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Porphyry   Listen
noun
Porphyry  n.  (pl. porphyries)  (Geol.) A term used somewhat loosely to designate a rock consisting of a fine-grained base (usually feldspathic) through which crystals, as of feldspar or quartz, are disseminated. There are red, purple, and green varieties, which are highly esteemed as marbles.
Porphyry shell (Zool.), a handsome marine gastropod shell (Oliva porphyria), having a dark red or brown polished surface, marked with light spots, like porphyry.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Porphyry" Quotes from Famous Books



... can reach, beneath as clear And blue a heaven as ever blest this sphere, Gardens and pillared streets and porphyry domes And high-built temples, fit to be the homes Of mighty gods, and pyramids whose hour Outlasts all ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al

... cheek had rained the morning light, Thrice on his lips the mildewed kiss of night, Crouched by some porphyry column's shining plinth, Or stretched ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various

... control. His fiery energy is shown by the rapidity with which hundreds of men swarm on ditch and flume. They are working at mill and giant water-wheels. They are delving and tracing the fat brown quartz, gold laden, from between the streaks of rifted basalt and porphyry. ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage

... But observe, secondly, the impression instantly made on Commynes' mind by the distinction between the elder palaces and those built "within this last hundred years; which all have their fronts of white marble brought from Istria, a hundred miles away, and besides, many a large piece of porphyry and serpentine ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin

... latitude 29 degrees, longitude 120 degrees. Bare granite rocks sometimes in the vicinity, though not attached. (May 4th.) : Two small specimens of Micaceous Iron-ore with brown Haematite. Impossible to state the age. Similar ore occurs in Victoria, in Elvans in Porphyry, but it also occurs ...
— Explorations in Australia • John Forrest

... Hamilton had built as a gift to his brother was nearing completion, and the finishing touches demanded personal supervision. As the heart of a high priest turns to his temple, so turned Paul Burton's heart to this spot at this time. It was a temple, but decidedly a pagan temple. Porphyry columns went up from a mosaic floor to a richly encrusted ceiling, and in conception and detail it was lavishly beautiful and perfect. Hamilton had conceived and planned the structure with a very ferocity of tense interest: though ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck

... Nineteenth Street into which Potash & Perlmutter proposed to move was an imposing fifteen-story structure. Burnished metal signs of its occupants flanked its wide doorway, and the entrance hall gleamed with gold leaf and plaster porphyry, while the uniform of each elevator attendant would have graced the high admiral of a ...
— Potash & Perlmutter - Their Copartnership Ventures and Adventures • Montague Glass

... he had crossed the great audience-chamber, under the entrance colonnade of huge porphyry columns, wrought with barbaric symbols of earlier dynasties and guarded by colossal Assyrian bulls—she seemed so young and tender to leave, even for a day, in those surroundings unguarded, at the mercy of that ...
— The Royal Pawn of Venice - A Romance of Cyprus • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull

... dark forest, where the elv seems to collect within itself nature's whole deep gravity. The stream rolls its clear waters over a porphyry soil where the mill-wheel is driven, and the gigantic porphyry bowls ...
— Pictures of Sweden • Hans Christian Andersen

... ambitious design, the monarch robbed the Temple of the Sun at Baalbek of columns of porphyry, despoiled the Temple of Diana of Ephesus of its finest pillars, took columns of pure white marble from the Temple of Minerva at Athens, and divested the shrines of Isis and Osiris in Egypt of their choicest granite ...
— A Trip to the Orient - The Story of a Mediterranean Cruise • Robert Urie Jacob

... anomalies in the observations on land; for they were found to take place upon almost all those parts of Terra Australis, where the basis stone is of granite, as here; and also in those where green-stone, porphyry, basaltes, or iron-stone prevail; whereas in the lime, or grit-stone countries, the needle did not appear to suffer any derangement. In the Appendix No. II. to the second volume, where the changes on ship board, which arose from altering the direction of the ...
— A Voyage to Terra Australis • Matthew Flinders

... occupying the tomb, or than to our general ideas of death, time, and eternity. It is probably for this reason that the immense sarcophagus lately dug up from under the temple of Bacchus without the walls, cut out of one solid piece of red porphyry, has such gay ornaments round it, relative to the sacrifices of Bacchus, &c.; and I fancy these stone coffins, if we may call them so, were often made ready and sold to any person who wished to bury their friend, and who ...
— Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey through France, Italy, and Germany, Vol. I • Hester Lynch Piozzi

... Phoenicia, who wrote in the first century after Christ, and till the alleged discovery of the MS. from which Wagenfeld professed to publish, the only portion of Philo's version known to exist consisted of fragments preserved by Eusebius and Porphyry. Wagenfeld's statement was, that the MS. in his possession had been obtained from the Portuguese monastery of St. Maria de Merinhao (the existence of which there is reason to doubt), and the portion which he first ventured to print appeared with a preface by Grotefend. Its genuineness was instantly ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent

... Dram of the Cortex reduced to a fine[1] Powder, and finely searced, and afterwards ground dry on a Porphyry, with the Cinnamon designed for a Dish of Chocolate, and mixed in the Chocolate with more Sugar than ordinary, may be taken without the least Reluctancy, and, if necessary, without being perceived: ...
— The Natural History of Chocolate • D. de Quelus

... had reared by enchantment a modest home, that was builded of jasper and porphyry and yellow and violet breccia. Inside, the stone walls were everywhere covered with significant traceries in low relief, and were incrusted at intervals with disks and tesserae of turquoise-colored porcelain. The flooring, of course, was of zinc, as a defence against the ...
— Figures of Earth • James Branch Cabell

... me a palace fit to receive the Princess Buddir al Buddoor. Let its materials be made of nothing less than porphyry, jasper, agate, lapis-lazuli, and the finest marble. Let its walls be massive gold and silver bricks laid alternately. Let each front contain six windows, and let the lattices of these (except one, which must be left unfinished) be enriched with diamonds, ...
— The Junior Classics, V5 • Edited by William Patten

... sun. All these things and, still more than these, the treasures which had come to the church from personages who to me were almost legendary figures (such as the golden cross wrought, it was said, by Saint Eloi and presented by Dagobert, and the tomb of the sons of Louis the Germanic in porphyry and enamelled copper), because of which I used to go forward into the church when we were making our way to our chairs as into a fairy-haunted valley, where the rustic sees with amazement on a rock, a tree, a marsh, the tangible proofs of the little people's supernatural passage—all these ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust

... men, but once were an abomination and destruction to them, and to which the blind people paid divine honour. I shall also pass over the bygone times of our cruel tyrants, whose notoriety was spread over to far distant countries; so that Porphyry, that dog who in the east was always so fierce against the church, in his mad and vain style added this also, that "Britain is a land fertile in tyrants."* I will only endeavour to relate the evils which Britain suffered in the times of the Roman emperors, and also those which ...
— On The Ruin of Britain (De Excidio Britanniae) • Gildas

... precipitous, both towards the main and the peninsula; but a natural terrace runs along under the cliff in the direction of Camden Sound, which I believe would form a good road to that harbour. The tract thus enclosed appears to be very fertile. Porphyry and basalt are the common rocks. The soil is rich vegetable mould, mixed with gravel and covered with the most luxuriant grass. The trees were in general small. We only found three springs here; these however were sufficient to ...
— Journals Of Two Expeditions Of Discovery In North-West And Western Australia, Vol. 1 (of 2) • George Grey

... Of Rome's church or another. I believe In one Priest, and one temple with its floors Of shining jasper gloom'd at morn and eve By countless knees of earnest auditors, And crystal walls too lucid to perceive, That none may take the measure of the place And say "So far the porphyry, then, the flint— To this mark mercy goes, and there ends grace," Though still the permeable crystals hint At some white starry distance, bathed in space. I feel how nature's ice-crusts keep the dint Of undersprings of silent Deity. ...
— The Poetical Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume IV • Elizabeth Barrett Browning

... seldom his wont, from Or San Michele by the Corso degli Adimari as far as San Giovanni, around which were then the great tombs of marble that are to-day in Santa Reparata, besides other tombs not a few, and Guido being between the columns of porphyry, that are there, and the tombs and the door of San Giovanni, which was locked, Messer Betto and his company came riding on to the piazza of Santa Reparata, and seeing him among the tombs, said:—"Go we and flout him." So they ...
— The Decameron, Vol. II. • Giovanni Boccaccio

... Pope Clement XII (who himself belonged to the Corsini family and who was an uncle of Cardinal Corsini) is in a niche between two columns of porphyry, and there is a bronze statue of the Pope. On the opposite side is a statue of Cardinal Corsini, and in the crypt below are tombs of the Corsini family. On the altar—always lighted—is a "Pieta" by Bernini, of which the face of the Christ ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting

... up the ravine, and in some places the banks rose almost perpendicularly from the bed of the dry torrent, presenting on both sides vast walls of black porphyry—for this is the principal rock composing the giant chain of the Andes. Above their heads screamed small parrots of rich plumage of the species Conurus rupicola, which make their nestling places, and dwell upon these rocky cliffs. This is a singular fact, as all ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid

... this Queen of Beauty lift her arm And take your broidered web,—ah, then the prize, The vast reward of all the scars and shame, For in the moment as a mystic charm The cloth is changed to porphyry, and lies Forever on her ...
— The Rose-Jar • Thomas S. (Thomas Samuel) Jones

... life God has given to them. Man and his works perish, but the monuments of the infusoriae are the flinty ribs of the sea, the giant bones of huge continents, heaped into mountain-ranges over which the granite and porphyry have set their stony seal for ever. Man thrives in his little zone: the populous infusoriae crowd every nook of earth from the remote poles ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 28. July, 1873. • Various

... conscientiously give him a character for orthodoxy. She took refuge in a position which is often a great resource in like cases, ascribing to him an intrinsic devoutness, a hidden substantial sanctity compatible with the utmost latitudes of heterodoxy; a bedrock of devout gneiss or porphyry hidden under a mere alluvium of modern freethinking; a reality—if the truth were known—of St. Francis of Assisi behind a mask of Voltaire. Her hearer only half followed her reasoning, but that mattered little, as she was brimming with assent ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan

... harder than Porphyry or Agate, the Chisel of my love, drove by the Mallet of my fidelity, would have made some impression on thee. I, that have shaped as I pleased the most untoward of substances, hoped by the Compass of reason, the Plummet of discretion, the Saw of constancy, the soft File of ...
— Town and Country, or, Life at Home and Abroad • John S. Adams

... only by the aid of ladders, and there defy the government forces until the hill is carried by assault, or by siege, or the defenders are enticed to descend. One such hill in the basin of the Rejang (Sarawak), Bukit Batu by name, consists of a mass of porphyry some 1500 feet in height, and several miles in diameter, with very precipitous sides. This has been used again and again as a place of refuge by recalcitrant offenders, being so strong a natural fortress that it has never been possible to carry it by assault. On the last occasion on which ...
— The Pagan Tribes of Borneo • Charles Hose and William McDougall

... of pearl, and porphyry, and marble, Vied with each other on this costly spot; And singing birds without were heard to warble; And the stain'd glass which lighted this fair grot Varied each ray;—but all descriptions garble The true effect, and so we had better not Be too minute; ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron

... effect the remission of sin—a nobler victim was necessary.[1870] A similar conception is found in the later Greek and Roman literature, but there is still no distinct theory. In the third century of our era Porphyry, who was greatly interested in religious matters and, doubtless, represents a considerable body of thoughtful current opinion, says simply that sacrifices are offered to do honor to a deity or to give thanks or to procure favors.[1871] The early Christian writers make no attempt to explain the ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy

... voyage on which he conducts you, past the infinity of the suns and the stars in their millions, scintillating in the cold air of night, to descend once more to our humble "Earth" (5/3.); first an ocean of fire, rolling its heavy waves of molten porphyry and granite, then "slowly hardening into strange floes and bergs, hotter than the red iron in the fire of the forge," rounding its back, all covered with gaping pustules, eruptive mountains and craters, and the first folds of its calcined crust, until the day when the vast mist of densest vapours, ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros

... companions, Captain Gill and Lieutenant Charrington, who were killed by Arabs while on a Government mission in the Desert of Sinai. Underneath the chancel arch is the sepulchre of Wellington, of Cornish porphyry, plain and unadorned. As with the monument, so here, no attempt is made to enumerate those titles, commands, orders and posts and offices of honour, proclaimed by Garter King at Arms, after Dean Milman had committed his body to the ground. The simple inscription, ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of St. Paul - An Account of the Old and New Buildings with a Short Historical Sketch • Arthur Dimock

... now the white; Nor waves the cypress in the palace walk; Nor winks the gold fin in the porphyry font: The firefly wakens: waken thou ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy

... AEthiopia.—Ver. 320. Possibly these may be the waters of trial, mentioned by Porphyry, as being used among the Indians. He says, that, according to their influence on the person accused, when drunk of by him, he was ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso

... height as the hill rises. This passage leads to a vertical facade 46 feet high, pierced by a door between 17 and 18 feet in height, which was bordered by columns carrying a cornice, above which was a triangular relieving space, masked by slabs of red porphyry adorned with spiral decorations, while the whole facade appears to have been enriched with bronze ornaments and coloured marbles. The massive lintel of the door is 29 feet 6 inches long, 16 feet 6 inches deep, and 3 feet 4 inches high, with a weight of ...
— The Sea-Kings of Crete • James Baikie

... children's toys that I gathered that afternoon, were those of which we have pictures. The first is a very pretty stone hatchet, very carefully shaped, and still quite sharp. It has been worked out from a porphyry pebble, and in every way, except size, is the same as hundreds that still are to be found lying about ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, V. 5, April 1878 - Scribner's Illustrated • Various

... admires the artistically arranged mosaic on the gold groundwork of the dome, he is amazed at the hundred columns which support the cupolas and galleries, some of dark-green marble, others of dark-red porphyry. The Emperor's wealth is inexhaustible. Has he not presented to the church seven crosses of gold, each weighing a hundred pounds? Does not the Church of the Divine Wisdom possess forty thousand chalice veils all embroidered ...
— From Pole to Pole - A Book for Young People • Sven Anders Hedin

... with drowsy echoes, as they rippled in and out among the rocks and along the sand. Fortunately for their pleasure, Noll picked up a curious pebble before they had gone a great way. It was not an agate, nor was it like the rounded pebbles of porphyry which the tide washed up, and puzzling over this, and asking Uncle Richard, at last, to explain its nature, somehow broke the heavy silence which had been between them, and questions and pleasant talk came ...
— Culm Rock - The Story of a Year: What it Brought and What it Taught • Glance Gaylord

... Or again, Christianity was reproached with its naked and hungry habits; with its sackcloth and dried peas. But the next minute Christianity was being reproached with its pomp and its ritualism; its shrines of porphyry and its robes of gold. It was abused for being too plain and for being too coloured. Again Christianity had always been accused of restraining sexuality too much, when Bradlaugh the Malthusian discovered that it restrained it too little. It is often accused in the same breath of prim respectability ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton

... her own father had ever seen her face; for she lived apart with the maidens who waited on her, in a lofty tower which her father had built specially for her. It was really a noble palace, with ten great rooms, one over the other. The first room was paved with porphyry and lined with slabs of coloured marbles, and the roof was of gold: and it was a kind of chapel for Aseneth. It had golden and silver images of all the gods of Egypt, and Aseneth worshipped them and burnt incense ...
— Old Testament Legends - being stories out of some of the less-known apochryphal - books of the old testament • M. R. James

... who was surveying the ruins of Rome, expressed a desire to possess some relic of its antient grandeur, Poussin, who attended him, stooped down, and, gathering up a handful of earth shining with small grains of porphyry, "Take this home," said he, "for your cabinet; and say boldly, Questa e ...
— Poems • Samuel Rogers

... It would seem that some demons are naturally wicked. For Porphyry says, as quoted by Augustine (De Civ. Dei x, 11): "There is a class of demons of crafty nature, pretending that they are gods and the souls of the dead." But to be deceitful is to be evil. Therefore some demons are ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas

... now that he has sent to the Academie specimens of gneiss and mica schist, containing pholades, on which the acid has no effect, he conceives that they must have entered by boring. They have also been found in porphyry—a fact of which Brongniart said, many years ago, that nature had concealed the explanation, and we must wait for a solution. Whether M. Cailliaud's solution be the true one or not, is a point that will soon be verified or disproved by geologists and naturalists, who are never better ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal - Volume XVII., No 422, New Series, January 31, 1852 • Various

... a tide Shoreless on every side, Save where the eye Of Fancy sweeps far lands Shelved slopingly with sands Of gold and porphyry. ...
— Riley Love-Lyrics • James Whitcomb Riley

... that of flowers. A man or two, hoary with marble-dust and ennobled by the "bloom" of it, stood tall and sad about the wheel, and we handed to these refined creatures our treasures of giallo-antico and porphyry and other marbles picked up "for remembrance" (and no doubt once pressed by a Caesar's foot or met by a Caesar's glance), in order to observe the fresh color leap to the surface,—yellow, red, ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop

... Romeo! She lived in a wonderful purple cave, not in the Palisades, but hidden in the Catskills; and from its door, which no one could find, she sent forth Day and Night alternately. Also, in immense jars of porphyry and gold, she kept sunshine and storm, to let out when she thought best. Perhaps those purple splashes and golden gleams we saw under the water were her storm and sun jars, which floated out of the cave and ...
— The Lightning Conductor Discovers America • C. N. (Charles Norris) Williamson and A. M. (Alice Muriel)

... you," he remarked. "If you come closer to the edge you can see it." Holman glanced at me in amazement, and moved by the one impulse we stepped toward the ledge. The rim of the vast pit, at the point where Leith was standing, was composed of porphyry of a dark-green shade, and as we neared the edge we noticed that this had been worn to that peculiar velvety smoothness that one notices on the pillars of Indian temples, where the sweaty hands of millions of worshippers have helped in the polishing ...
— The White Waterfall • James Francis Dwyer

... the individual lives of men as it is of great events. If the ages have to be reconstructed, so also must the men of the ages. If only a mummy now turn over in his porphyry sarcophagus, a papyrus is generally found under him; and the finder, with the papyrus in his hand, may go forth fully warranted to revise every event from the first cataclysm of the Devonian age to the last earthquake in Java, and every ...
— The Arena - Volume 18, No. 92, July, 1897 • Various

... venture of the travellers was amid the wrecks of an extinct volcano. It seemed here as if the genius of fire had striven to outdo the grotesque extravagances of the genii of the waters. Crags, towers, and pinnacles of porphyry were mingled with huge convoluted masses of light brown trachyte, of tufa either pure white or white veined with crimson, of black and gray columnar basalts, of red, orange, green, and black scoria, with adornments of obsidian, amygdaloids, rosettes of ...
— Overland • John William De Forest

... fire; and his works have therefore been able to resist the damp and to preserve their colour very well without suffering any change. With the same mixture he worked on peperino-stone, white and variegated marble, porphyry, and slabs of other very hard kinds of stone, materials on which paintings can last a very long time; not to mention that this has shown how one may paint on silver, copper, tin, and ...
— Lives of the most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 06 (of 10) Fra Giocondo to Niccolo Soggi • Giorgio Vasari

... consulted the haruspices; if he summoned the Council of Nicea, he also honored the statue of Fortune; if he accepted the rite of baptism, he also struck a medal bearing his title of "God." His statue, on the top of the great porphyry pillar at Constantinople, consisted of an ancient image of Apollo, whose features were replaced by those of the emperor, and its head surrounded by the nails feigned to have been used at the crucifixion of Christ, arranged so as to form a crown ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper

... the ruins of an Eastern city, men find a slab of porphyry or malachite so gorgeously grained, that not many whole and perfect works of art can stand undimmed and undiminished beside it. Such is ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld

... instance, affords a wonderful example of a mountain formed of marine deposits, and which has been raised by subterraneous fire, and those large and singular veins which you see at the base and rising through the substance of the strata are composed of volcanic porphyry, and offer a most striking and beautiful example of the generation and structure of rocks and ...
— Consolations in Travel - or, the Last Days of a Philosopher • Humphrey Davy

... Cousin an eclecticist. His Philosophy is a positive one compared with that of Emerson. Here are scraps of Plato and Hegel, of Porphyry and Swedenborg, of AEschylus and De Stael. Like the Lehrer zu Sais, 'he looks on the stars, and imitates their courses and positions in the sand.' In the obscurity that proves him great, for 'To be great ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... He was on the point of giving Plotinus a ruined city of Campania to try the experiment of realizing Plato's Republic. See the Life of Plotinus, by Porphyry, in Fabricius's Biblioth. Graec. l. iv.] [Footnote 155: A medal which bears the head of Gallienus has perplexed the antiquarians by its legend and reverse; the former Gallienoe Augustoe, the latter Ubique Pax. M. Spanheim supposes ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon

... Norman work in them. They are, every atom, done by Greeks, and are as pure Greek as the temple of AEgina; but more rich and refined. I drew with accurate care, and with measured profile of every moulding, the tomb built for Roger II. (afterwards Frederick II. was laid in its dark porphyry). And it is a perfect type of the Greek-Christian form of tomb—temple over sarcophagus, in which the pediments rise gradually, as time goes on, into acute angles—get pierced in the gable with foils, and their sculptures thrown outside on their flanks, and become at last in ...
— The Pleasures of England - Lectures given in Oxford • John Ruskin

... Fassi, far surpassed his master, and executed an altar of St. Antonio, for the church of S. Niccolo, at Carpi, which is still pointed out as something extraordinary. It consists of two columns of porphyry adorned with a pallium, covered with lace, which last is an exact imitation of the covering of an altar, while it is ornamented in the margin with medals, bearing beautiful figures. In the Cathedral at Carpi, is a monument by one Ferrari, which so perfectly imitates marble that ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects, and Curiosities of Art, (Vol. 2 of 3) • Shearjashub Spooner

... which surprised me. Gold, painting, sculpture, the richest ornaments of all kinds, are distributed everywhere with prodigality but taste. The architecture is correct and admirable, the marble is most exquisite; jasper, porphyry, lapis, polished, wreathed, and fluted columns, with their capitals and their ornaments of gilded bronze, a row of balconies between each altar with little steps of marble to ascend them, and the cage ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, Complete • Duc de Saint-Simon

... single moment lost sight of the need for secrecy. We were drilling when Blackwell's shadow fell across the mouth of the pit, but we had taken the precaution to cover the gold-bearing vein with spalls and chippings of the porphyry, and to see to it that none of the gold-bearing material showed in the small dump at the ...
— Branded • Francis Lynde

... Sand perceived that this artist, in place of giving body to his phantasy in porphyry and marble, or defining his thoughts by the creation of massive caryatides, rather effaced the contour of his works, and, had it been necessary, could have elevated his architecture itself from the soil, to suspend it, like the floating ...
— Life of Chopin • Franz Liszt

... has a slight degree of bitterness with it which cultivation may remove. Mica schist crowned some of the heights on the watershed, then gneiss, and now, as we descend further, we have igneous rocks of more recent eruption, porphyry and gneiss, with hornblende. A good deal of ferruginous conglomerate, with holes in it, covers many spots; when broken, it looks like yellow haematite, with black linings to the holes: this is probably the ore used in former times by the smiths, of whose existence we now find still more evidence ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume I (of 2), 1866-1868 • David Livingstone

... miner in question clearly described the older slate formations thrown up and pierced by beds of quartz, granite, porphyry, and other igneous rocks; the vast accumulations of sand, gravel, and shingle extending from the roots of the mountains to the banks of Fraser River and its affluents, which are peculiar characteristics of the ...
— Handbook to the new Gold-fields • R. M. Ballantyne

... Porphyry says: "By images addressed to sense, the ancients represented God and his powers—by the visible they typified the invisible for those who had learned to read in these types, as in a book, a treatise on the Gods. We need ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike

... of becoming. The reason, in one word, was not awake; the mind of man was ignorant of its own treasures and its own capacities. It is pathetic to think of the mediaeval students poring over a single ill-translated sentence of Porphyry, endeavoring to extract from its clauses whole systems of logical science, and torturing their brains about puzzles hardly less idle than the dilemma of Buridan's donkey, while all the time, at Constantinople ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds

... Gharipuri or Elephanta, with its ancient temple, at their head. Gharipuri translated means "the town of caves" according to the Orientalists, and "the town of purification" according to the native Sanskrit scholars. This temple, cut out by an unknown hand in the very heart of a rock resembling porphyry, is a true apple of discord amongst the archaeologists, of whom none can as yet fix, even approximately, its antiquity. Elephanta raises high its rocky brow, all overgrown with secular cactus, and right under it, at the foot of the rock, are hollowed out the chief temple and the two lateral ...
— From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan • Helena Pretrovna Blavatsky

... apartments. The prince then flew into the wildest rage. He kicked over a chiffonier, which tumbled on the carpet, broken into pieces. He next went into the galleries, and with the greatest coolness threw down, one after another, an enameled vase, a porphyry ewer, and a bronze candelabrum. The noise summoned every one to the ...
— Ten Years Later • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... Bay consists of crystalline rocks, granite poor in mica, and mica-schist lowermost, and then grey non-fossiliferous carbonate of lime, and last of all magnesian schists, porphyry, and quartzites. On the summits of the hills the granite has a rough trachytic appearance, but does not pass into true trachyte. Here however we are already in the neighbourhood of the volcanic hearths of Kamchatka, which for instance is shown by the ...
— The Voyage of the Vega round Asia and Europe, Volume I and Volume II • A.E. Nordenskieold

... about, too. There were treasures from Mexico and Peru, from every romantic bit of the wonderful countries south of us— blocks of porphyry with quaint grecques and hieroglyphic painting from Mitla, copper axes and pottery from Cuzco, sculptured stones and mosaics, jugs, cups, vases, little gods and great, sacrificial stones, a treasure house of Aztec and Inca lore—enough to keep one occupied for ...
— The Gold of the Gods • Arthur B. Reeve

... interesting of the sarcophagi were undoubtedly the three in Mr. Trelawny's room. Of these, two were of dark stone, one of porphyry and the other of a sort of ironstone. These were wrought with some hieroglyphs. But the third was strikingly different. It was of some yellow-brown substance of the dominating colour effect of Mexican onyx, which it resembled in many ways, excepting that the natural pattern of its ...
— The Jewel of Seven Stars • Bram Stoker

... cretaceous period, the valleys and gorges are filled with formations of every possible variety, sedimentary, metamorphic, and igneous. Down many of them run long streams of trap or basalt; occasionally there are dykes of porphyry and greenstone, and then patches of sandstone, before the limestone and flint recur."[133] Some slopes are composed entirely of soft sandstone; many patches are of a hard metallic-sounding trap or porphyry; but the predominant formation is a greasy or powdery limestone, bare often, but ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson

... Inverary glittered like a gem on the sea-shore, while to the right, amid lawns and gardens, and gleaming banks of wood, that hung down into the water, rose the dark towers of the Castle, the whole environed by an amphitheatre of tumbled porphyry hills, beyond whose fir-crowned crags rose the bare blue ...
— Letters From High Latitudes • The Marquess of Dufferin (Lord Dufferin)

... more graceful, nor more unlike what I mean. The Pales and Terminus I wish you to put up in the fields are familiar images, that you may cut out of an oak tree—not beautiful marble statues on porphyry pedestals twenty feet high." ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various

... summer dust with blood was laid;" And near Herodotus his ninefold roll display'd, Father of history; and Euclid's vest The heaven-taught symbols of that art express'd That measures matter, form, and empty space, And calculates the planets' heavenly race; And Porphyry, whose proud obdurate heart Was proof to mighty Truth's celestial dart; With sophistry assail'd the cause of God, And stood in arms against the heavenly code. Hippocrates, for healing arts renown'd, And half obscured within the ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch

... the custom of the Regents to dictate, to the students their observations on such parts of the writings of Aristotle, Porphyry, and others, as were read in their classes. This was done in Latin which was the only language allowed to be used by the students even in their common conversation. At a meeting of commissioners from the different universities of Scotland, which was held at Edinburgh on the 24th ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning

... matter of the Earth's nucleus, all beds of sediment are liable to be actually melted, or partially fused, or so heated as to agglutinate their particles; and that according to the temperature they have been raised to, and the circumstances under which they cool, they assume the forms of granite, porphyry, trap, gneiss, or rock otherwise altered. Further, it is manifest that though strata of various ages have been thus changed, yet the most ancient strata have been so changed to the greatest extent; both because they have been nearer to the centre of igneous agency; and because they have ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer

... of a bygone age, The marble, porphyry, alabaster forms, Still live: at night, to speech upon the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, October, 1877, Vol. XX. No. 118 • Various

... insects, fine dragons well twisted, imbricated, and coloured—nay, even gilt, although he is often short of gold—and throw them at the feet of his snow-clad mountains, piles of rocks, and other cloud-capped philosophers, long and terrible works, marble columns, real thoughts carved in porphyry. ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 3 • Honore de Balzac

... age Could scarcely rear: the lofty ceiling shone With richest tracery, the beams were bound In golden coverings; no scant veneer Lay on its walls, but built in solid blocks Of marble, gleamed the palace. Agate stood In sturdy columns, bearing up the roof; Onyx and porphyry on the spacious floor Were trodden 'neath the foot; the mighty gates Of Maroe's throughout were formed, He mere adornment; ivory clothed the hall, And fixed upon the doors with labour rare Shells of the ...
— Pharsalia; Dramatic Episodes of the Civil Wars • Lucan

... so abundant as to impede the traveller, seemed capable of absorbing not only the water which falls upon them, but also any which may descend from the low hills around. During our day's journey I found grey porphyry, the base consisting apparently of granular felspar with embedded crystals of common felspar and ...
— Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, Vol 2 (of 2) • Thomas Mitchell

... a vast preponderance of quartz, the flinty; and that vein of granite will be very soft from containing so much felspar; and this granite, a familiar example of which can be seen in the material of Waterloo Bridge, the learned, who give names, call porphyry. ...
— Menhardoc • George Manville Fenn

... propria, page 58, and never mentions manipulation amongst them, of which mode, indeed, Mesmer seems to have been the original discoverer. The ancients, too, were aware (as we are) that the magnetic and divining state can be produced only in young and somewhat simple (simpliciores) persons. Porphyry confirms this in his remarkable letter to the Egyptian priest of Anubis (to which I earnestly direct the physiologists), in which he asks, "Wherefore it happens that only simple (aplontxronz kai nxonz) and young persons were fitted for divination?" Yet there were many even then, as ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V2 • William Mienhold

... The educated classes had given up any honest and literal worship of the old gods. They were trying to excuse themselves for their lingering half belief in them, by turning them into allegories, powers of nature, metaphysical abstractions, as did Porphyry and Iamblichus, Plotinus and Proclus, and the rest of the Neo-Platonist school of aristocratic philosophers and fine ladies: but the lower classes still, in every region, kept up their own local beliefs and worships, generally ...
— The Hermits • Charles Kingsley

... in your palace, in your dress, nay, in the very costume of your incomparable slave, who has done me the honor to call here in your service. But now have you given of it the last and highest proof. Never has the wit of man before compounded an essence like that which lies buried in this porphyry vase.' ...
— Aurelian - or, Rome in the Third Century • William Ware

... the mine of Injun Jim, and one man (who owned cattle and called mines a gamble) told me that he doubted the whole story. A prospectors' bubble, he called it. Free gold, he insisted, did not belong in this particular formation; it ran in porphyry, he said,—and then he ran into mineralogy too technical for me now. I repeated his statement, however, and saw ...
— Casey Ryan • B. M. Bower

... woods wherein The boy's dream comes to pass, And Nature squanders on the boy her pomp, And crowns him with a more than royal crown, And unimagined splendor waits his steps. The gazing urchin walks through tents of gold, Through crimson chambers, porphyry and pearl, Pavilion on pavilion, garlanded, Incensed and starred with lights and airs and shapes, Color and sound, music to eye and ear, Beyond the best ...
— Poems - Household Edition • Ralph Waldo Emerson

... Logic, namely, that of Aristotle and the Schools. 2. A concise and simple, yet full statement of the Aristotelian Logic, with reference annexed to the authors, and the name and page of the work to which each part may be traced, so that it may be at once seen what is Aristotle's, what Porphyry's, what the addition of the Greek Commentators, and what of the Schoolmen. 3. An outline of the History of Logic in general, 1st Chapter. The Origin of Philosophy in general, and of Logic 'speciatim'. 2d Chap. Of the Eleatic and Megaric ...
— Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1. • Coleridge, ed. Turnbull

... minerals, suggestive of high temperature origin. The largest of these deposits is at Kiruna in northern Sweden; in fact this is the largest single deposit of high-grade ore of any kind yet known in the world. Here the magnetite forms a great tabular vertical body lying between porphyry and syenite. In the Adirondack Mountains of New York and in the highlands of New Jersey, magnetites are interbedded and infolded with gneisses, granites, and metamorphic limestones. In the western United States there are many ...
— The Economic Aspect of Geology • C. K. Leith

... mind! Atlantis, that ancient land of Meropis mentioned by the historian Theopompus; Plato's Atlantis; the continent whose very existence has been denied by such philosophers and scientists as Origen, Porphyry, Iamblichus, d'Anville, Malte-Brun, and Humboldt, who entered its disappearance in the ledger of myths and folk tales; the country whose reality has nevertheless been accepted by such other thinkers as Posidonius, Pliny, Ammianus Marcellinus, Tertullian, ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne

... high, but is now 115, and it consists of six huge cylinders of porphyry, one above another, whose junction is veiled by sculptured laurel wreaths. On its summit stood the statue of Constantine with the garb and attributes of the Grecian Sun-God, but having his head surrounded with the nails of the True Cross, brought ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin

... to find his host swollen to giant size. Instead, he found the same meager form, the same old suggestion of youth which would not age, the same pale hands, of almost feminine litheness. Lee Haines talked on—about a porphyry dyke somewhere to the north—a ledge to be found in the space of ten thousand square miles—a list of vague clues—an appeal for Barry to help them find it—and Barry was held listening though ever seeming to drift, or about to drift, towards the door. Black Bart lay facing ...
— The Seventh Man • Max Brand

... The broken porphyry pillars by these second doors were a gift from Pisa to Florence in recognition of Florence's watchfulness over Pisa while the Pisans were ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas

... resolved on dedicating them to the service of the Church; and, after being admitted into reader's orders, he began to distinguish himself by his opposition to philosophical infidelity. His work against Porphyry, the most valuable and elaborate of his writings, was extended to as many as thirty books. During the reign of Julian, when the Christian schools were shut up, and the Christian youth were debarred from the use of the classics, the two Apollinares, father and son, exerted themselves ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman

... his youth seven centuries ago, and how even more beautiful in the foretime. Of the great mosque writers of travel can scarcely say enough. Mr. Lane-Poole says: "Travellers stand amazed among the forest of columns which open out apparently endless vistas on all sides. The porphyry, jasper, and marbles are still in their places; the splendid glass mosaics, which artists from Byzantium came to make, still sparkle like jewels in the walls; the daring architecture of the sanctuary, with its fantastic crossed arches, is still as imposing as ever; the courtyard ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh

... when your eyes became accustomed to the endless running pattern could you trace it clearly, grasp the detail, note that every two bow windows were separated by one rain pipe, every two porches sustained by one pillar, one diminutive magnificent purple pillar, simulating porphyry and crowned with a rich Corinthian capital in freestone, the outline of each porch being picked out and made clear and decisive with woodwork painted white. Then, and not till then, did you see that the all-important detail ...
— The Combined Maze • May Sinclair

... Zeno Buddha Isaiah Daniel Empedocles Socrates Plato Aristotle Porphyry John Wesley Franklin Goldsmith Ray Paley Isaac Newton Jean Paul Richter Schopenhauer Byron Gleizes Hartley Rousseau Iamblichus Hypatia Diogenes Quintus Sextus Ovid Plutarch Seneca Apollonius The Apostles Matthew James James the Less Peter The Christian ...
— No Animal Food - and Nutrition and Diet with Vegetable Recipes • Rupert H. Wheldon

... late, and the princess retired into a large room of marble and porphyry, where several bubbling fountains, refreshed the air with an agreeable coolness. As soon as she entered the music began, a sumptuous supper was served up, and the birds from several aviaries on each side of the room, of which ...
— The Little Lame Prince - And: The Invisible Prince; Prince Cherry; The Prince With The Nose - The Frog-Prince; Clever Alice • Miss Mulock—Pseudonym of Maria Dinah Craik

... represented a different portion of the building—presumably that of St. Sophia. The capitals of the pillars were exquisite, few being duplicated, and the shafts were solid columns of black marble, supported on bases of porphyry. The floor was a network of mosaics, and the walls were a blaze of colored marbles. The altar, which stood in the central room, was of silver, with trappings of gold-embroidered velvet, and paraphernalia of gold. Dartmouth was entranced. He had a keen love of and appreciation for art, but he ...
— What Dreams May Come • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton

... forum, enters a court-yard, stoops under a gate, and he arrives before the front of the palace, adorned with a group in wax representing the Emperor Constantine hurling the dragon to the earth. A porphyry basin supports in its centre a golden conch filled with pistachio-nuts. His guide informs him that he may take some of them. ...
— The Temptation of St. Antony - or A Revelation of the Soul • Gustave Flaubert

... their original meaning. This is strikingly the case with the Scarabaeus which, under the hands of the Etruscan cutter, lost at once all specific character. He might be Scarabaeus anything: he is not pilularius; and, instead of being made of basalt, porphyry, smalt, and very rarely of pietra dura, as in Egypt, he is engraved in carnelian, onyx, sardonyx, and all the rare and lovely varieties of pietra dura,—which, being essentially the same, change their names with their colors,—but ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various

... The circle of the heavy eyebrows ended at the wide nostrils; the mouth was a crescent, but bowed downwards; the heavy shoulders were rounded. Indeed, the only straight line to be discerned about him was that of his hair, black as bitumen, banged across his forehead; even his polished porphyry eyes were constructed on some curvilinear principle, and never seemed to focus. It might be said of Mr. Gorse that he had an overwhelming impersonality. One could never be quite sure that one's words reached ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... become unfit for respiration. At every hundred paces they were obliged to stop to take breath. It was therefore past ten o'clock when the engineer and his companion reached the crest of the enormous mass of rocks of basalt and porphyry which composed the ...
— The Secret of the Island • W.H.G. Kingston (translation from Jules Verne)

... moselles are made by Messrs. Stock and Sons at Creuznach, a favourite watering-place in the romantic Nahe valley, noted for the picturesque porphyry cliffs which occasionally rise precipitously at the river's edge. Creuznach, where a capital wine is vintaged, on the southern slopes of the Schlossberg, is at no great distance from Bingen. Messrs. Stock and ...
— Facts About Champagne and Other Sparkling Wines • Henry Vizetelly

... established by Clive, did not yield such a surplus as had been anticipated by the Company; for at that time, the most absurd notions were entertained in England respecting the wealth of India. Palaces of porphyry, hung with the richest brocade, heaps of pearls and diamonds, vaults from which pagodas and gold mohurs were measured out by the bushel, filled the imagination even of men of business. Nobody seemed to be aware of what nevertheless was most ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... swore her laughter had the lilt Of chiming waters that are spilt In sprays of spurted melody From founts of carven porphyry, And in the billowy turbulence Of her dusk hair drowned soul and sense— Dark tides and deep, ...
— Dreams and Dust • Don Marquis

... its life does the cell save it. The new science exhibits the body as a temple, constructed out of cells, as a building is made of bricks. Just as some St. Peter represents strange marble from Athens, beauteous woods from Cyprus, granite from Italy, porphyry from Egypt, all brought together in a single cathedral, so the human body is a glorious temple built by those architects called living cells. When the scientist searches out the beginning of bird ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis

... in a building not far from the imperial palace. The pavement was of polished marble, and columns of porphyry supported a paneled dome. An altar with a statue of a heathen deity was at one end of the apartment. Magistrates in their robes occupied raised seats on the opposite end. In front of them were some soldiers guarding ...
— The Martyr of the Catacombs - A Tale of Ancient Rome • Anonymous

... rubbish heap that was once the playhouse of a Caesar, its walls bearded like a pard's face with tufted laurel and splotched like a brandy drunkard's with red stains; a church that is a dismal ruin without and a glittering Aladdin's Cave of gold and gems and porphyry and onyx within; a wide and handsome avenue starting from one festering stew of slums and ending in another festering stew of slums; a grimed and broken archway opening on a lovely hidden courtyard where trees are green and flowers bloom, and in the center ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb

... the shore of the basin of the steppes, as the basalts of Harutsh belong to the shore of the desert of Sahara; and lastly, as they are the only rocks of the kind we observed in the mountains of the Capitania-General of Caracas, which are also destitute of trachytes or trap-porphyry, basalts, and volcanic productions.* (* From the Rio Negro to the coasts of Cumana and Caracas, to the east of the mountains of Merida, ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V2 • Alexander von Humboldt

... than like marble. On the sarcophagus are some truly very beautiful boys and the dead man himself, with a Madonna, very well wrought, in a medallion. The sarcophagus has the shape of that one made of porphyry which is in the Piazza della Ritonda in Rome. This tomb of the Cardinal was erected in 1459; and its form, with the architecture of the chapel, gave so much satisfaction to the Duke of Malfi, nephew of Pope Pius II, that he had another made in Naples by the ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 3 (of 10), Filarete and Simone to Mantegna • Giorgio Vasari

... that no man can deny to the human mind any power, that power once achieved; and yet I did not wish to recover the first simplicity. If I must be but a shepherd building his hut among the ruins of some fallen city, I might take porphyry or shaped marble, if it lay ready to my hand, instead of the baked clay of the first builders. If Chaucer's personages had disengaged themselves from Chaucer's crowd, forgotten their common goal and shrine, and after sundry magnifications become, each in his turn, the centre of some ...
— Four Years • William Butler Yeats

... apparently divergent views. To form the idea was a silent judgment on the learning of his day; to realize it was more than one man could accomplish; but Boethius accomplished much. He translated the [Greek: Eisagogae] of Porphyry, and the whole of Aristotle's Organon. He wrote a double commentary on the [Greek: Eisagogae] and commentaries on the Categories and the De Interpretatione of Aristotle, and on the Topica of Cicero. He also composed ...
— The Theological Tractates and The Consolation of Philosophy • Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius

... room with a steep, ornamental Swiss roof has been built, is in a valley close to a clear, rushing river, which emerges a little higher up from an inaccessible chasm of great sublimity. One side of the valley is formed by cliffs and terraces of porphyry as red as the reddest new brick, and at sunset blazing into vermilion. Through rifts in the nearer ranges there are glimpses of pine-clothed peaks, which, towards twilight, pass through every shade ...
— A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains • Isabella L. Bird

... peaks and ridges, as well as the deepest valleys and ravines, were covered with the embowering forest; but here and there a huge boss of granite or porphyry reared its bare scalp out of the verdure like the head and shoulders of some antediluvian monster. The gigantic palms and foliage trees, all tufted with air-plants or strangled with climbers, were literally buried in flowers ...
— A Trip to Venus • John Munro

... shoulders and veils flowing from under their breasts that shimmered with pearls. The child recognised the nixies and tried to flee. But already their cold white arms had seized him, and in spite of his struggles and cries he was borne across the waters along the galleries of porphyry ...
— Honey-Bee - 1911 • Anatole France

... the palace that has eight walls of red porphyry, and a brass-sealed ceiling hung with lamps. The Emperor touched one of the walls and it opened, and we passed down a corridor that was lit with many torches. In niches upon each side stood great wine-jars filled to the brim with ...
— Selected Prose of Oscar Wilde - with a Preface by Robert Ross • Oscar Wilde

... four columns, forming the ceiling of the chapel, there is a coffer-work canopy of marble all carved, full of enamels fired in a furnace and of various fanciful designs in mosaic wrought with gold colour and precious stones. The surface of the pavement is full of porphyry, serpentine, variegated marbles, and other very rare stones, put together and distributed with beautiful design. The said chapel is enclosed by a grille made of bronze ropes, with candelabra above fixed into an ornament of marble, which makes a very beautiful finish to ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol 2, Berna to Michelozzo Michelozzi • Giorgio Vasari

... were brought to the city. Copper ore was brought from the mountain of copper in the land of Kimash, and gold was brought in powder from the mountains, and silver was brought from the mountains and porphyry from the land of Melukhkha, and marble from the mountain of marble. And the patesi installed goldsmiths and silversmiths, who wrought in these precious metals, for the adornment of the temple; and he brought smiths who worked ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, And Assyria In The Light Of Recent Discovery • L.W. King and H.R. Hall

... crowns and cherub-faces and intricate baskets of flowers. Each panel held a portrait, and over every panel, in faded gilt against the morning sun, shone an imperial crown. The windows were draped with hangings of rotten velvet. At the far end on a dais stood a porphyry table, and behind it, facing down the room, a single chair, or throne, also of porphyry and rudely carved. For the rest the room held nothing but dust—dust so thick that our visitors' naked feet left imprints ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine

... capacity for the world, so that the ancient Hebrew, Grecian, and Roman measures of capacity on the one hand, and our modern Anglo-Saxon on the other, are all derived, directly or indirectly, from the parent measurements of this granite vessel. "For," argues Mr. Taylor, "the porphyry coffer in the King's Chamber was intended to be a standard measure of capacity and weights for all nations; and all chief nations did originally receive their ...
— Archaeological Essays, Vol. 1 • James Y. Simpson

... marble heads and alabaster jars, Fragments of porphyry and Persian tiles, Lie heaped in ruin, and at our dismay The old Turk shrugs ...
— Poems of West & East • Vita Sackville-West

... him, and how devout and prayerful was his mind! A mild, clear light fell from the glass cupola above, which alone illuminated the hall, and displayed the pictures on the walls to the best advantage. In the middle of the room, beside the splendid porphyry vase standing there upon its gilded pedestal, leaned the tall, athletic form of Count Schwarzenberg, casting a long, dark shadow upon the shining surface of the inlaid floor. Gabriel Nietzel saw all this, and yet he ...
— The Youth of the Great Elector • L. Muhlbach

... the budget and the army estimates during long years, and sometimes divided and dispersed by his strokes, they, the rabble, will trample on him, like the Lilliputians on Gulliver, incapable of estimating his stature, and eternity and history will speedily bury him, not like a despot, in Egyptian porphyry, but ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various

... that, after all, the torch that sheds the serenest and divinest light is the human reason, and that we must investigate the Bible as we do other books. At least, I suppose he has reached some such conclusion. He may imagine that the pure gold of inspiration still runs through the quartz and porphyry of ignorance and mistake, and that all we have to do is to extract the shining metal by some process that may be called theological smelting; and if so I have no fault to find. Dr. Briggs has taken a step in advance—that is to say, the tree ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll

... other ancient writers have mentioned the scarabaeus, mostly in connection with Egypt. Orpheus, Theophrastus, Aristophanes, Pliny, Plutarch, AElian, Clement of Alexandria, Porphyry, Horapollon, Diogenes Laertius, who cites as works in which it was mentioned, the Natural Philosophy by Manetho (circa 286-247 B.C.,) the History of the Philosophy of the Egyptians, by Hecataeus (of Abdera? circa 331 B.C.,) and the writings of Aristagoras (circa ...
— Scarabs • Isaac Myer

... Aurelius, and the busy bustling age of Severus, were not the times for such a business. Bigoted Jews would not, and could not, have made such a character as Jesus of Nazareth; and the philosophers of that day, Celsus and Porphyry, for instance, hated it when presented to them as heartily as either Strauss or Paine. There were not wanting thousands of enemies, able and willing, to expose ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson

... is a red porphyry Vase containing the heart of Canova. It is placed in the great hall of the Academy of Arts at Venice, beneath the magnificent picture of the Assumption of the Virgin, by Titian. The vase is ornamented with ormoulu, and ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 566, September 15, 1832 • Various

... adapted for sound is St. Paul's, that though the walls were muffled with black cloth, the Dean's voice could be heard distinctly, even up in the western gallery. The sarcophagus which holds Wellington's ashes is of massive and imperishable Cornish porphyry, grand from its perfect simplicity, and worthy of the man who, without gasconade or theatrical display, trod stedfastly the path ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury

... the theory of general language is the subject of what is termed the doctrine of the Predicables; a set of distinctions handed down from Aristotle, and his follower Porphyry, many of which have taken a firm root in scientific, and some of them even in popular, phraseology. The predicables are a fivefold division of General Names, not grounded as usual on a difference in their meaning, that is, in the attribute ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill

... Gnostic teachers (155-233), wrote a book on Indian religion, quoted by Porphyry. This is important for it shows that he turned towards India for truth, but though his teaching included the pre-existence of the soul and some doctrine of Karma, it was not specially impregnated with Indian ideas. ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, An Historical Sketch, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Charles Eliot

... Grand Gate. There between octangular towers loopholed and finished battlement style was a covered passage suggestive of Egypt. Two Victories in high relief blew trumpets at each other across the entrance front. Ponderous benches of porphyry, polished smooth by ages of usage, sat one on each side for the guards; fellows in helmets of shining brass, cuirasses of the same material inlaid with silver, greaves, and shoes stoutly buckled. Those of them sitting sprawled their bulky limbs ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace

... surrender, in an architectural point of view, one mighty line of the colossal, quiet, life-in-death statue mountains in Egypt with their narrow fixed eyes and hands on their rocky limbs, nor one Romanesque facade with its porphyry mosaic of indefinable monsters, nor one Gothic moulding of rigid saints and grinning goblins, for ten Parthenons; and, I believe, I could show some rational ground for this seeming barbarity if this were the place to do so, but at present I can only ask the reader to compare ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin

... fluttered where the drive turns down hill. From under the fore-wheel of Juggernaut I struggled back to life with a great sob, that died before it sounded. I looked about the library for some staff to help me to my feet again. The porphyry vases were filled with gorgeous boughs, leaves of deep scarlet, speckled, flushed, gold-spotted, rimmed with green, dashed with orange, tawny and crimson, blood-sprinkled, faint clear amber; all hues ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 3, No. 16, February, 1859 • Various

... little by natural steps from the master to the disciples, we have, six or seven centuries later, the Platonists,— who also cannot be skipped,—Plotinus, Porphyry, Proclus, Synesius, Jamblichus. Of Jamblichus the Emperor Julian said, "that he was posterior to Plato in time, not in genius." Of Plotinus, we have eulogies by Porphyry and Longinus, and the favor of the Emperor Gallienus,—indicating the respect he ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various

... marble pillar, whilst King Philip strode impatiently about the apartment, only stopping at intervals to listen to some imaginary noise. According to the superstitious custom of the age, the King knelt for a few moments at the foot of a figure of the Virgin placed upon a porphyry pedestal to pray the Madonna to pardon him the deed of blood which was about to take place. Silence reigned, for no one, whatever his rank might be, dared to speak before his Sovereign ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 27, March 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various

... with her pallor and her wasted, thin face she looked deathlike. At a turn of the path where a great crag of purple porphyry closes the view of the lowlands, I saw her open her eyes. I rode just behind her holding the little girl with my right arm. 'The child is all ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad

... alabaster with a far-away Rampart of pearl, and flowing down by walls Of changeful opal, deepen into gold Of topaz, rosy gold of tourmaline, Crimson of garnet, green and gray of jade, Purple of amethyst, and ruby red, Beryl, and sard, and royal porphyry; Until the cataract of colour breaks Upon the ...
— The Poems of Henry Van Dyke • Henry Van Dyke

... I studied in my wanderings; many and various cathedrals, basilicas, and mosques have delighted me. I know the color and the value of tapestry and rich hangings; of mosaics, porphyry, and verd-antiques; of fluted alabaster and the delicate tracery of the arabesque; but the velvety quality of London soot when applied to the rough surfaces of rudely chiselled stones, and the soft loveliness gained by grime and smoke, came ...
— Outdoor Sketching - Four Talks Given before the Art Institute of Chicago; The Scammon Lectures, 1914 • Francis Hopkinson Smith

... permission he rose and made the circuit of the semi-divided rooms, coming out at last into the dim rotunda, forested with clustered porphyry columns, and there at last he caught sight of her. She had but just stepped into its shaded coolness out of the hot, bright day, and hung for a moment, in the act of furling her parasol, in which he was about to hail her, until he discovered by ...
— The Lovely Lady • Mary Austin

... Syriac[211], Gothic, and Egyptian versions, as well as by [Symbol: Aleph]BDL[Symbol: Delta], and (according to Tischendorf) by nearly twenty-five cursives; besides the following ancient writers: Irenaeus, Origen, Porphyry, Titus, Basil, Serapion, Epiphanius, Severianus, Victor, Eusebius, Victorinus, Jerome, Augustine. I proceed to shew that this imposing array of authorities for reading [Greek: en to Esaia to prophete] instead of [Greek: en tois prophetais] in St. Mark i. 2, which has certainly imposed ...
— The Causes of the Corruption of the Traditional Text of the Holy Gospels • John Burgon

... pavement of sapphires, like the body of heaven in its clearness, sown with silver stars. From the four corners of the roof hung four golden magic-wheels, called the tongues of the gods. At the eastern end, behind the altar, there were two dark-red pillars of porphyry; above them a lintel of the same stone, on which was carved the figure of a winged archer, with his arrow set to the string and his ...
— The Story of the Other Wise Man • Henry Van Dyke

... prominent place for learning. He was the scholar of Zoroaster at Babylon, and learned of him most of that knowledge which afterward rendered him so famous. So saith Apulcius (Floridorum secundo), and so say Jamblichus (in vita Pythag. c. 4), Porphyry (Ibid. p. 185. edit. Cant.), and Clemens Alexandrinus (Stromata i. p. 223) for the Zabratus or Zaratus of Porphyry, and the Na-Zaratus of Clemens, were none other than this Zoroaster; and they relate the matter thus: that when Cambyses ...
— Mysticism and its Results - Being an Inquiry into the Uses and Abuses of Secrecy • John Delafield

... the Lives of the Sophists, by Eunapius; the Life of Plotinus, by Porphyry; that of Proclus, by Marinus; and that of ...
— The Life of Jesus • Ernest Renan

... one by one; yet their sense came to me; and so I knew that Neith had come down to see her brother's work, and the work that he had put into the mind of the king to make his servants do. And she was displeased at it; because she saw only pieces of dark clay; and no porphyry, nor marble, nor any fair stone that men might engrave the figures of the gods upon. And she blamed her brother, and said, "Oh, Lord of truth! is this then thy will, that men should mold only foursquare pieces of clay: and the forms of the gods no more?" ...
— The Ethics of the Dust • John Ruskin

... some egg shells remove the internal skin and grind them on a piece of porphyry, then put the powder in a small vessel of pure water, and when it has settled at the bottom, draw off the water and dry the powder in the sun. This powder must be preserved in a bottle; when you want to use it put a small quantity of gum ammoniac into distilled vinegar, and leave it ...
— Young's Demonstrative Translation of Scientific Secrets • Daniel Young

... sarcophagus of porphyry resting on lions is the tomb where Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington, was laid in 1852, in the presence of 15,000 spectators, Dean Milman, who had been present at Nelson's funeral, then reading the services. Beyond the tomb of Nelson, in a ghastly ghost-befitting chamber hung with the ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume I. - Great Britain and Ireland • Various

... classification make reference to the so-called bifurcate scheme of division as the only one by which exhaustive division can be surely achieved. This is commonly illustrated by the ancient tree of Porphyry. By this method any subject it is desired to subdivide is first divided by writing the name of one selected species at one branch and writing at the other branch the name of the same species prefixed by "Not." Thus the Agassiz classification of living ...
— The Classification of Patents • United States Patent Office

... door a round disk of porphyry is sunk in the pavement. That is the spot where the emperors of the Holy Roman Empire were crowned in the old church; Charlemagne, Frederick Barbarossa and many others received the crown, the Chrism and the blessing here, before Constantine's ancient basilica was torn down lest it should ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford

... objects of curiosity, remain in their neighbourhood.—"From one, (says Gregoire,) we are informed, that they are possessed of nothing in this way except four vases, which, as they have been told, are of porphyry. From a second we learn, that, not having either forge or manufactory in the neighbourhood, no monument of the arts is to be found there: and a third announces, that the completion of its library cataloges has been retarded, because the person employed at them ne fait pas la diplomatique!"—("does ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady

... theologians as Cassiodorus, Gregory the Great, and Anselm of Canterbury; Tauler, Lefevre, Erasmus, and Pico della Mirandola. "He was quite at home in the exegetical Middle Ages, in the Canon Law, in Aristotle and Porphyry." "He was one of the first German professors to learn Greek and Hebrew." Moreover, Luther possessed, besides knowledge, those indispensable requisites in a good professor: "the faculty of plain, clear, correct, and ...
— Luther Examined and Reexamined - A Review of Catholic Criticism and a Plea for Revaluation • W. H. T. Dau

... France. The vaulted ceilings were done in wonderful mosaic. The walls decorated with marbles and rare sea shells. In every nook were marble pedestals and antique statuary, while the fountain in the centre, supplied from an underground stream, was of porphyry ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various

... these rough hard heads and cobbles that are scattered over the fields, or from quarry chips. And here will arise the question of cost. It would seem decidedly grand to use for the corners substantial blocks of hewn stone,—sandstone, granite, marble, or porphyry,—channelled and chamfered, rock-faced, tooled, rubbed, or decorated; key-stones and voussoirs embellished with your monogram or enriched by any other charming device you choose to invent; bands of encaustic tile, brilliant in color and pattern, belts of sculptured stone, and historic ...
— Homes And How To Make Them • Eugene Gardner

... her pyramid of precious stones? Of porphyry, jasper, agate, and all hues Of gem and marble, to encrust the bones Of merchant-dukes? the momentary dews Which, sparkling to the twilight stars, infuse Freshness in the green turf that wraps the dead, Whose names are mausoleums of the Muse, Are gently prest with ...
— Childe Harold's Pilgrimage • Lord Byron

... the pottery rings and glass beads worn by the poor. As might be expected in an Egyptian collection, the scarabaeus, or sacred beetle, frequently meets the eye. Here are scarabaei in gold, cornelion, chalcedony, heliotrope, torquoise, lapis-lazuli, porphyry, terra cotta, and other materials; many of them having royal names and ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 455 - Volume 18, New Series, September 18, 1852 • Various

... December 24, 1806. The chapel was named in honor of Queen Caroline, who furnished the books for the altar and pulpit, the plate, and two solid mahogany chairs, which are still in use in St. John's. Within the chancel rail is a curious font of porphyry, taken by Colonel John Tufton Mason at the capture of Senegal from the French in 1758, and presented to the Episcopal Society on 1761. The peculiarly sweet-toned bell which calls the parishioners of St. John's together every Sabbath is, I believe, the same that ...
— An Old Town By The Sea • Thomas Bailey Aldrich

... vast circular hall, the arched roof of which was supported on colonnades of what I took to be pillars of porphyry. Down the middle and round the sides ran tables of the same material; the walls were clothed in hangings of sable velvet, on which, in infinite reproduction, was embroidered in cypher the motto of the society. ...
— Prince Zaleski • M.P. Shiel

... marble, rose and white in the sun; rock pools, with exquisite network of sunbeams crossing their rippling surface, and filled with green ribbon-grasses and red sea-foliage, and shining gleams of broken porphyry, and pieces ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida

... from the sea-level. I no longer travel upon horizontal paths, but over hills and steep ridges, across deep valleys and ravines. The hoof of my horse no longer sinks in light sand or dark alluvion. It rings upon rocks of amygdaloid and porphyry. The soil is changed; the scenery has undergone a change, and even the atmosphere that surrounds me. The last is perceptibly cooler, but not yet cold. I am still in the piedmont lands—the tierras calientes. ...
— The Rifle Rangers • Captain Mayne Reid

... Gnostics; and to external and prejudiced spectators, whether philosophers, as Celsus and Porphyry, or the multitude, they wore an appearance sufficiently like the Church to be mistaken for her in the latter part of the ante-Nicene period, as she was confused with the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various

... long trance, Plotinus's first sensation was one of bodily hunger, the second of an even keener appetite for news of his philosophical Republic. In both respects it promised well to perceive that his chamber was occupied by his most eminent scholar, Porphyry, though he was less gratified to observe his disciple busied, instead of with the scrolls of the sages, with an enormous roll of accounts, which appeared to be occasioning ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett

... is what the Almighty Maker at first decreed—namely, earth to earth, ashes to ashes, and dust to dust. The poorest slave, buried in a hole within the ground, is safer from man's greed and violence than the mightiest conqueror; for the massive porphyry sarcophagus of Alexander was rifled by Caligula, and after that by others, in Egypt. And the same fate has befallen the tombs of Cyrus and Darius in Persia, for the sake of the riches entombed ...
— Byeways in Palestine • James Finn



Words linked to "Porphyry" :   groundmass, porphyritic rock, porphyritic, igneous rock



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