Diccionario ingles.comDiccionario ingles.com
Synonyms, antonyms, pronunciation

  Home
English Dictionary      examples: 'day', 'get rid of', 'New York Bay'




Fretwork   Listen
noun
Fretwork  n.  Work adorned with frets; ornamental openwork or work in relief, esp. when elaborate and minute in its parts. Hence, any minute play of light and shade, dark and light, or the like. "Banqueting on the turf in the fretwork of shade and sunshine."






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








Advanced search
     Find words:
Starting with
Ending with
Containing
Matching a pattern  

Synonyms
Antonyms
Quotes
Words linked to  

only single words



Share |





"Fretwork" Quotes from Famous Books



... Moan, who had been taken home before the singing began, was there. She had been sleeping for the last two hours in her bunk, the flaps of which were shut. They drew near with respect and peeped through the fretwork of her press, to bid her good-night, if by chance she were not asleep. But they only perceived her still venerable face and closed eyes; she slept, or she feigned to do so, ...
— An Iceland Fisherman • Pierre Loti

... after a long journey in a desert. He has invested the whole place with an atmosphere of tragedy. It's Roman in feeling and Greek in the refinement of its ornamentation. That rotunda reminds one of the Pantheon in Rome. Those Corinthian columns, with the melancholy drooping of the acanthus and the fretwork and the frieze, by Zimm, are suggestive of Greece. Maybeck says that his mind was started on the conception, 'The Island of Death,' by Boecklin, the painting that the German people know so well as the 'Todteninsel,' and by 'The Chariot ...
— The City of Domes • John D. Barry

... towards the sunset and rolling hills, and were overwhelmed with the volume of colour. Bosky trees lined the road, and the orange light came through the fretwork of their leaves and branches, and made the dust rising from the cattle and the people on the red roads and the deep shadows all aglow with warm, sombre colour; I would I could remember it exactly. One figure I can still see—there is an open space, green grass, and ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch

... 180 feet high, and constructed after the designs of Diotisalvi. It was commenced in 1153 and finished towards the end of the 14th cent. Above the third storey rises the dome, intersected by long lines of very prominent fretwork, meeting in a cornice near the top, and terminating in a small dome crowned with a statue of St. John the Baptist, the titular saint of all such edifices. In the interior eight large Sardinian granite columns and four marble piers support twelve arches, ...
— The South of France—East Half • Charles Bertram Black

... of essentials, show us in etching and aquarelle the romance of the commonplace. And so the rusty iron balconies of a chop suey across the street became quaint and curious: dragon and swinging gilded sign, banner and garish fretwork grew mellow and mysterious under the ruddy Hunter's Moon sailing aloft out of the city's haze like ...
— Athalie • Robert W. Chambers

... name for it) bedded among precipices overhanging the sea, with rocky caverns beneath, into which the waves dash, and where the sea-gull for ever wheels its screaming flight. On the tops of these are huge stones thrown transverse, as if an earthquake had tossed them there, and behind these is a fretwork of perpendicular rocks, something like the 'Giant's Causeway'. A thunder-storm came on while we were at the inn, and Coleridge was running out bareheaded to enjoy the commotion of the elements in the 'Valley of Rocks', but as if in spite, the clouds only muttered a few angry sounds, ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various

... a May morning, so mild was the air, so gay the sunshine, when the mist had risen. Wild flowers were blooming, and here and there unfolding leaves made a delicate fretwork against a deep blue sky. The wind did not blow; everywhere were stillness soft and sweet, ...
— To Have and To Hold • Mary Johnston

... of this hall rose into a vaulted roof, enriched with fretwork, and supported, on three sides, by pillars of marble; beyond these, long colonnades retired in gloomy grandeur, till their extent was lost in twilight. The lightest footsteps of the servants, as they advanced through these, were returned in whispering ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe

... sweat had started on his forehead, and across one cheek the old gray fretwork of wrinkles began to shadow suddenly. "I've done my best!" he pleaded. "I swear I have! Only I've never known how! With a mother, now," he stammered, "with a wife, with a sister, with your best friend's sister, you know just what to do! It's a definite relation! ...
— Little Eve Edgarton • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott

... delight In his halls and chambers out of sight; Sometimes his tinkling waters slipt Down through a frost-leaved forest-crypt, 190 Long, sparkling aisles of steel-stemmed trees Bending to counterfeit a breeze; Sometimes the roof no fretwork knew But silvery mosses that downward grew; Sometimes it was carved in sharp relief 195 With quaint arabesques of ice-fern leaf; Sometimes it was simply smooth and clear For the gladness of heaven to shine through, and here He had caught the nodding bulrush-tops ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell

... bustle, the hurry, the glare and shadow, the steam and sparks of Vulcanian forging. The results, it is true, are by no means confused or disorderly—neither were those of the forges that worked under Lipari—but there certainly went much more to them than the dainty fingering of a literary fretwork-maker or the dull rummagings of a realist a ...
— The Human Comedy - Introductions and Appendix • Honore de Balzac

... our horses' hoofs ringing out sharp against the cobble stones, talking about such light matters as engage the mind of youth. The moon was shining very brightly above us, silvering the broad streets, and casting a fretwork of shadows from the peaks and pinnacles of the churches. At Master Timewell's courtyard I sprang from my saddle, but Reuben, attracted by the peace and beauty of the scene, rode onwards with the intention of going as far ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle

... curiosities, and such things. Miss Merington told me about it. Gladys is going to be with Miss Frost. She's going to make fudge, and paper fairies. And her father is going to give her a lot of fans,—Japanese ones,—and Dick is going to cut her out some fretwork ...
— Marjorie's Busy Days • Carolyn Wells

... house myself," was the answer; "but there's a man coming down from Boston next week to put the architecture on." To this New England farmer, architecture was not in the planning and the proportion and the structure; to him it seemed to mean only some sort of jig-saw fretwork added as an afterthought. To most of those who amuse themselves by writing about the drama, "literary merit" is chiefly a matter of pretty speeches, of phrase-making, of simile and ...
— Inquiries and Opinions • Brander Matthews

... are contemplating his figure. This splendid monument is entirely of black and white marble, of the early part of the sixteenth century. The figures just mentioned are of white marble, kneeling upon cushions, beneath a rich canopy of Gothic fretwork. They are in their professional robes; their heads are bare, exhibiting the tonsure, with the hair in one large curl behind. A small whole-length figure of St. George, their tutelary saint, is below them, in gilded marble: and the whole base, or lower frieze, of ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume One • Thomas Frognall Dibdin

... pure, delicate lineaments, the flowery bloom of youth were passing, the marks left in the course of those years were not merely of time and care, but also of exquisite emotions and noble thoughts. With such chisels Time works upon his statues, tracery and fretwork, well worth the loss of the first virgin beauty of the alabaster; while the fire within, growing constantly brighter and brighter, shows all these changes in the material, as rich and varied ornaments. The vase, at last, becomes a lamp of ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli

... hall floor. But the great wardrobes and the carved chest that used to stand here were gone ... The son of the house set foot upon the mighty staircase and rested his hand upon the white enameled, fretwork banister, lifting it, however, at each step and then gently dropping it again at the next one, as if he were timidly trying to see whether his former familiarity with this respectable old banister could be restored ... On the ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various

... workmanship; the precious metal had been oxydised to every shade of colour, and was wrought in beautiful Mosaic: the walls and ceiling were entirely covered with the same, in some parts burnished, to reflect as mirrors, in others elaborately carved in ornamental fretwork, as peculiar from the elegance of its design, as from the superiority of its execution. On each side of the throne extending to the door at which we entered, were a row of ladies, and behind them raised on a platform about two feet higher, another ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Captain Frederick Marryat

... it. No wind has resuscitated the face of the sleeping waters. A thicker crust by this time stagnates upon it. The moths, that were then battening upon its obsolete ledgers and day-books, have rested from their depredations, but other light generations have succeeded, making fine fretwork among their single and double entries. Layers of dust have accumulated (a superfoetation of dirt!) upon the old layers, that seldom used to be disturbed, save by some curious finger, now and then, ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb

... of the broad plains of the Champagne, dotted with white villages and scattered homesteads among the poplars and the limes, the winding Vesle glittering in the sunlight, and the dark towers of Notre Dame de Reims, with all their rich Gothic fretwork, rising majestically above ...
— Facts About Champagne and Other Sparkling Wines • Henry Vizetelly

... in the heavens. He sprang to his feet, and stood a moment or two shivering a little as he looked about him. It was very cold, and the little open space where the tent stood was flooded with silvery light, though here and there the shadows of the firs fell athwart it black as ink and sharp as a fretwork cut in ebony. Then he saw Saunders close beside him, fumbling with the ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss

... of the town was on a different scale, beginning with "frame," rising through the semidetached, culminating expensively in Mansard roofs, cupolas and modern conveniences, and blossoming, in extreme instances, into Moorish fretwork and silk portieres for interior decoration. The Murchison house gained by force of contrast: one felt, stepping into it, under influences of less expediency and more dignity, wider scope and more leisured intention; its ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan

... if it were made of the skeleton leaves of the forest when the green chlorophyll has decayed away in the winter and left only the gauzy veins and veinlets through which the leaves were made. Soon even this fretwork was gone, and there was no sign of it to be seen. The liquid had eaten or drank the solid metal up, particle by particle. ...
— Among the Forces • Henry White Warren

... last side of the quadrangle. The huge hall, divided from the passage by a screen of stone fretwork, so fine as to attest the hand of some architect in the reign of Henry III., stretched to his right; and so vast, in truth, it was, that though more than fifty persons were variously engaged therein, their number was lost in the immense space. Of these, at one end of the longer ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... sat; and I remember that while Lady de Brantefield expressed her just indignation against the worms, for having dared to attack this precious relique, I, kneeling to the chair, admired the curious fretwork, the dusty honeycombs, which these invisible little workmen had excavated. But John of Gaunt's chair was nothing to King John's table. There was a little black oak table, too, with broken legs, which was invaluable—for, as Lady de ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. IX - [Contents: Harrington; Thoughts on Bores; Ormond] • Maria Edgeworth

... moment,' answered Mrs. Loring, astonished. 'He wasn't very gossipy—I gathered that his chief interests were fretwork and foreign politics.' ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing

... before him a high-heaped assemblage of red-tiled roofs, and above them rose the fretwork of a soaring Gothic spire. A narrow river half encircled the town, and a battered old bridge, guarded by a round-towered gateway, led out into the open country towards a horizon bounded by a low range of blue hills. Trumpet-calls ...
— With the Procession • Henry B. Fuller

... Forest, brought up in the house that had sheltered his race for centuries, he would have felt uneasy and out of his element if he had been all at once transported to a modern capital. But in Schwarzburg he felt that he was at home. The huge cathedral with its spires and arches and rich fretwork of dark stone, seemed to him the model of what all cathedrals should be. The swift river that ran between overhanging buildings, and beneath old bridges that were carved with armorial bearings and decorated with the rare ironwork of cunning smiths, famous long ago, bore in its breast the ...
— Greifenstein • F. Marion Crawford

... neither more nor less than a couple of garrets, high in the air, in an old Moorish house, in an old Moorish court, decayed, silent, poverty-struck; with the wild pumpkin thrusting its leaves through the broken fretwork, and the green lizard shooting over the broad pavements, once brilliant in mosaic, that the robe of the princes of Islam had swept; now carpeted deep with the dry, white, drifted dust, and only crossed by the ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]

... the part of man to nature—and victorious efforts of his hands over all her opposition. Round about it every atom of the connecting masonry had mouldered away and sunk into heaps of rubbish below—so that all possibility of reaching the tower seemed to be cut off. But beyond this tower Gothic fretwork and imperfect windows rose from the surrounding crags; and in many places were seen pillars springing from two dissevered points of rock—rising higher and higher—and at last inclining towards each other in vast arches; but the central stones that should have locked the architraves ...
— Walladmor: - And Now Freely Translated from the German into English. - In Two Volumes. Vol. II. • Thomas De Quincey

... from the corner, he turned in abruptly at a frame house which was distinguished from its neighbors by unusually ornate fretwork about the porch and gables, and tiptoed gently over the struggling grass on the narrow sidelawn. For it was here that the Silvey family lived, and if Bill were his boon companion with tastes akin to his, strange to relate, the Silvey ...
— A Son of the City - A Story of Boy Life • Herman Gastrell Seely

... that Chippendale made was heavy, but the best of it had much beauty. His delicate fretwork tea-tables are a delight, with their fretwork cupboards and carving. He seemed to combine many sides in his artistic temperament, a fact that many people lay to his power of assimilating the work of others. He did not make sideboards in our sense of the word. ...
— Furnishing the Home of Good Taste • Lucy Abbot Throop

... the high tree the blossom wavering fell, And over them the tremulous isles of light Slided, they moving under shade: but Blanche At distance followed: so they came: anon Through open field into the lists they wound Timorously; and as the leader of the herd That holds a stately fretwork to the Sun, And followed up by a hundred airy does, Steps with a tender foot, light as on air, The lovely, lordly creature floated on To where her wounded brethren lay; there stayed; Knelt on one knee,—the child on one,—and ...
— The Princess • Alfred Lord Tennyson

... then at last the great, stormy, faraway outside world. But sleep did not come. Oh, no! Nothing new came at all except that particularly wretched, itching type of insomnia which seems to rip away from one's body the whole kind, protecting skin and expose all the raw, ticklish fretwork of nerves to the mercy of a gritty blanket or a wrinkled sheet. Pain came too, in its most brutally high night-tide; and sweat, like the smother of furs in summer; and thirst like the scrape of hot sand-paper; and chill like the clammy horror of raw fish. Then, just as ...
— Molly Make-Believe • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott

... fortifications about it, as if to make of it a sure stronghold in the sea. The strange architecture and carving of the rocks, with faces and crowned heads but half obliterated upon them; the lofty arches, with columns of fretwork bearing them; the pinnacles, and sharp spires; the fallen masses heaped against the base of the cliffs, covered with seaweed, and worn out of all form, yet looking like the fragments of some great temple, with its treasures ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • Hesba Stretton

... glory." These places in winter were glorified with the fine arts of ice,—"frozen music," as some one has defined architecture,—for here winter had constructed from water a wondrous array of columns, panels, filigree, fretwork, relief-work, arches, giant icicles, and stalagmites as large as, and in ways resembling, a big tree with a fluted full-length ...
— Wild Life on the Rockies • Enos A. Mills

... carved stone fretwork Was at Easter-tide put on. Then the Duchess closed her labours; And she died ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold

... the forest bare and old, The blast of December calls, He builds, in the starlight clear and cold, A palace of ice where his torrent falls, With turret, and arch, and fretwork fair, And pillars ...
— Poems • William Cullen Bryant

... of great size and beautiful proportion. The ceiling, encrusted with green fretwork, and studded with silver stars, rested upon clustered columns of white and green marble. In the centre of a variegated pavement of the same material, a fountain rose and fell into a green porphyry basin, and by the side of the fountain, upon a couch ...
— Alroy - The Prince Of The Captivity • Benjamin Disraeli

... intended to be crowned by spires) before they soar from the facade. Between the towers, in olden times, as we know from an illumination in a Froissart MS., stood a great statue of the Virgin. The whole of this glorious fretwork of stone, including the tracery of the rose window, was once refulgent with gold and azure and crimson, and the finished front in its mediaeval glory has been compared to a ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey

... Volubilis and Sale. Windus extols in particular the sunken gardens of cypress, pomegranate and orange trees, some of them laid out seventy feet below the level of the palace-courts; the exquisite plaster fretwork; the miles of tessellated walls and pavement made in the finely patterned mosaic work of Fez; and the long terrace walk trellised with "vines and other greens" leading from the palace to the famous stables, and over which it was ...
— In Morocco • Edith Wharton

... received a fatal mischief in their desire for a sceptre, they will go to Styx in a common death. Fast by my head stands my Swedish shield, which is adorned with (as) a fresh mirror of diverse chasing, and ringed with layers of marvellous fretwork. There a picture of really hues shows slain nobles and conquered champions, and the wars also and the notable deed of my right hand. In the midst is to be seen, painted in bright relief, the figure of my son, whom this hand bereft of his span of life. He ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")

... orange-trees, the uneven line of the bank. Just where she saw it the ground had crumbled, the line wavered, and was depressed, and though the water was not visible the high lateen sails of the native boats, going southward in the sun, showed themselves to her strangely behind the fretwork of the leaves. At her approach a hoopoo rose and flew away above the trees. Somewhere a lark ...
— Bella Donna - A Novel • Robert Hichens

... pillars supporting the chancel arch, and on either side a smaller arch, one enclosing the vestry, the other the organ-chamber; the space between the top of these arches and the roof being filled with fretwork. The windows are stained glass. The pulpit and prayer-desk and all the seats are of oak, and nicely carved. Under the chancel window is an oak reredos, on which are inscribed the Creed, the Lord's Prayer, and the Ten Commandments in Indian. The altar-cloth ...
— Missionary Work Among The Ojebway Indians • Edward Francis Wilson

... the palace builded for Aladdin, Yonder St. Mark uplifts its sculptured splendor— Intricate fretwork, Byzantine mosaic, Color on color, column upon column, Barbaric, wonderful, a thing to kneel to! Over the portal stand the four gilt horses, Gilt hoof in air, and wide distended nostril, Fiery, untamed, as in the days of Nero. Skyward, a cloud of domes and spires and crosses; Earthward, black ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting

... delicate foliage, subdued and faint of hue, as if the ashes of the Gethsemane agony had been cast upon it for ever; and to have traced line by line the gnarled writhing of its intricate branches, and the pointed fretwork of its light and narrow leaves, inlaid on the blue field of the sky, and the small, rosy-white stars of its spring blossoming, and the heads of sable fruit scattered by autumn along its topmost boughs—the right, in Israel, of the stranger, ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe

... instance, and next to exterminate the strange brood of armed men that sprang up from its sown teeth. In short, the old mythologies are well nigh as full of the serpent as those ancient Runic obelisks of our country, whose endless knots and complicated fretwork are formed throughout of the interlacings of snakes. Let us, however, accept as representative of this innumerable class of legends, the classical story, rendered yet more classical by the profound and reverend comment given by Bacon in his ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller

... struggle to assume that upright position which is the proud prerogative of man. In another moment the recumbent position was re-assumed, and the nurse returning found the baby's face covered with blood, streaming from a severe wound on the forehead, the iron fretwork having proved harder than the baby's head. The scar remains down to the present time, and gives me the valuable peculiarity of only wrinkling up one side of my forehead when I raise my eyebrows, a feat that I defy any of my readers to emulate. The heavy cut has, I suppose, so injured ...
— Autobiographical Sketches • Annie Besant

... pain or annoyance of the constriction is too severe. The upper arm beads are removed with little difficulty; but those on the forearm are taken off only once or twice a year, when new threads are substituted, or when the owner is in mourning. Beneath these ornaments a delicate fretwork of blue lines is tattooed, so that the woman's arms may not be white and unsightly when she is without her ...
— The Tinguian - Social, Religious, and Economic Life of a Philippine Tribe • Fay-Cooper Cole

... began to shed the leaves thereof upon her feet; the meadow-sweet wreathed amongst it made clear the sweetness of her legs, and the mouse- ear studded her raiment as with gems. There she stood amidst of the blossoms, like a great orient pearl against the fretwork of the goldsmiths, and the breeze that came up the valley from behind bore the sweetness of her fragrance ...
— The Wood Beyond the World • William Morris

... pines and giant blocks along the stream's immediate margin,—getting glimpses here and there of the snowy fretwork of churned water which laced the higher rocks, and the black whirls which spun in the deep pits of the roaring bed beneath us,—we came at last to the base of "Yo-wi-ye," ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various

... Simon Barlevi was gray, and in shape an oblong. It had a flat roof laid with a plaster of lime, about which was a fretwork of open tiles. Beneath, for doorway, was a recess, surmounted by an arch and covered with a layer of mud. On each side was ...
— Mary Magdalen • Edgar Saltus

... to slip through, and it was this which he had counted upon doing. Slip through he did, as he had often done at home for fun, and curled himself up there to see if he could anyhow remain during many hours. He found that he could; air came in through the brass fretwork of the stove; and with admirable caution in such a little fellow he leaned out, drew the hay and straw together, and rearranged the ropes, so that no one could ever have dreamed a little mouse had been at them. ...
— Bimbi • Louise de la Ramee

... front of the two riders. He seemed to know where he was going, for he led the way without a pause through long blank silent streets of indescribable filth and smells. The gloom of them was deepened by jutting balconies, and by innumerable badgirs that cut out a strange black fretwork against amazing stars. At last the three stopped in front of a gate in the vicinity of the citadel. This was not one of the gateways that separate the different quarters of Shuster, but a door in a wall, recessed in a tall arch and ornamented ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various

... only the outer sides are open. We look out over a moat filled with water and covered with leaves and pink flowers. These are the celebrated lotus flowers, or lilies. Behind rise red walls, with here and there quaint little maroon-coloured towers, all pinnacles and angles, showing up like fretwork against the sky. The moat is crossed by bridges of dazzling white. It is nearly midday, the hottest and stillest time of all the day, and we are lunching in the Circuit House at Mandalay, the old capital of the kings ...
— Round the Wonderful World • G. E. Mitton

... before the destruction was begun, had time to note that the coffin was a remarkably fine specimen of cabinet-maker's work. There were various sorts of wood inlaid with care, and the fretwork along its sides had been jig-sawed with much pains spent in detail, and the pilasters were turned with art. But the old man battered at all this excellence with savageness. It was evident that he was not merely providing kindling-wood—he ...
— The Landloper - The Romance Of A Man On Foot • Holman Day

... the gate, over the dark flow of the water, she drew him down beside her, and thrusting out her veiled head, she pointed upward and to the right to a jutting balcony of mashrubiyeh, where a pale light showed through the fretwork. ...
— The Fortieth Door • Mary Hastings Bradley

... transformation scene at the theatre. Under my window a colony of cleome made a soft web of bloom that drew me every morning for a long still time; and one day I discovered that I was looking into a rare fretwork of fawn and straw colored twigs from which both bloom and leaf had gone, and I could not say if it had been for a matter of weeks or days. The time to plant cucumbers and set out cabbages may be set down in the almanac, but never seed-time nor ...
— The Land of Little Rain • Mary Austin

... Foulkes and Hogue of Portland, architects, imitates, though it does not reproduce, the Parthenon of the Athenian Acropolis. (p. 191.) Doric marble is replaced by the natural columns of the great trees of Oregon, and the frieze of Phidias, by the fretwork of the bark of pine and fir. There are forty-eight of the great columns, the same number as in the outer colonnade of the Parthenon, and, coincidentally, one for each State of the Union. They were cut from ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber

... may be described as a kind of carved open fretwork—that is to say, the ground is entirely cut away, leaving the pattern standing free. This will form an excellent piece of discipline with regard to the design of background forms, because in such work as this, those forms assert ...
— Wood-Carving - Design and Workmanship • George Jack

... the party into the house, where they noticed that the internal arrangements effected differed from those in other places, as no partitions could, in fact, be discerned. Indeed, the four sides were all alike covered with boards carved hollow with fretwork, (in designs consisting) either of rolling clouds and hundreds of bats; or of the three friends of the cold season of the year, (fir, bamboo and almond); of scenery and human beings, or of birds or flowers; either of clusters of decoration, or of relics ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin

... one degree of tightness, for all the beauty of the work depends upon its evenness and regularity. This pattern may be extended to any size, and would look very well if the flowers were sewn in pale pink ingrain cotton, and the fretwork in white cotton. ...
— The Ladies' Work-Book - Containing Instructions In Knitting, Crochet, Point-Lace, etc. • Unknown

... party. No. 9, concert given by the men of the auxiliary park camp; draughts tournament. No. 10, religious discussion class; Lord Wm. Cecil; service conducted by Chaplain Berry. No. 11, Professor Thos. Welsh's Bible class; mid-week rally. No. 12, fretwork and carpentry class; games; letter writing. No. 13, mid-week service; Bible class; letter writing. No. 14, cinema show; indoor games. No. 15, lantern lecture on "India in the Trenches." No. 16, ladies' concert party; Hindi and Urdu classes; letter writing; games. All of this covers ...
— With Our Soldiers in France • Sherwood Eddy

... thousands of competitive designs," said the visitor, "this great fretwork of cross purposes, is a decided change from the quiet order of our rural life. Hmm! There everything is under the administration of one undisputed will, and is executed by the unquestioning obedience ...
— Dr. Sevier • George W. Cable

... multiplied in the innumerable gradations of thistle, teasel, hawkweed, and aster! We might have had flowers edged with lace finer than was ever woven by mortal fingers, or tasselled and braided with fretwork of silver, never tarnished—or hoarfrost that grew brighter in the sun. But it was not to be, and after a few hints of what might be done in this kind, the Fate, or Folly, or, on recent theories, the extreme fitness—and consequent ...
— Proserpina, Volume 2 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin

... fireplace. The fireplace was like all other fireplaces, but not so the stove. Stark and straight, rising from floor to ceiling, it was fixed immovably in the wall, a pilaster of porcelain. No stove-door interrupted its enameled shaft: only a register of fretwork for the emission of heat, and quite dissociated from the cares of fire-building, relieved the ennui of this sybaritic length of polish. It was kindled—and that is the special merit of this famous invention—from without, in the corridor which borders the line of rooms. If you put the idea to profit, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 12, No. 32, November, 1873 • Various

... was steered slowly round the great hull, and finally Ben selected a place to clamber up among the fretwork below the heel of the bowsprit. With a nimble leap he was soon clinging to the heavy carving, and rapidly swarming hand over hand to the galleon's deck. When he reached it, he flung down a rope with which ...
— The Boy Aviators' Treasure Quest • Captain Wilbur Lawton

... forest had been a handsome exploit, quickening British pride with the spectacle of an Englishman at the head of it. Civilian blood tingled in office and shop, claiming affinity with Drake's. It needed an Englishman to bill-hook a path through that fretwork of branches, and fall upon his enemy six weeks before he was expected—the true combination of daring and endurance that stamps the race current coin across the world! Economy also pleaded for Drake. But for him the country itself must ...
— The Philanderers • A.E.W. Mason

... the elbow of the great bend and breakfast made from choice bits of two ducks, shot just before. About noon they entered a great curving stretch of river, completely walled in on one side with hills, which resembled a vast causeway or an arched cathedral. The rain had worn a wondrous fretwork upon their sides and ribs of blue clay lent this effect to ...
— The Story of Paul Boyton - Voyages on All the Great Rivers of the World • Paul Boyton

... secret word that was flying past. Forty leagues we might have run in the cathedral, and as yet no strength of morning light had reached us, when before us we saw the aerial galleries of organ and choir. Every pinnacle of fretwork, every station of advantage amongst the traceries, was crested by white-robed choristers that sang deliverance; that wept no more tears, as once their fathers had wept; but at intervals that sang together to the ...
— The English Mail-Coach and Joan of Arc • Thomas de Quincey

... it to please everybody. It is simple and severe at the bottom, and daintily traceried and pinnacled at the top, and yet seems all of a piece—though it isn't—and everybody must like the taper and transparent fretwork of the fleche above, which seems to bend to the west wind,—though it doesn't—at least, the bending is a long habit, gradually yielded into, with gaining grace and submissiveness, during the last three hundred years. And, coming ...
— Our Fathers Have Told Us - Part I. The Bible of Amiens • John Ruskin

... o'er the west) a scene Of winter in his milder mood. Green fields, Which no kine cropped, lay damp; and naked trees Threw skeleton shadows. Hedges, thickly grown, Twined into compact firmness, with no leaves, Trembled in jewelled fretwork as the sun To lustre touched the tremulous water-drops. Alone, nor whistling as his fellows do In fabling poem and provincial song, The ploughboy shouted to his reeking train; And at the clamor, from a neighboring ...
— In The Yule-Log Glow, Vol. IV (of IV) • Harrison S. Morris

... plentifully. Never had he tasted such delicious wine. He knew that the Tono Sama drank no better sake; nor did his master occupy a more splendid apartment than this one of the wine feast. The silken figured fusuma (screens), the fretwork crowning them, the many lamps—it was now dark—in bronze and precious ...
— Bakemono Yashiki (The Haunted House) - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 2 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville

... going to work, followed by his half-bred cur, and cheered by the fragrance of his short pipe. He watches the marauding sparrows, and thinks with tenderness of the fate of less audacious birds; and then pauses to examine the strange fretwork erected at the mill-dam by the capricious freaks of the frost. Art, it suggests to him, is often beaten by Nature; and his fancy goes off to the winter palace of ice erected by the Russian empress. His ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen

... delicate tracery of foliage, animals, and fruits. The effect of the zigzags is to divide the wall into a number of triangular compartments, each of which is treated separately, covered with a decoration peculiar to itself, a fretwork of the richest kind, in which animal and vegetable forms are most happily intermingled. In one a vase of an elegant shape stands midway in the triangle at its base; two doves are seated on it, back to back; from between them ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 7. (of 7): The Sassanian or New Persian Empire • George Rawlinson

... beautiful exceedingly. With the exception of this, and of a narrow blue seam, looking like lapis-lazuli, which ran diagonally from summit to base, the broad surface of this side had the look of snow-white marble lace or fretwork. Passing thence to the north face, we came apparently upon the part at which the berg separated from its parent glacier. Here was a new effect, and one of great beauty. In material it resembled the finest statuary ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various

... it is not rare to find combs that have a band of beaten silver with a fretwork pattern laid across the convex part above the teeth. These combs, however, are imported from the Debabons of Moncyo or from the composite group living farther up the river. The writer knows ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan

... the long ribbon of No Man's Land—the ribbon which straggles without a break from one end of France to the other. We were getting very close to that barrier now—within a couple of miles of it; and the pure white stars of these glorified Roman candles were describing graceful curves behind a fretwork of trees an inch or two above the horizon. Every five or six seconds a rifle cracked somewhere along the line—very different from the ceaseless pecking of Gallipoli. Then a distant German machine-gun started its sprint, stumbled, went on again, tripped again. A second machine-gun farther ...
— Letters from France • C. E. W. Bean

... end to end. This nave is absolutely empty. Every thing tells of expectation, of anticipation. The mighty Lombard pillars on either side—supporting a triforium gallery of circular arches and slender pillars of marble fretwork, delicate as lace—are wreathed and twined with red taffetas bound with golden bands. The gallery of the triforium itself is draped with arras and rich draperies. Each dainty column is decked with flags and pennons. The aisles and transepts blaze with gorgeous ...
— The Italians • Frances Elliot

... indication to the curious miners, and could be put up by himself and a single uncommunicative Chinaman, without any one else being aware of its existence. There was, indeed, something quaint in this fragment of Old World handicraft, with its smooth-jointed paneling, in two colors, its little lozenge fretwork, its lapped roof, overhanging eaves, and miniature gallery. Inartistic as Madison was—like most men of rigidly rectangular mind and principle—and accustomed to the bleak and economic sufficiency of the Californian miner's cabin, he was touched strangely by its novel grace and ...
— The Bell-Ringer of Angel's and Other Stories • Bret Harte

... the Doge's Palace was full of the deepest interest. Mounting the beautiful fretwork marble staircase, just at the rear of St. Mark's, we entered the great colonnade, and ascended to the rooms above, which are all heavily decorated and adorned on wall and ceiling with paintings by the great masters. The Hall of the Great Council ...
— Fair Italy, the Riviera and Monte Carlo • W. Cope Devereux

... beard, was seated working at a table near the window. He was making little boxes. His only tools were a knife, a tiny saw the size of a nail file and a pot of glue. He was using wood from old cigar boxes, thin boards of unfinished mahogany upon which he executed fretwork and embellishments of extraordinary delicacy. All year long he worked at making the same size boxes, only varying them occasionally by inlay work, new designs for the cover, or putting compartments inside. He did not sell his work, he distributed it in presents to persons ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola

... pictures of wood. They told the tale of the family tree by the coats of arms and the shields emblazoned by the cutter of wood, sometimes being enriched with colour; at others the picture forms were created by inlaying and superadding fretwork. There were intricate carvings of the Sheraton and Chippendale periods, and there were the wonderful floral sprays, cherubs, and other ornaments so cunningly wrought by Grinling Gibbons and his followers. ...
— Chats on Household Curios • Fred W. Burgess

... up visions of marble halls, marble fretwork, basins with splashing waters and marble doves, pillars crowned with intertwined marble hearts and lovers' knots tied with marble ribbons; therefore Jill stood transfixed as she entered the great hall of columns, with the goddess's somewhat forbidding head ...
— Desert Love • Joan Conquest

... away in a murmur. I craned my neck aloft. It was so dark, I could see nothing save the fretwork of branches against the night sky. I whispered to Francis, who was just in front ...
— The Man with the Clubfoot • Valentine Williams

... is something indefinite and authoritative in the Post Office. He is a practical man. He can do fretwork, cook a steak, clean boots, find out what's wrong with the gas, and understand Waterloo Station; in an emergency he is invaluable. This is just as well, because destiny has decided that the life of THOMAS GIDLING shall be a series of emergencies. He ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101. October 10, 1891 • Various

... evening they strolled down to the glacier to look once again, for the last time, into its crevices, and wonder at its fairy caverns, fringed with icicles, like rows of silver daggers, and ceiled with translucent sapphire, beneath whose blue fretwork the stray sunbeams lost their way amid ice-blocks of luminous green, and pillars of lapis-lazuli and crystal. They sat on a huge boulder of granite, which some avalanche had torn down, and tumbled from the mountain's side, and there ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar

... pass the stalls with open lattice ends of carven work in which sat the elder choir-boys. Having secured the key, Laurence hid it instantly beneath the leaden saint on his cap, refastening the long pin which kept our Lady of Luz in her place through the fretwork of the ...
— The Black Douglas • S. R. Crockett

... Saracenic architecture of Cairo and its neighborhood. Nothing could be, in its way, more beautiful. I had never before realized how much beauty is obtainable under the limitations of Mohammedanism; the exquisite tracery and fretwork of the Saracenic period were a constant joy to me, and happily, as there had been no "restorers," everything remained as it had left the hands of the men of genius ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White

... of the palm. Now they lingered in the trellised walks closely covered over with vines and creepers; then they stopped to gather the golden bloom weighing down the mango boughs, and to smell the highly-scented flowers that hung from the green fretwork ...
— Vikram and the Vampire • Sir Richard F. Burton

... of genius is to be thought one; and no fear or apprehension lessens it. Alighieri, who had certainly studied the gospel, must have been conscious that he not only was inhumane, but that he betrayed a more vindictive spirit than any pope or prelate who is enshrined within the fretwork of his ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor

... this there are circular side skylights of much smaller dimensions. All needful light is furnished, by these and by the windows in the front and rear walls. Free ventilation is also secured by iron fretwork, in suitable portions of the ceiling. In the extreme rear are the two rooms for the librarian, to which access is had by means of the ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various

... ruins around him, but he had built her up again out of the psychic atoms, and Laura was alive. She showed the hand of the master by her own nullity. In her splendid vanity she was like some piece of elaborate golden fretwork, from which the substance had been ...
— Audrey Craven • May Sinclair

... bound to the bank then the broad-bosomed vessel Fast in its fetters, lest the force of the waters 30 Should be able to injure the ocean-wood winsome. Bade he up then take the treasure of princes, Plate-gold and fretwork; not far was it thence To go off in search of the giver of jewels: [66] Hrethel's son Higelac at home there remaineth,[4] 35 Himself with his comrades close to the sea-coast. The building was splendid, the king heroic, Great in his hall, Hygd ...
— Beowulf - An Anglo-Saxon Epic Poem • The Heyne-Socin

... exceeding fair, with lovely pinnacles and spires and windows like to carven ivory, and beside it a church fairer yet; and then before it and lower down the hill and on either side were huge towers, stern and stout, all without fretwork or ornament; and there were many of these and one to help the other, all about the hill, and down by the river-side a baily such as never was a stronger or a wiser. And Sir Godrick said: "See thou, lad, those fair and beauteous buildings were the ...
— The Sundering Flood • William Morris

... December—on the Marshes' table—no, no, I dare not; it's all a matter of crusts and cruets, frills and ferns. Perhaps there'll be a moment later by the sea. Moreover, I feel, pleasantly pricking through the green fretwork and over the glacis of cut glass, a desire to peer and peep at the man opposite—one's as much as I can manage. James Moggridge is it, whom the Marshes call Jimmy? [Minnie, you must promise not to twitch till I've got this straight]. James Moggridge travels ...
— Monday or Tuesday • Virginia Woolf

... here remark that I could only hear of one pool in the United States where Salmo salar can be caught. There are heaps of salmon on the Pacific slope, but they are not salar, and not sportive in the rivers to the fly. This pool is the watery fretwork of a dam where the tidal portion of a fifty-mile length of river is ended, and the salmon are therefore caught in brackish water always with the fly. Seventy were taken there ...
— Lines in Pleasant Places - Being the Aftermath of an Old Angler • William Senior

... fretwork. A closely packed mass of people was choking the sidewalk and street—his brougham was like an island in a troubled lake. He saw several policemen—they were trying to move the crowd on, but not trying sincerely. He saw three huge cameras, their operators under the black cloths, their lenses ...
— The Cost • David Graham Phillips



Words linked to "Fretwork" :   framework, latticework, lattice



Copyright © 2024 Diccionario ingles.com