"Motif" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... degree not before known. Exaggerated gains, violent fluctuations in prices, meteoric rises and collapses—these gave rein to a gambling spirit perennial in man. The word "Projects" enters into literature as a recurrent motif, strangely familiar to our present generation, which needs only to turn Defoe's Essay on Projects into contemporary language to see the similarities between the year 1697 and the year 1939. That essay is filled with talk of "new Inventions, Engines, and I know not what, which have rais'd ...
— A Voyage to Cacklogallinia - With a Description of the Religion, Policy, Customs and Manners of That Country • Captain Samuel Brunt
... Tous les sujets Bulgares, quelle que soit leur religion, jouiront d'une complete egalite de droits. Ils pourront concourir a tous les emplois publics, fonctions et honneurs, et la difference de croyance ne pourra leur etre opposee comme un motif d'exclusion. ...
— Notes on the Diplomatic History of the Jewish Question • Lucien Wolf
... tried (the Valhalla motif). At first it seemed to produce the opposite effect, for the pulse was lowered. Later it rose to a rate double the normal, and the tension was diminished. The impression described by the subject afterward was a feeling ...
— Complete Hypnotism: Mesmerism, Mind-Reading and Spiritualism • A. Alpheus
... the following note: "Jean Mandeville, ou Manduith, theologien et mathematicien, etait ne a St. Alban en Angleterre d'une famille noble. On le surnomma pour un motif inconnu, ad Barbam et magnovillanus. En 1322, il traversa la France pour aller en Asie, servit quelque temps dans les troupes du Sultan d'Egypte et revint seulement en 1355 en Angleterre. Il mourut a Liege chez les Guilhemins, le 17th Novembre, 1372. Il laissa au dit monastere ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... nations. But the Hebrew possessed one characteristic which differentiated him from all other people. He was a monotheist, and he saw his God in every thing, every event, every place. His concept of God was his life-motif. This concept evolved slowly, painfully, throughout the centuries. The ancient Hebrew patriarchs saw it as a variable God, changeful, fickle, now violently angry, now humbly repentant, now making contracts with mankind, now petulantly destroying His own handiwork. ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... of this work that survives in common use is the immortal lyric, "I love thy kingdom, Lord," founded on a motif in the one hundred and thirty-seventh psalm. This, with Doddridge's hymn, "My God, and is thy table spread?" continued for a long time to be the most important church hymn and eucharistic hymn in the English language. We should not perhaps have looked for the gift of them to two Congregationalist ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... Flanking this main fountain are the two smaller fountains crowned by the graceful mermaids designed by Arthur Putnam. With their lovely pools and the splendor of gushing waters, these three serve as the motif for the formal ...
— The Architecture and Landscape Gardening of the Exposition • Louis Christian Mullgardt
... life—if in such a life one moment may without impertinence be thought more critical than another—must have come somewhere about 1870. M. Vollard once asked him what he did during the war. "Ecoutez un peu, monsieur Vollard! Pendant la guerre j'ai beaucoup travaille sur le motif a l'Estaque." M. Vollard is too good a patriot to add that during the war he also went into hiding, having been called up for military service. Cezanne, I am sorry to say, was an insoumis—a deserter. He seems to have ...
— Since Cezanne • Clive Bell
... Saint-Dominique eut temoigne quelque deplaisir de voir un pareil honneur defere exclusivement a l'ordre de Saint Francois; soit qu'Innocent craignit pour ses ambassadeurs les dangers d'un voyage aussi penible; soit enfin par quelque motif que nous ignorons, il nomma une seconde ambassade, a laquelle il fit prendre une autre route, et qui fut composee uniquement de Freres-precheurs. Ceux-ci, au nombre de cinq, avoient pour chef un nomme Ascelin, et parmi eux etoit un frere Simon, de Saint-Quentin, dont j'aurai bientot occasion ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, - and Discoveries of The English Nation, Volume 10 - Asia, Part III • Richard Hakluyt
... her career and her love affairs with a realism that is convincing, but free of offence. The heroine allures and for a long time retains the devotion and affection of a typical solitary Londoner, who is not less devoted to the bon motif; but the inevitable break occurs. There is plenty of humour and of first-hand knowledge in this study of upper Bohemian life of to-day, and ...
— Werwolves • Elliott O'Donnell
... placing them in the empty spaces between the infinite number of spherical worlds which he assumed. There his gods lived in bliss like ideal Epicureans. Lucretius, the only poet of this school, extolled them in splendid verse whose motif he borrowed from Homer's description of Olympus. In this way Epicurus also managed to uphold public worship itself. It could not, of course, have any practical aim, but it was justified as an expression of the respect man owed to beings whose existence expressed ...
— Atheism in Pagan Antiquity • A. B. Drachmann
... after contending that Brentano's RheinmAerchen,[41] which, though written before 1823, were not published until 1846, must have given Heine the hair-combing motif, Thorn says: "Also kann nur Brentano das Vorbild geliefert haben." This cannot be correct. What is, on the contrary, at least possible is that Heine influenced Brentano.[42] The RheinmAerchen were finished, in first form, in 1816. And Guido GOerres, to whom Brentano willed them, and who ...
— Graf von Loeben and the Legend of Lorelei • Allen Wilson Porterfield
... nothing," replied Madame decisively, "firstly, because I did not think that I would be doing any good by putting my own surmises into my brother's head, and, secondly, because I must confess that I thought that nice young Englishman had acted pour le bon motif." ...
— The Bronze Eagle - A Story of the Hundred Days • Emmuska Orczy, Baroness Orczy
... The motif of the story embodied in the following poem was crudely outlined in a brief sketch printed in an early collection of the authors verse, and subsequently cancelled for a purpose not until now accomplished. Wyndham Towers is not to be confused with this discarded sketch, the text of which ...
— Wyndham Towers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... wears the pussywillow for her flower, and this makes a delightful springlike motif for decoration. For the breakfast have round tables or one long table with twig baskets of pussywillows tied with bows of soft grasses, raffia dyed a silvery grey. The table is set with the old-fashioned ...
— Breakfasts and Teas - Novel Suggestions for Social Occasions • Paul Pierce
... of despair: "O, mein Mann! O, mein Mann!" She turned away, staggering about like some creature that has received a death wound. Hal's eyes followed her; her cry, repeated over and over incessantly, became the leit-motif of this ...
— King Coal - A Novel • Upton Sinclair
... millionaire—insulted. (If you were a Constant Reader of popular fiction, Michael Daragh, you'd know how difficult it is for millionaires to retain the shreds of human decency.) And that's just the prelude, but it introduces the motif which runs through the entire composition. Staid, middle-aged husbands of friends, editors, business men, authors,—Don Juans all! Rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief, doctor, lawyer, Indian chief, enmesh the road the ladies are ...
— Jane Journeys On • Ruth Comfort Mitchell
... that 'Marche Triomphante to-night great?" He hummed a bar from the motif, "That's it—my—" he cried, hitting his chair arm with his fist, "but that's a big thing—almost good enough for Wagner to have done; big and insistent and strong. I'm getting to like music with go to it—with bang and brass. Wagner does ...
— A Certain Rich Man • William Allen White
... little more than half the width of the gallery, Joan and Poluski worked steadily for twenty minutes. The Pole sang to himself incessantly, now bassooning between his thin lips the motif of some rhapsody of Lizst's, now murmuring the words of some catchy refrain from the latest review. Anybody else who so transgressed the rules would have been summarily turned out by the guards; but the ...
— A Son of the Immortals • Louis Tracy
... the life of the city. Congo Square, one of the great open squares in the old Creole quarter, was named for the slaves who used to congregate in its limits and dance the weird dances to the tunes of blood-stirring minor strains. Those who know the weird liet-motif of Coleridge-Taylor's Bamboula dance have heard the tune of the Congo dance, which every child in New Orleans could sing. Gottschalk's Danse des Negres is almost forgotten by this generation but in it he recorded the music of the West Indians. Camp Street, to-day one of the principal ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... Deux sentiments sont ici en presence, le desir de la paix et l'honneur national. Je l'ai souvent dit a Londres, je le repete de Paris. Le sentiment de la France—je dis de la France, et non pas des brouillons et des factions—est qu'elle a ete traitee legerement, qu'on a sacrifie legerement, sans motif suffisant, pour un interet secondaire son alliance, son amitie, son concours. La est le grand mal qu'a fait la Convention du 15 Juillet, la est le grand obstacle a la politique et a la paix. Pour guerir ce mal, pour lever cet obstacle, il faut prouver ...
— The Greville Memoirs (Second Part) - A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852 - (Volume 1 of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... wool and turned the men on the planks into colourless figures of giants, then a wild burst of thunderstorms, mad elemental uproar and rain. Through it all, against illness, heat, confusion of mind, one master impetus prevailed with me, to keep the shipping going, to maintain one motif at least, whatever else arose or ceased, the chuff of the spades, the squeaking and shriek of the barrows, the pluppa, pluppa, pluppa, as the men came trotting along the swinging high planks, and then at last, the ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... "dancing men" bored her. And she did not understand the district's quota of intellectuals very well; she was good at listening to symphony concerts, but she never had much luck in discussing the cleverness of the wood winds in taking up the main motif. It is history that she refused a master of arts with an old violin, a good taste in ties, and an ...
— Free Air • Sinclair Lewis
... something more—something still more personal and intimate. She was curious, and at the same time clearly resolved she must not hear it. She felt she must get him talking upon some impersonal theme at any cost. She snatched about in her mind. "What is the exact force of a motif?" she asked at random. "Before I heard much Wagnerian music I heard enthusiastic descriptions of it from a mistress I didn't like at school. She gave me an impression of a sort of patched quilt; little bits of patterned stuff coming ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... organization who guard the imperial crown in a fairy castle and are favorable to the ancient house of Hohenstaufen but inimical to the ruling Habsburgs. The basis is the newly awakening ideal of German unity but Arnim fails to express this clearly, and the concluding motif, that Germany's crown is to be spiritually won, resolves the whole into a frosty allegory. The progress of the story is, however, extremely interesting; the whole spacious and varied scene of medieval life is there, and as Tieck and Wackenroder discovered Nuremberg, and Brentano the Rhine, ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... It was only ninety minutes long, and I sat in a nervous swoon as I listened to the Childe Roland theme, the squat tower theme, the sudden little river motif, the queer gaunt horse theme, the horrid engine of war motif, the sinister, grinning, false guide subject—in short, to all the many motives of the poem, with its apotheosis, the dauntless blast from the brave knight as he at ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... to M. Zola in 1872, when he used continually to take his friend Paul Alexis for a ramble through the Halles. I have in my possession, however, an article written by M. Zola some five or six years before that time, and in this one can already detect the germ of the present work; just as the motif of another of M. Zola's novels, "La Joie de Vivre," can be traced to a short story written for a ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... the future look in those years! In this period Erasmus repeatedly reverts to the glad motif of a golden age, which is on the point of dawning. Perennial peace is before the door. The highest princes of the world, Francis I of France, Charles, King of Spain, Henry VIII of England, and the emperor Maximilian have ensured ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga
... up the thread of the talk where it had been left the previous watch; but neither was in a talking mood, and they soon fell silent. Presently a girl's rich voice rose to the accompaniment of Oddington's banjo, an instrument but poorly adapted to the motif of the music, which was plaintive, yearning. The deep contralto notes brought full meed of meaning, although the words were German; low, deep, uncertain at first—the ponderings of love, of devotion, of doubt—then swelling ...
— Dan Merrithew • Lawrence Perry
... generations,—and she has the Irish voice. It's delightful to hear it in a London theatre. That laugh, now, when she doubles over at the hips—who ever heard it out of Galway? She saves her hand, too. She's at her best in the second act. She's really MacConnell's poetic motif, you see; makes the ...
— Alexander's Bridge and The Barrel Organ • Willa Cather and Alfred Noyes
... never completely one." Something drove him to write, perhaps one of those shapeless hungers—a need for self-expression? a wish to find a more authentic kind of experience?—that would become a recurrent motif ...
— Winesburg, Ohio • Sherwood Anderson
... of view, if they did not possess a historical interest." As if historical interest could make them less deplorable from an artistic point of view! It might make them less deplorable from another point of view. Three times he explains the motif of the book. Here is the third and, at present, the last version of the motif: "That whether we are conquerors or conquered, triumphant or despairing, prosperous or pitiful, well or ailing, we are all these things through Him that loves us." I seem to remember that the late Frances ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... doubt; they were laughing. The musicians of the orchestra had given the signal; some of them did not conceal their hilarity. The audience, certain then that the music was laughable, rocked with laughter. This merriment became general; it increased at the return of a very rhythmical motif which the double-basses accentuated in a burlesque fashion. Only the Kapellmeister went on through the ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... old man in the corner was unconscious or asleep; the woman who tended him had stopped her spiritual ministrations. A child, propped up in one of the rear seats, had awakened to cry, fallen asleep, awakened and wept again. She had in her voice a thick, mucous note, which became to Eleanor the motif in that symphony of misery. Otherwise, no one seemed to be making sound except the two physicians. Her own doctor came up once, pressed a syringe again into the bare arm, whispered that ...
— The Readjustment • Will Irwin
... ever notice," observed Dick, "that every Mayfield time has a sort of motif? You have a central idea, and you expand on it, like writing ...
— Stanford Stories - Tales of a Young University • Charles K. Field
... onion soup which was strange; and as ominous of our journey into the Latin world as a blast of trumpets opening a Wagnerian overture. Indeed that onion soup was threaded through our whole trip like a motif. Our dinner that night ended in cheese and everything. It was our first meal aboard the boat. During two or three courses, we had considered the value of food as a two-way commodity—going down and coming up—but later in the dinner we ordered our food ...
— The Martial Adventures of Henry and Me • William Allen White
... the Western Hemisphere is conceived as taurine and characterized as a human bull. The base of the Equestrian is surrounded by a frieze of architecturalized fish and the rearing sea horses that furnish the principal upper motif for the play of water. Energy himself is presented as a nude male, typically American, standing in his stirrups astride a snorting charger - an exultant super-horse needing no rein - commanding with grandly elemental gesture of extended arms, ...
— Sculpture of the Exposition Palaces and Courts • Juliet James
... influence are the aggressive female like Mirrha, reminiscent of Shakespeare's Venus; the hunting motif in Dom Diego and Amos and Laura, recalling Adonis' obsession with the hunt; and the catalog of the senses in Philos and Licia, pp. 15-16, and Hiren, stanzas 75-79, which imitates Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis, ll. 427-450. Only Mirrha among ...
— Seven Minor Epics of the English Renaissance (1596-1624) • Dunstan Gale
... more extravagant than another idea that is mentioned repeatedly among the notes—that of an otherwise penniless man wandering about London with a single million-pound bank-note in his possession, a motif which developed into a very ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... the first time the sinister motif of the George Sand affair. In deference to Mr. Hadow I shall not call it a liaison. It was not, in the vulgar sense. Chopin might have been petty—a common failing of artistic men—but he was never vulgar in word ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... they have developed an excessive modesty in regard to bodily exposure which is in striking contrast to people who live on the warm sands of the South Seas. Inca sculptors and potters rarely employed the human body as a motif. Tiahuanaco is pre-Inca, yet even here the images are clothed. They were not represented as clothed in order to make easier the work of the sculptor. His carving shows he had great skill, was observant, and had true ...
— Inca Land - Explorations in the Highlands of Peru • Hiram Bingham
... the heart of the lanternlight Mrs. Kent was performing one of the more expurgated and perfunctory of her dances for the benefit of the select audience that remained, to scattered, perfunctory applause. The motif of it was ...
— The Wishing Moon • Louise Elizabeth Dutton
... taunt him. Out of that attitude grew the religious concepts of man as a mere speck of dust dependent on superior powers on high, who can only be appeased by complete surrender. All the early sagas rest on that idea, which continues to be the LEIT-MOTIF of the biblical tales dealing with the relation of man to God, to the State, to society. Again and again the same motif, MAN IS NOTHING, THE POWERS ARE EVERYTHING. Thus Jehovah would only endure man on condition of ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... are full of elders. They use the berries to colour the wine. A German writer, R. Voss, wove their fragrance into a kind of Leit-motif for one of his local novels. I met him once by accident, and am not anxious to meet him again. A sacerdotal and flabbily pompous old man—straightway my opinion of his books, never very high, fell to zero, and has there remained. He knew these regions well, and doubtless sojourned at one ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... vowed to a great sacrifice. She dominated the scene, and Lady Marayne, with a certain astonishment in her eyes and a smouldering disposition to irony, was the half-sympathetic, half-resentful priestess of her daughter-in-law's unparalleled immolation. The MOTIF of motherhood was everywhere, and at his bedside he found—it had been put there for him by Amanda—among much other exaltation of woman's mission, that most wonderful of all philoprogenitive ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... I had an idea last night, after you had gone to bed, and I was watching the stars through the pines. I won't read it to you yet, for it wants working up, but it's good—I am sure it is good! And that little stream along from the house; I found a song motif in that,—'Clear babbling over amber bed!' How's that for a word- picture? Shows the whole thing, doesn't it? The crystal clearness of the water; the music of its flow, the curious golden colour of the rocks. I'm always pleased when I can hit off a description in a line. ...
— Big Game - A Story for Girls • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... people whose faces we had stepped on, or who had been suddenly interrupted in a snore of powerful dimensions by the violent impact of a hard head against the diaphragm. By the time we had reached our own place the remarks had swelled to a chorus with a deplorable motif. ...
— With Our Army in Palestine • Antony Bluett
... at once the strain abandoned the woods-note and took another motif. At first it played softly in the higher notes, a tinkling, lightsome little melody that stirred a kindly surface-smile over a full heart. Then suddenly, without transition, it dropped to the lower register, and began to sob and wail in the full ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... Celts, and which is very manifest in the ornaments of the Mycaenean hoards—that is, perhaps, of the ancient Greek heroic age. The causes of these differences in the development of ornament, the causes that made Celtic genius follow one track, and pursue to its aesthetic limits one early motif, while classical art went on a severer line, it is, perhaps, impossible at present to ascertain. But it is plain enough that later art has done little more than develop ideas of ornament ...
— Custom and Myth • Andrew Lang
... attempt on the theatre was the prose farce of "Mr. H——," in which a wholly inadequate motif was made to supply material for two acts. The piece was played once (Drury Lane, 10th December, 1806) and damned. The eponymous hero, who chooses to be known merely by his initial, creates quite a sensation ...
— Charles Lamb • Walter Jerrold
... religious education. Hebrew sages were the forerunners of the modern religious education movement, for they devoted their time to developing the moral and spiritual ideals and character of the individual. And then the great teacher of Nazareth was a Rabbi, a Jew. The social motif is exceedingly strong throughout Jewish history and literature. Social justice, social service, and the universal brotherhood of man are the dominant ideas in the Old Testament, and they constitute a heritage of priceless value to the world and to ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... these give him he chooses the ones that chance to be beautiful. And in time these new beauties have become worn away like the trite metaphors that are now no longer metaphors, but part of the "funded capital." That was a ridiculous device of Schumann's, who found a motif for one of his loveliest things by using the letters of his temporary fair one's name—A B E G G; but it may not be so utterly unlike the procedure by ...
— The Psychology of Beauty • Ethel D. Puffer
... with desperate laudation a classical equanimity which he was never able to reach. He would have us love fate and laugh and dance; but there were drops of scorching tears upon the page of his prophecy and the motif of his challenge was the terrible gravity of his own nature; though the conclusion of his seriousness was that we must renounce all seriousness. It is Nietzsche himself who teaches us that in estimating the ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... roof of the building there comes floating the dull roar of the turbulent river Kura, mingled with shouts from the hucksters of the Avlabar Bazaar (the town's Asiatic quarter) and as a cross motif thrown into these sounds, the sighing of the wind and the cooing of doves. In fact, to be here is like being in a drum which ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky
... visit is due from his Aunt Selina, an elderly lady having ideas about things quite apart from the Bohemian set in which her nephew is a shining light. The way in which matters are temporarily adjusted forms the motif of the story. ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde
... warned him. "Therefore I advise you to keep a steady hand. I'm too big a brand for a slim chap like you to pluck from the burning, to our mutual comfort. Apropos, there's another grand idea for your sermon. You can suppress the naughty nicotine motif for the theme, if you choose. But what in thunder, made you put on the harness, in the ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... sometimes if that were a characteristic of all men, if that were the big motif in the lives of such men as Paul Abbey and Jack Fyfe, for instance; if everything else, save the struggle of getting and keeping money, resolved itself into purely incidental phases of their existence? For herself she considered that wealth, or the getting of wealth, was only a ...
— Big Timber - A Story of the Northwest • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... one or more verses, either exactly repeated or slightly modified, at the end of a stanza or less frequently at another fixed place (4, 10, 34). Aside from its rhythmic-melodic effect the refrain helps to center the attention on a certain idea or motif. ...
— A Book Of German Lyrics • Various
... to send herewith a diagram of the new rooms in which your brother Slason is now [brown ink] ensconced. The drawing may be bad and the perspective may be out of plumb, but the motif is good, as you [green ink] will allow. All that Brother Slason needs now to symmetrize his new abode is a box from home—a box filled [purple ink] with those toothsome goodies which only a kind, loving, indulgent sister can make and donate to an absent [black ink] brother. Having completed ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... sing them again to Sister Mayberry, child, that her ears may be rejoiced with mine." And Mother Mayberry caught at the top of the gate as the girl slipped the nodding baby down into her arms and in her wonderful muted voice hummed the Grail motif while the Deacon raised his thin old hands ...
— The Road to Providence • Maria Thompson Daviess
... was sitting in the company of the young couple. Andreas Doederlein, being in an unusually happy mood, went to the piano, and began playing the shepherd's motif from ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... My agents have ever since been on your track, but it was reserved for me to discover the last of the Birkenheads in the anonymous author of the 'Baronet's Wife.' That romance, in which you have had the baseness to use your knowledge of a mother's guilt as a motif in your twopenny plot, unveiled to me the secret of your hidden existence. You must stop the story, or alter the following numbers; you must give up your discreditable mode of life. Heavens, that a Birkenhead should be a literary character! ...
— In the Wrong Paradise • Andrew Lang
... the Walhalla motif, and Dorothea, bending over her doll, coquettishly kissed the ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... distingues, avec une correspondance touchant une matiere a laquelle il me semble que le Danemark ne soit guere moins interesse que ne le sont les Etats Unis; le premier y ayant contribue le digne motif, l'autre en ...
— Maria Mitchell: Life, Letters, and Journals • Maria Mitchell
... disgraceful sort, and the story is a story of low life. Women play an important role in the narrative, more important perhaps than they do in any other kind of ancient literature—at least their individuality is more marked. The efficient motif is erotic. I say the efficient, because the conventional motif which seems to account for all the misadventures of the anti-hero Encolpius is the wrath of an offended deity. A great part of the ...
— The Common People of Ancient Rome - Studies of Roman Life and Literature • Frank Frost Abbott
... body. Many critics consider this leather too cold in tone; but I consider this its highest merit, since it was evidently made so to emphasize by contrast the impassioned fervor of the hasp. The highlights in this part of the work are cleverly managed, the MOTIF is admirably subordinated to the ground tints, and the technique is very fine. The brass nail-heads are in the purest style of the early Renaissance. The strokes, here, are very firm and bold—every nail-head is a portrait. The handle on the ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... Richard's, and so suffered this seizure on his account. It is a strange combination altogether, and is now more the subject of conversation than any other topic, and it serves me also as one to fill my letter. Si le recit vous ennuye, vous n'ignorez pas le motif que j'ai a vous le faire. I suppose that you are not always at audiences, and that you may like sometimes to know what passes in circles from whence everything of moment is excluded, and where you may be again, to relieve yourself ...
— George Selwyn: His Letters and His Life • E. S. Roscoe and Helen Clergue |
