"Parthenon" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... pillared—and the character of the building outside was, without any servile imitation—for we worked in the glow of original genius, and none of us had then ever seen itself or its picture—wonderfully like the Parthenon. Entering, you found yourself in a superb hall, lighted up—not with gas, for up to that era gas had not been used except in Pandemonium—but with a vast multitude of farthing candles, each in a turnip stuck into the wall—while a chandelier of frozen snow-branches pendent from ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... hills shut it out. Having passed the village of Casha, they at last entered upon the slope, and thence into the plain of Attica but the intervening heights and the trees kept the town concealed, till a turn of the path brought it full again before them; the Acropolis crowned with the ruins of the Parthenon—the Museum ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... those wasted Hellenic outlines as he entered the dimly lighted room of the dying woman. She was already a classic ruin,—as wrecked and yet as perfect as the Parthenon. He grasped ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... a colossus of brass in the sea, for the tallest ships to sail in and out between his legs? Is it architecture we have invented? Why, here too we are but children. Can we match for pure design the Parthenon, with its clusters of double and single Doric columns? (I do adore the Doric when the scale is large), and for grandeur and finish, the theatres of Greece and Rome, or the prodigious temples of Egypt, up to whose portals men walked awe-struck through avenues a mile long of sphinxes, each as big ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... was a disappointment. He was awaiting a wonderful fully illustrated guide to the Land of the Midnight Sun, a suggestion of possible and coyly improbable trips, whereas he got only a letter from his oldest acquaintance—Cousin John, of Parthenon, New York, the boy-who-comes-to-play of Mr. Wrenn's back-yard days in Parthenon. Without opening the letter Mr. Wrenn tucked it into his inside coat pocket, threw away his toothpick, and ...
— Our Mr. Wrenn - The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man • Sinclair Lewis
... see," said Margaret, with the kind readiness of woman, who would profess to "see" the Secret of Hegel, or the inmost heart of the Binomial Theorem, or the nature of the duties of cover-point, or the latest hypothesis about the frieze of the Parthenon, rather than be troubled with prolonged explanations, which the expositor, after all, might ...
— The Mark Of Cain • Andrew Lang
... of God, which is peace militant, is unbroken amidst all conflicts. The wise old Greeks chose for the protectress of Athens the goddess of Wisdom, and whilst they consecrated to her the olive branch, which is the symbol of peace, they set her image on the Parthenon, helmed and spear-bearing, to defend the peace, which she brought to earth. So this heavenly Virgin, whom the Apostle personifies here, is the 'winged sentry, all skilful in the wars,' who enters into our hearts and fights for us to ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... old oaks, Answer. A race, that long has passed away, Built them;—a disciplined and populous race Heaped, with long toil, the earth, while yet the Greek Was hewing the Pentelicus to forms Of symmetry, and rearing on its rock The glittering Parthenon. These ample fields Nourished their harvests, here their herds were fed, When haply by their stalls the bison lowed, And bowed his maned shoulder to the yoke. All day this desert murmured with their toils, Till twilight blushed, and lovers walked, and wooed In a forgotten language, ...
— Poems • William Cullen Bryant
... It is pretentious, imposing, in bad taste, without simplicity and a real sanctity. I was disgusted with the Madeleine from the moment I knew it to be a church. At first I saw it only as a fine building—an imitation of the Parthenon—and I was struck with admiration. But when I was told that it was a temple for the warship of God, I was shocked, and still more so when I entered it. The interior, as a collection of fine paintings and statues, as a specimen of gorgeous Gothic architecture, ...
— Paris: With Pen and Pencil - Its People and Literature, Its Life and Business • David W. Bartlett
... himself, struck at him in the persons of his friends. Phidias was flung into prison for the impiety of introducing portraits of himself and Pericles into the battle of the Amazons depicted on the shield of the goddess Athena in the Parthenon; the brilliant Aspasia, the famous mistress of Pericles, was arraigned on a charge of impiety, and only acquitted through the eloquence of Pericles on her behalf; while the aged Anaxagoras was driven from ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 3 of 8 • Various
... man from the rudest and simplest beginnings. Many columns of early Egyptian temples or tombs are but bundles of Nile reeds slightly conventionalized in stone; the temples of Greece, including not only the earliest forms, but the Parthenon itself, while in parts showing an evolution out of Egyptian and Assyrian architecture, exhibit frequent reminiscences and even imitations of earlier constructions in wood; the medieval cathedrals, while evolved out of Roman ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... and resident alien. But those who are not carried away in that manner admire good men, whether they are poor, or strangers or exiles. Do we not see that all men adore the temple of Theseus as well as the Parthenon and Eleusinium? And yet Theseus was an exile from Athens, though it was owing to him that Athens is now inhabited, and he was banished from a city which he did not merely dwell in, but had himself built. And what glory ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... gardens—but to artists living among them and seeing only them! men's hands are not delicate in the early ages, and the fountain fairness of the palms is not very flowingly fashioned in the capitals; but in the flowery perfection of the Parthenon the palm triumphs. The forms of those columns came from Egypt, and that which was the suspicion of the earlier workers, was the success of more delicate designing. So is the palm inwound with our art, and poetry, and religion, ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... the Agora was the most considerable. The theatre, called the Odeon, was erected in Athens for musical and poetical contests. The Acropolis, with its temples, was rebuilt, and the splendid Propylaea, of Doric architecture, formed a magnificent approach to them. The temple of Athenae—the famous Parthenon—was built of white marble, and adorned with sculptures in the pediments and frieze by the greatest artists of antiquity, while Phidias constructed the statue of the goddess of ivory and gold. No Doric temple ever equaled the severe ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... picnic in the valley of Jehoshaphat and talked London gossip under the olives, it was an odd picture; it is strange to see the irrepressible English riding hurdles in the Campagna, and talking of ratting in the shadow of the Parthenon, as though within the beloved chimes of Bow; but it was stranger still to see those roughened, grimed men, with soleless boots and pants tattered "as if an imp had worn them," rolling out town-talk and well-known names in such perfectly ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... resigned to women approaching senility, and to the more ignoble variety of women labourers. A shop girl, perhaps, may plausibly fall in love with a moving-picture actor, and a half-idiotic old widow may succumb to a youth with shoulders like the Parthenon, but no woman of poise and self-respect, even supposing her to be transiently flustered by a lovely buck, would yield to that madness for an instant, or confess it to her dearest friend. Women know how little ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... the bad financial condition into which the government had fallen during the War of 1812. The building was designed by William Strickland, in his day the leading American architect, being modeled after the Parthenon of Athens. It was completed in 1824 and was put to its ...
— The Colonial Architecture of Philadelphia • Frank Cousins
... to the old one, and the miraculous exception of scientific discoveries, which by a second miracle were not smothered in their youth—are they not also common to all, like the undying beauty of the ruins of the Parthenon, Shakespeare's lightning and Beethoven's raptures, and like love, and ...
— Light • Henri Barbusse
... little truth, which serves to paint over the lie so that we get deceit and eternal slavery. Not the monuments of faith and love are the most durable, those of servitude last much longer. Rheims and the Parthenon fall to ruins, but the Pyramids of Egypt defy the ages; all about them is the desert, its mirages and its moving sand. When I think of the millions of souls swallowed up by the spirit of slavery in the ...
— Clerambault - The Story Of An Independent Spirit During The War • Rolland, Romain
... the work and ask oneself—"What was that like when it was new?" The Elgin Marbles are allowed by common consent to be the perfection of art. But how much of our feeling of reverence is inspired by time? Imagine the Parthenon as it must have looked with the frieze of the mighty Phidias fresh from the chisel. Could one behold it in all its pristine beauty and splendour we should see a white marble building, blinding in the dazzling brightness of a southern sun, the figures of the exquisite frieze in all probability ...
— The Mind of the Artist - Thoughts and Sayings of Painters and Sculptors on Their Art • Various
... millions are enthused by the orations of Isaiah; where one man is inspired by the valor of Horatious, tens of millions are inspired by the bravery of David; where one man's life is ennobled by the art in the Parthenon, scores of millions of lives are ennobled by the art in the sanctuary: where one man's life is guided by the moral maxims of Marcus Aurelius, hundreds of millions find their law of right and their ...
— The Jericho Road • W. Bion Adkins
... were the great period of Athenian literature and art: of the Parthenon and Phidias; of AEschylus, the soldier of Marathon; then Sophocles and Euripides and Aristophanes; finally, of Socrates, not himself an author, but the inspirer of Plato, and the founder of ethical science; according to popular ideas, the typical Sophist, but in ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XI. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... structure, covering less ground than St. Peter's, but of similar general effect. The little man looked up, but did not reply to my taunt. He said to the young lady, however, that the State House was the Parthenon of our Acropolis, which seemed to please her, for she smiled, and he reddened a little,—so I thought. I don't think it right to watch persons who are the subjects of special infirmity,—but ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... god." Miss Harrison gives two examples to substantiate her contention. In the first place, she states at some length arguments of irrefutable validity to show that the Panathenaic frieze, which originally surrounded the Parthenon, represents a great ritual procession, and she adds, "Practically the whole of the reliefs that remain to us from the archaic period, and a very large proportion of those of later date, when they do not represent heroic mythology, ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... visible; "Buda-Pest" may be readily inferred despite the overlapping labels of "Wien" and "Bale"; while away off to one corner a crumpled and lingering shred points back, though uncertainly, to the Parthenon and the Acropolis. And in the midst of this flowery field is planted a large M after the best style ...
— With the Procession • Henry B. Fuller
... artesian well in the world sunk by the side of the tallest column in all creation, the admiring, not overcritical patriot would be happier than ever was the Athenian when he looked up at the newly erected Parthenon. ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... position of defending him from himself. "You would rather see no such thing. You shouldn't talk in that utterly trivial way. I like the Parthenon, of course, but I can't think of it now because my head. is too full of my escape from where I was ...
— Active Service • Stephen Crane
... did not escape so fortunately. There were other circumstances which rendered him unpopular, and amongst them the fact that he had introduced portraits both of himself and Pericles in the sculptures which adorned the frieze of the Parthenon. Phidias died in prison before ...
— A Smaller History of Greece • William Smith
... rebels and political jobbers. "Surely the curse of Minerva, uttered by a great poet against the father, clings to the son." The removal of the old office-holders seemed to this writer to be an act of desecration not unlike the removal of the famous marbles from the Parthenon. In a despatch explaining his course on the Rebellion Losses Bill, Lord Elgin said that long before that legislation there were evidences of the temper which finally produced the explosion. He quoted the following passage from ...
— George Brown • John Lewis
... civic status, but we are making precedents every day in our conduct of popular government. In Athens—where woman was both worshiped and degraded—the protectress of the city was a feminine ideal whose glorious image crowned the Parthenon with consummate beauty. In America, where woman is beloved and respected as nowhere else in the world—if she is only true to the ideals of private and public virtue—if she seeks power only as a means for the highest good of the race, the old fable of the Pellas Athenae may become ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... find them by the statue anyway," he said to himself, and went on examining the foundations of the Parthenon. ...
— The Spartan Twins • Lucy (Fitch) Perkins
... beauty, which is always the garment Love wears, is better than we can make now. With us "The Beautiful" is often mere cant, or a form of sentimentality, but with them it was a principle, a spirtual faculty that determined all proportions. Thus their very philosophies show a beautiful formality, a Parthenon entrance to life. And from first to last they never left the gay amorous gods of nature out of their thoughts. This is a relief, a tender companionship, that we have lost from our prosaic world. You see Jessica grows "pedantic" also! The poem you sent has awakened in me these reflections. ...
— The Jessica Letters: An Editor's Romance • Paul Elmer More
... service of the State, described in these eloquent words, reflects itself in the highest productions of Greek art and literature, and is the source of that 'political' spirit which every one can detect, alike in the poems of Homer and the sculpture of the Parthenon, as the inspiring cause of the noblest efforts of imitation. It prevailed most strongly through the period between the battle of Marathon and the battle of Chaeronea, and has left its monuments in such plays as the Persae and Eumeuides of ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... hitherto denied him. Having started from London and got back to London again, he saw how imperfectly he had profited by his opportunities, how much he had missed. It was characteristic of him to begin all over again, and more thoroughly, conscientiously revisiting the Pyramids, the Parthenon, and the Taj Mahal, endeavoring to capture some of that true spirit of appreciation of which ...
— The Street Called Straight • Basil King
... one to see the carving, which at the summit is almost meaningless, while it only serves to diminish the apparent height of the column. So, too, in the triumphal arches of the Roman Emperors little attention was paid to the relative and varying attitudes of the bas-reliefs. From Greek art the Parthenon Frieze gives a singular example of this unrealised law. When in situ the frieze was only visible at a most acute angle and in a most unfavourable light: beyond the steps it vanished altogether, so one was obliged to stand among the columns to see it at all, and it was also necessary to look ...
— Donatello • David Lindsay, Earl of Crawford
... visited the British Museum; an exceedingly tiresome affair. It quite crushes a person to see so much at once, and I wandered from hall to hall with a weary and heavy heart, wishing (Heaven forgive me!) that the Elgin marbles and the frieze of the Parthenon were all burnt into lime, and that the granite Egyptian statues were hewn ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.
... most I can do. I am like M. Prudhomme, who thinks that the most beautiful church would be one which had at the same time the spire of Strasbourg, the colonnade of Saint Peter's, the portico of the Parthenon, etc. I have contradictory ideals. ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... beauty of the old Greek life began to dawn upon me. Suddenly I seemed to see the white figures throwing purple shadows on the sun-baked palaestra; 'bands of nude youths and maidens'—you remember Gautier's words—'moving across a background of deep blue as on the frieze of the Parthenon.' I began to read Greek eagerly for love of it all, and the more I read ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... possessing beauty enough to stand by itself. Not the images of their deities alone, but all their statues were gods. The charm of the Lizard-Slayer of Praxiteles, or of those immortal riders that swept along the friezes of the Parthenon, is something quite distinct from the beauty of a naked boy playing with an arrow, or a troop of Athenian citizens on horseback. These are the deathless forms of the happy Olympians, high above the cares and turmoil of the finite, self-centred and independent. It is ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... been made necessary by great natural forces in modern life, and having been made possible by new mechanical arts, now puts itself forward as the next great opportunity of the fine arts. One of the characteristic achievements of the immediate future shall be the twentieth-century Parthenon—a Parthenon not of the great and of the few and of the gods, but of the great many, where, through mighty corridors, day and night, democracy wanders and sleeps and chatters and is sad and lives and dies, streets rumbling below. The hotel—the crowd fireside—being more than any other one ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... quite comfortable. After a little the wind lulled, the fog dispersed again, and the iceberg seemed to contemplate our slow departure with complacent serenity. We regretted that the hour forbade a return. It would have been pleasant to play around that Parthenon of the sea in the twilight. The best that was left us was to look back and watch the effects of light, which were wonderfully fine, and had the charm of entire novelty. The last view was the very finest. All the east front was a most tender blue; the fissures on the southern ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... no more, None now need fear "the rude Carinthian boor," The bandit Greek, the Swiss of avid grin, Or e'en the predatory Bedouin. Where'er we roam, whatever realms to see, Our thoughts, great Agent, must revert to thee. From Parthenon or Pyramid, we look In travelled ease, and bless the name of COOK! Eternal blessings crown the wanderer's friend! At Ludgate Hill may all the world attend. Blest be that spot where the great world instructor ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, July 30, 1892 • Various
... a grand essay. I do not quite understand whether it is this essay that Dawson has been "down on." What a curious notion about Glacial climate, and Basques and Finns! Are the Basques mountaineers—I hope so. I am sorry I have not seen the "Athenaeum," but I now take in the "Parthenon." By the way, I have just read with much interest Max Muller (356/7. Probably his "Lectures on the Science of Language," 1861-64.); the last part, about first origin of language, seems the least ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... when Confucius died. Themistocles was preparing the way for Pericles; for then was being collected the treasure of Delos, which made Phidias and the Parthenon possible. During the life of Confucius lived Leonidas, Miltiades, Cyrus the Great, Cambyses, Darius, Xerxes. And then quite naturally occurred the battles of Marathon, Salamis and Thermopylae. Then lived Buddha-Gautama, Lao-tsze, Ezekiel, Daniel, Haggai, Zechariah, ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard
... known by the name of the Temple of Neptune. This building shares, together with the Temple of Theseus at Athens, the honour of being the best preserved monument of the Doric order in existence, and the impression of grandeur that it gives to the spectator rivals even the first sight of the Parthenon itself. In front of the building is a platform in the midst of which can be seen the hollow space that formerly held the altar of sacrifice, for according to the practice of the Greek religion, these rites of blood-shedding took place in the open air and outside ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... patron deity of Athens. This festival differed from the other Grecian games chiefly in two particulars. It was peculiar to the Athenians, and its chief feature was a solemn procession in which the Peplus, or sacred robe of Minerva, was carried to the Parthenon, and suspended before the statue of the goddess. The Peplus was covered with embroidery, worked by select virgins of the noblest families in Athens. The procession consisted of persons of all ages and both sexes. The old men carried olive branches in their ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... vibrating rhythms of his forms—his marbles are ever musical; not "frozen music" as Goethe said of Gothic architecture, but silent swooning music. This gate is a Frieze of Paris, as deeply significant of modern aspiration and sorrow as the Parthenon Frieze is the symbol of the great clear beauty of Hellas. Dante inspired this monstrous and ennobled masterpiece, but Baudelaire filled many of its chinks and crannies with writhing ignoble shapes; shapes of dusky fire that, as they tremulously stand ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... according to the nature of the tools, the selection of material, the particular sort of native endowment which are given to him. Some such men reveal their understanding of the soul and the world in the detached serenity, the too well-defined harmonies of a Parthenon; others in the dim and intricate richness, the confused and tortured aspiration of the long-limbed saints and grotesque devils of a Gothic cathedral. Others incarnate it in gleaming bronze; or spread it in subtle play of light and shade and tones of color on a canvas; or write ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... consequence has confronted all of them, without exception, in some hidden nook or cranny of the world,—some place unknown to fame. Anybody is as likely to meet the woman who is destined to become his wife, at Essex Junction on a wintry night, as in the Parthenon by moonlight in the month of May. The most romantic places in the world are often those that promised, in advance, ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... She became the centre and capital of the most polished communities of Greece, and she drew into a focus all the Grecian intellect; she obtained from her dependants the wealth to administer the arts, which universal traffic and intercourse taught her to appreciate; and thus the Odeon, and the Parthenon, and the Propylaea arose! During the same administration, the fortifications were completed, and a third wall, parallel [289] and near to that uniting Piraeus with Athens, consummated the works of Themistocles and Cimon, and preserved the communication between the twofold city, even ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... official and visible representation of the goddess of Athens, and thereby to raise the religious ideals of the Athenians. In this last part of his attempt he was successful; the statue became the pride and glory of the city in its fitting shrine, the Parthenon; but the old image was still preserved in the temple of Athena Polias, and remained the official centre of worship. We are not told that Pericles meant to supersede it; but it is very probable that he intended to do so, and was only ...
— Religion and Art in Ancient Greece • Ernest Arthur Gardner
... do good work with a baseball-bat too," said Burns; "but as for the raw material, give me the heads of the men who have sculped me to work on. I'd leave them so that they'd look like some of your Parthenon frieze figures with ...
— A House-Boat on the Styx • John Kendrick Bangs
... the forms around him—his arms, utensils, dwelling, or his own person. The history of every nation proves this, and no matter how rude, and even ugly, their efforts may seem to us, we are bound to recognize in them the same motives that actuated the builders of the Parthenon or of St. Peter's at Rome. This awakening and gratification of the aesthetic sense seems to be the first advance from a condition of mere animal existence, in which food, shelter, and comfort are the only ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 598, June 18, 1887 • Various
... it anywhere. Or, to return again to the past, take as another instance the ancient Greeks. Do you think that Greek art ever tells us what the Greek people were like? Do you believe that the Athenian women were like the stately dignified figures of the Parthenon frieze, or like those marvellous goddesses who sat in the triangular pediments of the same building? If you judge from the art, they certainly were so. But read an authority, like Aristophanes, for instance. You will find ...
— Selected Prose of Oscar Wilde - with a Preface by Robert Ross • Oscar Wilde
... an air at all picturesque or romantic; there is a plain Roman Catholic cathedral, a hideous new Protestant church of the cigar-divan architecture, and a Court-house with a portico which is said to be an imitation of the Parthenon: the ancient religions houses of the Spanish town are gone, or turned into military residences, and masked so that you would never know their former pious destination. You walk through narrow whitewashed lanes, bearing such martial names as are before mentioned, and by-streets with barracks ...
— Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Brandenburg Gate, where the Linden commences, forms the entrance to the city from the Thiergarten, and is a sort of triumphal arch, erected in 1789. It is seventy feet in height, and two hundred in width, being modelled after the entrance in the gateway of the temple of the Parthenon at Athens. It affords five ...
— Foot-prints of Travel - or, Journeyings in Many Lands • Maturin M. Ballou
... buildings of the Parthenon, rich with the statues and bas-reliefs of Phidias and his scholars, gleaming white against the blue sky, with the huge bronze statue of Athene Promachos, fifty feet in height, towering up among the temples and colonnades. In ...
— Lectures Delivered in America in 1874 • Charles Kingsley
... the limestone, but these are in great part demolished. Adjoining Devonport are East Stonehouse (an urban district, pop. 15,111), Stoke and Morice Town, the two last being suburbs of Devonport. The town hall, erected in 1821-1822 partly after the design of the Parthenon, is distinguished by a Doric portico; while near it are the public library, in Egyptian style, and a conspicuous Doric column built of Devonshire granite. This monument, which is 100 ft. high, was raised in commemoration ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various
... hallooing to the empty seats that re-echoed. They warn me of this and that hotel, and advise me concerning the journey from London. The usual tale of travelers is that Athens is a ruin. I have heard it rumored, for instance, that the Parthenon marbles are in London, and that the Parthenon itself has suffered from the "wreckful siege of battering days"; that the walls to Piraeus contain hardly one stone ...
— Journeys to Bagdad • Charles S. Brooks
... could still see enough to render possible a just impression of her old and chaste magnificence. It is painful to reflect within how comparatively short a period the chief injuries have been inflicted on such buildings as the Parthenon, and the temple of Jupiter Olympus, and to remember how recent is the greater part of the rubbish by which these edifices have been choked up, mutilated, and concealed. Probably until within a very few centuries, time had been, ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... and artificial beauty which are English, and love to hear the sound of such sweet and classical names as the Pentland and Malvern Hills, the Cliffs of Dover and the Trosachs, Richmond, Derwent, and Winandermere, which are to him now instead of the Acropolis and Parthenon, of Baiae, and Athens with its sea-walls, and ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... for the space of a year, had been nourished in a particular fashion; and, when it had been shown in every street, in every square, and before every temple, in the midst of a procession continually chanting, it ascended to the Acropolis, brushed passed the Propylaeum, and entered the Parthenon. ...
— The Temptation of St. Antony - or A Revelation of the Soul • Gustave Flaubert
... therefore, we must also form some conception of the classic. Now there is an obvious unlikeness between the thought and art of the nations of pagan antiquity and the thought and art of the peoples of Christian, feudal Europe. Everyone will agree to call the Parthenon, the "Diana" of the Louvre, the "Oedipus" of Sophocles, the orations of Demosthenes classical; and to call the cathedral of Chartres, the walls of Nuremberg—die Perle des Mittelalters—the "Legenda Aurea" of Jacobus de Voragine, the "Tristan und Isolde" ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... of Love's perfumed breath, For no response gives Death! Ah, 'tis a fearful sight to see Thy lustre on a human face Where the Promethean spark has left no trace, As if it shone upon The marble cold, Of that famed ruin old— The grand, but empty Parthenon! ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 5 November 1848 • Various
... apse of the Duomo of Pisa was a colossal image of Christ, in colored mosaic, bearing to the temple, as nearly as possible, the relation which the statue of Athena bore to the Parthenon; and in the same manner, concentrating the imagination of the Pisan on the attributes of the God ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... with sculpture, and both minister to architecture. So the world might hope once more to see public buildings nobly planned and no less nobly decorated, as in the past it saw the completion of the Parthenon and the churches of mediaeval Italy. It was unfortunate that they received so little encouragement from the public, and that their example had so narrow an influence. St. Paul's can show its Wellington monument, Lincoln's Inn its fresco; but year after year subject-pictures ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... that platform were a series of lesser temples—or chapels, as we should call them—decorated with niches, admirably engraved, and loaded with sculptured ornaments to a degree that appeared excessive to those who had seen the severe simplicity of the Parthenon or the Coliseum. But how prodigious the accumulation of architectural riches in the middle of an eastern desert! Combine in imagination the Temple of Jupiter Stator and the Coliseum at Rome, of Jupiter Olympius and the Acropolis at Athens, and you will yet fall ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844 • Various
... of God some men have! What can an Eskimo, whose highest conception of summer is a stunted bush, know of tropical orchards, of luscious peach, pear and plum? If the student has seen only the broken fragments of Phidias, what can he know of the Parthenon as it once stood in the zenith of its perfection, in the splendor of its beauty? But if man's reason can cull out all the lustrous facts of nature and history, and if his imagination has strength and skill to bring them all together, then ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis |
