at the earnest solicitation of ...
— Messages and Papers of Rutherford B. Hayes - A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents • James D. Richardson
... Canal and visited Queenston Heights and the tomb of Sir Isaac Brock. At the latter place he received an address from one hundred and sixty survivors of the War of 1812 at the hands of Chief Justice Sir J. Beverley Robinson and, on September 18th, laid the corner-stone of an obelisk in honour of the chief Canadian hero of that contest. A visit to Port Dalhousie and Hamilton followed, and at the latter place the reception was marked by splendid decorations ...
— The Life of King Edward VII - with a sketch of the career of King George V • J. Castell Hopkins
... from a square, triangular, or other base, gradually diminishing in size till it ends in a point at the top. Like the obelisk, pyramids were sometimes erected to preserve the memory of singular events, or to transmit to future ages the glory and magnificence of princes; but oftener as funeral monuments and receptacles for the dead, ...
— A Catechism of Familiar Things; Their History, and the Events Which Led to Their Discovery • Benziger Brothers
... life is under all circumstances to be preferred to vegetable existence,—had the great poplar cut down. It is so easy to say, "It is only a poplar!" and so much harder to replace its living cone than to build a granite obelisk! ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... he named others the Do-darto, the Fagonne, the Bignonne, the Phelipee. These are compliments proper to be made by the botanists, not only to those of their own rank, but to the greatest persons; for a plant is a monument of a more durable nature than a medal or an obelisk; and yet, as a proof that even these vehicles are not always sufficient to transmit to futurity the name conjoined with them, the Nicotiana is now scarcely known by any other name ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 6 - Reviews, Political Tracts, and Lives of Eminent Persons • Samuel Johnson
... was touched lightly to the body; the flesh swelled, and the form of the brand could never be obliterated. Many slaves passed from one plantation to another, being sold and resold, till their bodies were as thick with marks as an obelisk. How different from the symbols of care in the furrowed face and stooping form of a free laborer, where the history of a humble home, planted in marriage and nursed by independent sorrow, is printed by the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... the gray pinnacles of the Tuilleries, and the Gothic towers of Notre-Dame, and the Roman ones of St. Sulpice, and the dome of the Pantheon, under which lie the remains of so many of the great men of France, and the dark column of Place Vendome, wrought with figures in relief, and the obelisk brought from Egypt to ornament the Place Louis Quatorze, the associations with antiquity which the country presents, from being general, became particular and historical. They were recollections of ...
— Letters of a Traveller - Notes of Things Seen in Europe and America • William Cullen Bryant
... the great square, with its obelisk and circle of statues, its pavilions and balustrades; beautiful now, and peaceful, but peopled with ghastly memories—for it was here the Revolution set up its guillotine, and it was here that some four ...
— The Destroyer - A Tale of International Intrigue • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... towers. The bats came out, as if they knew how precious is their black at evening against the ethereal lemon color, the orange and the red. The little obelisk beyond the last sphinx on the left began to change, as in Egypt all things change at sunset—pylon and dusty bush, colossus and baked earth hovel, sycamore, and tamarisk, statue and trotting donkey. It looked like a mysterious finger pointed in warning ...
— The Spell of Egypt • Robert Hichens
... Tuileries and Rue de Rivoli. Numerous historical associations are connected with the place. The guillotine did much bloody work here during 1793-4-5; upwards of 2800 people perished by it. Foreign troops frequently bivouacked on the square when Paris was in their power. The Obelisk of Luxor, a Monolith or single block of reddish granite 76 feet high, was presented to Louis Phillipi by Mohamed Ali and erected in the centre of the Place. It adds very much to ...
— Shepp's Photographs of the World • James W. Shepp
... with dirt and dust that it could scarcely be seen, but evidently of Roman workmanship, and, probably, of the fourth century, if we may judge from its resemblance to some ornaments[65] upon the pedestal of the obelisk raised by Theodosius, in the Hippodrome of Constantinople. Our friend's conjecture is, that it had originally served for an altar: perhaps it might, with equal probability, be supposed to have been a tomb.—The corbels on the exterior of this ...
— Account of a Tour in Normandy, Vol. I. (of 2) • Dawson Turner
... party was in disguise, and the whole city was in a state of indescribable tumult, the fugitives succeeded in traversing, without being recognized, the broad central avenue of the garden of the Tuileries. Emerging by the gate of the Pont Tournant, they reached the foot of the obelisk in the Place de la Concorde. It was one o'clock in the afternoon; the duke had ordered the carriages to be ready for them there. But the mob, recognizing the carriages as belonging to the royal family, ...
— Louis Philippe - Makers of History Series • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... were quite able to appreciate, though by no means able to rival, the skill with which Addison imitated Virgil. His lines on the Barometer and the Bowling Green were applauded by hundreds, to whom the Dissertation on the Epistles of Phalaris was as unintelligible as the hieroglyphics on an obelisk. ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... complex ancient style, in less than a fortnight. My friend had formed some striking and original views regarding the theology represented by symbol on these ancient stones—at that time regarded as Runic, but now held to be rather of Celtic origin. In the centre of each obelisk, on the more important and strongly relieved side, there always occurs a large cross, rather of the Greek than of the Roman type, and usually elaborately wrought into a fretwork, composed of myriads of snakes, raised in some of the compartments ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... Their linen is not clean, and is wretchedly got up; their black turns rusty, like old mourning; they wear very indifferent fur; and take to the shabbiest cotton velvet, instead of silk velvet. I am on terms of recognition with several small streets of cats, about the Obelisk in Saint George's Fields, and also in the vicinity of Clerkenwell- green, and also in the back settlements of Drury-lane. In appearance, they are very like the women among whom they live. They seem ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... Lord Dalhousie laid the first stone of the beautiful obelisk overlooking what is now known as Dufferin Terrace, to commemorate the heroism of Wolfe and Montcalm, and bearing ...
— Old Quebec - The Fortress of New France • Sir Gilbert Parker and Claude Glennon Bryan
... Marrying him would be a deed committed in spite of his express warning. She went so far as to conceive him subsequently saying: "I warned you." She conceived the state of marriage with him as that of a woman tied not to a man of heart, but to an obelisk lettered all over with hieroglyphics, and everlastingly hearing him expound them, relishing renewing his lectures ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Rue de Rivoli is the most beautiful street in Paris. The windows of the sitting-room of Claudine's mother looked over the palace and its gardens, its chestnut-trees and its fountains, the Seine and its quays, with a more distant view of the Place de la Concorde and its obelisk, the Chambers of the Legislature, and the gilded dome of the Tuileries. Every procession passed under Claudine's windows. No little girl, I think, who lives in rooms overlooking the Rue de Rivoli would wish to exchange them for ...
— Harper's Young People, August 31, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... with such wine instead of with water," cried the soldier, "and that I were as big as the colossus of Atnenophis, and that the biggest obelisk of Hatasu were my drinking vessel, and that I might drink as much as I would! But now—what have you to say of this noble ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... saving of expense, secured by their formation into a workshop; that multiplication of product, foreseen, it is true, by the capitalist, but realized by free forces. Two hundred grenadiers, working under the direction of an engineer, stood the obelisk upon its base in a few hours; do you think that one man could have accomplished the same task in two hundred days? Nevertheless, on the books of the capitalist, the amount of wages is the same in both cases, because he allots to himself the benefit ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... stage-coach, upon France from the coupe of a diligence, upon Italy from the cushion of a carrozza. The broken windows of Apsley House were still boarded up when I was in London. The asphalt pavement was not laid in Paris. The Obelisk of Luxor was lying in its great boat in the Seine, as I remember it. I did not see it erected; it must have been an exciting scene to witness, the engineer standing underneath, so as to be crushed by the great stone if it disgraced him by falling in the process. As for the dynasties ...
— Our Hundred Days in Europe • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... hollows, a wrinkled, callous skin, a beard that had a trick of twitching its long white bristles, a menacing pointed chin, a toothless mouth, eyes bright as the eyes of his dogs in the yard, and a nose like an obelisk—there he stood in his gallery smiling at the beauty called into being by genius. A Jew surrounded by his millions will always be one of the finest spectacles which humanity can give. Robert Medal, our great actor, cannot rise ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... so low that it continues beneath the horizon until the ship is close upon the shore. The first landmarks, in fact, which the seaman makes, are the tops of trees growing apparently out of the water, or the summit of an obelisk, or the capital of a pillar, marking the site of some ancient and ...
— Cleopatra • Jacob Abbott
... action, like the lions at Genoa; to perch a colossal equestrian statue of the Duke of Wellington, arrayed in his waterproof cape, and mounted on a low-shouldered hack instead of a charger, on the top of an arch, by way of perpetual atonement to France for Waterloo; and now to think of planting an obelisk of the Pharaohs on a cab-stand. An obelisk of the Pharaohs in ancient Rome was an august captive, symbolizing the university of the Roman Empire, but an obelisk of the Pharaohs in London symbolizes little ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... ago as the year 1804 it was proposed at Avignon, to erect an obelisk in memory of Petrarch, at Vaucluse: "il a ete decide, qu'on l'elevera, vis-avis l'ancien jardin de Petrache, lieu ou le lit de sorgue forme ...
— On the Portraits of English Authors on Gardening, • Samuel Felton
... disappeared behind the western cliff, but a fierce ray from its sinking orb, struck upon a storm-cloud that hung over us, and thence was reflected in a glow of angry light of which the focus or centre seemed to fall upon the summit of this strange and obelisk-like pinnacle of rock. ...
— She and Allan • H. Rider Haggard
... turf-covered graves. Reared against the buttresses of the church was an old stone coffin, together with a fragment of a curious monumental effigy, likewise of stone; but the most striking objects in the place, and deservedly ranked amongst the wonders of Whalley, were three remarkable obelisk-shaped crosses, set in a line upon pedestals, covered with singular devices in fretwork, and all three differing in size and design. Evidently of remotest antiquity, these crosses were traditionally assigned to Paullinus, who, according to the Venerable Bede, first preached ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... zebra with its oblique rays, my view was obstructed by an outline of rising ground; after that is passed, the long avenue is obstructed by a copse, within which the roads meet at a cross-ways, in the centre of which stands a stone obelisk, for all the world like an eternal exclamation mark. From the crevices between the foundation stones of this erection, which is topped by a spiked ball (what an idea!), hang flowering plants, blue or yellow according to the season. Les Aigues must certainly have ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac
... visiting the churches of the city. 1. Temple of Antonius; column to his honour, and his victories inscribed. 2. Church of St. Ignazia; tomb of Gregory XV. 3. Pantheon of Agrippa—built 22 B.C., of Oriental granite brought from Egypt. The obelisk is from the Temple of Isis. 4. In the second chapel to the left, Raphael was buried in 1520. He gave orders to his scholar Lorenzetto to make the statue of the Virgin, behind which he is buried. It is ornamented by gold and silver offerings ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... friendly phantom's soon betrayed The talisman that roused your ecstasy. The laws of wonder-working might, The stores by beauty brought to light, Inventive reason in soft union planned To blend together 'neath your forming hand. The obelisk, the pyramid ascended, The Hermes stood, the column sprang on high, The reed poured forth the woodland melody, Immortal ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... hidden [Page 37] behind high walls. So high and strong are the walls of the British Legation that in the Boxer War of 1900 it served the whole community for a fortress, wherein we sustained a siege of eight weeks. A marble obelisk near the Legation gate commemorates the siege, and a marble gateway on a neighbouring street marks the spot where Baron Ketteler was shot. Since that war a foreign quarter has been marked out, the approaches to ...
— The Awakening of China • W.A.P. Martin
... the people. The pyramid in the Rue d'Angiviller was supported on a base six feet high by twelve broad; it rose to the height of fifteen feet, and was terminated by a globe. Four blocks of stone, placed at the angles, corresponded with the obelisk, and gave it an elegant appearance. Several inscriptions, in honour of the King and Queen, were affixed to it. I went to see this singular monument, ...
— Memoirs Of The Court Of Marie Antoinette, Queen Of France, Complete • Madame Campan
... Noah's flood piled the hill with blocks, which have served one Dr. Borlase and others as occasions for earning the character of blockheads. One thing is man's doing, without much dispute, and that is, an obelisk in honour of old Lord De Dunstanville, which is a conspicuous toothpick on the hilltop: no doubt, as in this case, nature brought the stones there, and man did his part in arranging them; poor Dr. B. would have you believe that every natural rock had been lifted here bodily for architectural ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... look over this field from our height and try to realize what mighty fortunes were here at stake, we note that the mementoes of that day are few. A Corinthian column and an obelisk are seen at the roadside as memorials of the bravery of two officers. This Lion's Mound, two hundred feet high and made from earth piled up by cart loads, commemorates the place where a prince was wounded. Colossal in size, the lion was cast from French ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 4 (of 10) • Various
... fair, and in his opinion was well connected, well educated and intelligent. She was also intensely bored with her home where, as if packed in a tight box, her individuality—of which she was very conscious—had no play. She strode like a grenadier, was strong and upright like an obelisk, had a beautiful face, a candid brow, pure eyes, and not a thought of her own in her head. He surrendered quickly to all those charms, and she appeared to him so unquestionably of the right sort that he did not hesitate for a moment ...
— Tales of Unrest • Joseph Conrad
... three distinct ages. The tower is, therefore, the apex of a cone, from which the descent is equally steep on all sides, and which is only approached by a series of steps. To give in a few words an idea of the height of this tower, we may compare it to the obelisk of Luxor on its pedestal. The pedestal of the tower of Issoudun, which hid within its breast such archaeological treasures, was eighty feet high on the side towards the town. In an hour the cart was taken off its wheels and ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... under the porticus of the Madeleine, on the summit of the great flight of steps which, rising above the railings, dominates the Place. Before him was the Rue Royale dipping down to the expanse of the Place de la Concorde, where rose the obelisk and the pair of plashing fountains. And, farther yet, the paling colonnade of the Chamber of Deputies bounded the horizon. It was a vista of sovereign grandeur under that pale sky over which twilight was slowly stealing, and which seemed to broaden the thoroughfares, throw back the edifices, ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... contrive to make ornament subservient to utility: a pleasing eye-trap might also contribute to promote science: an obelisk in a garden or park might be both ...
— The Natural History of Selborne, Vol. 2 • Gilbert White
... of uncommon beauty. Palm and tamarisk, acacia and rose-shrub, jasmine and purple mimosa made a multi-tinted jungle about a shadowy pool in which a white heron stood knee-deep. There were long stretches of sunlit sod, and walks of inlaid tile, seats of carved stone, and a single small obelisk, set on a circular slab, marked with measures for time—the Egyptian sun-dial. On every side were evidences of wealth ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... the count continued to descend the Corso. As they approached the Piazza del Popolo, the crowd became more dense, and above the heads of the multitude two objects were visible: the obelisk, surmounted by a cross, which marks the centre of the square, and in front of the obelisk, at the point where the three streets, del Babuino, del Corso, and di Ripetta, meet, the two uprights of the scaffold, between which glittered the curved knife of the ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... sight of the monticule crowned by an obelisk; surmounting the vine-clad slopes, we also obtain a glimpse of its "Ormes de Sully," or group of magnificent elms, one of many in France supposed to have been planted by the great Sully. Since my first acquaintance with this neighbourhood, more than twenty years ...
— East of Paris - Sketches in the Gatinais, Bourbonnais, and Champagne • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... square, are two fountains, one on either side, casting up water in showers; between them, in the midst, is an obelisk, brought from Egypt, and covered with mysterious writing; on your right rises an edifice, not beautiful nor grand, but huge and bulky, where lives a strange kind of priest whom men call the Pope, a very horrible old individual, who would fain keep Christ in leading-strings, calls ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... the most chaste and graceful monuments that adorn Mount Hermon Cemetery, erected by public subscription, and placed over the grave of one whose memory is so dearly cherished by all. The monument is of the Egyptian style of architecture, an obelisk 18 feet in height, with a base of 4 feet 10 inches, designed and modelled by our talented fellow-citizen, Mr. F. Morgan, sculptor, St. John street, so many of whose classic memorials of the dead grace Mount Hermon. It is cut from a solid block ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... high bluff, covered with wood, contiguous to the college, I observed a monument or obelisk, which I ascertained to have been erected to the memory of Kosciusko, a Polish patriot, who took a prominent part in the annihilation of British rule in America. It had a very picturesque effect, and was regarded with feelings of veneration by many of the American passengers, one of ...
— An Englishman's Travels in America - His Observations Of Life And Manners In The Free And Slave States • John Benwell
... the night we dined on the Pylon at Karnak? After dinner you tried to show me the ruins by moonlight, and wherever we went a black-robed watchman followed us, or a black-robed watchman glided from behind a pillar, or an obelisk, or a crumbling wall, and faced us, and at last we took to flight. Well, that's what life is like to certain women; that's what life has been for a long time to me. Whenever I've tried to look at anything beautiful ...
— Bella Donna - A Novel • Robert Hichens
... up every possible elevation, and a bright-faced girl who had conquered a high place on the base of the obelisk was chattering down at a group of her friends who were listening ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... long, black scarfs formed by the buildings. But they were so well acquainted with this panorama that in imagination they mentally saw the majestic sweep of the avenue, the double row of palaces, the place de la Concorde in the background with the Egyptian obelisk, and ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... loftier—the first impression gives no idea of the extraordinary height of the spire. We continued to descend, slowly and cautiously, with Saverne before us in the bottom. To the left, close to the road side, stands an obelisk: on which is fixed, hi gilt letters, this ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Two • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... by the fact that, every time excavations were made on either side of the Via di S. Ignazio for building or restoring the houses which line it, remarkable specimens of Egyptian art had been brought to light. The annals of discoveries begin with 1374, when the obelisk now in the Piazza della Rotonda was found, under the apse of the church of S. Maria sopra Minerva, together with the one now in the Villa Mattei von Hoffman. In 1435, Eugenius IV. discovered the two lions of Nektaneb I. which are now in the Vatican, and the two of black ...
— Pagan and Christian Rome • Rodolfo Lanciani
... the great public places in the city of Paris, moreover, commemorate, more or less openly, what might be called the great stains on the history of the nation. The Place de la Concorde is that of the Guillotine, and the Luxor obelisk is the monument of the more than twenty-eight hundred victims beheaded by that axe. The Place de l'Hotel de Ville was formerly the Place de Greve, famous in all hangmen's annals,—burnings alive, tearings asunder by horses, breakings on the wheel, decapitations, hangings,—from ...
— Paris from the Earliest Period to the Present Day; Volume 1 • William Walton
... approximated the same, by so much the more the excellencie of the woorke shewed it selfe, increasing my desire to behould the same. For there appeared no longer a substance of vnknowne forme, but a rare Obelisk vpon a vast frame and stonie foundation, the heigth whereof without comparison did exceed the toppes of the sidelying mountaynes, although I thought that they had beene the renowmed Olympus[a], the famous Caucasus[b], and not ...
— Hypnerotomachia - The Strife of Loue in a Dreame • Francesco Colonna
... of all Greek and Roman buildings with which we are acquainted is the absence—save in a few and unimportant cases—of the pyramidal form. The Egyptians knew at least the worth of the obelisk: but the Greeks and Romans hardly knew even that: their buildings are flat- topped. Their builders were contented with the earth as it was. There was a great truth involved in that; which I am the last to deny. But religions which, like the Buddhist or ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... of cultivation, great public buildings and an immense post office, a lifeless museum, an inert university, a splendid desert library, a street of souvenir shops, a certain industry of "seeing Washington," an idiotic colossal obelisk. It seems an ideal nest for the tariff manipulator, a festering corner of delegates and agents and secondary people. In the White House, in the time of President Roosevelt, the present writer found a transitory glow of intellectual activity, the spittoons and ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... disturbed the flower-nuptials of their souls. They turned rather, and winded up into the churchyard to preserve their mood. Majestic on the groves and mountains stood the Night before man's heart, and made that also great. Over the white steeple-obelisk the sky rested bluer, and darker; and, behind it, wavered the withered summit of the May-pole with faded flag. The son noticed his father's grave, on which the wind was opening and shutting, with harsh noise, the little door of the metal cross, to let the year of his death be ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... Dr. Arnold of Rugby, and had sufficiently identified the Ground of the Battle with the contemporaneous Accounts of it. As I happened to know the Field well—the greater part of it then belonging to my Family—I knew that Carlyle and Arnold had been mistaken—misled in part by an Obelisk which my Father had set up as on the highest Ground of the Field, but which they mistook for the centre-ground of the Battle. This I told Carlyle, who was very reluctant to believe that he and Arnold ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... months after the recitation of Franconnette at Toulouse, Jasmin resumed his readings in the cause of charity. In October 1840 he visited Oleron, and was received with the usual enthusiasm; and on his return to Pau, he passed the obelisk erected to Despourrins, the Burns of the Pyrenees. At Pau he recited his Franconnette to an immense audience amidst frenzies of applause. It was alleged that the people of the Pyrenean country were prosaic and indifferent to art. But M. Dugenne, in the 'Memorial des Pyrenees,' said that ...
— Jasmin: Barber, Poet, Philanthropist • Samuel Smiles
... he, "has given birth, as you know, to Trinco, the greatest genius of the universe, whose statue you see before you. That obelisk standing to your right commemorates Trinco's birth; the column that rises to your left has Trinco crowned with a diadem upon its summit. You see here the triumphal arch dedicated to the glory of Trinco ...
— Penguin Island • Anatole France
... attention was drawn towards an obelisk which stands by the road-side, recording a wonder of the last age; and the liberal attention of the public authorities to a discovery which promised ulterior advantages to the community. Several recent Fires had led ingenious ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips
... in circumference, and in which were one hundred gates of brass, must have had considerable architectural splendor. This account of Babylon, however, is probably exaggerated, especially as to the height of the walls. The tower of Belus, the Palace of Nebuchadnezzar, and the Obelisk of Semiramis were probably wonderful structures, certainly in size, which is one of the conditions of ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume III • John Lord
... (Journal Asiatic Soc., xix. 124) part of the inscription on the black obelisk of Ashurakbal found in Nineveh and now in the ...
— Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development • Francis Galton
... canvas; and this is no bad test, as I think the landscape painter is the gardener's best designer. The eye requires a sort of balance here; but not so as to encroach upon probable nature. A wood or hill may balance a house or obelisk; for exactness would be displeasing. . . It is not easy to account for the fondness of former times for straight-lined avenues to their houses; straight-lined walks through their woods; and, in short, every kind of straight line, where the foot has to travel over ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... An obelisk of gray Canadian granite now stands on this historic ground. Madame de la Peltrie did not remain more than two years in Ville-Marie, but returned to the convent at Quebec which she had left in a moment of caprice. Mdlle. Mance, who was Madame de Bullion's friend, ...
— Canada • J. G. Bourinot
... decade of this century, when Shalmaneser's obelisk was found with the inscription "Tribute of Jehu, son of Omri," English investigators, seeking to connect it with the Cimbric Chersonese in Jutland, at once took it for "Yehu ibn Umry." An Irish legend has it that Princess Tephi came to Ireland from ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... towards the top. The wall nearest the sea is only eight feet high. The only entrance is by a narrow passage between two high walls leading up to an inner court, where stands the grim god of war, with numerous other idols on either side of him. In front rises a lofty obelisk of wicker-work, and inside this the priest who acts the part of the oracle takes his stand. Just outside this inner court is the altar on which the human sacrifices are made. Near it stands the house occupied by the king when he resides in the ...
— The Cruise of the Mary Rose - Here and There in the Pacific • William H. G. Kingston
... The line of Putnam's retreat appears to have been from Bayard's Hill Fort on Grand Street across the country to Monument Lane (now Greenwich Avenue), which led to the obelisk erected in honor of General Wolf and others at a point on Fifteenth Street, a little west of Eighth Avenue. (See Montressor's Map of New York in 1775, "Valentine's Manual.") The lane there joined with an irregular road running on the ...
— The Campaign of 1776 around New York and Brooklyn • Henry P. Johnston
... symbolically solved in the Eleusinia. For us there is nothing real except as we realize it. Let it be that myriads have walked upon the earth before us,—that each race and generation has wrought its change and left its monumental record upon pillar and pyramid and obelisk; set aside the ruin which Time has wrought both upon the change and the record, levelling the cities and temples of men, diminishing the shadows of the Pyramids, and rendering more shadowy the names and memories of heroes,—obliterating even its own ruin;—set aside this oblivion of Time, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various
... of Plymouth. Here he died on May 9, 1657, "lamented by all the colonists of New England as a common blessing and father to them all," and the only special memorial that tangibly recalls his fame is the unpretentious obelisk on ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 3 of 8 • Various
... a day. The narrow streets, devoid of footways, and choked, in every obscure corner, by heaps of dung-hill-rubbish, contrast so strongly, in their cramped dimensions, and their filth and darkness, with the broad square before some haughty church; in the center of which, a hieroglyphic-covered obelisk, brought from Egypt in the days of the Emperors, looks strangely on the foreign scene about it; or perhaps an ancient pillar, with its honored statue overthrown, supports a Christian saint; Marcus Aurelius ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 7 - Italy, Sicily, and Greece (Part One) • Various
... above the sea, crowned by the ruins of a castle of the Saracens (hence the name of the place, Cal' at Eufimi), commands an extensive and beautiful view which includes three monuments—first, the famous Greek temple of Segesta; secondly, the theatre and the remains of the city above it; thirdly, the obelisk commemorating Garibaldi's first victory over the Neapolitans in May, 1860. These three monuments are considered to be the chief attractions of Calatafimi; but one should not suppose that, after one has seen its principal monuments, there is nothing more to be got ...
— Diversions in Sicily • H. Festing Jones
... of the events in the reign of thirty-five years of his successor, Shalmaneser III., is contained on the Black Obelisk of Nimroud, discovered by Layard and preserved in the British Museum. He conquered the whole country round Lake Van, ravaging the country "as a savage bull ravages and tramples under his feet the fertile fields." ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XI. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... signing the report, leaving the eleven guests, stimulated by the old captain of the Imperial Guard, to the wines, toasts, and liqueurs of a dessert composed of choice and early fruits, in pyramids that rivalled the obelisk of Thebes. By half-past ten the little sub-clerk was in such a state that Georges packed him into a coach, paid his fare, and gave the address of his mother to the driver. The remaining ten, all as drunk as Pitt and Dundas, talked of going on foot along the boulevards, ...
— A Start in Life • Honore de Balzac
... Passed over Cambridge 7810 feet long, walked up and down the cemetery which is superior in locality to Pere la Chaise at Paris, but has not the commanding view. In one part a great many beautiful flowers. The monuments have usually the family name and the Christian name on another side of the obelisk; a truly melancholy walk; a beautiful monument to the memory of Spurzheim[24]. I allowed the horse to have his own way back and he brought me at once near the hotel. At three I called upon Mr. Lee and we had a ...
— A Journey to America in 1834 • Robert Heywood
... but only for a short time, as it soon takes another direction. Passing the small town of Collin, we are whirled close by the battle-field where, in the year 1757, the great King Frederick paid his score to the Austrians. An obelisk, erected a few years since to the memory of General Daun, occupies a small eminence on the right. On the left is the plain of Klephorcz, where the Austrian army was ...
— Visit to Iceland - and the Scandinavian North • Ida Pfeiffer |
