"Gothic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... one day he discovered carved on one of the towers of the famous cathedral. "These Greek characters," he says, "black with age and cut deep into the stone with the peculiarities of form and arrangement common to the Gothic caligraphy that marked them the work of some hand in the Middle Ages, and above all the sad and mournful meaning which they expressed, forcibly impressed me." In "Notre Dame" there is all the tenderness for sorrow ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume V. • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... meanwhile musing in his Gothic library, and addresses a solemn invocation to Dulness, who accepts his sacrifice—a pile of his own works—transports him to her temple, and declares him to be the legitimate successor to the former rulers of her kingdom. The second book describes the games held in honour of the new ruler. Some ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... language;" and if it were a "noun of plural form and plural meaning," I still think that the singular form must have preceded it. The two instances CH. gives, "goods" and "riches," are more in point than he appears to suppose, although in support of my argument, and not his. The first is from the Gothic, and is substantially a word implying "possessions," older than the oldest European living languages. "Riches" is most unquestionably in its original acceptation in our language a noun singular, being identically the ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 32, June 8, 1850 • Various
... thickly crossed on the outside with iron bars, and filled with old iron spikes. Melissa's aunt unlocked the gate, and they entered the yard, which was overgrown with rank grass and rushes: the avenue which led to the house was almost in the same condition. The house was of real Gothic architecture, built of ...
— Alonzo and Melissa - The Unfeeling Father • Daniel Jackson, Jr.
... of Tintern Abbey, on the banks of the Wye, which are kept in high preservation by the Duke of Beaufort, afford a noble specimen of Gothic architecture, and retain marks ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, No. - 481, March 19, 1831 • Various
... began to sidle along again in and out among the trees, and on and on, never once looking at his companion till they were at the bottom of the garden. A pleasant piece of lawn, dotted with ornamental trees, sloped down to the river where, in a Gothic-looking boat-house, open at either end, a handsome-looking gig floated in ...
— Quicksilver - The Boy With No Skid To His Wheel • George Manville Fenn
... Grecian. It is true that his singular mind so ordered and disposed his classic lore as to impress it with something of an original and barbarous character—with an almost Gothic quaintness, more properly belonging to a rich native ballad than to the poetry of Hellas. There was a certain impropriety in his knowing so much Greek—an unfitness in the idea of marble fauns, and ...
— Eothen • A. W. Kinglake
... library. This is the gas plant, Daddy dear. The Gothic building on your left is the gymnasium, and the Tudor Romanesque beside it is the ...
— Daddy-Long-Legs • Jean Webster
... volcano peaks—the Battok, the Bromo, and the Widodaren—showing purple in the morning light. The Battok is a perfect cone, the lava-covered sides standing out in clearly defined ridges like the buttresses of a Gothic structure. The Bromo is the only one of the three now active. As we gaze down, we are startled by a deep groaning noise, and out of the wide crater mouth there issues a mass of grey smoke and ashes laden and streaked with ...
— Across the Equator - A Holiday Trip in Java • Thomas H. Reid
... and exertion. She could not shake it off. To her all things were empty, blank, immensely purposeless. Religion failed to touch her state—religion, that is, in the only form accessible. The interior of some frowning Gothic church of old Castile, or, from another angle, of some mellow Latin basilica, might have found the required mystic word to say to her. But Protestantism, even in its mild Anglican form, shuts the door ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... My father was sitting at the table sketching a plan of a summer villa, with Gothic windows, and with a fat turret like a fireman's watch tower—something peculiarly stiff and tasteless. Going into the study I stood still where I could see this drawing. I did not know why I had gone in to my father, but I remember ...
— The Chorus Girl and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... town, or extracted from the castle cellars, were broached, or the heads knocked in, and the contents poured into jugs and flagons of every shape and size. Although the light of the conflagration, glaring red through the tall Gothic windows, lit up the hall and rendered any further illumination unnecessary, a number of torches had been fixed round the apartment, the resinous smoke of which floated in clouds over the heads of the revelers. Seating themselves upon benches, chairs, and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLII. Vol. LV. April, 1844 • Various
... extraordinary looking inn. It was built of stone, with towers and battlements, like an old castle. The inside was very extraordinary, too. The public room looked, as Mr. George said, like an old Gothic hall of the middle ages. There were tables set out here for people to have breakfasts and dinners, and Mr. George ordered a dinner for us. There were other parties of tourists there, some ...
— Rollo in Scotland • Jacob Abbott
... however, could have been more unlike in outward aspect. The prince was, if we may say so, built on the Gothic model—fair, blue-eyed, bulky of limb, huge, muscular, massive, with a soft beard and moustache—for he had not yet seen twenty-four summers—and hair that fell like rippling gold on his shoulders. Captain Arkal, on the contrary, was dark, with a thick reddish beard, ...
— The Hot Swamp • R.M. Ballantyne
... Cinthio, dress'd in their Gothic Habits, Scaramouch, Harlequin and Musick. Charmante ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. III • Aphra Behn
... towers of defence, at first round, then polygonal, then square, flanked the west fronts, veritable keeps, where the sacred vessels and relics might be preserved and defended in case of attack. Soon spaces are clamant for decoration and the stone soars into the beauty of Gothic vaulting and tracery. ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... quiet, Barbara, her hair hanging loose outside her dressing gown, slipped from her room into the dim corridor. With bare feet thrust into fur-crowned slippers which made no noise, she stole along looking at door after door. Through a long Gothic window, uncurtained, the mild moonlight was coming. She stopped just where that moonlight fell, and tapped. There came no answer. She opened the door a little way, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... present building is nothing—a pseudo-Gothic monstrosity, built about 1830," laughed Delia; "but there are some old remains and foundations of the abbey. It is a big, rambling old place, and I should think dreadfully in want of doing up. My grandfather was a bit ...
— Delia Blanchflower • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... virtue in it; but I can not alter the nature of man. The fact is so; and these people of the Southern colonies are much more strongly, and with a higher and more stubborn spirit, attached to liberty, than those to the Northward. Such were all the ancient commonwealths; such were our Gothic ancestors; such in our days were the Poles; and such will be all masters of slaves, who are not slaves themselves. In such a people the haughtiness of domination combines with the spirit of freedom, fortifies ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... came under the influence of Gothic architecture. There was a blood affinity between Mr. Polly and the Gothic; in the middle ages he would no doubt have sat upon a scaffolding and carved out penetrating and none too flattering portraits of church dignitaries upon the ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... as wide as any of the others, while the outermost with the strips of panelling and carving which come beyond them are canted, following the line of the apse wall. Across these five upright divisions and in a straight line is thrown a great flattened trefoil arch joined to the back with Gothic vaulting. In the middle over the large division it is fringed with the intersecting circles of curved branches, while from the top to the blue-painted apse vault with its gilded ribs and stars a forest of pinnacles, arches, twisting and intertwining branches and leaves rises high above the ...
— Portuguese Architecture • Walter Crum Watson
... chapter-house is a detached building, connected by a cloister with the north aisle of the choir, and is on the model of that at York. The arch of entrance from the aisle, is said to exceed in elegance and correctness of execution, almost every thing of the kind in the kingdom; the chapter-house is of Gothic architecture, and the arch forming the approach is considered of modern insertion, the sculpture being finer and more delicate than any thing near it. This church and Ripon are said to be the only parochial, as well as collegiate, churches ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 14, - Issue 389, September 12, 1829 • Various
... the last of the Latin poets, forming the transitional link between the Classic and the Gothic mode ...
— Helps to Latin Translation at Sight • Edmund Luce
... however, for the face joke to be applied to others to be successful. Since, in spite of the complexion creams, "plumpers," and nose-machines advertised in the papers, faces will continue to be here and there somewhat Gothic, the wise thing for their owners is to accept them and think of other things, or console themselves before the unflattering mirror with the memory of those mortals who have been both quaint-looking and gifted. Wiser still perhaps to make ...
— A Boswell of Baghdad - With Diversions • E. V. Lucas
... The coffin will inclose your body, and the last earthly journey begin. Now," the spirit continued, "you shall all use my sight instead of your own." The walls of the cave seemed to expand, till they resembled those of a great cathedral, while the stalactites appeared to be metamorphosed into Gothic columns. They found themselves among a large congregation that had come to attend the last sad rites, while the great organ played Chopin's "Funeral March." The high vault and arches received the organ's tone, and a sombre light pervaded the interior. There was a ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds • J. J. Astor
... Architecture. All technicalities which could be dispensed with have been accordingly excluded; and when it has been unavoidable that a technical word or phrase should occur, an explanation has been added either in the text or in the glossary; but as this volume and the companion one on Gothic and Renaissance Architecture are, in effect, two divisions of the same work, it has not been thought necessary to repeat in the glossary given with this part the words explained in that prefixed to ...
— Architecture - Classic and Early Christian • Thomas Roger Smith
... be a mere fancy of mine," returned Lynde. "However, we have similar geological formations in the mountainous sections of New England; the same uncompromising Gothic sort of pines; the same wintry bleakness that leaves its impress even on the midsummer. A body of water tumbling through a gorge in New Hampshire must be much like a body of water tumbling through a ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... castellated building, immense and magnificent, in a faulty and incongruous style of architecture, indeed, but compensating in some degree for these deficiencies of external taste and beauty by the splendour and accommodation of its exterior, and which a Gothic castle, raised according to the strict rules of art, could scarcely have afforded. The declining sun threw over the pile a rich colour as Coningsby approached it, and lit up with fleeting and fanciful tints the delicate foliage of the rare shrubs and tall thin trees that clothed the acclivity ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... mound of earth surmounted it on the outside on which trees had rooted. The Earl of Moray, superior of the village, offered to restore the church to its original state, and, when examined by competent authorities, the supposed Chapter House was found to be a beautiful little Gothic chapel with groined roof supported {144} by a central pillar, similar to the building which once covered St. Margaret's well at Restalrig. Further explorations proved that the little octagonal building had evidently been raised over the miraculous ...
— A Calendar of Scottish Saints • Michael Barrett
... classification. Without taking into account the outward differences of size and form, the variety of flower and fruit, the peculiarities of leaf and branch, he sees even in their general architecture types of structure as distinct as Norman, Gothic and Egyptian. But if the first young germs of these three plants are placed before him and he is called upon to define the difference, he finds it impossible. He cannot even say which is which. Examined under the highest powers of the ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... the Eastern empire was torn away by the arms of the Saracens. Syria and Egypt were oppressed by the Arabian caliphs; and, after the reduction of Africa, their lieutenants invaded and subdued the Roman province which had been changed into the Gothic monarchy of Spain. The islands of the Mediterranean were not inaccessible to their naval powers; and it was from their extreme stations, the harbors of Crete and the fortresses of Cilicia, that the faithful or rebel ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 5 • Edward Gibbon
... fly-away nymphs and graces and seraphim? Why, the best and most skilled artists of their day in Europe. And whence comes it that the merest child can now see instinctively how out of place they are, how disfiguring, how incongruous? Why, because the Gothic revival has taught us all by degrees to appreciate the beauty and delicacy of a style which to our eighteenth century ancestors was mere barbaric mediaevalism; has taught us to admire its exquisite purity, and to dislike the obstrusive introduction ...
— Post-Prandial Philosophy • Grant Allen
... ever you have business that takes you to Bayonne, come in by river and from the sea, and how well you will understand the little town and its lovely northern Gothic! ...
— First and Last • H. Belloc
... travelled through a country beautiful beyond imagination, with all the possible diversities of rock, sometimes towering up like ruined castles, spires, pyramids, &c. We passed one place so like a ruined Gothic abbey, that we halted a little, before we could satisfy ourselves that the niches, windows, ruined staircase, &c. were all natural rock. A faithful description of this place would ...
— The Journal Of A Mission To The Interior Of Africa, In The Year 1805 • Mungo Park
... ours. As in the age of the Reformation, so in this, the German element of the modern character predominates. During the two centuries from which we have emerged, the Latin element had the upper hand. Our love of the Alps is a Gothic, a Teutonic, instinct; sympathetic with all that is vague, infinite, and insubordinate to rules, at war with all that is defined and systematic in our genius. This we may perceive in individuals as well ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... rich perpendicular, marking the point where the last Gothic meets the early Renaissance. Nicholas Close has commonly been considered to be the architect. He was a man of Flemish family, and for a few years held the cure of the parish of St. John Zachary, which church stood on the west ...
— A Short Account of King's College Chapel • Walter Poole Littlechild
... friendly calls. Still, something in the aspect of the place harmonised with my humour, and I worked my way round to the back, where the ground, after affording level enough for a kitchen-garden, broke steeply away. Both the word Gothic and the thing itself were still unknown to me; yet doubtless the architecture of the place, consistent throughout, accounted for its sense of comradeship in my hour of disheartenment. As I mused there, with the low, grey, purposeful-looking ...
— Dream Days • Kenneth Grahame
... Street), where a bevy of young girls were dancing, while their elders sat at their doors and looked on; but she did not attempt to join them. A little further, just past the Church of Saint Mary Magdalen, they came to a small gothic building over a well. Here, for this was Saint Maudlin's Well, Haimet drew the water, and they set forth on ...
— One Snowy Night - Long ago at Oxford • Emily Sarah Holt
... to read the Family Paper except at long intervals. She served up quite good dinners, and by the end of the fortnight few people would have known The Dales. For not only was the house clean and sweet—the drawing-room quite a charming old room, with its long Gothic windows, its tracery of ivy outside, and its peep into the distant rose-garden; the hall bright with great pots of flowers standing about—but the girls themselves were no longer in rags. The furniture dealer's was not the only shop ...
— Girls of the Forest • L. T. Meade
... first evening, the arrow landed us in a great spruce grove where the trees averaged a hundred and twenty-five feet in height. Below, the ground was cleared and level and covered with fine moss. The great gray trunks rose to Gothic arches of green. It was a churchly place. And running through it were little streams living ...
— Tenting To-night - A Chronicle of Sport and Adventure in Glacier Park and the - Cascade Mountains • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... little pheasantry, and a little dairy for show, and a little cottage for ditto, with a grotto full of shells, and a little hermitage full of earwigs, and a little ruin full of looking-glass, "to enlarge and multiply the effect of the Gothic."—"But you could only put your head in, because it was just fresh painted, and though there had been a fire ordered in the ruin all night, ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. 6 • Maria Edgeworth
... interior division of the house with screens or light partitions instead of walls lent itself to a style of decoration which was quite as different in its exigencies and character from Occidental mural decorations as was Japanese architecture from Gothic or Renaissance. The first native school of decorative artists was the Yamato-ryu, founded in the eleventh century by Fujiwara Motomitsu and reaching the height of its powers in the twelfth century. ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... use of explaining or analyzing it? Such work as this means the patience and simplicity of all feminine life; and can be produced, among us at least, no more. Gothic tracery itself, another of the instinctive labyrinthine intricacies of old, though analyzed to its last section, has become now the symbol only of a foolish ecclesiastical sect, retained for their shibboleth, joyless and powerless for all good. The very labyrinth of the grass and flowers of our ...
— Ariadne Florentina - Six Lectures on Wood and Metal Engraving • John Ruskin
... by a Gothic richness of detail,* the picturesque counterpart of its intricacy of thought, and, perhaps for this very reason, never so fully displayed in any subsequent work. Mr. Browning's genuinely modest attitude towards it could not preclude the ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... indignation of his uncle the Rector, and to the consequent delight of Sir Pitt, who was induced to go himself once or twice, which occasioned some violent sermons at Crawley parish church, directed point-blank at the Baronet's old Gothic pew there. Honest Sir Pitt, however, did not feel the force of these discourses, as he always ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... was all through the Indian Mutiny, are two very remarkable people; they keep a public- house where we often get our beer when out for our Sunday walk. She owns to sixty-seven, I should think she was a full seventy-five, and her husband, say, sixty-five. She is a tall, raw-boned Gothic woman with a strong family likeness to the crooked old crusader who lies in the church transept, and one would expect to find her body scrawled over with dates ranging from 400 years ago to the present time, just as the marble figure itself is. She has a great beard and moustaches and three ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... the torches, and accustom our vision to the gloom; when, both of these ends being attained, we advanced a few paces into the cave, and a sight of the most indescribable sublimity burst upon us. The appearance was that of a huge Gothic cathedral, having its roof supported upon pillars of spar, moulded into the most regular shapes, and fluted and carved after the most exact models of architecture. The roof itself was indeed too lofty to be discerned, nor ...
— The Campaigns of the British Army at Washington and New Orleans 1814-1815 • G. R. Gleig
... But the works of men have their classification too, for in human effort like causes produce like effects. Most people know what schools of poetry, painting, and music are. In architecture, we know, too, that there are great divisions—such as classic and Gothic. But many have yet to learn how far classification may go; and it is a new feature to have the peculiar national architecture of Scotland separated from that of England, and its peculiarities traced to interesting national events ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 445 - Volume 18, New Series, July 10, 1852 • Various
... him stop, to look at the enchanted rain of tiny lights. We stood in a billowy meadow, with the pale gray-green of the stacked oats dimly silvered by the baby moon, that was hurrying down the west after the sun. The bundles of grain made pointed, gothic arches, and through these, back and forth, in and out, threaded the fireflies, like fairies with lanterns searching for lost members ...
— Lady Betty Across the Water • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... earlier yet, Ad. Mueller had looked upon taxes not in the light of an insurance premium, but as "the interest of the invisible and yet absolutely necessary intellectual capital of the nation." (Elemente, III, 75.) Of course, the State is much more than a species of capital; just as a Gothic cathedral is something more than a piece of masonry, but does not on that account cease to be ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... who may be disposed to ask, what could induce me to write in so difficult a measure, I can only answer, that it pleases my ear, and seems, from its Gothic structure and original, to bear some relation to the subject and spirit of the Poem. It admits both of simplicity and magnificence of sound and of language, beyond any other stanza that I am acquainted with. ...
— The Minstrel; or the Progress of Genius - with some other poems • James Beattie
... things Graver to speak of than admiring ladies Or Gothic architecture. Here, to-day, Unto your doubting eyes there shall be made A revelation of profounder scope Than aught that life has ...
— Mr. Faust • Arthur Davison Ficke
... promised to be sinister. The Roman Empire no longer existed save in name. Foreigners, come from all the countries of the Mediterranean, plundered the provinces under its authority. The army was almost altogether in the hands of the Barbarians. They were Gothic tribunes who kept order outside the basilica where Ambrose had closed himself in with his people to withstand the order of the Empress Justina, who wished to hand over this church to the Arians. Levantine eunuchs domineered over the exchequer-clerks ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... that stood hand in hand about the Maypole? It could not be that the fauns and nymphs, when driven from their classic groves and homes of ancient fable, had sought refuge, as all the persecuted did, in the fresh woods of the West. These were Gothic monsters, though perhaps of Grecian ancestry. On the shoulders of a comely youth uprose the head and branching antlers of a stag; a second, human in all other points, had the grim visage of a wolf; a third, still with the trunk and limbs of a ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... apprehensions and constant irritation. To the eye there is nothing but beauty; to the imagination pleasant pageants of old time; to the ear the soothing cadence of the leaves as the gentle breeze goes over. The beeches rear their Gothic architecture, the oaks are planted firm like castles, unassailable. Quick squirrels climb and dart hither and thither, deer cross the distant glade, and, occasionally, a ...
— The Open Air • Richard Jefferies
... time to look about us at leisure, and observe the beauties of this place of civic festivity. The Hall you see in front of you, is the place devoted to the entertainment usually given by the Lord Mayor on his entrance upon the duties and dignities of his office. It is a fine gothic building, in which the various courts of the city are held. The citizens also meet there for the purpose of choosing their representatives in Parliament, the Lord Mayor, Sheriffs, &c. It was originally built in the year ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... manufacturers of champagne. In the same way the petit vin de Chierry, dexterously prepared and judiciously mingled with other growths, often figures as "Fleur de Sillery" or "Ay Mousseux." In reality it is not until we have passed the ornate modern Gothic chteau of Boursault, erected in her declining years by the wealthy Veuve Clicquot, by far the shrewdest manipulator of the sparkling products of Ay and Bouzy of her day, and the many towers and turrets of which, rising above ...
— Facts About Champagne and Other Sparkling Wines • Henry Vizetelly
... out-of-doors clothes: black frock coats and tall hats. The whole school was there, some thirty of us, in the charge of an usher, who knew as little as we did of the things which we were about to see. We crossed the threshold of the laboratory, not without excitement. I entered a great nave with a Gothic roof, an old, bare church through which one's voice echoed, into which the light penetrated discreetly through stained glass windows set in ribs and rosettes of stone. At the back were huge raised benches, with ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... favorite idea of a library. He appears to have got so far as this, that the ceiling is to be of carved oak, with ribs running to a boss overhead, and finished mediaevally with ultramarine blue and gilding,—and then away he goes sketching Gothic patterns of book-shelves which require only experienced carvers, and the wherewithal to pay them, to be the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... of tea,' he added, showing me a paper parcel. 'On the envelope there is a printed account of the Chinese system of writing, extracted from authors of the most established reputation. These things I print, principally with the hope of, in some degree, removing the worse than Gothic ignorance prevalent amongst natives of these parts. I am from London myself. With respect to all that relates to the Chinese real imperial tea, I assure you sir, that—' Well, to make short of what you doubtless ...
— The Romany Rye • George Borrow
... first Monograph shows the demand existing for artistic work of this high grade; and an equal sale may be predicted for the portfolio that illustrates the beautiful marble Gothic building of the Connecticut State Capitol. This possesses perhaps even a higher interest than the Harvard Law School, because it is a great public building, and not ...
— The Olden Time Series, Vol. 1: Curiosities of the Old Lottery • Henry M. Brooks
... a man of taste." The honest Englishman takes the liberty to judge and to condemn men who have made so pernicious a use of their talents. This pretension to make the conscience speak is in the eyes of the French man of letters a gothic prejudice. Listen how he expresses himself on the subject: "Criticism in France has freer methods.—When we try to give an account of the life, or to describe the character, of a man, we are quite willing to consider him simply ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... unanimous in favour of the expedition to Moscow. "They regarded it," says Segur, "as a mere hunting party of six months;" but that did not hinder it from bringing the Cossacks to Paris. The old Romans were unanimous in their cry for cheap bread, and they brought the Gothic trumpet to their gates from its effects. A vast majority of the electors of Great Britain in 1831, were in favour of Reform: out of 101, 98 county members were returned in the liberal interest; and now they have got their reward, in seeing the Reformed Parliament preparing ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... west of Dover Plains Village, is also well worth a visit. Here a small stream has worn out a remarkable cavern in the rocks forming a gothic arch for entrance. It lies in a wooded gorge within easy walk from the village. Many years ago the writer of this handbook paid it an afternoon visit, and the picture has remained impressed with wonderful vividness. The archway opens into a solid rock, and a stream of water issues from ...
— The Hudson - Three Centuries of History, Romance and Invention • Wallace Bruce
... deforming. chaos, randomness (disorder) 59. [taking form from surroundings] fluid &c 333. V. deface [Destroy form], disfigure, deform, mutilate, truncate; derange &c 61; blemish, mar. Adj. shapeless, amorphous, formless; unformed, unhewn^, unfashioned^, unshaped, unshapen; rough, rude, Gothic, barbarous, rugged. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... others. They were ornamented with oak carvings and fluting, painted windows, and other such decorations. There was one in particular, which was called the Jerusalem chamber. This was the grand receiving-room of the abbot. It had a great Gothic window of painted glass, and the walls were hung with curious tapestry. This room, with the window, the tapestry, and all the other ornaments, remains to ...
— Richard III - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... beautiful is this strange crypt, when one's eye gets accustomed to the gloom, with its exquisite ribbed and vaulted roof, supported upon huge circular columns. Returning to the court, another doorway conducts us into a most superb Gothic hall, with a row of slender columns down the center. This was the monks' refectory in ancient times; adjoining this is another grand hall, divided into four aisles by rows of granite columns, all of the most perfect thirteenth century work. Above these are two other halls, still more ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 430, March 29, 1884 • Various
... lately— "''Pon honor, he improved my memory greatly.'" Here curtsying low, I asked the blue-legged sprite, What share he had in this our play to-night. 'Nay, there—(he cried)—there I am guiltless quite— "What! choose a heroine from that Gothic time "When no one waltzed and none but monks could rhyme; "When lovely woman, all unschooled and wild, "Blushed without art, and without culture smiled— "Simple as flowers, while yet unclassed they shone, "Ere Science called their brilliant world her own, ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... glowing description of a choral service in the Cathedral. She described the building itself with the precision of an architect, not excepting the massive key which was also in keeping with the style of architecture—the form of a cross. And this grand and imposing Gothic structure, its solemn service, inspiring music pealing along the corridors, echoing and re-echoing through the vaulted arches, the solemn procession wending slowly down from the altar and entering by the eastern door, the prelates in the ...
— Marguerite Verne • Agatha Armour
... arches—appears to be in consummate repair. At all points where decay has laid its finger, the structure is clamped with iron, or otherwise carefully protected; and being thus watched over,—whether as a place of ancient sanctity, a noble specimen of Gothic art, or an object of national interest and pride,—it may reasonably be expected to survive for as many ages as have passed over it already. It was sweet to feel its venerable quietude, its long-enduring peace, and yet to observe how kindly and even cheerfully it received the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... men sit down in them, and you ask a man how he likes the church: he says, "I like it very well, but I can't hear." The voice of the preacher dashes against the pillars. Men sit down under the shadows of the Gothic arches and shiver, and feel they must be getting religion, or something ...
— T. De Witt Talmage - As I Knew Him • T. De Witt Talmage
... Pothinus and his brethren, the city was pillaged and burned. [308:3] Septimius Severus narrowly escaped murder by the hand of one of his own children. Decius, whose name is associated with an age of martyrdom, perished in the Gothic war. Valerian, another oppressor, ended his days in Persia in degrading captivity. The Emperor Aurelian was assassinated. Diocletian languished for years the victim of various maladies, and is said to ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... original book, German was printed in fraktur ("gothic") type while English and other languages were in Roman type. For this e-text, fraktur is shown in {braces} (introduction, notes, glossary), and Roman in ...
— Eingeschneit - Eine Studentengeschichte • Emil Frommel
... young tradesman in Holland or Germany goes a-courting, I am told the first question the young woman asks of him, or perhaps her friends for her, is, 'Are you able to pay the charges?' that is to say, in English, 'Are you able to keep a wife when you have got her?' The question is a little Gothic indeed, and would be but a kind of gross way of receiving a lover here, according to our English good breeding; but there is a great deal of reason in the inquiry, that must be confessed; and he that is not able to pay the charges, should never begin the journey; for, be the ...
— The Complete English Tradesman (1839 ed.) • Daniel Defoe
... was fair and frosty, and we were astir early. Pine Mountain loomed before us like the steep roof of some vast gothic cathedral. The ridge seemed as straight as a house ridge, and we could not see that any natural depression made the ascent much easier in one place than another. Our road ran up a spur of the mountain till the regular slope was reached, ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V2 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... biographers, who calling in malice to the aid of their ignorance, have not scrupled to assert that the father of Sheridan died unattended by any of his nearest relatives!—Such are ever the marks that Dulness leaves behind, in its Gothic irruptions into the sanctuary of departed Genius—defacing what it cannot understand, polluting what it has not the soul to reverence, and taking revenge for its own darkness, by the wanton profanation of all that is sacred ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore
... called the "lantern" the weak point in the system of Gothic, or rather of English Gothic, architecture (for in French churches there is usually no lantern), and there is something to be said for ...
— The Cathedral Church of York - Bell's Cathedrals: A Description of Its Fabric and A Brief - History of the Archi-Episcopal See • A. Clutton-Brock
... Scripture, which, in their mouths, was sometimes degraded by misapplication, gave, in Macbriar's exhortation, a rich and solemn effect, like that which is produced by the beams of the sun streaming through the storied representation of saints and martyrs on the Gothic window ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... temperament, he viewed all things from the artist's standpoint. His distaste for politics was strong, and his lack of interest in political intrigues was profound. "His artistic soul, nurtured in the illustrious literary school of Seville," says Correa, "and developed amidst Gothic Cathedrals, lacy Moorish and stained-glass windows, was at ease only in the field of tradition. He felt at home in a complete civilization, like that of the Middle Ages, and his artisticopolitical ideas and his fear of the ignorant crowd made him regard with marked predilection ...
— Legends, Tales and Poems • Gustavo Adolfo Becquer
... and laid out in lots and avenues, plans of gothic design were made for chapel and superintendent's residence, and contract for construction was awarded the writer. The project was not entirely an unselfish one, but profit was not the dominating incentive. ...
— Shadow and Light - An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century • Mifflin Wistar Gibbs
... the sand floor, the bird built his bower by taking each stem in his beak, holding it very firmly and then with a strong sidewise and downward thrust slicking it upright in the sand, to stand and to point "just exactly so." The finished bower was a Gothic tunnel with walls of grass stems, about eighteen inches long and a foot high. In making it the male bird wrought as busily as a child building a playhouse of blocks. Our bird would pick up pieces of blue ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday
... and flues. The third year advanced a man to the nice points of the trade such as the foreign bonds—Flemish, Dutch, Roman and Old English; cutting and turning of arches of all kinds,—straight, cambered, semi-circular, three centred elliptical, and many forms of Gothic and Moorish arches; also brick panels and cornices. Finally it gave practice in the laying out of plans and work from these plans. Whatever time was left was devoted to speed in all these things as far as it was consistent with ...
— One Way Out - A Middle-class New-Englander Emigrates to America • William Carleton
... the notes and alterations in the Devonshire folio [Mr. Collier's] is of a mixed character, varying even in the same page, from the stiff, labored Gothic hand of the sixteenth century to the round text-hand of the nineteenth, a fact most perceptible in the capital letters. It bears unequivocal marks also ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... he writes to Moore from Ravenna, in 1821, "I have always regarded him as the greatest name in our Poetry. Depend upon it, the rest are barbarians. He is a Greek temple, with a Gothic cathedral on one hand, and a Turkish mosque and all sorts of fantastic pagodas and conventicles about him. You may call Shakspeare and Milton pyramids, if you please; but I prefer the Temple of Theseus, or the Parthenon, to a mountain ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... science not yet matured. It is the great conquest of modern civilization; it is the indispensable condition to the full development of the activity and enterprise of man. The liberation of the artisan and the labourer, is the signal triumph of modern over ancient times whether we regard classic or Gothic antiquity. Viewing things on a large scale, it may be considered as a late triumph; and, without depreciating its value, we may easily admit that there remains much to be done in the cultivation of the free artisan, to enable him to govern himself, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844 • Various
... elms now flung their short morning shadows; on the encompassing houses, some of exceeding stateliness and beauty, others of a simpler, less distinguished character, yet each instinct with a dignity and seemliness which exquisitely harmonised it with its finer fellows; and finally on the slender Gothic loveliness ...
— Good Old Anna • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... for the grandiose, carried to excess in St. Peter's, is visible in other sixteenth century ecclesiastical buildings, such as the Badia at Florence. Small {687} as this is, there is a certain largeness of line that is not Gothic, but that goes back to classical models. St. Etienne du Mont at Paris is another good example of the influence of the study of the ancients upon architecture. It is difficult to point to a great cathedral or church built in Germany during this century. In England portions ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... eccentric habits, and consisting simply of an iron cylinder with a pipe that passed through the window, had been manufactured for them at Palma; a charming clay vase surrounded with a garland of ivy displayed its beauty on the top of the stove; a beautiful large Gothic carved oak chair with a small chest convenient as a book-case had, with the consent of the sacristan, been brought from the monks' chapel; and last, but not least, there was, as we have already read in the letters, a piano, in the first weeks only a miserable ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... me,' he said, and conducted them into the open air of the inner court, almost opposite the archway in its buildings leading to the stone bridge, whose gothic structure bestrid the moat ...
— St. George and St. Michael • George MacDonald
... flag, floating from the summit of the temple, proclaimed to mankind that it was 'Sleary's Horse-riding' which claimed their suffrages. Sleary himself, a stout modern statue with a money-box at its elbow, in an ecclesiastical niche of early Gothic architecture, took the money. Miss Josephine Sleary, as some very long and very narrow strips of printed bill announced, was then inaugurating the entertainments with her graceful equestrian Tyrolean flower-act. Among ...
— Hard Times • Charles Dickens*
... yourself what Thomson would call an interminable plain,[21] interspersed in a lovely manner with beautiful green hills. The Seasons here are only shifted by Summer and Spring. Winter with his fur cap and his cat-skin gloves, was never seen in this charming retreat. The Castle is of Gothic structure, awful and lofty: there are fifty bed-chambers in it, with halls, saloons, and galleries without number. Mr. M——'s father, who was a man of infinite humour, caused a magnificent lake to ...
— Boswell's Correspondence with the Honourable Andrew Erskine, and His Journal of a Tour to Corsica • James Boswell
... bad taste at the least possible expense, and certainly never included any notion of ornament in the details. Now, large sums are expended on places of worship, without reference to creed. First-rate architects are employed. Fine Gothic structures are produced. The rebuilding of the Greyfriars' Church, the restoration of South Leith Church and of Glasgow Cathedral, the very bold experiment of adopting a style little known amongst us, the pure Lombard, in a church for Dr. W.L. ...
— Reminiscences of Scottish Life and Character • Edward Bannerman Ramsay
... is, it should serve as a base to the building. It will at once be seen, therefore, that terraces are most in place against those buildings that have strong horizontal lines, and they are little suitable against buildings with very broken lines and mixed or gothic features. In order to join the terrace to the building, it is usually advisable to place some architectural feature upon its crown, as a balustrade, and to ascend it by means of architectural steps. The terrace elevation, therefore, becomes ...
— Manual of Gardening (Second Edition) • L. H. Bailey
... of the Gothic age, Missal with the blazoned page, Whence, O Missal, hither come, From what ...
— Collected Poems - In Two Volumes, Vol. II • Austin Dobson
... place of London was, oddly enough, the nave of St. Paul's Cathedral. This superb Gothic church, later destroyed by the Great Fire, was used as a common passageway, as a place for doing business and for meeting friends. In {56} the late morning hours, the men-about-town promenaded there, displaying their gorgeous clothes and hailing those whom ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... This change took place before the Goidelic Celts broke away and invaded Britain in the tenth century B.C., but while Celts and Teutons were still in contact, since Teutons borrowed words with initial p, e.g. Gothic fairguni, "mountain," from Celtic percunion, later Ercunio, the Hercynian forest. The loss must have occurred before 1000 B.C. But after the separation of the Goidelic group a further change took place. Goidels preserved the sound represented by qu, or more ...
— The Religion of the Ancient Celts • J. A. MacCulloch
... forms of the government were hardly altered; so that the state was wholly regulated by its ancient usages; and, like some Gothic edifice, its beauty and solidity were perfectly original, and different from the general rules and modern theories of surrounding nations. The country loved its liberty such as it found it, and not in the fashion of any Utopian plan traced by some new-fangled system of political philosophy. ...
— Holland - The History of the Netherlands • Thomas Colley Grattan
... the Great Seal, Owyn is represented with a bifid beard, very similar to Richard II, seated under a canopy of Gothic tracery; the half-body of a wolf forming the arms of his chair on each side; the back-ground is ornamented with a mantle semee of lions, held up by angels. At his feet are two lions. A sceptre is in his right hand; but ...
— Henry of Monmouth, Volume 1 - Memoirs of Henry the Fifth • J. Endell Tyler
... Armada, therefore, having, been disabled or damaged—according to a Spanish eye-witness—and all their small shot exhausted, Medina Sidonia reluctantly gave orders to retreat. The Captain-General was a bad sailor; but he was, a chivalrous Spaniard of ancient Gothic blood, and he felt deep mortification at the plight of his invincible fleet, together with undisguised: resentment against Alexander Farnese, through whose treachery and incapacity, he considered. the great Catholic cause to have been, so foully sacrificed. Crippled, maltreated, ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... galloped over the private way, which ran along the side of a gentle hill until one end of the mansion came into view. It seemed likely there was no suspicion who we were, for a man digging in the garden, stood up and took off his cap to us. The front door looked like the Gothic entrance of a church, and I sprang from my horse and knocked loudly against the studded oak. An old man opened the door without any measure of caution, and I stepped inside. I asked him who he was, and he said he was ...
— The O'Ruddy - A Romance • Stephen Crane
... cropped after the fashion of certain Greenwich villagers. My disappointment was not great; my lady was not suggestive of a boarding-school miss. But I had hoped to find somewhere a trace of the copper-bronze head whose royalty of hair I had shorn as the traitors shore King Childeric's Gothic locks. ...
— The Thing from the Lake • Eleanor M. Ingram
... to the south is Bishop Langton's Chantry, though the work is partly De Lucy's, including the walls and the early vaulting shafts. The defaced front-screen and the oak-panelling all round are very rich examples of late Gothic, and the stone vaulting has been compared in point of elaboration with that in the chapel of Henry VII. at Westminster. On the groining, at the junction of the ribs, is carved Bishop Langton's rebus, consisting of the musical sign for a "long" upon a ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Winchester - A Description of Its Fabric and a Brief History of the Episcopal See • Philip Walsingham Sergeant
... nation, until the temple of Eresburg was destroyed by Charlemagne, and the column itself transferred to the monastery of Corbey, where, perhaps, a portion of the rude rock idol yet remains, covered by the ornaments of the Gothic era." [Palgrave on the English Commonwealth, vol. ...
— The Fifteen Decisive Battles of The World From Marathon to Waterloo • Sir Edward Creasy, M.A.
... was not taken down till the villa had been despoiled of all the curious and costly toys and bawbles with which it was packed and crammed. At each stroke of the hammer,—and for four-and-twenty days the quaint Gothic mansion resounded with the "Going, going, gone" of the auctioneer,—at every stroke of the hammer Walpole must have turned uneasily in his grave; for at every stroke of that fatal implement some beautiful miniature, or rare engraving, or fine painting, or precious ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... corrupted both by that superstition and by that philosophy against which she had long contended, and over which she had at last triumphed. She had given a too easy admission to doctrines borrowed from the ancient schools, and to rites borrowed from the ancient temples. Roman policy and Gothic ignorance, Grecian ingenuity and Syrian asceticism, had contributed to deprave her. Yet she retained enough of the sublime theology and benevolent morality of her earlier days to elevate many intellects, and to purify many hearts. Some things ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... heavy and the burden was great that descended to Isabella in 1474, for although she came to the throne through Gothic ancestry and in conformity with Gothic law, her father's heir and the chosen of the people, yet the nation had already poured out its blood in defence of her "succession" and the war of her "accession" was pending. No wonder that Isabella never forgot that it was through the people ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 3 of 8 • Various
... nothing in my aching head but a few words, some such stupid sentences as, "It's done," or, "It's accomplished" (in Polish it is much shorter), or something of the sort, repeating itself endlessly. The long procession moved out of the narrow street, down a long street, past the Gothic front of St. Mary's under its unequal towers, ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... splendid dignity, like some imperial palace of richest architecture; the symmetry of the parts and the chaste magnificence of the whole delight the eye and command the approbation of the judgment. The pathetic and moral Euripides has the solemnity of a Gothic temple, whose storied windows admit a dim religious light, enough to show its high embowed roof, and the monuments of the dead which rise in every part, impressing our minds with pity and terror as emblems of the uncertain and short duration of human greatness, and with an awful sense ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... clinging to the sides of a rugged mountain a narrow track of shining steel wound its way upward, marking the pathway of civilization in its march from sea to sea, while near the summit of a neighboring peak a quaint cabin of unhewn logs arranged in Gothic fashion was built ...
— At the Time Appointed • A. Maynard Barbour
... all fit and ready for the Worship of God, gorgeous in the sunny splendors of the atmosphere of Palestine. So they were built. A single motion of the arm of a rude, barbarous Assyrian Spearman, or drunken Roman or Gothic Legionary of Titus, moved by a senseless impulse of the brutal will, flung in the blazing brand; and, with no further human agency, a few short hours sufficed to consume and melt each Temple to a smoking mass ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... could, and then began to inspect the place in which he was imprisoned, to find that the ideas he had formed of it in the dark were not far wrong, inasmuch as there was a plastered wall, a stone floor, an ancient-looking door with a big keyhole, through which he could see nothing, and the Gothic window with iron bars across, and no glass to keep out ...
— In the King's Name - The Cruise of the "Kestrel" • George Manville Fenn
... vocations; the postulant has need—and this is quite natural—to mould himself in surroundings which please him, to encourage himself in a church which wraps him round, in a somewhat sombre chapel; and to obtain that result you want the Romanesque or Gothic style." ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans
... This will be the more readily comprehended when we remember that Father Persons' books, which Brinkley had printed before, were in English, and that English prose was then still generally printed in Gothic character[9]. ...
— Ten Reasons Proposed to His Adversaries for Disputation in the Name • Edmund Campion |
