"Parthenon" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... learned enterprise by the Minister of Education, and had carried an imagination already prepossessed and dazzled with Homeric visions. He told his story well and with detail, combining the recollections of the scholar with the impressions of an artist. The pediment of the Parthenon, the oleanders of the Ilissus, the stream "that runs in rain-time," the naked peak of Parnassus, the green slopes of Helicon, the blue gulf of Argus, the pine forest beside Alpheus, where the ...
— The Ink-Stain, Complete • Rene Bazin
... afford them the time to cultivate their minds and to exercise their limbs, with no other concern that that of having the most beautiful city, the most beautiful processions, the most beautiful ideas, and the most beautiful men. In this respect, a statue like the "Meleager" or the "Theseus" of the Parthenon, or again a sight of the blue and lustrous Mediterranean, resembling a silken tunic out of which islands arise like marble bodies, together with a dozen choice phrases selected from the works of Plato and Aristophanes, teach us more than any ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... Egypt are peculiar and its own. Mr. Pococke will have it that Greece was a migrated India: it was, of course, a migration from some place that first planted the Hellenic stock in Europe; but if the man who carved the Zeus, and built the Parthenon, and wrote the "Prometheus" and the "Phaedrus," were a copy, where shall we find the original? Indeed, there has never been a great migration that did not result in a new form of national genius. And it is the thoroughness of the transformations thus ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... in the new Hall is that of the age of Edward III, as exhibited in that Parthenon of Gothic architecture, York Minster; although the architect, Mr. Porden, has occasionally availed himself of the low Tudor arch, and the forms of any other age that suited his purpose, so as to adapt the rich variety of our ancient ecclesiastical architecture to modern domestic convenience. Round ...
— The Mirror, 1828.07.05, Issue No. 321 - The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction • Various
... religion of Pleasure, in which all Europe gave itself to luxury, ending in death. First, bals masques in every saloon, and then guillotines in every square. And all these three worships issue in vast temple building. Your Greek worshipped Wisdom, and built you the Parthenon—the Virgin's temple. The Mediaeval worshipped Consolation, and built you Virgin temples also—but to our Lady of Salvation. Then the Revivalist worshipped beauty, of a sort, and built you Versailles, and the Vatican. Now, lastly, will you tell me what we ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... of God some men have! What can an Eskimo, whose highest conception of summer is a stunted bush, know of tropical orchards, of luscious peach, pear and plum? If the student has seen only the broken fragments of Phidias, what can he know of the Parthenon as it once stood in the zenith of its perfection, in the splendor of its beauty? But if man's reason can cull out all the lustrous facts of nature and history, and if his imagination has strength and skill to ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... militant, is unbroken amidst all conflicts. The wise old Greeks chose for the protectress of Athens the goddess of Wisdom, and whilst they consecrated to her the olive branch, which is the symbol of peace, they set her image on the Parthenon, helmed and spear-bearing, to defend the peace, which she brought to earth. So this heavenly Virgin, whom the Apostle personifies here, is the 'winged sentry, all skilful in the wars,' who enters into our hearts and fights for us to keep us in ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... Goth, and Turk, and Time had spared," the world could still see enough to render possible a just impression of her old and chaste magnificence. It is painful to reflect within how comparatively short a period the chief injuries have been inflicted on such buildings as the Parthenon, and the temple of Jupiter Olympus, and to remember how recent is the greater part of the rubbish by which these edifices have been choked up, mutilated, and concealed. Probably until within a very few centuries, time had been, simply and ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... together, and then have one twice as long as either. But I speak of a musical piece, which must of course be the natural development of certain ideas, with one part depending on another. In like manner, you might make an Ionic temple twice as long or twice as wide as the Parthenon; but you would lose the beauty of proportion by doing so. This, then, is what I meant to say of the primitive architecture and the primitive music, that they soon come to their limit; they soon are exhausted, and can do nothing more. ...
— Loss and Gain - The Story of a Convert • John Henry Newman
... of all the works, and was surveyor-general, though upon the various portions other great masters and workmen were employed. For Callicrates and Ictinus built the Parthenon; the chapel at Eleusis, where the mysteries were celebrated, was begun by Coroebus, who erected the pillars that stand upon the floor or pavement, and joined them to the architraves; and after his death Metagenes of Xypete added the frieze and the upper line of columns; Xenocles of Cholargus ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch
... Royal Palace; whispering the antique secrets of the ages into the ears of the maidens who, unwearied and happily submissive, bear up the Porch of the Erechtheion; stealing across the vast spaces and between the mighty columns of the Parthenon. The dawns and the twilights had not lost the pure savor of their almost frail vitality. The deepness of slumber still came with ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... Rome. The Roman civilization was a very inferior affair, no doubt. But Bonamy talked a lot of rot, all the same. "You ought to have been in Athens," he would say to Bonamy when he got back. "Standing on the Parthenon," he would say, or "The ruins of the Coliseum suggest some fairly sublime reflections," which he would write out at length in letters. It might turn to an essay upon civilization. A comparison between the ancients and moderns, with some pretty sharp hits at Mr. Asquith—something ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... empty seats that re-echoed. They warn me of this and that hotel, and advise me concerning the journey from London. The usual tale of travelers is that Athens is a ruin. I have heard it rumored, for instance, that the Parthenon marbles are in London, and that the Parthenon itself has suffered from the "wreckful siege of battering days"; that the walls to Piraeus contain hardly one stone ...
— Journeys to Bagdad • Charles S. Brooks
... the world in intellectual pursuits, in art, in poetry, in philosophy. A large and vital part of European culture is rooted directly in the language and thought of Athens. The most beautiful edifice in the world was the Peace Palace of the Parthenon, erected by Pericles, to celebrate the end of Greece's suicidal wars. This endured 2,187 years, to be wrecked at last (1687) in Turkish hands by the Christian bombs of ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... his friend Mrs. Willyams, 'I shall lose a powerful friend and colleague. It is a dazzling adventure for the house of Stanley, but they are not an imaginative race, and I fancy they will prefer Knowsley to the Parthenon and Lancashire to the Attic Plains.' 'The Greeks really want to make my friend Lord Stanley their king. This beats any novel; but he will not. Had I his youth I would not hesitate, even with the earldom of Derby in ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... on one hand, and a Turkish mosque and all sorts of fantastic pagodas and conventicles about him. You may call Shakspeare and Milton pyramids, if you please; but I prefer the Temple of Theseus, or the Parthenon, to a ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... land. Religion gathers around its altars the faithful of every creed. Statesmen have arisen "fit to govern all the world and rule it when 'tis wildest." Orators have appeared who have rivaled the great masters of antiquity. The doors of the American Parthenon are ever open to invite the humble but aspiring youth to enter and fill the loftiest niche. The highest dignity is within the grasp of all; for the lowly boy, born and reared in our own sweet valley of Cumberland, shall, when the spring ...
— Phrases for Public Speakers and Paragraphs for Study • Compiled by Grenville Kleiser
... philosophy. At all events, tradition credits him with the invention of "scientific" boxing. Was it he, perhaps, who taught the Greeks to strike a rising and swinging blow from the hip, as depicted in the famous metopes of the Parthenon? If so, the innovation of Pythagoras was as little heeded in this regard in a subsequent age as was his theory of the motion of the earth; for to strike a swinging blow from the hip, rather than from the shoulder, is a trick which the ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... by their predecessors. Still, what is the refined chiselling of later scholars compared with the rough-hewn stones of men like Bopp or Grimm? If the Cyclopean stones of the Pelasgians are not like the finished works of art by Phidias, what would the Parthenon be without the walls ascribed to the Cyclops? It is the same in all sciences, and we must try to be just, both to the genius of those who created, and to the diligence of those who ...
— My Autobiography - A Fragment • F. Max Mueller
... top, with a simple capital, and supported the entablature. The horizontal lines of the architrave and cornice were more marked than the vertical lines of the columns. The portico with its row of columns supported the pediment. The Parthenon is the most perfect example of the Doric order, and shattered as it is by time and man it is still one of the most beautiful buildings in the world. It was built in the time of Pericles, from about 460 to 435 B.C., and the work was superintended by Phidias, who did much of the work himself ...
— Furnishing the Home of Good Taste • Lucy Abbot Throop
... marble buildings of the Parthenon, rich with the statues and bas-reliefs of Phidias and his scholars, gleaming white against the blue sky, with the huge bronze statue of Athene Promachos, fifty feet in height, towering up among the temples and colonnades. In front, and ...
— Lectures Delivered in America in 1874 • Charles Kingsley
... mediaeval life, contemplated from the ramparts of a castle, in the "dim, religious light" of an old monastic chapel, or amid the obsolete trappings and weapons of an armory! What a distinct and memorable revelation of ancient Greece is the Venus or Apollo, a Parthenon frieze or a fateful drama! The best political essays on the French Revolution are based on the economical and social facts recorded in the Travels of Arthur Young. The equivocal action of Massena, when he commanded Paris against the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... through my grounds. The Desert lies upon their edge, and Damascus stands in my garden. I am given to understand, also, that the Parthenon has been removed to my Spanish possessions. The Golden-Horn is my fish-preserve; my flocks of golden fleece are pastured on the plain of Marathon, and the honey of Hymettus is distilled from the flowers that grow in the vale of ...
— Prue and I • George William Curtis
... described in these eloquent words, reflects itself in the highest productions of Greek art and literature, and is the source of that 'political' spirit which every one can detect, alike in the poems of Homer and the sculpture of the Parthenon, as the inspiring cause of the noblest efforts of imitation. It prevailed most strongly through the period between the battle of Marathon and the battle of Chaeronea, and has left its monuments in such plays as the Persae and Eumeuides ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... saying that the crucial test of the frieze of the Parthenon is its adaptability to an apartment in Bloomsbury. So long as the illusion of the Acropolis gave credit to Pheidias' design, and the sunlight of Attica imposed its delicate intended shadows edging the reliefs, the countrymen ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... liberality, justice, discretion. Byron liked new-papered rooms, and pull'd down old wainscot of cedar; Bright-color'd prints he preferr'd to the graver cartoons of a Raphael, Sailor and Turk (with a sack,) to Eginate and Parthenon marbles, Splendid the palace he rais'd—the gin-palace in Poesy's purlieus; Soft the divan on the sides, with spittoons for the qualmish and queesy. Wordsworth, well pleas'd with himself, cared little for modern or ancient. ...
— The International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. 1, No. 7 - Of Literature, Art, and Science, August 12, 1850 • Various
... British Museum; an exceedingly tiresome affair. It quite crushes a person to see so much at once, and I wandered from hall to hall with a weary and heavy heart, wishing (Heaven forgive me!) that the Elgin marbles and the frieze of the Parthenon were all burnt into lime, and that the granite Egyptian statues were hewn and squared into ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.
... used the name once before; but he then applied it to pieces generally small in the scale of their delineations, whereas these, even if broken away one from the other, are yet like the disjoined figures from the pediment of the Parthenon in their dignity and force. One indeed among Mr. Tennyson's merits is, that he does not think it necessary to keep himself aloft by artificial effort, but undulates with his matter, and flies high ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... this principle? Surely not. 'If I were hungry I would not tell thee; for the world is mine and the fulness thereof,' is a grand word, but it does not give all the truth. When Paul stood on Mars Hill, and, within sight of the fair images of the Parthenon, shattered the intellectual basis of idolatry, by proclaiming a God 'not worshipped with men's hands as though He needed anything, seeing He giveth to all men all things,' that truth, mighty as it is, is not all. We requite God by taking rather ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... reader. They are the materials of history, not history itself. They bear the same relation to the works of Livy or Gibbon which the rude blocks in the quarry do to the temples of St Peter's or the Parthenon. Ordinary readers are not aware of this when they take up a volume of despatches; they expect to be as much fascinated by it as they are by the correspondence of Madame de Sevigne, Cowper, Gibbon, or Arnold. They will soon find their mistake: the book-sellers will erelong ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... sight Of those who heard what he was never to hear. To see them listening was itself enough To make him suffer; and to watch worn eyes, On other days, of strangers who forgot Their sorrows and their failures and themselves Before a few mysterious odds and ends Of marble carted from the Parthenon — And all for seeing what he was never to see, Because it was alive and he was dead — Here was a wonder that was more profound Than any that was in fiddles ...
— The Three Taverns • Edwin Arlington Robinson
... which could be seen by the ancient mariners far out at sea. Making our way across the summit of the Acropolis around pieces of broken columns, trampling over fragments of decorations, and passing foundations of missing statues, we stood in front of the Parthenon, the temple which had been erected to the patron deity of the Athenians. We thought that the professor might weary of answering questions, but he seemed glad to voice the thoughts that were arising ...
— A Trip to the Orient - The Story of a Mediterranean Cruise • Robert Urie Jacob
... necessary by great natural forces in modern life, and having been made possible by new mechanical arts, now puts itself forward as the next great opportunity of the fine arts. One of the characteristic achievements of the immediate future shall be the twentieth-century Parthenon—a Parthenon not of the great and of the few and of the gods, but of the great many, where, through mighty corridors, day and night, democracy wanders and sleeps and chatters and is sad and lives and dies, streets ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... how the fish outbuilt her shell, Painting with morn each annual cell? Or how the sacred pine-tree adds To her old leaves new myriads? Such and so grew these holy piles, While love and terror laid the tiles. Earth proudly wears the Parthenon, As the best gem upon her zone, And Morning opes with haste her lids To gaze upon the Pyramids; O'er England's abbeys bends the sky, As on its friends, with kindred eye; For out of Thought's interior sphere ...
— Poems Every Child Should Know - The What-Every-Child-Should-Know-Library • Various
... and satisfying if we could trace step by step the progress of Greek sculpture from the rude archaic manner to that of the Periclean age, or from such art as is seen in the sculpture of AEgina to the perfections of the reliefs of the Parthenon. This we cannot do; but we know some of the causes that led to this progress, and can give accounts of a few sculptors who, while they did not equal the great Phidias, were at least the forerunners of such a type ...
— A History of Art for Beginners and Students - Painting, Sculpture, Architecture • Clara Erskine Clement
... the relic hunter who opened the door to the looter. The spirit which sends the tourist tapping about the ruins of the Parthenon, awoke in San Francisco. Idle and curious men swarmed into the city, poking about in the ruins in the hope of finding something worth carrying away as a souvenir of the greatest ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum
... the well-proportioned columns of constitutional liberty? Who shall frame together the skillful architecture which unites national sovereignty with State rights, individual security, and public prosperity? No, if these columns fall, they will be raised not again. Like the Coliseum and the Parthenon, they will be destined to a mournful, a melancholy immortality. Bitterer tears, however, will flow over them than were ever shed over the monuments of Roman or Grecian art; for they will be the remnants of a more glorious ...
— Washington's Birthday • Various
... the same category Hawthorne's remark concerning the Elgin marbles in the British Museum, that "it would be well if they were converted into paving- stones." There are no grander monuments of ancient art than those battered and headless statues from the pediment of the Parthenon (the figures of the so-called "Three Fates" surpass the "Venus of Melos"), and archaeologists are still in dispute as to what they may have represented; but the significance of the subject before him was always the point in which Hawthorne was interested. ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... the Caucasian, he departed in the direction of the ape! Here was zoology mutely but eloquently telling us why there had blossomed no Confucius, no Moses, no Napoleon, upon that black stem; why no Iliad, no Parthenon, no Sistine Madonna, had ever risen from ...
— Lady Baltimore • Owen Wister
... feeling that not so much the private as the common wealth is by him indicated. I think the true soul—humble, rapt, conspiring with all, regards all souls as its lieutenants and proxies—itself in another place—and saith of the Parthenon, of the picture, of the poem,—It is also my work. I can never quarrel with your state of mind concerning original attempts in your own art. I admire it rather. And I am pained to think of the grievous resistance ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... architecture. as i approached the british museum, i noticed the ionic colonnade that runs along the front. the first room i visited was the one filled with marbles which lord elgin brought from the parthenon at athens. ...
— The Century Handbook of Writing • Garland Greever
... rise In the dim forest crowded with old oaks, Answer. A race, that long has passed away, Built them;—a disciplined and populous race Heaped, with long toil, the earth, while yet the Greek Was hewing the Pentelicus to forms Of symmetry, and rearing on its rock The glittering Parthenon. These ample fields Nourished their harvests, here their herds were fed, When haply by their stalls the bison lowed, And bowed his maned shoulder to the yoke. All day this desert murmured with their toils, Till twilight blushed, and lovers ...
— Poems • William Cullen Bryant
... chat, or Euripides call with an invitation to witness a rehearsal of the "Medea." Athens is to me the most satisfactory of all the restored cities of antiquity, every relic there is so indisputably genuine. My sunrise view from the Parthenon was a fair match for a midnight view I once had of ...
— Recollections of a Long Life - An Autobiography • Theodore Ledyard Cuyler
... true that every visual element is understood as expression too. It is not true, however, that expression and impression are parallel and mutually corresponding beyond the elements. Suppose a concourse of columns covered by a roof,—the Parthenon. Those psychophysical changes induced by the sight now mutually check and modify each other. Can we say that there is a "meaning," like the energy of the column, corresponding to that complex? It is at least not energy itself. ...
— The Psychology of Beauty • Ethel D. Puffer
... official and visible representation of the goddess of Athens, and thereby to raise the religious ideals of the Athenians. In this last part of his attempt he was successful; the statue became the pride and glory of the city in its fitting shrine, the Parthenon; but the old image was still preserved in the temple of Athena Polias, and remained the official centre of worship. We are not told that Pericles meant to supersede it; but it is very probable that he intended to do ...
— Religion and Art in Ancient Greece • Ernest Arthur Gardner
... out of the rock. There is no joy in this labour, and the savage, harsh yell of the machines drowns any song that of old might have lightened the toil. Blasted out of the mountains by slaves, some 13,000 of them, dragged by tortured and groaning animals, the marble that might have built a Parthenon is sold to the manufacturer to decorate the houses of the middle classes, the studios of the incompetent, the streets of our trumpery cities. Do you wonder why Carrara has never produced a sculptor? The answer is here in the quarries ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... the consent of all who come after. It stands with the Iliad and Shakespeare's plays, with the writings of Aristotle and Plato, with the Novum Organon and the Principia, with Justinian's Code, with the Parthenon and St. Peter's. It is the first Christian poem; and it opens European literature, as the Iliad did that of Greece and Rome. And, like the Iliad, it has never become out of date; it accompanies in undiminished freshness the literature ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... iron in them and sailed from the Crimea round the shores of the Black Sea, once and again, plundering Trebizond, and at last the temple itself of Diana at Ephesus. They had even penetrated into Greece and Athens, plundered the Parthenon, and threatened the capitol. They had fought the Emperor Decius, till he, and many of his legionaries, were drowned in a bog in the moment of victory. They had been driven with difficulty back across the Danube by Aurelian, and walled out ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley
... that St. Patrick thought it his duty to destroy it? And the attitude of the people at the time of its destruction shows that it could not have borne for them the same sacred character as the statue of Minerva in the Parthenon did for the Greeks or that of Capitoline Jove for the Romans. Can we suppose that St. Paul or St. Peter would have dared to break either of these? And let us remark that the event we discuss occurred at the very beginning of St. Patrick's ministry, ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... Yoshio says of the Chinese and Japanese is also true of all the great western ages of the past. We can do a number of things,— that is, have invented machinery to do a number of things for us,—but with all our resources we could not build a Parthenon: could not even reproduce it, with the model there before our eyes ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... carving, which at the summit is almost meaningless, while it only serves to diminish the apparent height of the column. So, too, in the triumphal arches of the Roman Emperors little attention was paid to the relative and varying attitudes of the bas-reliefs. From Greek art the Parthenon Frieze gives a singular example of this unrealised law. When in situ the frieze was only visible at a most acute angle and in a most unfavourable light: beyond the steps it vanished altogether, so one was obliged to stand among the columns ...
— Donatello • David Lindsay, Earl of Crawford
... little Cockney lives must have a background, let it be Italian. Big enough in all conscience. The ceiling of the Sistine Chapel for me. There the contrast is just as much as I can realize. But not the Parthenon, not the frieze of Phidias at any price; ...
— A Room With A View • E. M. Forster
... carry with it through time the memory of all its deeds and imaginations, and it burdens itself only in a new era with what was highest among the imaginations of the ancestors. What is essentially noble is never out of date. The figures carved by Phidias for the Parthenon still shine by the side of the greatest modern sculpture. There has been no evolution of the human form to a greater beauty than the ancient Greeks saw and the forms they carved are not strange to us, and if this is true of the outward form it is true of the indwelling ...
— The Coming of Cuculain • Standish O'Grady
... contains a small but precious collection of Greek sculptures. In the centre are three archaic works: a draped Juno, and in glass cases, a Head of Apollo, and a Head of a Man, the latter still bearing traces of the original colouring. Also in cases are: Head of a Lapith from the Parthenon; and Head of a woman attributed to the sculptor Calamis, acquired in 1908 from the Humphrey Ward collection. Three bas-reliefs from a temple of Apollo at Thasos show a marked advance in artistic expression, which reaches its ultimate perfection in the lovely fragment of the Parthenon ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... force-pumps and taps used in the Roman houses—all things that could be produced by a man directing his own muscles—were produced in the Rome of Nero as perfectly as they could be produced to-day. To this fact our museums bear ample and minute witness; while the Colosseum and the Parthenon are quite enough to show that the masons of the ancient world were at least the equals of our own. If no advance, then, in the quality of manual labour as such has taken place in the course of two thousand years, it is idle to contend that its powers have increased in the course of eighty. But ...
— A Critical Examination of Socialism • William Hurrell Mallock
... varied his program. Instead of going directly to his hotel, he started on a round of the bars and cafes, drinking a cocktail here and a cocktail there, and two or three when he encountered men he knew. It was after an hour or so of this that he dropped into the bar of the Parthenon for one last drink before going to dinner. By this time all his being was pleasantly warmed by the alcohol, and he was in the most genial and best of spirits. At the corner of the bar several young men were up to the old trick of resting their elbows and attempting to force ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... of the Education Office, was coming back from a Garden Suburb, where the conversation had turned upon Eugenics. Photographs of the most beautiful Greek statues had stood displayed along the overmantel; Walter Pater's praise of the Parthenon frieze had been read; and a discussion had arisen upon the comparative merits of masculine and feminine beauty, during which Mr. Clarkson maintained a modest silence. He did, however, support the contention of his hostess that the human form was the most ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... farm-place the person most human. You spoke out so plainly with squealing and capering, With whinnying, snorting, contorting and prancing, As you dodged your pursuers, looking askance, With Greek-footed figures, and Parthenon paces, O broncho that would not ...
— Chinese Nightingale • Vachel Lindsay
... boys on huge black buffaloes splashed in the river. Veiled girls with water jars on their high-held heads from which the shawls trailed down to the dust filed past from the villages like a Parthenon frieze. On the high banks the naked fellaheen were already stooping to the incessant dipping of the shadouf, while from the fields came the plaintive creaking of the well sweep, as some harnessed camel or bullock began its ...
— The Fortieth Door • Mary Hastings Bradley
... virginity; that it is no longer a mere piece of floating poetry. But if you, and a few feverish men, in top hats, running about in a street in London, choose to differ as to the ideal itself, not only from the Church, but from the Parthenon whose name means virginity, from the Roman Empire which went outwards from the virgin flame, from the whole legend and tradition of Europe, from the lion who will not touch virgins, from the unicorn who respects them, and who make up together the bearers of your own national ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... content or not, it is evident that all hope of improvement lies in the tendency, somewhat noticeable of late, to the abnegation of exotic styles and graces. We have survived the Parthenon pattern, and there seems to be a prospect that we shall outlive the Gothic cottage. Even the Anglo-Italian bracketed villa has seen its palmiest days apparently, and exhausted most of its variations. We are in an extremely chaotic state just now; but there seems ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... The Parthenon in all its glory could not have looked more beautiful to the returning Greek than this half-ruined fort ...
— The Pools of Silence • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... Gate, where the Linden commences, forms the entrance to the city from the Thiergarten, and is a sort of triumphal arch, erected in 1789. It is seventy feet in height, and two hundred in width, being modelled after the entrance in the gateway of the temple of the Parthenon at Athens. It affords five passage-ways ...
— Foot-prints of Travel - or, Journeyings in Many Lands • Maturin M. Ballou
... II. Fig. 3.—From a Japanese drawing of the seventeenth century; the pose is a modification of the "flying gallop," and agrees closely with that of Fig. 1 in this plate. Fig. 4.—The flex-legged prance from a bas-relief in the frieze of the Parthenon, B.C. 300. Fig. 5.—A modern French drawing giving a pose very similar to that of Figs. 1 and 3. It is the most "effective" pose yet adopted by artists, and is an improvement on the full-stretched flying gallop, though failing to suggest the greatest ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester
... the nature of the tools, the selection of material, the particular sort of native endowment which are given to him. Some such men reveal their understanding of the soul and the world in the detached serenity, the too well-defined harmonies of a Parthenon; others in the dim and intricate richness, the confused and tortured aspiration of the long-limbed saints and grotesque devils of a Gothic cathedral. Others incarnate it in gleaming bronze; or spread it in subtle play of light ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... architecture refers to the system of designing buildings on some definite geometrical system of regulating the sizes of the different parts. The Greeks certainly employed such a system, though there are not sufficient data for us to judge exactly on what principle it was worked out. In regard to the Parthenon, and some other Greek buildings, Mr. Watkiss Lloyd has worked out a very probable theory, which will be found stated in a paper in the "Transactions of the Institute ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 633, February 18, 1888 • Various
... village of Casha, they at last entered upon the slope, and thence into the plain of Attica but the intervening heights and the trees kept the town concealed, till a turn of the path brought it full again before them; the Acropolis crowned with the ruins of the Parthenon—the Museum ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... fully its proud superiority to all the accidents of changing taste and modified culture. It is only the truest art that can bear that test. The fanes of Paestum will always be more beautiful even than the magical shore on which they stand. The Parthenon, fixed like a battered coronet on the brow of the Acropolis, will always be the loveliest sight that Greece can offer to those who come sailing in from the blue Aegean. It is scarcely possible to imagine a condition of thought or feeling in which these master-works shall seem quaint ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... than a James or Joseph, but we need never suspect it of uncomplimentary mental reservations, and neither its appetite nor its morals cause us uneasiness. Fellow-citizens of Greek extraction maintain parlors where we may sit, like so many statues on the Parthenon, while they polish our shoes. In all large cities are quiet retreats where it is quite conventional, and even degage, for the most Perfect Gentleman to wait in what still remains to him, while an obliging fellow ...
— The Perfect Gentleman • Ralph Bergengren
... word, in Greek sculpture of the Periclean epoch. The conception of absolute beauty having been discovered to be an abstraction, the tradition of the purely ideal has gone with it. The caryatids of the Erechtheum, the horsemen of the Parthenon frieze, the reliefs of the Nike Apteros balustrade are admired certainly; but they are hardly sympathetically admired; there is a tendency to relegate them to the limbo of subjects for aesthetic lectures. And yet no one can have carefully examined ...
— French Art - Classic and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture • W. C. Brownell
... yon woodbird's nest Of leaves and feathers from her breast, Or how the fish outbuilt its shell, Painting with morn each annual cell? Such and so grew these holy piles While love and terror laid the tiles; Earth proudly wears the Parthenon As the best gem upon her zone; And Morning opes with haste her lids To gaze upon the Pyramids; O'er England's abbeys bends the sky As on its friends with kindred eye; For out of Thought's interior sphere These wonders rose to upper air, And nature gladly gave them place, Adopted them into ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... Hellenic outlines as he entered the dimly lighted room of the dying woman. She was already a classic ruin,—as wrecked and yet as perfect as the Parthenon. He grasped ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... were a multitude of casts, the fighting gladiator, the discobulus, the Venus of Milo, and hundreds of smaller pieces, masks, torsos, and the heads of the Parthenon horses. Flattened paint-tubes and broken bits of charcoal littered the floor and cluttered the chairs and shelves. A strong odour of turpentine and fixative was in the air, mingled with the stronger odours of linseed oil and sour, ...
— Vandover and the Brute • Frank Norris
... however, several questions, some of which seem still undecided. When was the temple built? Was it all built at one time? Was it restored after its destruction by the Persians? Did it continue in use after the erection of the Parthenon? Was it in existence in the days of Pausanias? Did Pausanias mention it in his description of the Acropolis? Conflicting answers to nearly all of these questions Page 2 have appeared since the discovery of the temple. Only the first question ...
— The American Journal of Archaeology, 1893-1 • Various
... the apse of the Duomo of Pisa was a colossal image of Christ, in colored mosaic, bearing to the temple, as nearly as possible, the relation which the statue of Athena bore to the Parthenon; and in the same manner, concentrating the imagination of the Pisan on the attributes of the God ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... vision to excite the worship of those least inclined to idolatry of Nature. She was of the noblest type of English beauty, and she seemed as calmly unconscious of its excellence and rarity as one of the grand Greek women of the Parthenon. She had, however, a sensuous fulness and bloom, a queenly carriage of head and neck, a clearness of feature, and a liquid kindness of eye that suggested ...
— Master of His Fate • J. Mclaren Cobban
... operate most powerfully in his favor. He sent home to Greece an account of the victory, and with the account he forwarded three hundred suits of armor, taken from the Persian horsemen killed on the field. These suits of armor were to be hung up in the Parthenon, a great temple at Athens; the most conspicuous position for them, perhaps, which all ...
— Alexander the Great - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... avoiding which no reasonable means had been found. To learn from genius, we must try to recognize, both what is still imperfect, and what is grandly and unwontedly successful. There is no great work of art, not excepting even the Iliad or the Parthenon, which is not open, especially in point of ornament, to the scoff of the scoffer, or to the injustice of those who do not mind being unjust. But all art belongs to man; and man, even when he is greatest, is ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... followed! Presently, under their hands, fair and clear of outline as a Grecian temple, grew up the science of Geometry. Perfect for all time, and as incapable of change or improvement as the Parthenon, appear the Elements of Euclid, whose voice comes floating down through the ages, in that one significant rejoinder,—"Non est regia ad mathematicam via." It is the reply of the mathematician, quiet-eyed and thoughtful, to the first Ptolemy, inquiring if there were not some less difficult ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various
... and manager of the whole was Pheidias, although there were other excellent architects and workmen, such as Kallikrates and Iktinus, who built the Parthenon on the site of the old Hekatompedon, which had been destroyed by the Persians, and Koroebus, who began to build the Temple of Initiation at Eleusis, but who only lived to see the columns erected and the architraves placed upon them. On his death, Metagenes, of Xypete, added the frieze ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume I (of 4) • Plutarch
... of material could not enhance, and this effect of material, underlying that of form, raises the latter to a higher power and gives the beauty of the object a certain poignancy, thoroughness, and infinity which it otherwise would have lacked. The Parthenon not in marble, the king's crown not of gold, and the stars not of fire, would be feeble and prosaic things. The greater hold which material beauty has upon the senses, stimulates us here, where the form ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... Cathedral on one hand, and a Turkish Mosque and all sorts of fantastic pagodas and conventicles about him. You may call Shakspeare and Milton pyramids, if you please, but I prefer the Temple of Theseus or the Parthenon to a mountain of ...
— Life of Lord Byron, With His Letters And Journals, Vol. 5 (of 6) • (Lord Byron) George Gordon Byron
... with these qualities are inspired in us when we contemplate it, and are presented to us by its form. Whether the architect deliberately aimed at the sublime or graceful—whether the dignified serenity of the Athenian genius sought to express itself in the Parthenon, and the mysticism of mediaeval Christianity in the gloom of Chartres Cathedral—whether it was Renaissance paganism which gave its mundane pomp and glory to S. Peter's, and the refined selfishness of royalty its specious splendour to the palace ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... temples pulled down, its arches dislocated, its columns stretching over the earth; in these ruins you could still detect the solid proportions of a sort of Tuscan architecture; farther off, the remains of a gigantic aqueduct; here, the caked heights of an acropolis along with the fluid forms of a Parthenon; there, the remnants of a wharf, as if some bygone port had long ago harbored merchant vessels and triple-tiered war galleys on the shores of some lost ocean; still farther off, long rows of collapsing walls, deserted thoroughfares, a whole ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... little the wind lulled, the fog dispersed again, and the iceberg seemed to contemplate our slow departure with complacent serenity. We regretted that the hour forbade a return. It would have been pleasant to play around that Parthenon of the sea in the twilight. The best that was left us was to look back and watch the effects of light, which were wonderfully fine, and had the charm of entire novelty. The last view was the very finest. All the east front was a most tender blue; the fissures on the southern face, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... and life is here in its first budding, and will bloom into the greatest art-people of all time. Those two supreme Fine Arts of mature Greece, Architecture and Sculpture, are present in examples which foretell plainly Phidias and the Parthenon. ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... mania. So I nodded at him very gravely, and answered, "Yes, you will find us all tinctured with it, more or less." At last, to Mr. Smedley's great joy, he got my father alive off this roof, and on his way to Downing, the new college of which Leslie Foster talked so much, and said was to be like the Parthenon. Shockingly windy walk: thought my brains would have been blown out. Passed Peter House, and saw the rooms in which Gray lived, and the irons of his fire-escape at the window. Warned Mr. Smedley of the danger of my father being caught by a coachmaker's ...
— The Life And Letters Of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 1 • Maria Edgeworth
... ugly lines, and overhead a meagre strip of sky. Over Athens the sky hung glorious, a curve of light from side to side. His soul flew wide to meet it. Once more he was swinging along the "Street of the Winds," his face lifted to the Parthenon on its Acropolis, his nostrils breathing the clear air. Chicago had dropped from him like a garment, his soul rose and floated.... Athens everywhere—column and cornice, and long, delicate lines, and colour of marble and light. He drew a ...
— Mr. Achilles • Jennette Lee
... addition has been made or attempted that has not been felt to be an injury. And I doubt not that seven thousand years hence, if time could but spare it so long, pilgrims would still go in search of the beautiful from the remotest parts of the world, from parts now unknown, to worship before the Parthenon, and, may I not add, the Temple of the ...
— Aurelian - or, Rome in the Third Century • William Ware
... back to London again, he saw how imperfectly he had profited by his opportunities, how much he had missed. It was characteristic of him to begin all over again, and more thoroughly, conscientiously revisiting the Pyramids, the Parthenon, and the Taj Mahal, endeavoring to capture some of that true spirit of appreciation of which ...
— The Street Called Straight • Basil King
... character, there is an effect more profound and artless, if it be less striking and less elaborate than in the Grecian heroine. To Antigone we give our admiration, to Cordelia our tears. Antigone stands before us in her austere and statue-like beauty, like one of the marbles of the Parthenon. If Cordelia reminds us of any thing on earth, it is of one of the Madonnas in the old Italian pictures, "with downcast eyes beneath th' almighty dove?" and as that heavenly form is connected with our human sympathies only by the expression of maternal ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... space of a year, had been nourished in a particular fashion; and, when it had been shown in every street, in every square, and before every temple, in the midst of a procession continually chanting, it ascended to the Acropolis, brushed passed the Propylaeum, and entered the Parthenon. ...
— The Temptation of St. Antony - or A Revelation of the Soul • Gustave Flaubert
... because of the bad financial condition into which the government had fallen during the War of 1812. The building was designed by William Strickland, in his day the leading American architect, being modeled after the Parthenon of Athens. It was completed in 1824 and was put to its ...
— The Colonial Architecture of Philadelphia • Frank Cousins
... the great period of Athenian literature and art: of the Parthenon and Phidias; of AEschylus, the soldier of Marathon; then Sophocles and Euripides and Aristophanes; finally, of Socrates, not himself an author, but the inspirer of Plato, and the founder of ethical science; according to popular ideas, the ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XI. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... Greeks themselves are not in entire accord." A remarkable utterance. Politicians had gone to Siberia for less. Palmerston, too, had his way, and Otto, escorted by a warship, left his fatherland. On arriving in Athens, the joy-bells rang out and the columns of the Parthenon were flood-lit. But the choice was not to the popular taste; and it was not long before Otto was extinguished, as well as the lights. By the irony of fate, he returned to Munich on the very day that Ludwig had erected a Doric arch to commemorate the activities ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... levellers. If two "levellers" of equal height are used with a third of less height placed at the centre of the course, with perhaps others of intermediate height used at intermediate points, it would obviously be equally easy to set out a curved course, as, for instance, the curved stylobate of the Parthenon which rises about three inches in its length of one hundred feet. By a simple calculation any desired curve could be laid out in this way. The word scamillus is a diminutive of scamnum, ...
— Ten Books on Architecture • Vitruvius
... meaning of Greek sculpture and show its close affinity with ritual, we shall take two instances, perhaps the best-known of those that survive, one of them in relief, the other in the round, the Panathenaic frieze of the Parthenon at Athens and the Apollo Belvedere, and we shall take them in chronological order. As the actual frieze and the statue cannot be before us, we shall discuss no technical questions of style or treatment, but simply ask how they came to be, what human need do they express. The ...
— Ancient Art and Ritual • Jane Ellen Harrison
... matters mend. The most comforting sign of better times was a partial resumption of specie payments by the Bank of England, followed shortly by the opening of the first Savings Bank in London. Other memorable events of the year were the acquisition of the famous Elgin marbles from the Parthenon in Athens, celebrated in Keats's sonnet "On Seeing the Elgin Marbles," and the publication of Shelley's long poem "Alastor," and Leigh Hunt's "Story of Rimini." A diplomatic setback pregnant with future trouble was the dismissal of Lord Amherst, ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... the soul mounts, steep above steep, from the rudely hewn granite to the breathing marbles of the Parthenon, to the hues of Titian, to the forests in stone, the domes and minarets, and the gemmed splendour of later races, to the drifted snows of the Taj-Mahal, ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb
... a block of such and such thickness, pointing to the reasonable conclusion that this thickness should never be lost sight of, the carving ever and anon returning to the surface as a measure of music does to its key-note. This is exemplified in all the great works of antiquity, among which the Parthenon frieze may be quoted as evidence. On the other hand, all pictorial sculpture, such as carved landscapes with figures diminishing both in scale and projection, necessarily fail to uphold this sense of solidity, as there must occur large spaces which are hollowed out far below the surface ...
— Wood-Carving - Design and Workmanship • George Jack
... nothing. On the highest part of this ground you will build your house: an airy situation is invaluable in warm weather; and then a view is so desirable. In the choice of a style of architecture some difficulty arises. You may either have a clap-board Parthenon, with Corinthian columns in front and Doric columns in the rear, painted white, to flash back the rays of the sun, or which is perhaps more fashionable, a Gothic cottage, with steep roof, rustic pillars, fantastic ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, January 1844 - Volume 23, Number 1 • Various
... rustle on the dark stairs, and in a moment she appeared in the light of his lamp. He went up to seize her hand, and found she was clammy as a marine deity, and that her clothes clung to her like the robes upon the figures in the Parthenon frieze. ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... or so mixed up with the background or surroundings, that you do not see a figure in violent action starting prominently out from the window as you stand in the church. But, after all, this is a thing of artistic sense and discretion, and no rules can be formulated. The Parthenon frieze is of figures in rapid movement. Yet what repose! And in stained-glass you must aim at repose. Remember,—it is an accessory to architecture; and who is there that does not want repose in architecture? Name me a great building which does ...
— Stained Glass Work - A text-book for students and workers in glass • C. W. Whall
... steady and painstaking labour. No great work has ever been done "at a heat." It is the result of repeated efforts, and often of many failures. One generation begins, and another continues—the present co-operating with the past. Thus, the Parthenon began with a mud-hut; the Last Judgment with a few scratches on the sand. It is the same with individuals of the race; they begin with abortive efforts, which, by means of ...
— Thrift • Samuel Smiles
... fact: When the last of the Metopes was taken from the Parthenon, and, in moving it, a great part of the superstructure with one of the triglyphs, was thrown down by the work men whom Lord Elgin employed, the Disdar, who beheld the mischief done to the building, took his pipe out of his ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... of Corinth, and all that was alive in Greek art had died many years earlier. That it had died before the death of Alexander let his tomb at Constantinople be my witness. Before they set the last stone of the Parthenon it was ailing: the big marbles in the British Museum are the last significant examples of Greek art; the frieze, of course, proves nothing, being mere artisan work. But the man who made what one may as well call "The Theseus" and "The Ilissus," the man whom one may as well call Phidias, ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... words. Here is the Acropolis, with its snow-white temples and propylaeum, fair and chaste as though they had been built in heaven and gently lowered to this Attic mound by the hands of angels. There in the Parthenon are the sculptures of Phidias, and yonder in the temple of the Dioscuri, the paintings of Polygnotus,—ideal beauty bodied forth to lure the souls of men to unseen and eternal worlds. If they turn to the east, the isles ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding
... that the Greeks, for whom the whole body was an ever-open book, could so train their vision to its vivid music (has not Taine indeed said something to this effect in his travel notes in Southern Italy?) that when they came to carve reliefs for their Parthenon, even to represent the body in seeming repose, they instinctively knew how to show it sensitive, alive, as in truth it is, redeemed from grossness by the exquisite delicacy of its mechanism at every point. People think that the so-called danse ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis
... a Scot, James Bruce, Earl of Elgin and Kincardine, directly descended from the patriot king Robert the Bruce. His father was the British ambassador who salvaged the 'Elgin marbles' from the Parthenon and sold them to the nation, thus drawing down upon himself the angry satire of Byron in 'The Curse of Minerva' and 'Childe Harold's Pilgrimage.' The new governor-general was young, poor, and able. Far more than his predecessors, he had enjoyed the advantages ...
— The Winning of Popular Government - A Chronicle of the Union of 1841 • Archibald Macmechan
... utterances and writings possess that classic quality whose supreme expression is found in Greek literature. This is because Lincoln had an essentially Hellenic mind. First of all the architecture of his thought was that of the Greek masters, who, whether as Phidias they built the Parthenon to crown with harmonious beauty the Acropolis, or as Homer they recorded in swelling narrative from its dramatic beginning the strife of the Achaeans before Troy, or even as Euclid, they developed from postulates the ...
— The Poets' Lincoln - Tributes in Verse to the Martyred President • Various
... This statue, Flaxman observes, sixty feet in height, was the most renowned work of ancient sculpture, not for stupendous magnitude alone, but more for careful majesty and sublime beauty. His Minerva in the Parthenon was of gold and ivory. The goddess was represented standing robed in a tunic, and her head covered with the formidable aegis; with her right hand she held a lance; in the left she held a statue of Victory about five feet high; her helmet was surmounted ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... Theresa, acquired an innocent and enviable fame as the Maid of Athens, without the dangerous glory of having taken any very firm hold of the heart that she was asked to return. A more solid passion was the poet's genuine indignation on the "lifting," in Border phrase, of the marbles from the Parthenon, and their being taken to England by order of Lord Elgin. Byron never wrote anything more sincere than the Curse of Minerva; and he has recorded few incidents more pathetic than that of the old Greek who, when the last stone was removed for ...
— Byron • John Nichol
... with a crown of woe, Scarred by the ruin of two thousand years, By fraud and by barbarian force laid low, Buried in dust, and watered with the tears Of unregarded bondmen, toiling on, Crushed in the shadow of their Parthenon; ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100., Jan. 31, 1891 • Various
... to rid ourselves, by hurry, of the pain of parting." He adds, "We could not refrain from looking back, as we passed rapidly to the shore, and we continued to direct our eyes towards the spot, where we had caught the last glimpse of the Theseum and the ruins of the Parthenon through the vistas in the woods, for many minutes after the city and the Acropolis had been totally hidden from ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. I. (of VI.) - With his Letters and Journals. • Thomas Moore
... beauty of the nests of a wood-pigeon and a bottle-tit, as between the hut of a North American savage and a Grecian temple. But although the savage, in the course of ages, may attain as much civilization as would lead him to the construction of a new Parthenon, the wood-pigeon will continue only to make a platform of sticks to the end of time. It is evident, from a contemplation of all nature, that the faculties of quadrupeds, birds, insects, and all the inferior animals, are stationary: those of man only are progressive. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 486 - Vol. 17, No. 486., Saturday, April 23, 1831 • Various
... sound deduction, is to look at the work and ask oneself—"What was that like when it was new?" The Elgin Marbles are allowed by common consent to be the perfection of art. But how much of our feeling of reverence is inspired by time? Imagine the Parthenon as it must have looked with the frieze of the mighty Phidias fresh from the chisel. Could one behold it in all its pristine beauty and splendour we should see a white marble building, blinding in the dazzling brightness of a southern sun, the figures of the exquisite frieze in all probability ...
— The Mind of the Artist - Thoughts and Sayings of Painters and Sculptors on Their Art • Various
... discover a more arid country, devoid of vegetation, particularly of trees, than Greece; and to compare it with the apparently inexhaustible wealth of virgin forests of Oregon makes the contrast almost grotesque. Besides, a building like the Parthenon, designed to grace and terminate the top of a hill, is surely not adapted for a flat piece of ground like the Exposition field. And in the choice of material used in its construction it shows a lack of appreciation for the fitness of things generally. The ...
— The Art of the Exposition • Eugen Neuhaus
... audience of the world. Music would chant its praise in every clime, and all peoples would swell the chorus. The painter would give it immortality, and the sculptor monuments more enduring than the pyramids, statues more godlike and sublime than ever crowned Grecian Parthenon, or adorned with Parian marble the temples of Augustan Rome. The press would glow with enthusiasm, and the procession of nations march in the grand ovation, not to national airs, or under national banners, but under the world's new flag, and to the music of the world's new anthem of universal ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 2, No 6, December 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... about Greek architecture has thus far been only touched upon; that is, the liberal use it made of color. The ruins of Greek temples are to-day monochromatic, either glittering white, as is the temple at Sunium, or of a golden brown, as are the Parthenon and other buildings of Pentelic marble, or of a still warmer brown, as are the limestone temples of Paestum and Girgenti (Acragas). But this uniformity of tint is due only to time. A "White City," such as made the pride of Chicago in 1893, would have ...
— A History Of Greek Art • F. B. Tarbell
... antiquity; gives abundant proofs of the upward tendency of man from the rudest and simplest beginnings. Many columns of early Egyptian temples or tombs are but bundles of Nile reeds slightly conventionalized in stone; the temples of Greece, including not only the earliest forms, but the Parthenon itself, while in parts showing an evolution out of Egyptian and Assyrian architecture, exhibit frequent reminiscences and even imitations of earlier constructions in wood; the medieval cathedrals, ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... plenteous spring, often extend even to irrational animals. It is right for a good man to feed horses which have been worn out in his service, and not merely to train dogs when they are young, but to take care of them when they are old. When the Athenian people built the Parthenon, they set free the mules which had done the hardest work in drawing the stones up to the acropolis, and let them graze where they pleased unmolested. It is said that one of them came of its own accord to where the works were going on, and used ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume II • Aubrey Stewart & George Long
... round the ruins of its strength shall stand The best and noblest of a ransomed land— Pilgrims, like these who throng around the shrine Of Mecca, or of holy Palestine! A prouder glory shall that ruin own Than that which lingers round the Parthenon. Here shall the child of after years be taught The works of Freedom which his fathers wrought; Told of the trials of the present hour, Our weary strife with prejudice and power; How the high errand quickened woman's soul, And touched her lip as with a living coal; How Freedom's martyrs ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... and to learn by heart the oral traditions of taste. Out he goes; and, leaving the tumble-down town behind him, he mounts the Acropolis to the right, or he turns to the Areopagus on the left. He goes to the Parthenon to study the sculptures of Phidias; to the temple of the Dioscuri to see the paintings of Polygnotus. We indeed take our Sophocles or Aeschylus out of our coat-pocket; but, if our sojourner at Athens would understand how a tragic ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... ult.), at noon, in the church of the Madeleine, was one of the most imposing we ever remember to have witnessed. The great door of the church was hung with black curtains, with the initials of the deceased, "F. C.," emblazoned in silver. On our entry we found the vast area of the modern Parthenon entirely crowded. Nave, aisles, galleries, &c., were alive with human beings who had come to see the last of Frederick Chopin. Many, perhaps, had never heard of him before....In the space that separates the nave from the choir, a lofty mausoleum ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... virtue, which flames in creation, can be apprehended in its results alone. Rule applies but to the merits of denial—to the excellencies which refrain. Beyond these, the critical art can but suggest. We may be instructed to build a "Cato," but we are in vain told how to conceive a Parthenon or an "Inferno." The thing done, however; the wonder accomplished; and the capacity for apprehension becomes universal. The sophists of the negative school who, through inability to create, have scoffed at creation, are now ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... worshipped throughout Greece, but was regarded with special veneration by the Athenians, she being the guardian deity of Athens. Her most celebrated temple was the Parthenon, which stood on the {47} Acropolis at Athens, and contained her world-renowned statue by Phidias, which ranks second only to that of Zeus by the same great artist. This colossal statue was 39 feet high, and was composed of ivory and gold; its majestic beauty formed the chief attraction of the temple. ...
— Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece and Rome • E.M. Berens
... to dawn upon me. Suddenly I seemed to see the white figures throwing purple shadows on the sun-baked palaestra; 'bands of nude youths and maidens'—you remember Gautier's words—'moving across a background of deep blue as on the frieze of the Parthenon.' I began to read Greek eagerly for love of it all, and the more I read ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... know, is in truth a very imposing structure, covering less ground than St. Peter's, but of similar general effect. The little man looked up, but did not reply to my taunt. He said to the young lady, however, that the State House was the Parthenon of our Acropolis, which seemed to please her, for she smiled, and he reddened a little,—so I thought. I don't think it right to watch persons who are the subjects of special infirmity,—but we ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... the only building about the Rock which has an air at all picturesque or romantic; there is a plain Roman Catholic cathedral, a hideous new Protestant church of the cigar-divan architecture, and a Court-house with a portico which is said to be an imitation of the Parthenon: the ancient religions houses of the Spanish town are gone, or turned into military residences, and masked so that you would never know their former pious destination. You walk through narrow whitewashed lanes, bearing such martial ...
— Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo • William Makepeace Thackeray
... was the largest of the Greek temples. The area of the Parthenon at Athens was not one fourth of that of the temple of Ephesus."—Smith's Dictionary of Greek and Roman ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... of the structure; and when so brilliant as to attract especial attention, they divert the mind from the total effect much as a series of beautiful marbles set between those perfect columns would have ruined the Parthenon. It was not in any single feature—not in pediment, column, or capital, not in frieze, architrave, or tympanum—that its glorious beauty lay, but in the simple strength and the harmonious symmetry of the whole, in the general plan. Webster planned his orations, ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... Greece; he lacked the interval of centuries which has allowed mankind to see their work in its true perspective. He possessed traditional moral standards whereby to judge the actions of historical contemporaries; he could praise or blame his politicians with a good conscience. For the Parthenon creators he had no sure norm. The standards were not yet evolved. Pheidias was a talented fellow-citizen—a hewer in stone by profession: what could he know of the relations of Pheidias to posterity? Great things can only be seen at a proper distance. ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... to be bought. It had seemed to him a good thing to stand there motionless, majestic, day after day, far beyond the reach of average purses, and having in his mien something of the frigid nobility of the horses on the Parthenon frieze, with nothing at all of their unreality. A coat of real chestnut hair, glossy, glorious! From end to end of the Parthenon frieze not one ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... church. It is pretentious, imposing, in bad taste, without simplicity and a real sanctity. I was disgusted with the Madeleine from the moment I knew it to be a church. At first I saw it only as a fine building—an imitation of the Parthenon—and I was struck with admiration. But when I was told that it was a temple for the warship of God, I was shocked, and still more so when I entered it. The interior, as a collection of fine paintings and statues, as a specimen of gorgeous Gothic architecture, is one of the best in ...
— Paris: With Pen and Pencil - Its People and Literature, Its Life and Business • David W. Bartlett
... of Childe Harold. He wrote (March 12) Hints from Horace (published 1831), an imitation or loose translation of the Epistola ad Pisones (Art of Poetry), and (March 17) The Curse of Minerva (published 1815), a skit on Lord Elgin's deportation of the metopes and frieze of the Parthenon. ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... methods they prefer. They propagate their race, and collect in communities for defence and social advantage. When thus collected, they will learn to talk, to write, to symbolize, to construct something, be it a medicine-lodge or a Parthenon. Their primitive sense of an invisible and spiritual agency assumes the forms of their ignorance and of their disposition: dread and cruelty, awe and size, fancy and proportion, gentleness and simplicity, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... a peasant sowing grain; an everyday incident, truly enough observed but nothing more. Gradually the background is cut down, the space restricted, the figure enlarged until it fills its frame as a metope of the Parthenon is filled. The gesture is ever enlarged and given more sweep and majesty, the silhouette is simplified and divested of all accidental or insignificant detail. A thousand previous observations are compared and resumed in one general and comprehensive ...
— Artist and Public - And Other Essays On Art Subjects • Kenyon Cox
... order to augment the grandeur of the man. How far this notion, as the principle of a rule, may be sound, it would be unnecessary, perhaps impertinent, to inquire here; but its justness as applicable to the sculptures of antiquity, is abundantly verified by the bas-reliefs brought from the Parthenon of Athens. It is, indeed, so admitted a feature of antient art, as to be regarded by some critics as having for its object the same effect in sculpture, which is attained by light and shadow in painting.—In a picture, the Artist, by a judicious ...
— The Life, Studies, And Works Of Benjamin West, Esq. • John Galt
... and in it "the capable eye" may discover the pose of the Cnidian Venus of Praxiteles, of the Jupiter Olympius of Phidias, and the other lost wonders of ancient chisels, and, more directly, the tender severity of Doric capitals, and the secret grace of the shafts of the Parthenon. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 • Various
... the position of defending him from himself. "You would rather see no such thing. You shouldn't talk in that utterly trivial way. I like the Parthenon, of course, but I can't think of it now because my head. is too full of my escape from where I was ...
— Active Service • Stephen Crane
... given a proper focus to the matter, and this collection of beautiful things made by people dead these two thousand years is now known to be absolutely priceless, almost as much so as the Elgin Marbles, taken from the Parthenon at Athens and which now repose in the British Museum, the chief attraction ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... Princess met the women of all India in their splendour, and woman's world met woman's world for the world's good. I'd fain have seen the tall, fair, Saxon surrounded by devoted Eastern subjects! All I did see was some of the preparations—red cloth being laid in acres up to a stately Parthenon—but from various accounts I have heard from ladies who were present, this must have been one of the most extraordinary and gorgeous functions ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch
... of the thirteenth century as the most beautiful creation of their art, among the details of ornament; and this particular rose is the direct parent of that at Chartres, which is classic like the Parthenon, while both of them served as models or guides for that at Paris which dates from 1220, those in the north and south transepts at Rheims, about 1230, and so on, from parent to child, till the rose faded forever. No doubt there were Romanesque ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... was fresh: she had read something of that sort somewhere in Goethe. She had wanted to come herself when she was her sister's age; but her father was in business then and they couldn't leave Utica. The young man thought of the little sister frisking over the Parthenon and the Mount of Olives and sharing for two years, the years of the school-room, this extraordinary pilgrimage of her parents; he wondered whether Goethe's dictum had been justified in this case. He asked Pandora if Utica were the seat of her family, if it were ...
— Pandora • Henry James
... the most exacting training of the eye, of the visual memory, and of the judgment. As an example of the exercise of this sort of discipline we may cite Professor Waldstein's recognition of a marble fragment in the form of a head in the Louvre as belonging to a metope of the Parthenon. When, after Professor Waldstein's suggestion of the probable connection, a plaster cast of the head was taken to the British Museum and placed upon the headless figure of one of the metopes, the surfaces of fracture were found to correspond.[103] ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... her picnic in the valley of Jehoshaphat and talked London gossip under the olives, it was an odd picture; it is strange to see the irrepressible English riding hurdles in the Campagna, and talking of ratting in the shadow of the Parthenon, as though within the beloved chimes of Bow; but it was stranger still to see those roughened, grimed men, with soleless boots and pants tattered "as if an imp had worn them," rolling out town-talk and well-known names in ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... can prophecy—we had as little need for the one as for the other. Earthquake and hurricane, volcano and valley flood, autumn frosts and winter blasts, fever, consumption, war, and pestilence, the grave-yard and the charnel-house, the Parthenon and the Pyramids, the silent cities of Colorado, and the buried palaces of Assyria, unite to attest ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... magnificent building, which really faces George Street, but was formerly considered to be in the square, is one of the palatial clubs evolved by the demands of modern luxury. The house which formerly stood here was used by the Parthenon Club from 1837-41, and was subsequently pulled down to make way for the present clubhouse, opened 1851, and built from designs by Parnell and Smith. The exterior is a combination of Sansovino's Palazzo Cornaro and the Library of St. Mark ...
— The Strand District - The Fascination of London • Sir Walter Besant
... written their thoughts, expressed their aspirations, and embodied their feelings as clearly and truly as by any other form of utterance. We know Egypt as vividly by its pyramids, the age of Pericles by the Parthenon of Athens, Imperial Rome by the Flavian Amphitheatre and the Baths of Caracalla, as from the pages of their respective literature. The mediaeval cathedrals, monasteries, and churches are a living record of the faith and ...
— Scottish Cathedrals and Abbeys • Dugald Butler and Herbert Story
... night, to tell them tantalizing tales of how musically Aegean wavelets broke against the marbles at Piraeus; how loud the nightingales sang in the plane and poplar groves at home; how the white glory of the Parthenon smiled down on violet-crowned Athens, where their wives and children thronged the temples, in sacrificial rites ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson |
