"Freestone" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... them cut glass, after it has got hard, when you ought to make them mould it while it is soft. It is not so obvious how much expense you waste in cutting diamonds and rubies, which are the hardest things you can find, into shapes that mean nothing, when the same men might be cutting sandstone and freestone into shapes that meant something. It is not so obvious how much of the artists' time in Italy you waste, by forcing them to make wretched little pictures for you out of crumbs of stone glued together at enormous cost, when the tenth of the time would make good and noble pictures for you out ...
— A Joy For Ever - (And Its Price in the Market) • John Ruskin
... years, and the roof had fallen in, allowing the elements to complete the work of destruction. On each side of the altar was the remains of fine carving, and a weather-beaten picture above gave evidence of having been a beautiful painting. Over the door was a large oblong slab of freestone, elaborately carved, representing "Our Lady of Light" rescuing a human being from the jaws of Satan. A large tablet, beautifully executed in relief, stood behind the altar, representing various saints, with an inscription stating that ...
— The Old Santa Fe Trail - The Story of a Great Highway • Henry Inman
... hardly describe my surprise on revisiting it in 1849, to behold a city grown up suddenly, as if by enchantment, with several handsome churches and public and private buildings of cut stone, brought from the fine freestone quarries in the precipitous mountains or ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... been built from the designs and under the superintendance of John Shaw, Esq., F.R. and A.S. the architect of Christ's Hospital. The tower is of the Kelton stone, a very superior kind of freestone, of beautiful colour, from the county of Rutland. Of this material King's College Chapel, Cambridge, and many other of our finest edifices have been constructed. The tower has below an entrance doorway, finished with rich mouldings and tracery; on each side are the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 20, Issue 558, July 21, 1832 • Various
... projecting, deeply and darkly, at the extreme angles of a curtain, or flat wall, which united them, and thus protecting the main entrance, that opened through a lofty arch in the centre of the curtain into the inner court of the castle. The arms of the family, carved in freestone, frowned over the gateway, and the portal showed the spaces arranged by the architect for lowering the portcullis, and raising the drawbridge. A rude farm-gate, made of young fir-trees nailed together, now formed the only safeguard of this once formidable entrance. The esplanade ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... board partition on one side through which a "neebor" could be heard snoring. Filling all of the outer wall between the peephole, leaded windows and running-up to the slope of the ceiling, was a great fireplace of native white freestone, carved into fluted columns, foliated capitals, and a flat pediment of purest classic lines. The ballroom of a noble of Queen Mary's day had been cut up into numerous small sleeping closets, many of them windowless, and were let to the chance lodger at threepence the night. Here, ...
— Greyfriars Bobby • Eleanor Atkinson
... have heard before. The remains are considerable, and some parts of the walls would still admit of being restored. The palace has outlasted not only the kingdom, but almost its history. This edifice was partly built of a reddish freestone, very like that which is so much used in New York, a material that abounds on ...
— A Residence in France - With An Excursion Up The Rhine, And A Second Visit To Switzerland • J. Fenimore Cooper
... meetinghouse in Brattle Street at the time of the opening of this story was a large unpainted wooden structure which was torn down in 1772 and replaced by an elegant edifice of brick with quoins of freestone. John Hancock gave one thousand pounds and a bell. The pastor, Reverend Samuel Cooper, was an earnest advocate for the rights of the Colonies, and without doubt his influence, combined with that of Samuel Adams, had much to do in attaching ...
— Daughters of the Revolution and Their Times - 1769 - 1776 A Historical Romance • Charles Carleton Coffin
... the facade was an oaken door, in two sections, studded with nails driven in the pattern of a quineunx, in the centre of which the Claes pride had carved a pair of shuttles. The recess of the doorway, which was built of freestone, was topped by a pointed arch bearing a little shrine surmounted by a cross, in which was a statuette of Sainte-Genevieve plying her distaff. Though time had left its mark upon the delicate workmanship of portal and shrine, the extreme care taken ...
— The Alkahest • Honore de Balzac
... hardly to be believed but which is nevertheless true: for about the quays and about the streets lay many people dead, or stood, but quite without motion, and they were all white or about the colour of new-hewn freestone, yet were they not statues but real men, for they had, some of them, ghastly wounds which showed their entrails, and the structure of their ...
— The World of Romance - being Contributions to The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, 1856 • William Morris
... where no one will ever find him. He is desperate, and he hasn't a penny. Now, among the five or six houses built by these contractors, which have to be sold, there's a jewel of a house, built of freestone, in the neighborhood of the Madeleine,—a frontage laced like a melon, with beautiful carvings,—but not being finished, it will have to be sold for what it will bring; certainly not more than a hundred thousand francs. By spending twenty-five thousand ...
— The Lesser Bourgeoisie • Honore de Balzac
... of architecture and tombs of wood, or freestone, or brass, naturally thinks of GOLD as the best enriching and ennobling substance for them; in the midst also of the fever of the Renaissance he writes, as every one else did, in praise of precisely the most ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... defended throughout the whole breadth of the isthmus: first by a trench, then by a grassy rampart, and lastly by a wall thirty cubits high, built of freestone, and in two storys. It contained stables for three hundred elephants with stores for their caparisons, shackles, and food; other stables again for four thousand horses with supplies of barley and ...
— Salammbo • Gustave Flaubert
... other view you may see them half-hidden by it. A few flowering stems have escaped the scythe in the first picture, and nestle close against the poet's headstone. Hard by sleeps poor Hartley Coleridge, with a slab of freestone graven with a cross and a crown of thorns, and the legend, "By thy Cross and Passion, Good Lord, deliver us."[A] All around are the graves of those whose names the world has not known. This view, (302,) from above Rydal Mount, is so Claude-like, especially ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various
... near the beach; it consists of several houses and barracks placed irregularly, but well built of white freestone. The only inhabitants are marines, and some negroes liberated from slave-ships, who are paid and victualled by government. There is not a private person on the island. Many of the marines appeared well contented ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin
... Wintoncester, that fine old city, aforetime capital of Wessex, lay amidst its convex and concave downlands in all the brightness and warmth of a July morning. The gabled brick, tile, and freestone houses had almost dried off for the season their integument of lichen, the streams in the meadows were low, and in the sloping High Street, from the West Gateway to the mediaeval cross, and from the mediaeval ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... but no one was allowed within, except the physician, who visited daily, and the orderly officers, who looked through the spars every half-hour. Of course, it was rather a cold lodging; but, as winter advanced, a hole was dug a few feet from each cage, built round with freestone, and filled with sand, upon which charcoal was afterwards kept burning. Benches were provided for them to sleep on, and two of the orderlies presented them with bear-skins; but the native fashion is to lie on a thick, wadded quilt, folded together, and laid ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 448 - Volume 18, New Series, July 31, 1852 • Various
... at the respectable old freestone building, with 'Goldsmith' inscribed on the iron window-blinds, and a venerable date carved over the door. Inside, those blinds came high, and let in but little light over the tall desks, at which were placed the black-horsehair ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Jardine, whom he afterwards married. His wife had been, for a considerable time, a cook-maid to Sir Thomas Kirkpatrick of Closeburn, who procured for her husband, from the Duke of Queensberry, an advantageous lease of the freestone quarry of Gatelowbrigg, in the parish of Morton. Here he built a house, and had as much land as kept a horse and cow. My informant cannot say, with certainty, the year in which his father took up his residence at Gatelowbrigg, but he is sure it must have been ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... heart of Bassigny, at Morimond. There were the remains of a large abbey, a piece of land worthy of the name which the monks had given it—"Mort-au-monde"—a wild, magnificent bit of Nature with a pool of some hundred acres or more and a forest of venerable oak trees; meadows with canals of freestone where the spring-tide flowed along under bowers of trees, a veritable wilderness where the vegetation had been left to itself since the Revolution; springs babbling along in the shade; wild flowers, cattle-tracks, the remains of a garden and the ruins of buildings. Here and there a few ...
— Rene Mauperin • Edmond de Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt
... burial-ground, where some masons were building a tomb, we found a good many old monuments, and several covered with slabs of red freestone or slate, and with arms sculptured on the slab, or an inlaid circle of slate. On one slate gravestone, of the Rev. Nathl. Rogers, there was a portrait of that worthy, about a third of the size of life, carved in relief, ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 1 • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... outward was principally wheat, the price of which varied very much; sometimes it was 2s. 6d. a bushel in Launceston, and 18s. in Sydney. The return cargo from Port Jackson was principally coal, freestone, and cedar. ...
— The Book of the Bush • George Dunderdale
... it would be difficult to find a fairer scene than Brentham offered, especially in the lustrous effulgence of a glorious English summer. It was an Italian palace of freestone; vast, ornate, and in scrupulous condition; its spacious and graceful chambers filled with treasures of art, and rising itself from statued and stately terraces. At their foot spread a gardened domain of considerable extent, bright with flowers, dim with coverts ...
— Lothair • Benjamin Disraeli
... meant an expedition under the blazing August sun. To-day I find her at my door; we are intimate neighbours. The embrasure of the closed window provides an apartment of a mild temperature for the Pelopaeus. (A species of Mason-wasp—Translator's Note.) The earth-built nest is fixed against the freestone wall. To enter her home, the Spider-huntress uses a little hole left open by accident in the shutters. On the mouldings of the Venetian blinds, a few stray Mason-bees build their group of cells; inside the outer shutters, left ajar, a Eumenes (Another Mason-wasp—Translator's ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... Branch the Big Beaver Kill joins the Delaware, almost doubling its volume. Here I struck the railroad, the forlorn Midland, and here another set of men and manners cropped out,—what may be called the railroad conglomerate overlying this mountain freestone. ...
— The Writings of John Burroughs • John Burroughs
... from Ravenshead Oak is a small cave which goes by the name of Robin Hood's stable. It is in the breast of a hill, scooped out of brown freestone, with rude attempt at columns and arches. Within are two niches, which served, it is said, as stalls for the bold outlaw's horses. To this retreat he retired when hotly pursued by the law, for the place was a secret even from ...
— Abbotsford and Newstead Abbey • Washington Irving
... substantially built of clean grey freestone throughout, in that plainer fashion of Greek classicism which prevailed at the latter end of the last century, when the copyists called designers had grown weary of fantastic variations in the Roman orders. The main block approximated to a square on the ground plan, ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy
... side, at the bottom of which we could only make out: "A.D. 1788, ... the tears of strangers watered her grave." For years, young persons of a romantic turn of mind have visited the grave and chipped off small pieces of the freestone for relics. This modern habit of chipping monumental stones for relics is inexcusable; for it is not done by ignorant or otherwise lawless persons, but too often by the educated, who carry their mawkish sentiment to such an extreme as to deface and sometimes, as in ...
— The Olden Time Series, Vol. 6: Literary Curiosities - Gleanings Chiefly from Old Newspapers of Boston and Salem, Massachusetts • Henry M. Brooks |
