"Picturesqueness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 13.—This morning I photographed the Sam Swain family at their special request. Swain wants to send a photograph of the family to his mother at the Cape. There was such an attiring of themselves beforehand, but all the picturesqueness was gone when they appeared, for they had discarded their handkerchiefs. Charlotte wanted to know if they should wear hats instead. I was thankful to be able to say it would not do as they would cast a ...
— Three Years in Tristan da Cunha • K. M. Barrow
... street Christmas brings something of picturesqueness, of cheer. Its message was ever to the poor and the heavy-laden, and by them it is understood with an instinctive yearning to do it honor. In the stiff dignity of the brownstone streets up-town there may be scarce a hint of it. In the homes of the poor it blossoms on stoop ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis
... all this region, which was now to be disturbed by the din and havoc of war. Its picturesqueness long since disappeared. Upon Manhattan Island, the city's push "uptown"-ward has been like the cut of a drawing knife, a remorseless process of levelling and "filling-in." Forty times in population and twenty in area has it expanded beyond ...
— The Campaign of 1776 around New York and Brooklyn • Henry P. Johnston
... two hours among the hills. As we approached the sacred mountain, we came upon the region of oaks—the first oak I had seen since leaving Europe last autumn. There are three or four varieties, some with evergreen foliage, and in their wild luxuriance and the picturesqueness of their forms and groupings, they resemble those of California. The sea of grass and flowers in which they stood was sprinkled with thick tufts of wild oats—another point of resemblance to the latter country. But here, there is no gold; there, ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor
... Henry with that mixture of pride and extreme familiarity which comes best from a relation. In all matters not touching Henry, I feel that I can rely upon her; in its main lines her narrative is strictly confirmed by Scurvilegs, and she brought to it a picturesqueness and an appreciation of the true character of Belvane which is lacking in the other; but her attitude towards Henry Smallnose was absurd. Indeed she would have had him the hero of the story. This makes Roger ...
— Once on a Time • A. A. Milne
... and was an expanse of plain glass with only a little remains of a cusp at the top of the arch. The bells were in one of the true Hampshire weather-boarded square towers, of which very few still exist in their picturesqueness. There were the remains of an old broken font, and a neat white marble one, of which the tradition was that it was given by a parish clerk named David Fidler, and it still exists as the lining ...
— John Keble's Parishes • Charlotte M Yonge
... the almost barbaric picturesqueness of light and grouping; but her eyes had barely skimmed the scene when the meaning of the hush that filled the place was brought home ...
— The Mystics - A Novel • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... whole, Magism, though less elevated and less pure than the old Zoroastrian creed, must be pronounced to have possessed a certain loftiness and picturesqueness which suited it to become the religion of a great and splendid monarchy. The mysterious fire-altars on the mountain-tops, with their prestige of a remote antiquity—the ever-burning flame believed to have been kindled from on high—the ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 3. (of 7): Media • George Rawlinson
... have already filled volumes. Lastly, we promise the Wells visiter some gratification, by extending his tour to Brambletye House, memorialized in Horace Smith's entertaining novel. These few traits may serve to show the picturesqueness of the environs of the Wells, and consequently of Mr. Britton's volume; and we leave the reader with their grateful impression on ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 551, June 9, 1832 • Various
... avoided, as did that of his art, which exactly reproduced his character, anything like self-conscious picturesqueness. It is pleasant to have the object of our regard unconscious of himself. He had a way of ignoring, while observing automatically, all accessories, which reminded us that his soul was ever awake, and waiting to be made free of earthly ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... grown so large as to be almost unwieldy. But her tropical coloring retained its vividness, retained its breath-taking quality of picturesqueness, retained its alluring languor. She sat now holding a huge fan. Indeed, since the day that Honey had piled the fans on the beach, Chiquita had never been without one in her hand. Scarlet, the scarlet of her lost ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore
... beautiful morning when you come," returned he, with a touch of that picturesqueness that sounded so quaintly coming from him. All this time he had retained her hand, and now, looking her in the eyes, he drew it with painful effort toward his lips. Cornelia's heart beat so she could scarcely stand, and her mind was in a confusion, but she did not withdraw her hand. Perhaps because ...
— Bressant • Julian Hawthorne
... long, narrow embrasured opening in the wall, defended by the usual Spanish grating, and still further back, as in the frame of a picture, the half length figure of Mrs. Peyton, very handsome and striking, too, with a painted picturesqueness from the effect of ...
— Susy, A Story of the Plains • Bret Harte
... heard the vengeance of the future on Horeb. Then comes a significant pause. The basses begin, "And when the Lord would take him away;" another brief pause, and the full chorus pictures in vivid color the coming of the fiery chariot and the whirlwind by which he was caught up into heaven. The picturesqueness and dramatic intensity of this splendid chorus can hardly be described in words. One more tenor aria ("Then, then shall the Righteous shine") and a brief soprano solo introduce the chorus, "Behold My servant." A beautiful quartet ("Oh! come, every one that thirsteth") follows, ...
— The Standard Oratorios - Their Stories, Their Music, And Their Composers • George P. Upton
... broad band of sunshine shone down the steep ladder and cut a golden swath through the dingy gloom and fell athwart the chest and illuminated the group: the tall and swaggering Cales, the rugged, grizzled Pete, and the other sailormen; a typical group and not to be matched for picturesqueness anywhere; with their faces intent upon the center of the old black sea chest, where glowed and glittered the gold and jewels in the band of light that shone upon some of the faces of the intent group, ...
— Frontier Boys on the Coast - or in the Pirate's Power • Capt. Wyn Roosevelt
... (most of his poems are in the rhymed pentameter couplet;) but in 1822 appeared his poem of Italy, in blank verse, which has the charm of originality in presentation, freshness of personal experience, picturesqueness in description, novelty in incident and story, scholarship, and taste in art criticism. In short, it is not only the best of his poems, but it has great merit besides that of the poetry. The story of Ginevra is a masterpiece of cabinet art, and is universally appreciated. With these ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... France. The land is also fairly wooded, and the vine, of which we hear so much in our accounts of ancient Cenomannian warfare, is, to say the least, not so prominent a feature as it was then. And we need not say that vines, except either on a hill-side or against a house, do not add to the picturesqueness of a landscape. The land, without being strictly hilly, much less mountainous, is far from flat, and it contains some considerable heights, as the ranges culminating in the peak of Mont Aigu, which forms a prominent ...
— Sketches of Travel in Normandy and Maine • Edward A. Freeman
... was a thriving town in the Middle Ages, and existed in Roman times, there is very little to be seen older than the period of the late Renaissance. It is a busy modern town, and for the archaeologist is merely a convenient place of departure for other more interesting sites, though there is some picturesqueness of costume and situation about it; and the Englishman is pleased to see many ships with the national flag, and to know that one of the great industries of the place is the Whitehead torpedo factory. ...
— The Shores of the Adriatic - The Austrian Side, The Kuestenlande, Istria, and Dalmatia • F. Hamilton Jackson
... were ornamented with a wreath of natural flowers, which gave an additional charm to her beautiful features, the rest of her costume being also adorned with gaily-coloured feathers, further increasing the picturesqueness of her appearance. She lightly stepped out of the canoe, followed by her companion, who hauled it up on the beach at the same time that Nigel landed. They together made their way to the village as ...
— Villegagnon - A Tale of the Huguenot Persecution • W.H.G. Kingston
... fashionable district. It was here that the king and the archbishop had their palaces and the wealthy their brick and stone. The public park skirted the lake, and was patterned after those fine gardens which add so much to the picturesqueness of Vienna and Berlin. There were wide gravel paths and long avenues of lofty chestnuts and lindens, iron benches, fountains and winding flower beds. The park, the palaces, and the Continental Hotel enclosed a public ...
— The Puppet Crown • Harold MacGrath
... sparingly introduced, goes to the heart; his pictures of crime and despair not seldom rise to the terrific, and he has a marvellous power of painting natural scenery, and of bringing out in detail the beauty and picturesqueness of scenes at first sight uninteresting, or even uninviting. He is absolutely free from affectation or sentimentality, and may be regarded as one of the greatest masters of the realistic in our literature. With these merits he ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... the customs of this band of intensely religious people without laying on the color too thickly and without melodramatic exaggeration, to retain all the color and picturesqueness of the original scene without excess, was the difficult task which Mr. How had to accomplish, and it is one which he ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss
... neither crochets nor embroiders presents for people, nor sketches, nor recites, nor sings, or in fine annoys the public in any way whatsoever. Her enemies deny that she is good-looking, but even her friends concede her curious picturesqueness and her knowledge of it. Her penetration, indeed, is not to be despised; she has even grasped the fact that all men are not necessarily fools in spite of the fashion in which they talk to women. It must be admitted, however, that her emotions are prone to take ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... with them, movements which seemed to imply blank verse and to be thrown away upon two women and a little furniture. A consciousness stood in the room between them, and their commonplaces about the picturesqueness of the bazaar rode on long absorbed regards, one reading, the other anxious to read; yet the encounter was so conventionally creditable to them both that they might have smiled past each other under any circumstances next day and acknowledged no demand ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... warfare, science stripped it of its picturesqueness. The commanding general no longer cavorts upon his charger, nor smiles as the bullets whistle about him, while he stands surrounded by an ornamental general staff, whose breasts are covered with ribbons and medals representing every known variety of ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja
... one sees only in the low billiard-rooms in Paris. His companion was tall, long-limbed, and slender; and his dress, although of the ordinary cut, either from the disposition of colors, or from the careless, graceful attitudes of the wearer, assumed a certain air of picturesqueness. Both the men possessed the same marked Oriental type of countenance which distinguished the Wondersmith and Madame Filomel. True gypsies they seemed, who would not have been out of place telling fortunes, or stealing chickens in the green lanes ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... not attempted to embellish these narratives, but with the help of maps and some good illustrations he brings them vividly before us in all their picturesqueness."—Daily Telegraph. ...
— Colonial Born - A tale of the Queensland bush • G. Firth Scott
... powerless against the feeblest band; so far from its being singular that we find no other record of that state of man, so unstable and sure to perish was it that we should rather wonder at even a single vestige lasting down to the age when for picturesqueness it became ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... frankly confess our admiration of the high qualities of "Miles Standish." In construction we think it superior to "Evangeline"; the narrative is more straightforward, and the characters are defined with a firmer touch. It is a poem of wonderful picturesqueness, tenderness, and simplicity, and the situations are all conceived with the truest artistic feeling. Nothing can be better, to our thinking, than the picture of Standish and Alden in the opening scene, ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... hotels and various small pensions and family houses. We are staying at the Grand, which is very comfortable. There is a splendid terrace overlooking the lake; rather an ambitious name for the big pond, which does, however, add to the picturesqueness of the place, particularly at night, when all the lights are reflected in the water. The whole hotel adjourns there after dinner, and people walk up and down and listen to the music until ten o'clock. After that there is a decided falling off of the beau monde. Many people take their ...
— Chateau and Country Life in France • Mary King Waddington
... horns and black faces. It was the most delightful, most romantic, ride and walk I ever had." These early visits to Scotland inspired her with her love for the Highlands and the Highlanders. She found there quite a world of poetry. The majestic scenery, the fresh, bracing air, the picturesqueness of the kilted gillies, the piping and the dancing, and the long days among the heather, recalled scenes which Sir Walter Scott has glorified for all time, and which are especially identified with the fortunes of the unhappy Stuarts, of whom she is ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 6 of 8 • Various
... lacked strength; on the contrary, he was tall and well, if loosely, built. Grace is not a common manly attribute, but he possessed it to an eminent degree. There was a careless ease in his manner, an unconscious picturesqueness in his poses, a turn, that would have smacked of haughtiness had there been the slightest element of pride in his disposition, in the curve of ...
— A Girl of the Commune • George Alfred Henty
... the subject better, than by the following anecdote. Whence it is derived, has escaped my memory; but I have a floating notion that it is told of Socrates in Xenophon or Plato. At any rate, by way of giving fixity thereto and picturesqueness, let us here report the story as ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... like Osterhaut and Jowett, Indians like Tekewani, doctors like Rockwell, priests like Monseigneur Fabre, ministers like Mr. Tripple, and ne'er-do-weels like Marchand may be found in many a town of the West and North. Naturally the book must lack in something of that magnetic picturesqueness and atmosphere which belongs to the people in the Province of Quebec. Western and Northern life has little of the settled charm which belongs to the old civilization of the French province. The only way to recapture that charm is to place Frenchmen in the West, and have them ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... life-time, and in which he died at last. Altogether, it is an exceedingly unsuitable place for a pastoral and rural poet to live or die in,—even more unsatisfactory than Shakspeare's house, which has a certain homely picturesqueness that contrasts favorably with the suburban sordidness of the abode before us. The narrow lane, the paving-stones, and the contiguity of wretched hovels are depressing to remember; and the steam of them ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... adventitious aids of long hair and Elizabethan beard, would have been peculiarly spiritless and insignificant, but from the complacency that shone like an unguent in every line of it, as well as from the studied picturesqueness of his costume, it was manifest that he posed as a unique and interesting character, a being mysterious and romantic, melancholy and rarely gifted—like the ...
— Grey Roses • Henry Harland
... the eye could reach; and as I watched the decaying trees I thought of the price we had to pay for our vaunted supremacy in the manufacture of iron. We may fill our purses, but we pay a heavy price for it in the loss of picturesqueness and beauty. I left the castle with reluctance, and proceeded to inspect the limestone quarries in the neighbourhood. The limestone has long been worked out from underneath the castle; but not far from it is Wren's Nest Hill, ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... panellings, incrusted with antique figures, carved in the black heart of oak—knights, and squires, and priests of old. Then he peoples these shadowy chambers with crowds of stern burghers, or grave ecclesiastics, or soldiers 'armed complete in mail;' and so forms striking pieces of gloomy picturesqueness. Figure-paintings of a lighter calibre also abound. There is Mr John Absolon, who is in great request for painting figures in panoramic pictures; Mr Lee, whose graceful rural maidens are not to be surpassed: Mr Warren, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 444 - Volume 18, New Series, July 3, 1852 • Various
... Whatever of picturesqueness an English hamlet has, this American one has. It has its wealthy hereditary aristocracy, its small farmers or squires and its peasants, its ruins and haunted houses, its traditions of savages and of the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, September 1880 • Various
... and express traffic of those days lacked the picturesqueness of the passenger coaches, nothing illustrates so conclusively what the great road meant to an awakening West as the long lines of heavy Conestogas and rattling express wagons which raced at "unprecedented" speed across hill and vale. Searight, the local ...
— The Paths of Inland Commerce - A Chronicle of Trail, Road, and Waterway, Volume 21 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Archer B. Hulbert
... toy; his toy came before everything. But why did he make himself offensive to many people by speaking against Christianity? It was so illogical to love art as he did and to hate religion.... He had listened much more indulgently to Ulick than she had expected, and seemed to perceive the picturesqueness of the gods, Angus and Lir. It was Christianity that irritated and changed him to the cynic he was not, and forced him into arguments which she hated: "that when you went to the root of things, no one ever acted except from a selfish motive" and ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... which even boasted a featureless Celestial, who had unobtrusively extinguished himself with a stove-pipe hat, Torrini was the only figure that approached picturesqueness. With his swarthy complexion and large, indolent eyes, in which a southern ferocity slept lightly, he seemed to Richard a piece out of his own foreign experience. To him Torrini was the crystallization of Italy, or ...
— The Stillwater Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... back upon Villa F'loriano, and set off, high-hearted, up the wide lawns, under the bending trees—whither, on four red-marked occasions, he had watched her disappear—towards the castle, which faced him in its vast irregular picturesqueness. There were the oldest portions, grimly mediaeval, a lakeside fortress, with ponderous round towers, meurtrieres, machiolations, its grey stone walls discoloured in fantastic streaks and patches ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... The picturesqueness and romance of the war of picture books were missing. To stand beside an English battery of thirty guns laying a barrage as they fired their shells to a point ten miles distant, made one feel as if one were an actual part of real warfare, ...
— A Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward Bok
... valley of Angrogna, up which the inhabitants of La Tour were accustomed to retreat on any sudden invasion by the army of Savoy. The valley is one of exquisite beauty, presenting a combination of mingled picturesqueness and sublimity, the like of which is rarely to be seen. It is hemmed in by mountains, in some places rounded and majestic, in others jagged and abrupt. The sides of the valley are in many places finely wooded, while in others well-tilled fields, pastures, and vineyards slope down ...
— The Huguenots in France • Samuel Smiles
... won light and motive force for the valley towns from the falling water. There are those who fear the harnessing of water-power, because it may mean the spoiling of beautiful scenery. Such buildings as I saw in no way marred the view, but rather added to it a touch of human picturesqueness. ...
— Westward with the Prince of Wales • W. Douglas Newton
... fair to hold their own as long as English fiction retains its popularity. Johnson considered Miss Burney equal to Fielding. But although she possessed qualities similar to his—constructive power and picturesqueness—she possessed them in a lesser degree. In the management of the difficulties of the epistolary form of novel-writing, she surpassed ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... the meadow-lark and the note of the robin sounded sweetly against the stillness of the air. A trio of crows sailed athwart the blue, their great wings beating the air to slow, solemn measure. The pine woodland added shelter and picturesqueness to the road, and to the light breeze its sweet resinous odor. And Fairfax was here, there, everywhere, looking after things with all the zeal of a ...
— Peggy Owen and Liberty • Lucy Foster Madison
... importance and dignity that ranks with the great battles on other fronts of the Great War. Never before had two great powers fought in territory so absolutely ill adapted to the movement of large bodies of troops. For the same reason the story attains a picturesqueness absent from the dreary plains of Galicia and Poland and Flanders. Austrians, Hungarians and Italians fought in a land known throughout the world to tourists for its grandeur of scenery, its towering, snow-clad peaks, and idyllic lakes and valleys. It was warfare ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume III (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... while she was dressing for dinner, to explain that I was not responsible for any of this picturesqueness. "Oh, perhaps I am to blame myself!" she exclaimed. "I think I interviewed a ...
— Sylvia's Marriage • Upton Sinclair
... cause and effect, while it lessens the painfulness of life, adds to life's picturesqueness. The man to whom evolution is but a name looks at the sea as a grandiose, monotonous spectacle, which he can witness in August for three shillings third-class return. The man who is imbued with the idea of development, of continuous cause and effect, perceives in the sea an element which ...
— How to Live on 24 Hours a Day • Arnold Bennett
... picturesqueness of the style of this book is combined with sound sense, and strong argument, when the author pleads the claims and the beauties of realism in art; and though addressed to artists, the volume is one of that most attractive which hat been set ...
— Normandy Picturesque • Henry Blackburn
... she was a good subject for a portrait, being distinguished by a gentle picturesqueness, which was perhaps unconsciously bestowed by some minute peculiarity of dress, such as artists seldom fail to assume. The effect was to make her appear like an inhabitant of pictureland, a partly ideal creature, not to be handled, nor even approached too closely. In her feminine self, Hilda ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume I. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... representative of nothing, are legislators by inheritance. Should we summon to a conclave of the nations a king who had no kingdom? But the pity of it! Not only the break with eight centuries of history—nay, more, for when had not every king his council of notables?—not only the loss of picturesqueness and sentiment and lofty mien, but the certainty, the appalling certainty, that, when an aristocracy of birth falls, it is not an aristocracy of character or intellect, but an aristocracy—save the mark—of money, which is ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... comment to the letters of Carlyle and Emerson during these years,—Lowell speaks of the impression made by this remarkable discourse. It "was an event without any former parallel in our literary annals, a scene to be always treasured in the memory for its picturesqueness and its inspiration. What crowded and breathless aisles, what windows clustering with eager heads, what enthusiasm of approval, what grim silence of foregone dissent! It was our Yankee version of a lecture by Abelard, our Harvard ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, - 1834-1872, Vol. I • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... the next morning as she went to open her window after dressing, she drew back with a new consciousness, and then, making a peephole in the curtain, looked over the opposite roofs. She had seen them many times before, but now they had acquired a new picturesqueness, which as her view was, of course, the reverse of the poor painter's sketch, must have been a transfigured memory of her own. Then she glanced curiously along the line of windows level with hers. All these, however, with their occasional revelations of the menage ...
— Tales of Trail and Town • Bret Harte
... gave to the syllables threw the word into wonderful picturesqueness, enchanting Owen. It was the first time he had heard an Arab pronounce this word, so characteristically African; and he asked him to say it again for the pleasure of hearing it, liking the way the Saharian spoke it, with an accent at once tender and proud, that of a native speaking ...
— Sister Teresa • George Moore
... a very slow-beating imagination who cannot realise the picturesqueness of these ancient sea-duels. Two frigates cruising for prey catch the far-off gleam of each other's topsails over the rim of the horizon. They approach each other warily, two high-sniffing sea-mastiffs. A glimpse of fluttering colour—the red flag and the drapeau blanc, or the ...
— Deeds that Won the Empire - Historic Battle Scenes • W. H. Fitchett
... [Jonson] or any other eminent man transcending you in merit." One of the most diverting personages in Jonson's comedy is Captain Tucca. "His peculiarity" has been well described by Ward as "a buoyant blackguardism which recovers itself instantaneously from the most complete exposure, and a picturesqueness of speech like that of a ...
— Cynthia's Revels • Ben Jonson
... singers, loving this line, take care to pronounce the words with unusual distinctness: the listener may feel that the performer has the capacity for great and consistent suffering. It is not, of course, that youth loves unhappiness, but the appearance of it, its supposed picturesqueness. Youth runs from what is pathetic, but hangs fondly upon pathos. It is the idea of sorrow, not sorrow, which charms: and so the young singer dwells upon those lingering tomorrows, happy in the conception of a permanent wretchedness incurred ...
— The Flirt • Booth Tarkington
... black, with his red bandolier, his gloves, and his stick. This does not strike one as anything out of the common, because the composition is so true, so perfectly natural and simple. I cannot remember having seen a single picture in which the peculiar style and picturesqueness of those days is so vividly expressed, as in the figures of these two men calmly walking ...
— Rembrandt • Josef Israels
... during the reigns of Richard I., John, and Henry III.; a battlefield during the wars of the Barons and the wars of the Roses; but the ancient character of the town was almost entirely destroyed by the great fire of 1675,—not without benefit to the health, though at the expense of the picturesqueness of this ancient borough. ...
— Rides on Railways • Samuel Sidney
... faces and black beards, their rich instinct for color in costume; their fierce conversation and violent gestures; the energy of their movements when they worked, and the profoundness of their repose when they rested; the picturesqueness and grotesqueness of the negroes, too; the huge, flat, round baskets of fruit which the black men carried on their heads, and which the Sicilians bore on their shoulders or the nape of the neck. The "captain" of the schooner was a ...
— Dr. Sevier • George W. Cable
... fact that Russia is not a country of fine scenery, the voyage down the river is pleasant enough. The left bank is as flat as the banks of the Rhine below Cologne, but the right bank is high, occasionally well wooded, and not devoid of a certain tame picturesqueness. Early on the second day the steamer reaches Kazan, once the capital of an independent Tartar khanate, and still containing a considerable Tartar population. Several metchets (as the Mahometan houses of prayer are here termed), with their diminutive minarets in the ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... telescope, and many were the theories concerning it. At so great a distance, and with the hot sunlight shining full upon it, the fort might have been a strip of white sand; later it was decided to be a tribunal of unusual proportions, and at last when it loomed full upon us in all the picturesqueness of its gray, moss-grown walls, with weeds trailing in luxurious profusion from every crevice, we decided that there lived the American inhabitants of Misamis. Soldiers gathered under the roof of the ...
— A Woman's Journey through the Philippines - On a Cable Ship that Linked Together the Strange Lands Seen En Route • Florence Kimball Russel
... are not rich in this imaginative material which appeals to one fond of history or art; but this defect is compensated for by an extraordinary picturesqueness of life and a wonderful luxuriance of nature. The Oriental trip also makes less demand on one's reading than even a hasty journey through Europe. There are few pictures, few statues. Only India and Egypt appeal to the sense of the historical, Japan stands ...
— The Critic in the Orient • George Hamlin Fitch
... Gardens, shaded by palms and lebbak-trees, made this portion of the town quite habitable. Behind, on the rising sand-dunes, lay the crowded, stifling mass of native dwellings, to visit which one's heart must be strong. Bazaars might be artistic and unique, but as their quaintness and picturesqueness increased so also did the odours of garlic, the uncleanliness, and ...
— The Tale of a Trooper • Clutha N. Mackenzie
... Torpenhow. He represented the Central Southern Syndicate in the campaign, as he had represented it in the Egyptian war, and elsewhere. The syndicate did not concern itself greatly with criticisms of attack and the like. It supplied the masses, and all it demanded was picturesqueness and abundance of detail; for there is more joy in England over a soldier who insubordinately steps out of square to rescue a comrade than over twenty generals slaving even to baldness at the gross details of transport ...
— The Light That Failed • Rudyard Kipling
... characterised by variety, liveliness, and picturesqueness. 'As a master of style Livy is in the first rank of historians. He marks the highest point which the enlarged and enriched prose of the Augustan age reached just before it began to fall into decadence.... The periodic structure of Latin prose, which had been developed ...
— Helps to Latin Translation at Sight • Edmund Luce
... Spanish War deposed the Civil War from its position as the last event of great external picturesqueness in the national history. However sincere may be our love of peace, war remains irresistibly fascinating to the imagination; and the imagination of young America has now a foreign war instead of a civil war to look back upon. The smoke of battle, in which the ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... old hall of the deserted Putnam Manor Inn, where we had expected to find warmth and food and the picturesqueness of a century back. Instead of these things we had found the place in the hands of a caretaker. Dicky had asked to go through the house on the pretence of wishing ...
— Revelations of a Wife - The Story of a Honeymoon • Adele Garrison
... conventional dress, one conventional face; we have no bond of union but pecuniary interest; we talk anything that comes uppermost for talking's sake, and without expecting to be believed; we have no nature, no simplicity, no picturesqueness: everything about us is as artificial and as complicated as our steam-machinery: our poetry is a kaleidoscope of false imagery, expressing no real feeling, portraying no real existence. I do not see any compensation for the poetry of the ...
— Crotchet Castle • Thomas Love Peacock
... Norman keep, or of Roman structures that existed before the Conqueror's castle was ever dreamed about. They are like toadstools that spring up from the mould of a decaying tree. Ugly as they are, they add wonderfully to the picturesqueness of the scene, being quite as valuable, in that respect, as the great, broad, ponderous ruin of the castle-keep, which rose high above our heads, heaving its huge gray mass out of a bank of green foliage and ornamental shrubbery, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... destroy was Robert Hart's admiration for the soldier hero. If the apparent inconsistencies of his character were numerous, all of them added force and picturesqueness to it, and only served to increase the affection of one who knew him ...
— Sir Robert Hart - The Romance of a Great Career, 2nd Edition • Juliet Bredon
... Well adapted for the sea coast and other exposed places. It is of extremely uncertain habit and is subject to the loss of the lower limbs. It frequently presents a certain picturesqueness of outline, but it could not be used as a specimen tree on ...
— Studies of Trees • Jacob Joshua Levison
... would be on their homeward way, as happy as holiday could make them, especially if they were returning for the summer harvest or the autumn vintage. The latter was then, as now, a season of festivity. In these more modern days something of its primitive picturesqueness may have been lost; but when Agassiz was a boy, all the ordinary occupations were given up for this important annual business, in which work and play were so happily combined. On the appointed day the working people might be seen trooping in from neighboring cantons, where there were no vineyards, ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz
... question; but whether his technical excellences are always broadly representative or not is not so certain. That the writer who has so amply proven his own joy in the wealth of his material, should have been beguiled by its picturesqueness into a partisanship for the class making a special appeal, is not surprising. But truth in art is largely a matter of selection; and if Mr. Cable has sinned in the gleaning, it was undoubtedly because of visual limitation, ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... pile is now wearing away. Trees grow in some of the deserted apartments, and ivy creeps along the walls; though the ruins have little of the picturesqueness of decay. The best point of view, or north-west, is represented in the Engraving; a short distance hence lies the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 566, September 15, 1832 • Various
... upside down, interwoven with strips of turquoise sky and green waters—a bewildering, intoxicating jumble of tatters and tangles, maddening in detail, brilliant in color, harmonious in tone: the whole scintillating with a picturesqueness beyond the ken or brush of any ...
— Outdoor Sketching - Four Talks Given before the Art Institute of Chicago; The Scammon Lectures, 1914 • Francis Hopkinson Smith
... Boulevard des Italiens in the French capital. Brussels is a city of shady boulevards, open spaces, and pleasant parks as is Paris; and the beautiful Bois de la Cambre on its outskirts compares very favorably with the world-renowned Bois de Boulogne as regards rural charm and picturesqueness. ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 4 (of 10) • Various
... to follow in detail a career so well known. Every particular of it, and even the sermons with all their heads, may be found in the Historie of the Reformation in Scotland, which yields in interest, in picturesqueness and the most living and graphic power of narrative, to none of the primitive chronicles. No professional word-painter has ever put a dramatic scene, a contention, a battle, such as those which were everyday occurrences in Scotland at that time, upon paper with more pictorial ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... and town that we visited was like the introduction of a new picture. There was no sameness between any of them. Each had aimed at picturesqueness or stately magnificence, and neither had failed to obtain it. Looking back as I now do upon Mizora, it presents itself to me as a vast and almost limitless landscape, variegated with grand cities, lovely towns and villages, majestic hills and mountains crowned with glittering snows, ...
— Mizora: A Prophecy - A MSS. Found Among the Private Papers of the Princess Vera Zarovitch • Mary E. Bradley
... of the prisons. The towers rise from masses of foliage, and form no unpleasing feature of what must be, in spite of Signor P——, a delightful Italian garden in sunny weather. The ground is not so flat as elsewhere in Padua, and this inequality gives an additional picturesqueness to the place. But as we were come in search of horrors, we scorned these merely lovely things, and hastened to immure ourselves in the dungeons below. The custodian, lighting a candle, (which ought, we felt, to have ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 117, July, 1867. • Various
... directly from the people, in their homes, or as I have listened to the earnest voice of the native priest explaining the ancient ceremonials of his fathers. The stories are close translations, losing only a certain picturesqueness and vigour in their foreign guise; but the melodies are exactly as sung by ...
— Indian Story and Song - from North America • Alice C. Fletcher
... say, in answer, that our present question is not this, but another—not who made the tree, but what is it? Is there anything besides matter in the tree? If so, what, and where? Mr. Martineau may have begun by this time to discern that it is not 'picturesqueness,' but cold precision, that my Vorstellungs-faehigkeit demands. How, I would ask, is this vegetative soul to be presented to the mind? where did it flourish before the tree grew? and what will become of it when the ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... in Hodshon's lack of picturesqueness. He was like no detective she had read about between Sherlock Holmes and Philo Gubb. He was like no detective at all. It was almost impossible to accept ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... Gideon Vetch as the storm-ruffled plumage was part of an eagle. If the misguided man had attired himself in a toga, he would have carried the Mantle without dignity perhaps, but certainly with picturesqueness. ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... and the vivid picturesqueness of the stories are indisputable, and their originality and their marked distinction are no less decided.—Boston ...
— Cinderella - And Other Stories • Richard Harding Davis
... intelligence which, though without education, learns everything. He possessed an inexhaustible, imperturbable store of talk. His words gushed forth abundantly in original remarks, laughable images, the metaphors that flow from the comic genius of crowds. He had the natural picturesqueness of the unadulterated farce. He was brimming over with amusing stories and buffoonery, rich in the possession of the richest of all repertories of house-painter's nonsense. Being a member of divers of the low haunts called lists, he knew all the new tunes and ballads, and he was never ...
— Germinie Lacerteux • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
... fearsome and terrifying prospect. I could not trust myself. In a way, I envy the man who can hold his own under such circumstances. His transcendent powers enable him to preserve his sturdy humanness of character, his charming simplicity of diction, his graphic picturesqueness of phrase, and his exquisite winsomeness of behaviour without the extraneous assistance which the children render to some of us. But I could not do it. I should go all to pieces. And so, when I dream that I have entered a pulpit from which I can survey no roguish ...
— Mushrooms on the Moor • Frank Boreham
... season of sugar-making. At the period in which the events of our story occurred, the cultivation of the maple was much more extensive than now, but even at present it is sufficiently well maintained to enable a traveller to study all its picturesqueness and charm. In Vermont, New Hampshire, Michigan and Wisconsin, the maple is cultivated, but in such a matter-of-fact, mercantile fashion, that there is no rural poetry in ...
— The Bastonnais - Tale of the American Invasion of Canada in 1775-76 • John Lesperance
... its present importance. Unlike any other roads in Europe the British high roads have never been subjected to any organised attempts to grade or straighten them out, and to that no doubt their peculiar picturesqueness is to be ascribed. The old Bun Hill High Street drops at its end for perhaps eighty or a hundred feet of descent at an angle of one in five, turns at right angles to the left, runs in a curve for about thirty yards to a brick bridge over the dry ditch that ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells
... northern companion. Its trees are often tall and stately, but they are usually much scattered and are surrounded by stretches of scanty grass. There is no trace of the mossy carpet and dense copses of undergrowth that add so much to the picturesqueness of the forests farther north. The unkempt half-breed or Indian hunter is replaced by the prosaic gatherer of turpentine. As the man of the southern forests shuffles along in blue or khaki overalls and carries his buckets from tree to tree, he seems a dull figure ...
— The Red Man's Continent - A Chronicle of Aboriginal America, Volume 1 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Ellsworth Huntington
... given in the harbor, July 2, was, in the way of picturesqueness, one of the most original and most beautiful ever seen. The sky was clear, the sea calm, the crowd of spectators enormous. Napoleon and Josephine, going down from the terrace in the garden of the Palazzo Doria, entered a large round temple, ...
— The Court of the Empress Josephine • Imbert de Saint-Amand
... retain at the present time so large a share of the dignity and picturesqueness originally theirs, as does the homestead whose chief interest for us lies in the fact that it was the Revolutionary prison of Doctor Benjamin Church, the first-discovered traitor to the American cause. This house ...
— The Romance of Old New England Rooftrees • Mary Caroline Crawford
... That picturesqueness of dress and custom has passed away, but Barnstaple is still a prosperous and pleasant city, lying on the sleek curve of the River Taw, and surrounded by low smooth hills. Seen from the opposite side of the river on a spring afternoon, from ...
— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland
... and sat down, drawing from his pocket a silver cigarette case, which he offered to the Englishman. There was a certain picturesqueness in the man's attitude and manner. His face and movements possessed a suggestion of energy which seemed out of place here in the sleepy South, and stamped him as a native not of dreamy Andalusia, but of ...
— In Kedar's Tents • Henry Seton Merriman
... place thereof they had those huge central markets, that colossus of ironwork, that new and wonderful town. Fools might say what they liked; it was the embodiment of the spirit of the times. Florent, however, could not at first make out whether he was condemning the picturesqueness of Baratte's or its ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... cabled to Washington, when a change of administration brought Boker's tenure of office to a close, asking if it were not possible to have him retained. He had had his difficulties at the Porte, as Lowell had had at Madrid. But his artistic nature responded quickly to the picturesqueness of his surroundings. "Within a mile of me," he writes Leland from Turkey,—"for I am now living at Therapia upon the Bosphorus—there is a delicious encampment of the black tents of a tribe of Gypsies." While he was in Russia he was continually ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: Francesca da Rimini • George Henry Boker
... with two deep verandahs, standing on a well-kept lawn planted with exotic trees, is the most imposing building in Hilo. All the foreigners have carried out their individual tastes in their dwellings, and the result is very agreeable, though in picturesqueness they must yield the plain to the native houses, which whether of frame, or grass plain or plaited, whether one or two storied, all have the deep thatched roofs and verandahs plain or fantastically latticed, which are so in harmony with the surroundings. These lattices and single ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... the embellishments of man. Our cup of happiness was full to the brim when we were taken to this entrancing spot overlooking the Hudson River, with its innumerable sloops, steamboats and tugs adding so much to the picturesqueness of the scene. As we strolled along, we regaled ourselves every now and then with a refreshing glass of mead, a concoction of honey and cold water, purchased from a passing vender; and when cakes or candy were ...
— As I Remember - Recollections of American Society during the Nineteenth Century • Marian Gouverneur
... the trail, so that the missile merely grazed him. We heard a subdued protest of one syllable, as he turned and went back. It was all uninteresting night to me now—beauty, picturesqueness, enchantment gone, with that repressed yelp. I didn't even rise from my seat on the rock. I had looked too close. ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort
... 25th of December he arrived at Zinder, the frontier town of Bornou, built round and about masses of rock, which rose out of the ground, the picturesqueness of the place being increased by groups of date-palms. Water, which collects at short depths below the surface, fertilises a number of tobacco-fields, and gives to the vegetation around a very ...
— Great African Travellers - From Mungo Park to Livingstone and Stanley • W.H.G. Kingston
... getting shot by his friends for merely being present to applaud them. So, fancying him thus, with his yellow hair, his scarlet-striped waistcoat, and his tragedy, the young girl felt a share of family greatness, or, at least, of picturesqueness, descend to her. And she smiled sadly back upon the smile in the picture, and dreamed about ...
— The Two Vanrevels • Booth Tarkington
... her observation and the clearness of her judgment. Moreover, she is always impartial: she has no preconceived theories to support, and consequently she is at liberty neither to extenuate nor set down aught in malice. In picturesqueness of description she has been excelled by many, in soberness and correctness of statement by none; and, after all, it is more important that our travellers should tell us what they have really seen, than what they would have wished to see; should trust to their intelligence as observers rather than ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... convenience about them; nor do they fail to represent the manners and feelings of their own time. The earliest of these, built about the reign of Queen Anne, stretch out a hand toward the Gothic times, and are not without picturesqueness, especially when their surroundings are beautiful. The latest built in the latter days of the Georges are certainly quite guiltless of picturesqueness, but are, as above said, solid, and not inconvenient. All these houses, both ...
— Hopes and Fears for Art • William Morris
... the citizens continued to discuss and wonder over the strangely mated pair of incidents that had distinguished and exalted the past twenty-four hours above any other twenty-four in the history of their town for picturesqueness and splendid interest; and long before the lights were out and burghers asleep it had been decided on all hands that in capturing these twins Dawson's Landing had drawn a prize in the great ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... Examiner—"The characters are sketched with real life and picturesqueness. Mr. Boldrewood accomplishes the very difficult feat of enabling his readers not only to understand the bewildering complexities of mining law, but to be interested in the situations which arise out of their ...
— Robbery Under Arms • Thomas Alexander Browne, AKA Rolf Boldrewood
... the tranquil habits of this modest life was made by Samuel's astonishing errand. The story is told with wonderful picturesqueness and dramatic force. The minute account of the successive rejections of his brothers, Samuel's question and Jesse's answer, and then the pause of idle waiting till the messenger goes and returns, heighten the expectation with which we look for his appearance. And then what a sweet young face ...
— The Life of David - As Reflected in His Psalms • Alexander Maclaren
... broad paved square, crossed by two rows of tamarind-trees, and bounded on one side by a Spanish piazza—you can study a spectacle of savage picturesqueness. There are no benches, no stalls, no booths; the dealers stand, sit, or squat upon the ground under the sun, or upon the steps of the neighboring arcade. Their wares are piled up at their feet, for the most part. Some ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... Her picturesqueness calmed John's ebullient discontent; he decided that she knew nothing of, and was not an accomplice in, his mother's scheme: For the sake of his guest he strove to make himself agreeable during dinner, but it was clear that he missed the hierarchy of ...
— A Mere Accident • George Moore
... available as interest producers. But much as we delight to talk about our symptoms, we are never particularly interested in listening to those of others, still less in seeing them portrayed upon the stage. On account of their slow course, utter absence of picturesqueness, and depressing character, the vast majority of diseases are quite unsuitable for artistic material. In fact, the literary worker is almost limited to a mere handful, at one extreme, which will produce sudden and dramatic effects, like heart failure, apoplexy, or the ghastly introduction of ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson
... where it had been, but instead of the ship, I saw directly through the glass the inhabitants of Nunami arising and beginning their daily business, a scene which I might have missed since I was previously wholly absorbed by the picturesqueness of the sky. ...
— The Revolutions of Time • Jonathan Dunn
... German literature. He steeped himself so thoroughly in German that he himself came to write English, if I may so express it, with a German accent. Carlyle's style is harsh and rugged. It has a vividness and picturesqueness all his own, but when Carlyle began to write people cared neither for his style nor for his subjects. He found publishers hard to persuade, and life ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... assure her that I would attempt no hateful picturesqueness of narration. "Suppose I just say that you were rather lonely here, now that Ev'leen Ann has left you, and that you thought it would be nice to have your sister come to stay with you, so that 'Niram and ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... individual. What allured me in Proserpine was the amount of inner emotion there was in the drama, which is very advantageous to the music. Music gives expression to feelings which the characters cannot express, and accentuates and develops the picturesqueness of the piece; it makes acceptable what would not ...
— Musical Memories • Camille Saint-Saens
... When the sense of picturesqueness, as well as that of justness and dignity, had been lost, the spring of the continuous mouldings was replaced by what Professor Willis calls the Discontinuous impost; which, being a barbarism of ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin
... Rome, Naples, and other Italian cities in which he willingly lingered, are picturesque and worthy of the subject. Petrarch is also conscious of the beauty of rock scenery, and is perfectly able to distinguish the picturesqueness from the utility of nature. During his stay among the woods of Reggio, the sudden sight of an impressive landscape so affected him that he resumed a poem which he had long laid aside. But the deepest impression of all was made ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... glancing at these, Winston paused for an idle moment, his eyes fastened upon a whirling spectacle of dancers in the hall beyond. It formed a scene of mad revelry; yet in his present state of mind, he cared little for its frontier picturesqueness, and soon turned away, mounting the broad stairway down which, like an invitation, echoed the sharp click of ivory chips, and the excited voices of those absorbed in play. In both size and gorgeousness of decoration the rooms above ...
— Beth Norvell - A Romance of the West • Randall Parrish
... the whole charm of this city on its seven hills would have departed: already is it on the wane. Sultan Mahmoud's hostility to beards and to flowing robes, to the turban and the jherid, has deprived his capital city of much of its picturesqueness and peculiarity; but still enough remains of eastern manners and costumes to make it one of the most interesting cities in the world to visit and roam over. Such as, like ourselves, may not hope to sport a caique on the ...
— The International Weekly Miscellany, Volume I. No. 8 - Of Literature, Art, and Science, August 19, 1850 • Various
... of the City had changed, and its colour and picturesqueness were gone, at no time was London more powerful or more magnificent. There were no nobles living within the walls: only two or three of the riverside palaces remained along the Strand: there were no troops of retainers riding along the streets in ...
— The History of London • Walter Besant
... that sloped down nearly to the ground in the back over an ell covering the kitchen, added in the shape known as a lean-to, or, as it was called by country folk, the linter. This sloping roof gave the one element of unconscious picturesqueness which redeemed the prosaic ugliness of these bare-walled houses. Many lean-to houses are still standing in New England. The Boardman Hill House, built at North Saugus, Massachusetts, two centuries and a half ago, and the two houses of lean-to form, the birthplaces of President ...
— Home Life in Colonial Days • Alice Morse Earle
... islanders. They are colonized here, from commissioner in charge down to private, in a cheek-by-jowl fashion that shows their ability to unbend and republicanize on occasion. Great Britain's head-quarters are made particularly attractive, not more by the picturesqueness of the buildings than by the extent and completeness of her exhibit. In her preparations for neither the French nor the Austrian exposition did she manifest a stronger determination to be thoroughly well represented. Col. H.B. Sanford, of the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XVII. No. 101. May, 1876. • Various
... however, in much dramatic verse, or in meditative blank verse, as used by Wordsworth. Much of the poetry of Byron, Browning, Keats, and Shakespeare, while supremely great from the standpoint of color, or dramatic power, or picturesqueness, or thought, is not musical. To bring some poems within the limit of musical notation ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... south-west; but on every other side there are drained, though still unhealthy, marshes, stretching away to meet the central Walachian plains. From a distance, the multitude of its gardens, and the turrets and metal-plated or gilded cupolas of its many churches give Bucharest a certain picturesqueness. In a few of the older districts, too, where land is least valuable, there are antique one-storeyed houses, surrounded by poplars and acacias; while the gipsies and Rumans, wearing their brightly coloured native costumes, the Russian coachmen, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... not least, the general grouping of the whole structure in combination with the buildings which are gathered about its haunches, though with no suspicion of a detracting element as in some sordid and crowded cities, where, in spite of undeniable picturesqueness, is presented a squalor and poverty not creditable either to the city of its habitation or to the cathedral authorities themselves. From every point of vantage the steeples of Notre Dame de Noyon add the one ingredient which makes a unity of the entire ensemble,—a true old-world ...
— The Cathedrals of Northern France • Francis Miltoun
... managing things by means of loops and ribbons, has an effect which is not without its picturesqueness, perhaps more so than is our system of "keeping things together" in clothing matters. After all it is only a matter of opinion. The inhabitants of the land of Cho-sen, from my experience, are not much given ...
— Corea or Cho-sen • A (Arnold) Henry Savage-Landor
... modern gaiety and radiance, while the other side of their courtyards open upon the busy working Rue St. Honore, lined by the tall, many-windowed houses which have witnessed so many revolutions. They have all the picturesqueness of innumerable balconies, high, slated roofs, with dormer windows, window-boxes full of carnations and bright with crimson flowers through the summer, and they overlook an ever-changing crowd, in great part composed of men in blouses and ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... as this is merely a study of the manner in which the untrained characteristics and varied limitations of one man adjusted or failed to adjust themselves to incongruous surroundings and totally unprepared-for circumstances, such details, whatsoever their potential picturesqueness, can be touched upon but lightly. No new idea of value to the world of practical requirements is presented to the public at large without the waking of many sleeping dogs, and the stirring of many snapping fish, floating with open ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... down the paths and on the public benches. The soldiers are under the law of military obedience, and are so far in slavery, as all soldiers are, but nothing of their slavery is visible, and they are the idols of an unstinted devotion, which adds to the picturesqueness and, no doubt, the pathos of the great London spectacle. It is said that they sometimes abuse their apparent supremacy, and that their uniform generally bars them from places of amusement; but one sees nothing of their insubordination or exclusion in the ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... added in stone, but the old house was brick. He was much abused at the time for his want of taste, and heard a good deal about putting new cloth as patches on old rents; but, as the shrubs and ivy have grown up, a certain picturesqueness has come upon the place, which is greatly due to the difference of material. The place is somewhat sombre, as there is no garden close to the house. There is a lawn, at the back, with gravel walks round it; ...
— The American Senator • Anthony Trollope
... religious prejudice, and even by the use of these very terms—civilisation and barbarism—which convey to most persons the impression of a difference not merely in degree but in kind. Even the Germany has been suspected by some critics of sacrificing fidelity to poignancy of contrast and picturesqueness of narrative. Other histories too, which have been handed down to us among the archives of the people to whose infancy they relate, have been thought distorted by the pride of race or by the religious sentiment of a newer age. It is important then to observe that these suspicions, ...
— Ancient Law - Its Connection to the History of Early Society • Sir Henry James Sumner Maine
... however, that the difficulties would be greatly lessened could we but command backgrounds of the European order. Thackeray, the Brontes, George Eliot, and others have written great stories, which did not have to be romances, because the literal conditions of life in England have a picturesqueness and a depth which correspond well enough with whatever moral and mental scenery we may project upon them. Hawthorne was forced to use the scenery and capabilities of his native town of Salem. He saw that he could ...
— Confessions and Criticisms • Julian Hawthorne
... venerableness, although from the style of its construction it seems to have survived beyond its first century. He added a porch in front, and a central peak, and a piazza at each end, and painted it a rusty olive hue, and invested the whole with a modest picturesqueness; all which improvements, together with its situation at the foot of a wooded hill, make it a place that one notices and remembers for a few moments after passing it. Mr. Alcott expended a good deal of taste and some money (to no ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... cannery, Cherry saw a tender moored to the dock, and noticed strangers among the buildings. They stared at her curiously, as if the sight of a white girl attended by a copper-hued giant were part of the picturesqueness they expected. As she drew near her own house, she saw a woman approaching, and while yet a stone's-throw distant she recognized her. A jealous tightening of her throat and a flutter at her breast told her that ...
— The Silver Horde • Rex Beach
... in themselves; they had no grandeur of outline, no picturesqueness even, though at morning and evening the sun, like a great magician, clothed them with ...
— Stories by English Authors: Orient • Various
... Paris—Paris beautiful in its strange blending of smoky ruins and splendid, freshly-erected mansions—that we can pardon the white glare of newly-opened streets, the Vandal desecration of antique landmarks, the universal sacrifice of old memories, historic associations and antique picturesqueness on that altar of modern progress whose high priest was Baron Haussmann and ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 86, February, 1875 • Various
... green cloak and pretty black shady hat. There was a new sort of picturesqueness about her, which Aunt Marjorie noticed in an abstracted way; she put it down to "the polish which even a short residence in the metropolis always gives;" she had not the faintest idea that it was due to the dignity which a ...
— A Young Mutineer • Mrs. L. T. Meade
... through his writings and his life. A busy scholar at Paris, a reforming Archdeacon in Wales, the wittiest of Court chaplains, the most troublesome of bishops, Gerald became the gayest and most amusing of all the authors of his time. In his hands the stately Latin tongue took the vivacity and picturesqueness of the jongleur's verse. Reared as he had been in classic studies, he threw pedantry contemptuously aside. "It is better to be dumb than not to be understood," is his characteristic apology for the novelty of his style: ...
— History of the English People, Volume I (of 8) - Early England, 449-1071; Foreign Kings, 1071-1204; The Charter, 1204-1216 • John Richard Green
... translations of the New and Old Testaments, and paving the way for the new faith by a series of vigorous polemical writings, the style of which proclaims him the founder of modern Swedish prose. Centuries passed before the effective simplicity and homely picturesqueness of his style were surpassed. He became, furthermore, Sweden's first dramatist. The Comedy of Tobit, from which Strindberg uses a few passages in slightly modernized form at the beginning of his play, is now generally recognized as an authentic ...
— Master Olof - A Drama in Five Acts • August Strindberg
... from the rock-crystal chandeliers, big as haystacks, within the state apartments, is supplemented by the fires in the heater and on the snow outside, round which the waiting coachmen warm themselves, with Rembrandtesque effects of chiaro-oscuro second only to the picturesqueness of dvorniki in their nondescript caps and shaggy coats, who cluster round blazing fagots in less aristocratic quarters when the ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood
... town!" said Smolin, looking at the girl with a kindly smile, "it is so beautiful, so vigorous; there is cheerfulness about it that inspires one to work. Its very picturesqueness is somewhat stimulating. In it one feels like leading a dashing life. One feels like working much and seriously. And then, it is an intelligent town. Just see what a practical newspaper is published here. By the way, we intend to ...
— Foma Gordyeff - (The Man Who Was Afraid) • Maxim Gorky
... which 'seem to me infinitely more interesting than the most interesting play or novel,' and you get strange glimpses of the ways of thinking and living among classes otherwise unknown to you. These criminal courts, he says in another letter, are a 'never-ending source of interest and picturesqueness for me. The little kind of meat-safe door through which the prisoners are called up, and the attendant demon of a gaoler who summons them up from the vasty deep and sends them back again to the vasty deep for ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... stranger take into consideration that Rembrandt took up his abode in the town when it was rapidly growing, and when the picturesqueness of its late-mediaeval appearance had to concede to graver conceptions, based on the classics and the Italian renaissance. Let him remember that the threefold girdle of wide canals lined with big houses, which now embraces the old city, ...
— Rembrandt's Amsterdam • Frits Lugt
... a barrage down on yo'!" A platform was improvised near a blazing fire of pine boards and we had some excellent clogging and singing. The big basso had evidently a strong feeling for his steel helmet, and it undoubtedly added to his picturesqueness—setting off his features with his teeth and eyes gleaming ...
— War in the Garden of Eden • Kermit Roosevelt
... horizontal about half-way down, and drooping in handsome curves at the base. By the time the sapling is five or six hundred years old this spiry, feathery, juvenile habit merges into the firm, rounded dome form of middle age, which in turn takes on the eccentric picturesqueness of old age. No other tree in the Sierra forest has foliage so densely massed or presents outlines so firmly drawn and so steadily subordinate to a special type. A knotty ungovernable-looking branch five to eight feet thick ...
— The Mountains of California • John Muir
... to be sent to Brixton for obtaining money under false pretences. It gives a greatly increased value to their lands, as may be seen by the superior rents they can obtain for the farms along the line; and as to the picturesqueness of the landscape, it is only because the eye is not yet accustomed to it, nor the mind embued with railway associations, that it is not considered a finer "object" than the level greenery of a park, or the hedgerows of a cultivated farm. Painters have already ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... on a spur of the Mokattam hills, occupies the S.E. angle of the city. The prospect from the ramparts of this fortress is one of striking picturesqueness and beauty. Below lies the city with its ancient walls and lofty towers, its gardens and squares, its palaces and its mosques, with their delicately-carved domes and minarets covered with fantastic ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... neighborhood could remember. The first and probably the wildest of them had come out from Virginia when Los Angeles was still a drowsing Spanish village, bringing with him an aged and excellent cellar and a flock of negro servants. Honor's Carmody grandmother could remember the picturesqueness of his entourage, of James King himself, the hard-riding, hard-drinking, soft-spoken cavalier with his proud, pale wife and his slim, high-stepping horses and his grinning blacks. The general conviction was, Grandmother ...
— Play the Game! • Ruth Comfort Mitchell
... feature of the religious life of India, at present, is the existence there of several new cults or religions. They not only add picturesqueness to the religious situation, they also reveal the unrest of the people and their desire for something better than the orthodox faith of their fathers ...
— India's Problem Krishna or Christ • John P. Jones
... irregular shape of counties in Virginia or townships in Massachusetts, which grew up just as it happened. The contrast is similar to that between Chicago, with its straight streets crossing at right angles, and Boston, or London, with their labyrinths of crooked lanes. For picturesqueness the advantage is entirely with the irregular city, but for practical convenience it is quite the other way. So with our western lands the simplicity and regularity of the system have made it a marvel of convenience for the settlers, ...
— Civil Government in the United States Considered with - Some Reference to Its Origins • John Fiske
... Fair that could be persuaded to lend itself to his purpose. Certainly, there was nothing in the fair-house, with those poor, dreary old people straggling through it, to gladden an artistic conception. Agricultural implements do not group effectively, or pose singly with much picturesqueness; tall stalks of corn, mammoth squashes, huge apples and potatoes want the beauty and quality that belong to them out of doors, when they are gathered into the sections of a county fair-house; piles of melons fail ...
— The Coast of Bohemia • William Dean Howells
... ARE a pretty limited lot, you will admit that? Originality is not in their line; they can't think up anything new, anything to freshen up the old moss-grown dullness of the language lesson and put life and "go" into it, and charm and grace and picturesqueness. ...
— The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories • Mark Twain
... redolent of the warm soft air of the Western Lochs and Moors, sketched out with remarkable grace and picturesqueness."—Saturday Review. ...
— MacMillan & Co.'s General Catalogue of Works in the Departments of History, Biography, Travels, and Belles Lettres, December, 1869 • Unknown
... the War in the Southern Department" is a valuable military history and a very interesting book. The movements of Greene in face of Cornwallis are described with a precision which renders the narrative valuable to military students, and a picturesqueness which rivets the attention of the general reader. From these memoirs a very clear conception of the writer's character may be derived, and everywhere in them is felt the presence of a cool and dashing nature, a man gifted with the mens aequa in arduis, ...
— A Life of Gen. Robert E. Lee • John Esten Cooke
... received fine training. Even Sonia, impressed by the enthusiasm of the gathering, and its esteem for Dillon, could not withhold her admiration. Alas, it was not her Horace who poured out a volume of musical tone, vigorous English, elegant rhetoric, with the expression, the abandonment, the picturesqueness of a great actor. She shuddered at his descriptions, her heart melted and her eyes moistened at his pathos, she became filled with wonder. It was not Horace! Her husband might have developed powers of eloquence, but would have to be remade to talk in that fashion of any land. This ...
— The Art of Disappearing • John Talbot Smith
... to approach Mycenae from any side without being struck with the picturesqueness of the site. If you come down over the mountains from Corinth, as soon as you reach the head of the valley of the Inachus, which is the plain of Argos, you turn aside to the left, or east, into a secluded corner—"a recess of the horse-feeding Argos," as Homer calls it—and then you find ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Vol VIII - Italy and Greece, Part Two • Various
... the unseen choir of bird-voices; but their song emphasized the silence. In the pale light the shells of wrecked houses glimmered white, like things seen deep down under clear water. They were mysterious as daytime ghosts; and already a heartbreaking picturesqueness had taken possession of the streets, as an artist-decorator comes into an ugly room and mellows all its crudeness with his ...
— Everyman's Land • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... western and eastern harbours and by the Otter river. The situation, with its wooded hills and neighbouring islands, is no less beautiful than that of other south-coast towns, but the substitution of brick for wood as building material after a fire in 1892 made against the picturesqueness of the town. There is a fine cathedral, rebuilt in Gothic style after a fire in 1880. Christiansand is an important fishing centre (salmon, mackerel, lobsters), and sawmills, wood-pulp factories, shipbuilding yards and mechanical ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... A dictionary word, but uncommon. Recall similar words used by De Quincey which add picturesqueness in part ...
— De Quincey's Revolt of the Tartars • Thomas De Quincey
... of the chiefs and the substance of the clan system were finally swept away, though the sentiment lingers, even in the Transatlantic abodes of the clansmen, and is prized, like the dress, as a remnant of social picturesqueness in a prosaic and levelling age. The hills and lakes—at the thought of which even Gibbon shuddered—are the favourite retreats of the luxury which seeks in wildness refreshment from civilization. After Culloden, Presbyterianism effectually made its way into the Highlands, ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... Sir David Lyndsay to his purpose, presenting him, even as he presents the stately and venerable Angus, with faithful and striking picturesqueness. Bishop Douglas is exactly suited to his share in the development of events; and had room likewise been found for the Court poet Dunbar—author of James's Epithalamium, the 'Thrissill and the Rois'—it would have been both a fit and a seemly arrangement. ...
— Marmion • Sir Walter Scott
... Oleg."[7] His most important work, both from the literary and the historical points of view—although not so regarded by his contemporaries—was his drama "Fingal," founded on Ossian's Songs, and is a triumph of northern poetry and of the Russian tongue, rich in picturesqueness, daring, and melody. His contemporaries regarded "Dmitry Donskoy" as his masterpiece, although in reality it is one of the least noteworthy of his compositions, and ...
— A Survey of Russian Literature, with Selections • Isabel Florence Hapgood
... basis. The incidents and characters are portrayed with all the freshness and picturesqueness common ...
— Hunter's Marjory - A Story for Girls • Margaret Bruce Clarke
... of how obstruction is to be put down. Mr. Gladstone answers the questions very briefly; but there is hidden and fateful meaning in every syllable he utters; and the House of Commons, looking on, shows itself in one of those moments which bring out all its picturesqueness—its latent passions—its very human characteristics. There is the eager strain of curiosity. Every face is turned to that of the single pale white solitary figure that stands out from the Treasury Bench, dressed, I may add, in the sober but light grey suit of the summer season, in spite ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... if not positive, were great. In the violent coming of age of Elizabethan literature, his voice was heard loudly, not always discordantly, and with an accent eminently personal to himself. His life, though shadowy, has elements of picturesqueness and pathos; his writings are a storehouse ...
— The Vnfortunate Traveller, or The Life Of Jack Wilton - With An Essay On The Life And Writings Of Thomas Nash By Edmund Gosse • Thomas Nash
... locality—the American quarter, from Fourteenth Street down to Canal, west of Sixth Avenue—will reveal a moral and physical cleanliness not found in any other semi-congested part of New York; an individuality of the positive sort transmitted from generation to generation; a picturesqueness in its old houses, 'standing squarely on their right to be individual' alongside those of modern times, and, above all else, a truly American ...
— Greenwich Village • Anna Alice Chapin |
