"Oriental" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... stifled the remonstrances of conscience darts his compulsatory ray, that, bursting the secrecy of guilt, drives the criminal frantic to confession and expiation." History of the Trial.—Even one of the Counsel, Mr. Dallas, is represented as having caught this Oriental contagion, to such a degree as to express himself in the following manner:—"We are now, however, (said the Counsel,) advancing from the star-light of Circumstance to the day-light of Discovery: the sun of Certainty is melting the darkness, and—we are arrived at ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore
... revivifying, and our return is a source of complimentary jubilation at this no-end of a hotel. We came here in the ten o'clock boat—that floating mansion-house, which Mr. James Fisk left as a memorial of the public good a splendid sinner can do when he is active and oriental in his taste. ...
— Phemie Frost's Experiences • Ann S. Stephens
... and purest, the wisest and the most loving of all human beings; and have attributed such language as that in the text, which—translate it as you will—ascribes absolute divinity, and nothing less, to our Lord Jesus Christ—they have attributed it, I say, to some fondness for Oriental hyperbole, and mystic Theosophy, in the minds of the Apostles. Others, again, have gone further, and been, I think, more logically honest. They have perceived that our Lord Jesus Christ Himself, as His words are reported, attributed divinity to Himself, just as much as did His ...
— Westminster Sermons - with a Preface • Charles Kingsley
... scheme of colour. Her day-dreams, coloured by the descriptions of ducal mansions in penny novelettes, came suddenly true. And she lingered before carved cabinets, strange vases like frozen rainbows, and Oriental tapestry with the instinctive delight in luxury planted ...
— Jonah • Louis Stone
... reflections as I turned away from the now empty house, in which for two-and-twenty years I had dwelt with my poor, wasteful, uncalculating father. My father was a scholar of most stupendous attainments, particularly in Oriental literature, but a perfect child in all that related to the ordinary affairs of life. Absorbed in his studies, he let his pecuniary matters take care of themselves. Consequently, when death suddenly laid him low, and deprived ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. V, May, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... long form: Oriental Republic of Uruguay conventional short form: Uruguay local long form: Republica Oriental del Uruguay local short form: Uruguay Digraph: UY Type: republic Capital: Montevideo Administrative divisions: 19 departments (departamentos, singular - departamento); Artigas, ...
— The 1993 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... situation in India by means that were above the Oriental but below the normal English standard of morality. He was impeached for his pains later on by the Whigs, whose moral indignation was sharpened by resentment at the use of Anglo- Indian gold to defeat them at the general election of 1784. Ireland was placated by the grant ...
— The History of England - A Study in Political Evolution • A. F. Pollard
... quarter. This was in the large number of Chinese pouring into the state. Already every town of importance had its quaint Chinese quarter, bits of Asia transplanted to the western hemisphere. Yet these sons of Asia, with their quiet, gliding motions and oriental dress, had been of great service in the development of the new land. Many of the most helpful improvements were rendered possible by their labor, and for years they were almost the only servants for house or laundry work to be obtained. Never did the housewives ...
— History of California • Helen Elliott Bandini
... was patently an Englishman, though there were traces of Oriental ancestry in his cast. The other, he of the doleful habit, was as unmistakably of Gallic pattern, though he dressed and carried himself in a thoroughly Anglo-Saxon fashion, and even seemed a trace intrigued when greeted ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... names, and were proud of calling themselves their countrymen. The University was divided into four great nations, as the medieval antiquarian would style them; and in the middle of the fourth century, Proaeresius was the leader or proctor of the Attic, Hephaestion of the Oriental, Epiphanius of the Arabic, and Diophantus of the Pontic. Thus the Professors were both patrons of clients, and hosts and proxeni of strangers and visitors, as well as masters of the schools: and the Cappadocian, Syrian, or Sicilian youth who came to one or other of them, would ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... partly modernized by the late Mme. Sechard; the walls were adorned with a wainscot, fearful to behold, painted the color of powder blue. The panels were decorated with wall-paper—Oriental scenes in sepia tint—and for all furniture, half-a-dozen chairs with lyre-shaped backs and blue leather cushions were ranged round the room. The two clumsy arched windows that gave upon the Place du Murier were curtainless; there was neither clock nor candle sconce nor mirror above ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... romance of the Byzantine Empire, presenting with extraordinary power the siege of Constantinople, and lighting its tragedy with the warm underglow of an Oriental romance. As a play it is a ...
— Shorty McCabe on the Job • Sewell Ford
... door behind her. A tall, gaunt, yellow-skinned man, his head perfectly bald and the lower part of his face covered with a heavy white beard and moustache, faced them. His clothing was half Western, half Oriental. A pair of thin, creased, grey tweed trousers met, or almost met, a pair of Turkish slippers, showing an inch of bare, lean ankle in between. His body was covered with a dirty yellow robe of fine woollen ...
— The Mummy and Miss Nitocris - A Phantasy of the Fourth Dimension • George Griffith
... all the physical beauty the inheritance of Greek thought and memories of Greek mythology could suggest, together with a wealth of gorgeous mysticism and rapture of sensuous intoxication, which was the fruit of its intercourse with the oriental world. The writers of Alexandria lacked the 'high seriousness' of purpose to produce an Aeneid, the imaginative enthusiasm needed for a Faery Queen. What they possessed was delicacy, refinement, and ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... an Oriental shawl thrown over her shoulders, sat at one side of the chimney-piece. Dussardier sat facing her at the other side. He seemed to feel himself in an embarrassing position. Besides, he was rather intimidated by his artistic surroundings. Had the Vatnaz, ...
— Sentimental Education, Volume II - The History of a Young Man • Gustave Flaubert
... remembered, was of opinion that nothing could be so well calculated to restore a drooping young lady to mental and physical health as the present of a handsome set of jewels. Mr. Whistler's opinion that there is nothing like leather—of a jovial and Japanese design—savours somewhat of the Oriental cordwainer. ...
— The Gentle Art of Making Enemies • James McNeill Whistler
... that it isn't hell already, and that I am not in it?"—a question which threw a lurid light on his educational and disciplinary experiences. Some of my readers will probably recollect the "Japanese Village" at Knightsbridge—a pretty show of Oriental wares which was burnt down, just at the height of its popularity, a few years ago. On the day of its destruction I was at the house of a famous financier, whose children had been to see the show only two days before. ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... ungratified. During the conversation the vehicle approached the mansion. Mr. Fabian H——, during the entire ride, had thought upon the pipe and sofa which awaited him upon his return, for he smoked like a Turk, and loved the ease of oriental life. There was one pursuit, however, which afforded him still greater pleasure, and that was to ogle other men's wives, for he was an unfortunate son of Adam, never being able to discover beauties which his wife might ...
— The Home in the Valley • Emilie F. Carlen
... English-speaking dragomans used to meet together at the cool of the day, to practise the tongue of their profession and discuss the news. Clad in the gayest Oriental clothing to attract the foreigner, their talk was all of Europe and its social splendours. At the moment of Iskender's entrance, a man named Khalil was gravely playing English music-hall airs on a concertina, having acquired the art by instruction from an English ...
— The Valley of the Kings • Marmaduke Pickthall
... George was a sailor before the mast, and Henry was teacher of the advanced Bible class. At twenty-two George, through fighting-habits and drinking-habits acquired at sea and in the sailor boarding-houses of the European and Oriental ports, was a common rough in Hong-Kong, and out of a job; and Henry was superintendent of the Sunday-school. At twenty-six George was a wanderer, a tramp, and Henry was pastor of the village church. Then George came home, and was Henry's guest. One evening a man passed ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... to the Sha-mien at four o'clock. They were silent and no longer observant, being more or less exhausted by the tedious action of the chairs. Even Ah Cum had resumed his Oriental shell of reserve. To reach the Sha-mien—and particularly the Hotel Victoria—one crossed a narrow canal, always choked with rocking sampans over and about which swarmed yellow men and women and children in varied ...
— The Ragged Edge • Harold MacGrath
... oval is formed by an embankment 4 feet high, and is perfectly regular in outline, its transverse and conjugate diameters being respectively 160 and 80 feet. The combined figure has been regarded as a symbolical illustration of the Oriental cosmological idea of the serpent and the egg; but, however this may be, little doubt can exist of the symbolical character ...
— Ancient America, in Notes on American Archaeology • John D. Baldwin
... Mediterranean to the East. Greece was sunk in everlasting sleep, Rome lay in ruins and had become a tributary state. Jerusalem was destroyed, Alexandria at the mouth of the Nile in a state of decay. The world's metropolis lay on the Black Sea, and was a half-oriental colony called Byzantium, or, after Constantine the Great, Constantinople. The heathen world was a waste, and Christianity had become the State religion. But the spirit of Christianity had not penetrated the empire. Doctrine indeed there was—plenty of doctrine—but ...
— Historical Miniatures • August Strindberg
... have asked why they made baulks; why they did salute the most handsome, and let the ill-favoured go. This has been unseemly in my sight.'—(Grace Abounding, No. 315). However such a custom may have been innocent in the oriental scenes of apostolic labours, it has been very properly discontinued in later ages, unless it be as in the case of old Honest, or the unexpected meeting of very old ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... Second Voyage, Columbus (this part of the Journal is definitely ascribed to him by his son) writes of Indians spreading powder on a table, and sniffing it through a forked reed, thereby becoming intoxicated. Now the first account is suspiciously like a book-story of Oriental hashish-taking.—the second has no implication of smoking at all, while the third describes nothing but the process of taking a sternutatory. Indeed this last account is clearly based on a book account, in which there was a play on the Arabic words tubb[a]q "styptic" and tabaq ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 5, 1920 • Various
... steed—a beautiful Arabian—and having at his side his son, a boy about ten or twelve years old, who was riding a pony, a diminutive copy of his father's mount, the two attended by a numerous body-guard, dressed in gorgeous Oriental uniforms. As the procession passed our carriage, I, as pre-arranged, stood up and took off my hat, His Serene Highness promptly acknowledging the salute by raising his hand to the forehead. This was all I saw of him, ...
— The Memoirs of General Philip H. Sheridan, Vol. II., Part 6 • P. H. Sheridan
... sees, etc.: This description is not only beautiful in itself, but it serves an important purpose in the plan of the poem. It is a kind of condensation or symbolic expression of Sir Launfal's many years of wandering in oriental lands. The hint or brief outline is given, which must be expanded by the imagination of the reader. Otherwise the story would be inconsistent and incomplete. Notice how deftly the picture ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell
... great in trifles, whilst they are really trifling in every thing that is great. I cannot however exactly subscribe to an opinion pronounced on them by a learned and elegant writer[22], who was well versed in oriental literature, as being rather too unqualified; but he was less acquainted with their character than that of any other Asiatic nation, and totally ignorant of their language. "Their letters," says he, "if we may so call them, are merely the symbols of ideas; their philosophy seems yet ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... provisions in our ships were much injured by the heat of the climate. In prosecuting our determination of returning home, it pleased God to conduct us to a place for repairing our vessels, where we found a people who received us with much kindness, and from whom we procured a great number of oriental pearls. During forty-seven days which we spent among this tribe, we purchased an hundred and nineteen fine pearls, at an expence not exceeding forty ducats; as we gave them in return bells, mirrors, and beads of glass and amber of very little value. For one bell ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. III. • Robert Kerr
... Prince-Cardinal, known of old as a seeker after everything of notoriety, soon became the intimate of one who flattered him with the accomplishment of all his dreams in the realization of the philosopher's stone; converting puffs and French paste into brilliants; Roman pearls into Oriental ones; and turning earth to gold. The Cardinal, always in want of means to supply the insatiable exigencies of his ungovernable vices, had been the dupe through life of his own credulity—a drowning man catching at a straw! But instead of making ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XV. and XVI., Volume 5 • Madame du Hausset, and of an Unknown English Girl and the Princess Lamballe
... the courage to face the buffalo veal of Roumania and to dine with a German family at one o'clock; he has serious views on the right method of cooking those famous white truffles of Turin of which Alexandre Dumas was so fond; and, in the face of the Oriental Club, declares that Bombay curry is better than the curry of Bengal. In fact he seems to have had experience of almost every kind of meal except the 'square meal' of the Americans. This he should study at once; there is a great field ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... beloved. He was in such clover at Stockholm that he might have lingered on there indefinitely, if the Khedive had not invited him, in September, to be his guest at the opening of the Suez Canal. This sudden incursion of an Oriental potentate into the narrative seems startling until we recollect that illustrious persons were invited from all countries to this ceremony. The interesting thing is to see that Ibsen was now so fatuous as to be naturally so selected; the only other Norwegian ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... city—so untouched that, with the sunlight irradiating its cream-coloured walls and the blue-white domes above them, it rests on its carpet of rich fruit-gardens like some rare specimen of Arab art on a strip of old Oriental velvet. ...
— In Morocco • Edith Wharton
... stare about, quite unconscious of the cause, when his whole company betrayed their uneasiness at the approach of an overkept haunch of venison; and neither by the nose nor the palate could he distinguish corked wine from sound. He could never tell Madeira from sherry,—nay, an Oriental friend having sent him a butt of sheeraz, when he remembered the circumstance some time afterwards and called for a bottle to have Sir John Malcolm's opinion of its quality, it turned out that his butler, mistaking the label, ...
— Sir Walter Scott - (English Men of Letters Series) • Richard H. Hutton
... with his feet on the earth and his head in the skies; but he liked better to sit on earth, to wither the soft, fresh, fragrant lips of a woman with kisses, for like Death, he devoured everything without scruple as he passed; he would have full fruition; he was an Oriental lover, seeking prolonged pleasures easily obtained. He sought nothing but a woman in women, and cultivated cynicism, until it became with him a habit of mind. When his mistress, from the couch on which she lay, ...
— The Elixir of Life • Honore de Balzac
... friend, Ward Mortimer, was one of the best men of his day at everything connected with Oriental archaeology. He had written largely upon the subject, he had lived two years in a tomb at Thebes, while he excavated in the Valley of the Kings, and finally he had created a considerable sensation by his exhumation of the alleged mummy of Cleopatra ...
— Tales of Terror and Mystery • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the days when the outlaws were rampant, and they began dealing faro in Oriental. They found many a friend—and some enemies—from those years in western Kansas among the more adventurous element in the new town. Former buffalo-hunters, teamsters, quiet-spoken gamblers, and two-gun ...
— When the West Was Young • Frederick R. Bechdolt
... agreed to their teacher's plan. Sid was specially enthusiastic. Will Somers said he would help. Aunt Stanshy had promised to open the rooms of her house, and one December night, when the sky was like the dark face of an Oriental beauty, hung all over with golden jewelry, the White Shields and their friends met at Aunt Stanshy's. How happy were the club boys to find there a banner sent by Mr. Walton. He wrote that Tim Tyler was coming to Sunday-school, and that they had previously secured four scholars, and Tim ...
— The Knights of the White Shield - Up-the-Ladder Club Series, Round One Play • Edward A. Rand
... in a knowledge of the many languages of India he stood unrivalled. During his residence in the East, he published a "Dissertation on the Languages and Literature of the Indo-Chinese Nations," in the tenth volume of the "Asiatic Researches," and he left numerous MSS. on subjects connected with oriental learning. He was early a votary of the Muse; and, in youth, was familiar with the older Scottish bards. In April 1795, he appeared in the Edinburgh Literary Magazine as author of an elegy "On the ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... From the description I had of her, the Van Wyck girl was not at all the kind of female that I thought Jerry would like. She was an exotic, and was redolent, I am sure, of faint sweet odors which would perplex Jerry, who had known nothing but the smell of the forest balsams. She was effete and oriental, Jerry ...
— Paradise Garden - The Satirical Narrative of a Great Experiment • George Gibbs
... agree with you, sir, in every respect—Christianity was an invertebrate materialism of separation—crude, mechanical separation—less spiritual, less ethical, than almost any of the Oriental faiths. Affirming the brotherhood of man, yet separating us into a heaven and a hell. Christians cowering before a being of divided power, half-god and half-devil. Indeed, I remember no religion so non-moral—none ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... themselves—just as we shall be the ancients to our successors. The Renaissance people all did contemporary work, under pretence of doing historical: contemporary types for Madonnas, local landscapes for Oriental scenery, up-to-date dresses for New Testament episodes, portraits of their patrons for patron-saints and apostles. Did you ever see a more modern figure than Tintoretto's portrait of himself, the elderly man in a frock-coat ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... its future in an eternal progress which should, of course, imply immortality. New Thought is hospitable to truth from whatever source derived. It is particularly hospitable to the suggestions of oriental religions and, as far as it has taken form as a distinct religious movement, it is becoming more and more markedly a kind of syncretism, a putting together of religious elements drawn from widely universal sources and it patently seeks nothing ...
— Modern Religious Cults and Movements • Gaius Glenn Atkins
... paths of oriental and middle age writers, he dashed deep into the forest of nature and surveyed for himself a new dominion of thought, that has never been occupied before or since his birth. Like a comet of universal light, he shines over the world with the warm ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce
... abandon their mosses and pebbles in despair. A late traveler in Japan says of one of these: "It was a fairy-like landscape seen through a spy-glass reversed." Some of the details were real trees dwarfed to pigmies by the art of the Oriental florist. There were limpid lakes peopled with gold-fish; grottos and summer-houses of exquisite finish draped with growing verdure and large enough to shelter a small company of rabbits: lovely walks ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... you must not let the sins of my youth find me out now and cast me from Paradise. You alarm me for what your father may think of that book of mine on Oriental philosophy; I would not have him take it with him into his prayer-closet and there in that Star Chamber use it against us in his determination of our suit. Tell him, my Love, that I too have come to see the folly of what I there wrote. Not that anything in the book is false or ...
— The Jessica Letters: An Editor's Romance • Paul Elmer More
... she was throwing Mont Blanc at my head, she mentioned you two eminently evangelical guides, from whose infallible lips she had gleaned her knowledge. As for you, Douglass, I suggest you abandon Oriental studies, forego the dim hope of martyrdom in India, and begin your missionary labours at home. My dear, the Buddhist is at your own door. Now, Peyton, how do you relish the ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... in admiration and delight. Even Mr. Morgan was roused to make an admiring inspection of the curious ornaments and devices; and Elvira, with her perfect features, rich complexion, dark blue eyes, Titian coloured hair, fine figure, and Oriental ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... doubtless perished on the holy soil. A fraction only of the host which in multitudes like the stars and desert sands invaded the east, assembled for the assault upon the Holy City. Famine, thirst and pestilence decimated the great armies upon which fell the united cohorts of the oriental powers. Blasphemy and prostitution, the refuge of despair, alternated in the camp of the Crusaders with fanatic visions of visiting archangels, of armed and shining knights descending the slopes of heaven in their defence. From such a phantasmagoria, surpassing ...
— The Counts of Gruyere • Mrs. Reginald de Koven
... The supple Oriental grinned and made obeisances, pretended not to know "The Rogue's March" (to the hen-house), and went off playing "Johnny Comes ...
— A Perilous Secret • Charles Reade
... he drew away from the globes. They poured their penetrating blue light over him, inspectingly, while the music from within rose and fell in regular cadences, sweetly impelling and dulling to the senses as strong oriental incense. ...
— The Beast of Space • F.E. Hardart
... in some of the old palaces and audience halls of the inner, or purple, forbidden City. With the yellow porcelain roofs, and the blue and green and gold, and the red walls, it is really the barbaric splendor you read about, and about the first thing that comes up to the conventional idea of what is Oriental. The Hindoo influence is much stronger here than anywhere else we have been, or else really Thibetan, I suppose, and many things remind one of the Moorish. The city of Peking was a thousand years building, and was laid out on a plan when the capitals of Europe were purely haphazard, ...
— Letters from China and Japan • John Dewey
... creature," laughed her mistress. She was rather touched indeed by the slavish desire to please and do service swiftly which the Ayah's blunder seemed to indicate. She had wished to save her mistress even the trouble of giving the order. That was her Oriental way, Emily thought, and it was very affectionate ...
— Emily Fox-Seton - Being The Making of a Marchioness and The Methods of Lady Walderhurst • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... Thousand and One Nights gives a very interesting narrative which he believes to be founded on an historical fact in which Haroun Al Raschid plays the part of the good Duke of Burgundy, and Abu-l-Hasan the original of Christopher Sly. The gravity of the treatment and certain incidents in this Oriental story recall more strongly Calderon's drama than the Induction to the "Taming of the Shrew". "La Vida es Sueno" was first published either at the end of ...
— Life Is A Dream • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... point. Sultan Bajazet wanted his younger brother out of the way, and he paid the Papacy forty thousand ducats a year to keep the young fellow a prisoner in Italy. It was a gilded captivity and doubtless the dissolute Oriental enjoyed himself quite as well at Rome as he would have done in Constantinople. But after Alexander had achieved the triple tiara, Bajazet refused to pay his forty thousand ducats any longer. The Pope, ...
— The Grey Room • Eden Phillpotts
... drew up at a creeper-hung porch paved in red tiles. The chauffeur helped Mary to alight and, pushing open a glass door, ushered the girl into a square, comfortably furnished hall. Some handsome Oriental rugs were spread about: trophies of native weapons hung on the walls, and there were some fine specimens of old Dutch ...
— The Yellow Streak • Williams, Valentine
... have only this to say, that by whatsoever means he became acquainted with it, it is precisely the same dance which is said to have been exhibited by some strolling Moor before the late Queen Caroline. It is, indeed, very strange, but no less true, that many of the oriental customs are yet prevalent in the remote and isolated parts of Ireland. Had the late Mr. O'Brien, author of the Essay on Irish Round Towers, seen Bob perform the dance I speak of, he would have hailed him ...
— The Ned M'Keown Stories - Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of - William Carleton, Volume Three • William Carleton
... Lord walking in the cool of the evening, showing his hind quarters to Moses, ordering abominable massacres, and punishing chiefs who had not killed enough people. On further perusal, there is revealed, "A great deal of Oriental bombast, incoherence and absurdity, that the marvels recounted are often ludicrous ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... latitudes, that the desire for aggrandizement raged. The Portuguese considered that the natural southern frontier of their great colony was the River Plate. The Spaniards, having already possession of the northern bank, fiercely resented any such pretension, with the result that the Banda Oriental, by which name the Republic of Uruguay is still locally known, as well as the southern part of the Province of Paraguay, became the scene of many battles. It may be said that the warfare between the two nations continued here, with but rare and ...
— South America • W. H. Koebel
... not knowing in what company he was, for Napoleon's plain appearance had nothing about it that would reveal to an Oriental mind the presence of a monarch, talked with extreme familiarity of the incidents of the war," says Thiers, narrating this episode. In reality Lavrushka, having got drunk the day before and left his master dinnerless, had been whipped and sent to the village in ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... after the oriental pattern which the eastern Emperors had imported from Asia and from Egypt and which (so they flattered themselves) resembled the court of Alexander the Great. This strange inheritance which the dying Byzantine Empire bequeathed to an unsuspecting world continued to live with great vigour for ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... artistic habit to hold his tongue between his teeth, twist his head in sympathy with the elaborate fingering, and involuntarily lift one foot higher and higher from the floor as some skittish note frantically dodges to evade him, his general musical aspect at his own hearth is that of a partially Oriental gentleman, agonizingly laboring to cast from him some furious animal full of strange sounds. Thus engaging in desperate single combat with what, for making a ferocious fight before any recognizable tune can he rescued from it, ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 18, July 30, 1870 • Various
... Marianina, a girl of sixteen, whose beauty realized the fabulous conceptions of Oriental poets! Like the Sultan's daughter in the tale of the Wonderful Lamp, she should have remained always veiled. Her singing obscured the imperfect talents of the Malibrans, the Sontags, and the Fodors, in whom some one dominant quality always mars the ...
— Sarrasine • Honore de Balzac
... writings. Secondly, it is a good example of what I call the pious palimpsest. It is over-scored with contradictory matter. The author, for example, while accidentally informing us that Alfonso kept a carriage, imputes to him a degrading, Oriental love of dirt and tattered garments, in order (I presume) to make his character conform to the grosser ideals of the mendicant friars. I do not believe in these traits—in his hatred of soap and clean apparel. From his works I deduce a different original. He was refined and urbane; ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... looking on the Boulevard des Italiens, consisting of more rooms than a bachelor generally requires; low-pitched, indeed, but of good dimensions, and decorated and furnished with a luxury which really astonished the provincial, though, with the high-bred pride of an oriental, he suppressed every sign ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... is a military miracle which, so far as we can judge, far excels the retreat of Xenophon; and, although mainly doubtless to be explained by the solidity of the Roman, and the inefficiency of the Oriental, system of war, it at all events secures to the leader of this expedition an honourable name in the foremost rank of men of military capacity. If the name of Lucullus is not usually included among these, it is to all appearance ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... world. But, thanks be to God, he is a devout follower of Christ, and a most useful one. He is now twenty-five years of age; and I do not think we have a better decipherer of manuscripts in the Church than he, since he is conversant with most of the Oriental tongues, although so young. I sometimes fear God will visit me for bestowing too much affection upon the boy. I strive against it, but he remains the light of my eyes. If it be ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various
... be by any means celebrated, were it not for the enterprises which cost Leander his life and Lord Byron an ague, are two hamlets, which, like the greater portion of Turkish villages, offer in no shape whatever what it is the fashion to term the Oriental type. They are composed of an assemblage of rose-coloured houses, whose large red roofs, seen through the verdure and flowers, call to one's mind the description of a ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 380, June, 1847 • Various
... a priceless lamp, and was crossed by a strip of wonderful Chinese embroidery. There were heavy antique brass candlesticks on the mantel, flanking a great mirror whose carved frame showed against its gold rare touches of Florentine blue. The rugs on the floor were a silken blend of Oriental tones, the books in the cases were bound in full leather. An oil portrait of Taylor hung where his wife's dutiful eyes would often find it, lovely pictures of the children filled silver frames on ...
— Poor, Dear Margaret Kirby and Other Stories • Kathleen Norris
... streets, as alive as by day, where boys in high-keyed voices were already crying the latest New York papers; and between one and two o'clock in the morning found myself comfortably abed in a commodious room, in the Oriental Hotel, which stood, as well as I could learn, on the filled-up cove, and not far from the spot where we used to beach our boats ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... American Indian name, the lovely white Cherokee Rose (R. Sinica), that runs wild in the South, climbing, rambling, and rioting with a truly Oriental abandon and luxuriance, did indeed come from China. Would that our northern thickets and roadsides might be decked with its pure flowers and almost equally beautiful dark, glossy, ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... some remark to another, who, from his Oriental dress, was easily recognised by Harold as one of the Arab traders of the coast. His men appeared ...
— Black Ivory • R.M. Ballantyne
... appeared a confused mass of golden and blue-and-silver domes, and spires, and towers, and green roofs, and crescents, and crosses, and gold and silver chains, glittering in the sun, altogether forming a scene such as is pictured in the Arabian Nights Entertainments or other Oriental romances, but such as one scarcely expects to find within eight days' easy journey of ...
— Fred Markham in Russia - The Boy Travellers in the Land of the Czar • W. H. G. Kingston
... and executed it. It is the culmination of all that has been done in the wide expanse of territory purchased from France in 1803, and the achievements of all nations in the world since that day. It is a far cry from the early oriental fairs in the East, which were perhaps the early ancestors of this great Exposition, and all honor and credit and glory is due the men who stood shoulder to shoulder in carrying this great enterprise to such a magnificent culmination. It represents ...
— New York at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, St. Louis 1904 - Report of the New York State Commission • DeLancey M. Ellis
... question, if the Chinese were allowed a free entry they would perpetuate the smartest pure Oriental mixed class in the Islands. On the other hand, if their exclusion should remain in force beyond the present generation it will have a marked adverse effect on the activity of the people (vide ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... carpet. In one recess of the room the musicians were sleeping with their bizarre musical instruments tightly clasped in their arms. A dozen Turks, magnificently dressed, were seated on the soft carpet in Oriental fashion, that is to say, after the manner of tailors. They were supported by piles of cushions of all sizes and shapes, and seemed to be plunged ...
— The Cross of Berny • Emile de Girardin
... of the garden in the most oriental of all evenings, and from breathing odours beyond those of Araby. The acacias, which the Arabians have the sense to worship, are covered with blossoms, the honeysuckles dangle from every tree in festoons, the seringas are thickets of sweets, and the new-cut hay in the field tempers the balmy gales ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... Simpson will commence on Monday next a six days' sale of valuable books in all classes of literature; oriental, and other manuscripts; autograph letters; ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 47, Saturday, September 21, 1850 • Various
... laughed; and then, seeing my embarrassment, she went on: "Oh, the house is just like everything else Fenelon meddles with. Outside it's a mixture of all the styles, and inside a hash of all the nationalities from Siamese to Spanish. Fenelon hangs the Oriental tinsels he has collected on pieces of black baronial oak, and the coat-of-arms he had designed by our Philadelphia jewellers is stamped on the dining-room chairs, and even worked into ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... stamp and devices—to what was not money at all, but a "coined ingot"—on 378 grains of pure silver (420 grains, standard), known as the "trade-dollar." It was intended by this means to make United States silver more serviceable in the Asiatic trade. Oriental nations care almost exclusively for silver in payments. The Mexican silver dollar contained 377-1/4 grains of pure silver; the Japanese yen, 374-4/10; and the United States dollar, 371-1/4. By making the "trade-dollar" slightly heavier than any coin used in the Eastern world, it would give ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • John Stuart Mill
... prototype of the temple. At the outset its very possibility is doubtful. Very strange is the contrast between this splendid structure, on which the costliest material is lavished and wrought in the most advanced style of Oriental art, and the soil on which it rises, in the wilderness amongst the native Hebrew nomad tribes, who are represented as having got it ready offhand, and without external help. The incompatibility has long been noticed, and gave rise to doubts as early ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen
... potato tree, and QUERCUS SKELTICA - brave growths. The caves were all embowelled in the Surreyside formation; the soil was all betrodden by the light pump of T. P. Cooke. Skelt, to be sure, had yet another, an oriental string: he held the gorgeous east in fee; and in the new quarter of Hyeres, say, in the garden of the Hotel des Iles d'Or, you may behold these blessed visions realised. But on these I will not dwell; they were an outwork; it was in the accidental scenery ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the sheikh. In return the sheikh made him a rich present, in which was a splendid scymeter and dagger, with some beautiful pearls of six carats forming a string above a foot in length, besides one fine pearl of eighteen carats: for a great deal of fine oriental pearls are found in this coast of Arabia. He likewise gave each of the Turks two rich-vests or caftans, and a young black slave. The Kiahya made him many compliments, and entreated him to wait upon the Pacha; but the sheikh would on no account consent. Finding ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VI - Early English Voyages Of Discovery To America • Robert Kerr
... of benevolence for saving themselves. The Burdwan translator misunderstands vihinsa and makes nonsense of the idea. Altogether, though highly ornate, the metaphors are original. Of course, the idea is eminently oriental. Eastern rhetoric being fond of spinning out metaphors and similes, which, in the hands of Eastern ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... husband more unfaithful than King Henry; probably there was not. His gallantries were outrageous, his taste in women catholic, and his illegitimate progeny outnumbered that of his grandson, the English sultan Charles II. He differs, however, from the latter in that he was not quite as Oriental in the manner of his self-indulgence. Charles, by comparison, was a mere dullard who turned Whitehall into a seraglio. Henry preferred the romantic manner, the high adventure, and knew how to ...
— The Historical Nights Entertainment, Second Series • Rafael Sabatini
... vision has broken my slumbers, but I continue to hope that the Oriental features of Sultan Bajazet's brother may presently revisit the place of his taking off, and that Prince Djem will some night afford me the pleasure of a conversation. How much might we tell each other that neither ...
— The Grey Room • Eden Phillpotts
... complicated. Indeed, in order to represent a sound one must employ not less than eight characters. All the modern literature of Thibet is written in this language. The pure Thibetan is only spoken in Ladak and Oriental Thibet. In all other parts of the country are employed dialects formed by the mixture of this mother language with different idioms taken from the neighboring peoples of the various regions round ...
— The Unknown Life of Jesus Christ - The Original Text of Nicolas Notovitch's 1887 Discovery • Nicolas Notovitch
... the dance floor to sit along the rail where the yellow cars will line up next morning to sweep Stella away within a day after she and her putties have come into my young life, I may say that I find Stella O'Cleave not difficult to look upon. I always feel a sense of Oriental luxury, as though I had bought a new rug, when Stella turns on me the slumberous midnight of her eyes. I am enamored of the piled black shadows of Stella's hair, even as displayed in the somewhat ...
— Maw's Vacation - The Story of a Human Being in the Yellowstone • Emerson Hough
... aspirations," heedless of the great confessions implied in the swoon at Francesca's story, and the passage through the fire at the end of the seventh circle of Purgatory. But when he comes to things like "Dolce color d'oriental zaffiro," and "Era gia l'ora," it is hardly possible to do more justice to the subject. The whole description of his Italian sojourn in the Autobiography is an example of the best kind of such writing. Again, of all the people who have rejoiced in Samuel Pepys, Leigh Hunt "does it ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... Strasolda, attired in a robe of dark green velvet, which well relieved the fairness of her complexion, and displaying upon her finely moulded neck and arms a collar and bracelets of large and lustrous oriental pearls. Her firlgers were bedecked with costly rings, and upon her head she wore an ornament of singular device, which soon attracted universal attention. Above the rim of a golden comb, richly chased and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various
... of bargaining, pierced with shrill screams of extortion and expostulation. A few mild, slim, young London policemen sauntered, apparently unseeing, unhearing, among the fevered, nervous Semitic crowd, in which the Oriental types were by no means so marked as in New York, though there was a greater number of red Jews than I had noted before. The most monumental features of the scene were the gorgeous scales of wrought ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... Something Oriental still hung about these chambers, though the modern furniture was not at all in keeping with the style. Mr. Keith did not profess to be a man of taste. "I try to be comfortable," he used to say. He ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... sportively along the path, on which the sunbeams darted and the checquered foliage trembled—where the tender greens of the beech, the acacia and the mountain-ash, mingling with the solemn tints of the cedar, the pine and cypress, exhibited as fine a contrast of colouring, as the majestic oak and oriental plane did of form, to the feathery lightness of the cork tree and the waving grace ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... whether spoken or written, are more or less metaphorical, interspersed with what are called figures of speech. It is customary to represent nations and tribes, whose language abounds in symbols, as but little advanced in civilization; and to view oriental nations as more disposed to indulge in tropes and figures than those of the west; but perhaps this relative estimate of the modes of speech in the eastern and western hemispheres will admit of some modification, ...
— Notes On The Apocalypse • David Steele
... to Dave weddin' Tucson Jennie. I'm pirootin' 'round Tucson with Dave at the time, Dave's workin' a small bunch of cattle, 'way over near the Cow Springs, an' is in Tucson for a rest. We've been sloshin' 'round the Oriental all day, findin' new virchoos in the whiskey, an' amoosin' ourse'fs at our own expense, when about fifth drink time in the evenin' Dave allows he's some sick of sech revels, an' concloods he'll p'int out among the 'dobys, sort o' explorin' ...
— Wolfville Days • Alfred Henry Lewis
... was the religion of those who built this shrine, if shrine it was? The ornamentation of that part of the outer wall which faces the rising sun suggests sun-worship. The phalli (if they are phalli) point to one of the Oriental forms of the worship of the forces of nature. The birds' heads may have a religious significance, and possibly the significance which it is said that vultures had in the Syrian nature-worship. These ...
— Impressions of South Africa • James Bryce
... Incas rivalled that of Rome, Jerusalem, or any of the old Oriental countries, in riches and show, the palaces being decorated with a great profusion of gold, silver, fine cloth and precious stones." [Footnote: Rev. Thomas Wood, LL.D., Lima, Peru, In ...
— Through Five Republics on Horseback • G. Whitfield Ray
... original. But in the end I have acquiesced in my first and still abiding conviction that a literal translation (such as that which I have given in the notes of my edition of the Sanskrit text) might have commended itself to Oriental students, but would not have given a true idea of the beauty of India's most cherished drama to general readers, whose minds are cast in a European mould, and who require a translator to clothe Oriental ideas, ...
— Sakoontala or The Lost Ring - An Indian Drama • Kalidasa
... harshness, the Hindu is subtle, affable, practiced to dissimulation, with ready susceptibilities to temporize and to barter justice for expediency. On the one side, we see the Westerner haughty, unyielding and unwilling to conciliate; on the other we behold the Oriental willing to be trampled upon when it seems necessary, and to smile with apparent gratitude under the process; but, withal, possessed of a large inheritance of ineradicable prejudices, which make a contact with his too ...
— India's Problem Krishna or Christ • John P. Jones
... disposed to be friendly, to be sure: he's made governor of Calcutta now, and wants to feel his feet. But he's a weak man, by all accounts; and weak men, when they are afraid, are always cruel. If he caught an Englishman spying out the land he'd most probably treat him after oriental methods. ...
— In Clive's Command - A Story of the Fight for India • Herbert Strang
... [Footnote A: The quaint Oriental imagery here employed should not blind the reader to the precise scientific accuracy of the idea of which this imagery is the vehicle. Schopenhauer says: "Polarity, or the sundering of a force into two quantitively different and ...
— The Beautiful Necessity • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... them, the part of the room behind us was literally crammed with well-armed men. A few minutes were passed in silence, during which time we had an opportunity of looking at each other, and around the hall in which we were seated. The latter was of very common workmanship, and exhibited no signs of oriental magnificence. Overhead hung a printed cotton cloth, forming a kind of tester, which covered about half of the apartment. In other places the roof and rafters were visible. A part of the house was roughly partitioned off, to the height of nine or ten feet, enclosing, as I was afterwards ...
— The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes • Fedor Jagor; Tomas de Comyn; Chas. Wilkes; Rudolf Virchow.
... to conduct us safely through his dominions. He received us at court the day after our arrival. Unaccustomed as I was to Asiatic magnificence, I confess that my eyes were at first so dazzled by the display of oriental pomp that, as I prostrated myself at the foot of the sultan's throne, I considered him as a personage high as human veneration could look upon. After having made my salam, or salutation, according ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth |
