"Porphyry" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the lowest step was of marble, so white and clear that he beheld his face in it. The colour of the next was a deadly black, and it was all rough, scorched, and full of cracks. The third was of flaming porphyry, red as a man's blood when it leaps forth under the lancet.[19] The angel, whose feet were on the porphyry, sat on a threshold which appeared to be rock-diamond. Dante, ascending the steps, with the encouragement of Virgil, fell at the angel's feet, and, after thrice beating himself on the ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt
... smart** also, *slow **quick Which that was made? and of the care and woe That we had in our matters subliming, And in amalgaming, and calcining Of quicksilver, called mercury crude? For all our sleightes we can not conclude. Our orpiment, and sublim'd mercury, Our ground litharge* eke on the porphyry, *white lead Of each of these of ounces a certain,* *certain proportion Not helpeth us, our labour is in vain. Nor neither our spirits' ascensioun, Nor our matters that lie all fix'd adown, May in our working nothing us avail; For lost is all our labour and travail, And all the cost, a twenty devil ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... of Vallambrosa. It was first used to counterfeit marbles; and the altar of St. Antonio, in the church of St. Nicolo, at Carpi, is still preserved as a monument of extraordinary skill and beauty. It consists of two columns, representing porphyry, and adorned with a pallium, embroidered as it were with lace; while it is ornamented in the margin ...
— The Lady's Album of Fancy Work for 1850 • Unknown
... S[a]nkhya reappear as the Gnostic 'three classes,' [Greek: pneumagikoi], [Greek: psuchikoi], [Greek: ulikoi].[32] In regard to Neo-Platonism, Garbe says: "The views of Plotinus are in perfect agreement with those of the S[a]nkhya system."[33] Porphyry, the disciple of Plotinus, has the Yoga doctrine of immediate perception of truth leading to union with the deity. As is well known and undisputed, this Porphyry copies directly from the treatise of Bardesanes, which contains an account of the Brahmatis;[34] ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... fingers, clad in rags, fed on rejected scraps. That was what the elephant of the Bastille was good for. This idea of Napoleon, disdained by men, had been taken back by God. That which had been merely illustrious, had become august. In order to realize his thought, the Emperor should have had porphyry, brass, iron, gold, marble; the old collection of planks, beams and plaster sufficed for God. The Emperor had had the dream of a genius; in that Titanic elephant, armed, prodigious, with trunk uplifted, bearing its tower and scattering ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... a scribe who was collecting taxes. In Melcatis and Pi- Hebit also earth-tillers wrecked the houses of Phoenician tenants. At Kasa they refused to repair the canal, declaring that pay from the treasury was clue them for that labor. Finally in the porphyry quarries the convicts killed their overseers and tried to escape in ...
— The Pharaoh and the Priest - An Historical Novel of Ancient Egypt • Boleslaw Prus
... the first tunnel for crossing the Nagara-yama chain. This tunnel is 2,500 meters in length, 4.8 in width and 4.2 in height. The water reaches a depth of 1.8 meters upon the floor. It was pierced through very varied materials, such as clay, schists, sandstone and porphyry, and is lined throughout with brick masonry. The construction was effected by means of a working shaft 45 meters in depth, sunk in the axis of the work, at a third of its length from the west side. At the upper extremity are established sluices that permit of securing to the canal a constant discharge ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 810, July 11, 1891 • Various
... fair to see, Shine all the Arts, but oh! this river side, Pranked with gay flowers, is dearer far to me Than gold and porphyry vases bright and wide; How glad in heaven the song-bird carols free! Sweeter these zephyrs float than all the showers Of costly odors ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... covers the walls, he admires the artistically arranged mosaic on the gold groundwork of the dome, he is amazed at the hundred columns which support the cupolas and galleries, some of dark-green marble, others of dark-red porphyry. The Emperor's wealth is inexhaustible. Has he not presented to the church seven crosses of gold, each weighing a hundred pounds? Does not the Church of the Divine Wisdom possess forty thousand chalice veils all embroidered with pearls ...
— From Pole to Pole - A Book for Young People • Sven Anders Hedin
... (some reckoning it at two or six thousand degrees while others hold it incomputable) that absolutely no life can exist within such balls of fire. But after the more solid parts are formed (granite, porphyry, etc.,) gradually by cooling off and contracting, and these are fused together into larger masses, then begin the ribs of the earth-structure, the rocky foundations of the super-structure, and as soon as the development ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, August 1887 - Volume 1, Number 7 • Various
... meaning. This is strikingly the case with the Scarabaeus which, under the hands of the Etruscan cutter, lost at once all specific character. He might be Scarabaeus anything: he is not pilularius; and, instead of being made of basalt, porphyry, smalt, and very rarely of pietra dura, as in Egypt, he is engraved in carnelian, onyx, sardonyx, and all the rare and lovely varieties of pietra dura,—which, being essentially the same, change their names with their ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various
... at this moment It sleeps without a sign of life; it is as good as dead. I will not consort with reformed corpses, I the life-lover, I the abundant. I have known living only; I will not acknowledge kinship with death. White graves or black, linen or porphyry, Are all one to me. And yet, on the Lybian plains Where dust is blown, A king once Built of baked clay and bulls of bronze A tomb that makes ...
— Spectra - A Book of Poetic Experiments • Arthur Ficke
... Ange. Do you know the Seventh and Tenth Visions of that poem, which describe the favourite amusements of the Men-gods? Before the Deluge, beyond the rude tents of the nomad shepherds, there rose city upon city of palaces built of jasper and porphyry, splendid and utterly corrupt; inhabited by men who called themselves gods and explored the subtleties of all sciences to minister to their vicious pleasures. At ease on soft couches, in hanging gardens set with fountains, these beings feasted ...
— Old Fires and Profitable Ghosts • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... was not broken up like the Western. The emperors reigned at Constantinople in great state and splendour, in palaces lined with porphyry and hung with purple, and filled with gold and silver. The Greeks of the east had faults the very contrary to those of the Teutons of the west. Instead of being ignorant, rude, and savage, they were learned, courtly, and keen-witted; but their sharpness ...
— The Chosen People - A Compendium Of Sacred And Church History For School-Children • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... of the golden ground through the leaves beside them, interrupted and dim, like the morning light as it faded back among the branches of Eden, when first its gates were angel-guarded long ago. And round the walls of the porches there are set pillars of variegated stones, jasper and porphyry, and deep-green serpentine spotted with flakes of snow, and marbles, that half refuse and half yield to the sunshine, Cleopatra-like, "their bluest veins to kiss"[155]—the shadow, as it steals back from them, revealing line after line of azure undulation, ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... by a gaudy glass; 70 And the great Element, which is to space What Ocean is to Earth, spreads its blue depths, Softened with the first breathings of the spring; The high Moon sails upon her beauteous way, Serenely smoothing o'er the lofty walls Of those tall piles and sea-girt palaces,[ef] Whose porphyry pillars, and whose costly fronts, Fraught with the Orient spoil of many marbles, Like altars ranged along the broad canal, Seem each a trophy of some mighty deed 80 Reared up from out the waters, scarce less strangely Than those more massy and mysterious giants Of architecture, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... porphyries either may be glassy or may consist in part of a felt of minute crystals; in either case it represents the consolidation of the rock after its outpouring upon the surface. On the other hand, the large crystals of porphyry have slowly formed deep below the ground at an ...
— The Elements of Geology • William Harmon Norton
... his cheek had rained the morning light, Thrice on his lips the mildewed kiss of night, Crouched by some porphyry column's shining plinth, Or ...
— The Professor at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.)
... waves murmured only softly and soothingly and with drowsy echoes, as they rippled in and out among the rocks and along the sand. Fortunately for their pleasure, Noll picked up a curious pebble before they had gone a great way. It was not an agate, nor was it like the rounded pebbles of porphyry which the tide washed up, and puzzling over this, and asking Uncle Richard, at last, to explain its nature, somehow broke the heavy silence which had been between them, and questions and pleasant talk came ...
— Culm Rock - The Story of a Year: What it Brought and What it Taught • Glance Gaylord
... form Wind Cave, the Onyx Caves in the southern hills and Crystal Cave near the eastern edge toward the north. This was near the close of the Cretaceous Age. But here is a point on which the best authorities who have studied the porphyry peaks, have failed to agree; Prof. N.H. Winchell believing that the intrusion occurred, probably, during the Jura Trias, but as Cretaceous beds, of more recent date, are found to have been distorted by the outflow, it seems that Professors Todd, Newton and Carpenter hold the stronger position ...
— Cave Regions of the Ozarks and Black Hills • Luella Agnes Owen
... of William Porphyry Benham is the story of a man who was led into adventure by an idea. It was an idea that took possession of his imagination quite early in life, it grew with him and changed with him, it interwove at last completely with his being. His story is its story. It was traceably germinating ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... researches of this gentleman, among the remains of Neomagus Lexoviorum, have already brought to light a large number of valuable medals, both in silver and bronze, as well as a considerable quantity of fragments of foreign marble, granite, and porphyry, some of them curiously wrought. The most important of his discoveries has been recently made: it is that of a Roman amphitheatre, in a state of great perfection, the grades being covered only by a ...
— Account of a Tour in Normandy, Vol. II. (of 2) • Dawson Turner
... artificial flowers, and all manner of trumpery gew-gaws, hanging at the saintly shrines. The rust and dinginess that have dimmed the precious marble on the walls; the pavement, with its great squares and rounds of porphyry and granite, cracked crosswise and in a hundred directions, showing how roughly the troublesome ages have trampled here; the gray dome above, with its opening to the sky, as if heaven were looking down ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume II. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the Iliad (Rhapsodies) of Homer is only a number of "detached songs" which perhaps for centuries were delivered orally, and that they contain the secret doctrines of the priests. Porphyry says that "we ought not to doubt that Homer has secretly represented the images of divine things under the concealment of fable." It has been said of Plato that he banished the poems of Homer from his imaginary ...
— The God-Idea of the Ancients - or Sex in Religion • Eliza Burt Gamble
... banks of the stream, and then knee deep up its bright waters, and then over the breezy hills, "O'er the hills, amang the heather," whence I watched its gleaming course between red-colored rocks, like walls of porphyry or Roman tufa, and through corn-fields, and by tufted woods, and felt for an hour as if there was no ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... seen the same kinds of hills in latitude 29 degrees, longitude 120 degrees. Bare granite rocks sometimes in the vicinity, though not attached. (May 4th.) : Two small specimens of Micaceous Iron-ore with brown Haematite. Impossible to state the age. Similar ore occurs in Victoria, in Elvans in Porphyry, but it also ...
— Explorations in Australia • John Forrest
... flinty; and that vein of granite will be very soft from containing so much felspar; and this granite, a familiar example of which can be seen in the material of Waterloo Bridge, the learned, who give names, call porphyry. ...
— Menhardoc • George Manville Fenn
... room in a building not far from the imperial palace. The pavement was of polished marble, and columns of porphyry supported a paneled dome. An altar with a statue of a heathen deity was at one end of the apartment. Magistrates in their robes occupied raised seats on the opposite end. In front of them were some soldiers guarding ...
— The Martyr of the Catacombs - A Tale of Ancient Rome • Anonymous
... rose and made the circuit of the semi-divided rooms, coming out at last into the dim rotunda, forested with clustered porphyry columns, and there at last he caught sight of her. She had but just stepped into its shaded coolness out of the hot, bright day, and hung for a moment, in the act of furling her parasol, in which he was about ...
— The Lovely Lady • Mary Austin
... apartments. The prince then flew into the wildest rage. He kicked over a chiffonier, which tumbled on the carpet, broken into pieces. He next went into the galleries, and with the greatest coolness threw down, one after another, an enameled vase, a porphyry ewer, and a bronze candelabrum. The noise summoned every one to ...
— Ten Years Later • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... which Hamilton had built as a gift to his brother was nearing completion, and the finishing touches demanded personal supervision. As the heart of a high priest turns to his temple, so turned Paul Burton's heart to this spot at this time. It was a temple, but decidedly a pagan temple. Porphyry columns went up from a mosaic floor to a richly encrusted ceiling, and in conception and detail it was lavishly beautiful and perfect. Hamilton had conceived and planned the structure with a very ferocity of tense interest: though to Hamilton a music-room ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... the blanchisseuses at work. It has a curious interest, this spectacle of primitive toil: the deep channel of the Roxelane winding under the palm-crowned heights of the Fort; the blinding whiteness of linen laid out to bleach for miles upon the huge bowlders of porphyry and prismatic basalt; and the dark bronze-limbed women, with faces hidden under immense straw hats, and knees in the rushing torrent,—all form a scene that makes one think of the earliest civilizations. Even here, in this modern ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... taper there seemed stings at their tips; manners of one who had ranged all ranks of society from highest to lowest, and duped the most wary in each of them. Did she please it, a crown prince might have thought her youth must have passed in the chambers of porphyry! Did she please it, an old soldier would have sworn the creature had been a vivandiere,—in age, perhaps, bordering on forty. She looked younger, but had she been a hundred and twenty, she could not have been more wicked. Ah, ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... portion of the theory of general language is the subject of what is termed the doctrine of the Predicables; a set of distinctions handed down from Aristotle, and his follower Porphyry, many of which have taken a firm root in scientific, and some of them even in popular, phraseology. The predicables are a fivefold division of General Names, not grounded as usual on a difference in their meaning, that is, in the attribute which they connote, ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... Scipio at the rock. He turned it back and forth in his hand, looking it over; he chucked and caught it slightingly in the air, and handed it back. "Porphyry, I see." That was his only word about it. He said it cheerily. He left no room for discussion. You could not damn a thing worse. "Ever been in Santa Rita?" pursued Scipio, while the enthusiast slowly pushed his rock back into his pocket. "That's down in New Mexico. Ever ...
— The Virginian - A Horseman Of The Plains • Owen Wister
... fulness of its radiance; and of colour combined of friezes of burnished gold, and brilliant frescoes, and rich altar pieces, and bronze statues, and slabs of oriental alabaster, and blocks of red porphyry and lapis lazuli, and guilded vaulted ceiling, and walls of ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson
... confined to the Christian Church. For the city of Alexandria, where that spirit seems to have been peculiarly potent as shown in the transfigured Judaism of Philo, was the birthplace of the Neo-Platonic school already mentioned above. And among its greatest members, such as Plotinus, Porphyry, Proclus, the religious influence of the East was distinctly apparent. True, they followed Socrates and Plato in reverence for knowledge as the unfailing begetter of virtue. But their speculations about the divine Being were touched by Oriental emotion. And we may with some confidence ...
— Pantheism, Its Story and Significance - Religions Ancient And Modern • J. Allanson Picton
... circle of the heavy eyebrows ended at the wide nostrils; the mouth was a crescent, but bowed downwards; the heavy shoulders were rounded. Indeed, the only straight line to be discerned about him was that of his hair, black as bitumen, banged across his forehead; even his polished porphyry eyes were constructed on some curvilinear principle, and never seemed to focus. It might be said of Mr. Gorse that he had an overwhelming impersonality. One could never be quite sure that one's words reached ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... central doorway, sits in tight-buttoned uniform a fitting idol for so ugly a shrine, the double-chinned effigy of the reigning monarch. We turned for comfort to a chapel on the right, where in four sarcophagi of porphyry are deposited the remains of the Northern sovereigns. The bones of Roger repose in a plain oblong chest with a steep ridged roof, and the other three coffins, though somewhat more elaborate, are yet simple and massive, as befits their destined use. The inscription, on that of Constantia is touching, ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... exploits which they had achieved under his auspices, and on the numerous benefits which they had thereby secured to their native country. The throne on which he sat, composed of white marble and supported by a slab of porphyry, was consecrated to the god of war, whom he chose to claim for his father and patron, and that the descendants of the vanquished Ethiopians might not be ignorant of their obligations to Ptolemy Euergetes, King of Egypt, he gave orders that his name and principal triumphs should be inscribed ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 10 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... almost believe that to be a giant's castle," remarked Lawrence, pointing to the opposite side of the ravine, where a huge perpendicular mountain of porphyry was so broken into turrets, towers, and battlements, that it was difficult, except for its size, to believe it other than the work of man. There were even holes and formations about it that had the appearance of antique ...
— The Rover of the Andes - A Tale of Adventure on South America • R.M. Ballantyne
... of his report Mr. Foote mentions the fact that "a great dyke of beautiful porphyry traverses the hills east of the Karigatta temple overlooking Seringapatam. The porphyry, which is of warm brown or chocolate colour, includes many crystals of lighter coloured felspar, and dark crystals of hornblende. ...
— Gold, Sport, And Coffee Planting In Mysore • Robert H. Elliot
... ruins went on, which was as subtle as that of flowers. A man or two, hoary with marble-dust and ennobled by the "bloom" of it, stood tall and sad about the wheel, and we handed to these refined creatures our treasures of giallo-antico and porphyry and other marbles picked up "for remembrance" (and no doubt once pressed by a Caesar's foot or met by a Caesar's glance), in order to observe the fresh color leap to the ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... as true of the individual lives of men as it is of great events. If the ages have to be reconstructed, so also must the men of the ages. If only a mummy now turn over in his porphyry sarcophagus, a papyrus is generally found under him; and the finder, with the papyrus in his hand, may go forth fully warranted to revise every event from the first cataclysm of the Devonian age to the last earthquake in Java, and every ...
— The Arena - Volume 18, No. 92, July, 1897 • Various
... puniceus, or blood-red. Gibbon was never more mistaken than when he argued that all the endless disputing about the purpureus of the ancients might have been evaded by attending to its Greek designation, namely, porphyry-colored: since, said he, porphyry is always of the same color. Not at all. Porphyry, I have heard, runs through as large a gamut of hues as marble; but, if this should be an exaggeration, at all events porphyry is far from being so monochromatic as Gibbon's argument would presume. The truth is, colors were ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... the infinity of the suns and the stars in their millions, scintillating in the cold air of night, to descend once more to our humble "Earth" (5/3.); first an ocean of fire, rolling its heavy waves of molten porphyry and granite, then "slowly hardening into strange floes and bergs, hotter than the red iron in the fire of the forge," rounding its back, all covered with gaping pustules, eruptive mountains and craters, and the first folds of its calcined ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... the town of Alus, and then went forward again between bare walls of greyish-green and red porphyry. These cliffs rose higher and higher, but from time to time, above the lower range, they could see the rugged summit of some giant of the range, though, bowed under their heavy loads, they ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... a palace fit to receive the Princess Buddir al Buddoor. Let its materials be made of nothing less than porphyry, jasper, agate, lapis-lazuli, and the finest marble. Let its walls be massive gold and silver bricks laid alternately. Let each front contain six windows, and let the lattices of these (except one, which must be left unfinished) be enriched with diamonds, rubies, ...
— The Junior Classics, V5 • Edited by William Patten
... stair was marble white, so smooth And polished, that therein my mirrored form Distinct I saw. The next of hue more dark Than sablest grain, a rough and singed block Cracked lengthwise and across. The third, that lay Massy above, seemed porphyry, that flamed Red as the life-blood spouting from a vein. On this God's Angel either foot sustained, Upon the threshold seated, which appeared A rock of diamond. Up the trinal steps My leader cheerily drew me. "Ask," said he, "With humble ...
— Purgatory • Mary Anne Madden Sadlier
... long been known among the Eastern nations before it was introduced into Europe. The Hindoos were especially skilled in the art of making steel, as indeed they are to this day; and it is supposed that the tools with which the Egyptians covered their obelisks and temples of porphyry and syenite with hieroglyphics were made of Indian steel, as probably no other metal was capable of executing such work. The art seems to have been well known in Germany in the Middle Ages, and the process is on the whole very faithfully described by Agricola in his ...
— Industrial Biography - Iron Workers and Tool Makers • Samuel Smiles
... face; for she lived apart with the maidens who waited on her, in a lofty tower which her father had built specially for her. It was really a noble palace, with ten great rooms, one over the other. The first room was paved with porphyry and lined with slabs of coloured marbles, and the roof was of gold: and it was a kind of chapel for Aseneth. It had golden and silver images of all the gods of Egypt, and Aseneth worshipped them and burnt incense to them every day. The second chamber was Aseneth's own. In it were all her jewels ...
— Old Testament Legends - being stories out of some of the less-known apochryphal - books of the old testament • M. R. James
... and, at last, actually got a frock, belonging to one of our people that was towing, overboard. At the same time they immediately shewed a knowledge of bartering, and sold some fish they had (amongst which was an extraordinary flounder, spotted like porphyry, and a cream-coloured eel, spotted with black) for small nails, of which they were immoderately fond, and called them goore. But, indeed, they caught with the greatest avidity bits of paper, or any thing else that was thrown to them; and if what was thrown ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 15 (of 18) • Robert Kerr
... tells me. Hopeful, as he called it. Seems he picked up some rich float. This float was where a dyke of porphyry comes up to the surface an' got weathered away down to the pay ore. Leastwise, this was her dad's theory. He told her everything he thought as they shacked erlong together, I reckon, an' she remembers it. He figgers this sylvanite lies under this porphyry ...
— Rimrock Trail • J. Allan Dunn
... white coating, and 2 feet long by 18 inches broad, in beds worked for phosphatic nodules at Foxhall, four miles south-east of Ipswich. These must have been tranquilly drifted to the spot by floating ice. Mr. Prestwich also mentions the occurrence of a large block of porphyry in the base of the Coralline Crag at Sutton, which would imply that the ice-action had begun in our seas even in this older period. The cold seems to have gone on increasing from the time of the Coralline ...
— The Student's Elements of Geology • Sir Charles Lyell
... Drummond, the scientist, tells us that only by losing its life does the cell save it. The new science exhibits the body as a temple, constructed out of cells, as a building is made of bricks. Just as some St. Peter represents strange marble from Athens, beauteous woods from Cyprus, granite from Italy, porphyry from Egypt, all brought together in a single cathedral, so the human body is a glorious temple built by those architects called living cells. When the scientist searches out the beginning of bird or bud or acorn he comes to a single cell. Under the microscope that cell is seen to be absorbing ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis
... wonderful mosaic. The walls decorated with marbles and rare sea shells. In every nook were marble pedestals and antique statuary, while the fountain in the centre, supplied from an underground stream, was of porphyry inlaid with mosaic. ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... is that the dream is a dim prevision of coming events. Artemidorus, the great authority on dream interpretation (oneirocritics) for the ancient world, actually defines a dream as "a motion or fiction of the soul in a diverse form signifying either good or evil to come;" and even a logician like Porphyry ascribes dreams to the influence of a good demon, who thereby warns us of the evils which another and bad demon is preparing for us. The same mode of viewing dreams is quite common to-day, and many who pride themselves on a certain intellectual culture, and who imagine themselves ...
— Illusions - A Psychological Study • James Sully
... as the hill rises. This passage leads to a vertical facade 46 feet high, pierced by a door between 17 and 18 feet in height, which was bordered by columns carrying a cornice, above which was a triangular relieving space, masked by slabs of red porphyry adorned with spiral decorations, while the whole facade appears to have been enriched with bronze ornaments and coloured marbles. The massive lintel of the door is 29 feet 6 inches long, 16 feet ...
— The Sea-Kings of Crete • James Baikie
... nations, except the descendents of Abraham, were abandoned by the Almighty, and subjected to the power of daemons or evil spirits. Fontenelle in his "Histoire des Oracles" makes the following extract from the works of the Pagan philosopher Porphyry. ...
— Zophiel - A Poem • Maria Gowen Brooks
... cankered rubbish heap that was once the playhouse of a Caesar, its walls bearded like a pard's face with tufted laurel and splotched like a brandy drunkard's with red stains; a church that is a dismal ruin without and a glittering Aladdin's Cave of gold and gems and porphyry and onyx within; a wide and handsome avenue starting from one festering stew of slums and ending in another festering stew of slums; a grimed and broken archway opening on a lovely hidden courtyard where trees are green and flowers bloom, and in the center there stands a statue which is ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... ostrich—the usual inhabitants of the most dreary deserts. There is no sort of water—even the birds seem to avoid the place as pestilential—the sun was burning hot." In a few days the scene changed, and Bruce is noting that in four days he passes more granite, porphyry, marble, and jasper than would build Rome, Athens, Corinth, Memphis, Alexandria, and half a dozen more. At last after a week's travel they reached Cossier, the little mud-walled village on the shores of the Red Sea. Here Bruce embarked in a small boat, the planks of which were sewn together instead ...
— A Book of Discovery - The History of the World's Exploration, From the Earliest - Times to the Finding of the South Pole • Margaret Bertha (M. B.) Synge
... and coloured—nay, even gilt, although he is often short of gold—and throw them at the feet of his snow-clad mountains, piles of rocks, and other cloud-capped philosophers, long and terrible works, marble columns, real thoughts carved in porphyry. ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 3 • Honore de Balzac
... him a character for orthodoxy. She took refuge in a position which is often a great resource in like cases, ascribing to him an intrinsic devoutness, a hidden substantial sanctity compatible with the utmost latitudes of heterodoxy; a bedrock of devout gneiss or porphyry hidden under a mere alluvium of modern freethinking; a reality—if the truth were known—of St. Francis of Assisi behind a mask of Voltaire. Her hearer only half followed her reasoning, but that mattered little, as she was brimming with assent to anything Gwen advanced, with ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... 150 feet high, but is now 115, and it consists of six huge cylinders of porphyry, one above another, whose junction is veiled by sculptured laurel wreaths. On its summit stood the statue of Constantine with the garb and attributes of the Grecian Sun-God, but having his head surrounded with the nails of the ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin
... opening just big enough for a man to wriggle through. Passing into it, they entered a long underground passage, which led out on to a wide field, above which spread a blue sky. In the middle of the field stood a magnificent castle, built out of porphyry, with a roof of gold and with glittering battlements. And his beautiful guide told him that this was the palace in which her father lived and reigned over his kingdom in ...
— The Yellow Fairy Book • Leonora Blanche Alleyne Lang
... to rob the cities of Greece of their finest works in order to supply the deficiencies of his own artists: Athens and Asia were despoiled to adorn his semi-barbarous capital. The city was provided with a forum, in which was placed a column of porphyry upon a white marble base, in all one hundred and twenty feet high, upon which stood a bronze figure of Apollo. A hippodrome, or circus of great size, and the baths and pleasure-grounds, recalled the memory of those of Rome. Schools and theatres, aqueducts, fourteen ...
— A Smaller History of Rome • William Smith and Eugene Lawrence
... generally similar to those now in use. The contents of ancient Indian mounds, or tumuli, opened in Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Iowa, show the use of pipes by the aborigines probably centuries before the discoveries by Columbus. Many were elaborately carved in porphyry or some other hard stone, while others were made of baked clay. Others, many of them also elaborately carved and ornamented, have been found in Mexico. Roman antiquities show many pipes, but they do not show the use of tobacco. It ...
— Cuba, Old and New • Albert Gardner Robinson
... placer would be found; or, on a mountainside where the porphyry was stained, he would carelessly chip off a fragment of rock, turn it up to the sun, and behold it rich in ruby silver; or, some day, the vein instead of pinching out would widen; there would be pay ore almost from the grass-roots—rich, ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson
... waving in the breeze, and the wood resounds with the cries of bright-winged choristers. The torrent-beds are of the clearest and finest white sand, glittering with gold-coloured mica, and varied with nodules of clear and milky quartz, red porphyry, and granites of many hues. Sometimes the centre is occupied by an islet of torn trees and stones rolled in heaps, supporting a clump of thick jujube or tall acacia, whilst the lower parts of the beds are overgrown with long lines of lively green ...
— First footsteps in East Africa • Richard F. Burton
... Latin, Syriac[211], Gothic, and Egyptian versions, as well as by [Symbol: Aleph]BDL[Symbol: Delta], and (according to Tischendorf) by nearly twenty-five cursives; besides the following ancient writers: Irenaeus, Origen, Porphyry, Titus, Basil, Serapion, Epiphanius, Severianus, Victor, Eusebius, Victorinus, Jerome, Augustine. I proceed to shew that this imposing array of authorities for reading [Greek: en to Esaia to prophete] instead ...
— The Causes of the Corruption of the Traditional Text of the Holy Gospels • John Burgon
... not harder than Porphyry or Agate, the Chisel of my love, drove by the Mallet of my fidelity, would have made some impression on thee. I, that have shaped as I pleased the most untoward of substances, hoped by the Compass of ...
— Town and Country, or, Life at Home and Abroad • John S. Adams
... was in the second century, Porphyry became in the third. His work, which was a large and formal treatise against the Christian religion, is not extant. We must be content, therefore, to gather his objections from Christian writers, who have noticed in order to answer ...
— Evidences of Christianity • William Paley
... probably granitic. The large Brumer Island is composed of igneous rocks as formerly mentioned; and at Dufaure Island I obtained from some canoes which came off to us a few smooth water-worn pieces of hornblendic porphyry. Some specimens of obsidian, or volcanic glass, were also procured from the natives at the latter place, where sharp-edged fragments are used for shaving with; one variety is black, another of a light reddish-brown, with dark streaks. Mount Astrolabe is apparently ...
— Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John MacGillivray
... Madonna stepped out of its frame, had all the stiffness, the precision of those mysterious figures, the more modern cousins of Isis and her sister goddesses sheathed in marble folds by Egyptian sculptors. It was granite, basalt, porphyry, with ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac
... probable that the exhibition of designs, which an alibi prevented me from seeing, included several obelisks; but the peculiarities I should have insisted on, would have been first to make good use of the real thing, the rarely carved old Egypt's porphyry; and, next, to have had our hero's likeness within reasonable distance of ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... since August 8, 1885. Four massive granite piers, with rows of Doric columns between, supported the roof and the obtuse cone of the cupola, which rested upon a great circle of Ionic pillars. The interior was cruciform. In the centre was the crypt, where, upon a square platform, rested the red porphyry sarcophagus. From the mausoleum summit, 150 feet above, the eye swept the Hudson ...
— History of the United States, Volume 5 • E. Benjamin Andrews
... that she does and says, as one to whom splendor had been familiar from her very birth. She treads as though her footsteps had been among marble palaces, beneath roofs of fretted gold, o'er cedar floors and pavements of jasper and porphyry—amid gardens full of statues, and flowers, and fountains, and haunting music. She is full of penetrative wisdom, and genuine tenderness, and lively wit; but as she has never known want, or grief, or fear, or disappointment, her wisdom is without a touch of the sombre or the ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... utmost of the wish; wherefore, an thou wouldst see it, arise forthright and look on it." So Alaeddin arose and the genie carried him, in the twinkling of an eye, to the palace, which when he saw, he was amazed at its building, for that all its stones were of jade and alabaster and porphyry and mosaic. The genie carried him into a treasury full of all manner of gold and silver and precious jewels past count or reckoning, price or estimation; then he brought him into another place, where he saw all the requisites of the table, platters and spoons and ewers ...
— Alaeddin and the Enchanted Lamp • John Payne
... Porphyry says: "By images addressed to sense, the ancients represented God and his powers—by the visible they typified the invisible for those who had learned to read in these types, as in a book, a treatise on the Gods. We need not wonder if the ignorant ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... principal gallery, Henrietta perceived an open door which admitted them into a small octagon chamber, of Ionic architecture. The walls were not hung with pictures, and one work of art alone solicited their attention. Elevated on a pedestal of porphyry, surrounded by a rail of bronze arrows of the lightest workmanship, was that statue of Diana which they had so much admired at Pisa. The cheek, by an ancient process, the secret of which has been recently regained at Rome, was tinted with ...
— Henrietta Temple - A Love Story • Benjamin Disraeli
... Crabby, Brave, Corblets and Longy are the most noteworthy. South-west of Longy Bay, where the coast rises boldly, there is a remarkable projecting block of sandstone, called La Roche Pendante (Hanging Rock) overhanging the cliff. Sandstone (mainly along the north-east coast), granite and porphyry are the chief geological formations. There are a few streams, but water is obtained mainly from wells. Trees are scarce. The town of St Anne stands almost in the centre of the island overlooking and extending towards the harbour. ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... friezes displaying bodies in contortion, caryatids, cast from life, supporting the springers of the arches, mixed groups of loins and chests with swelling muscles, under the electric lights, and, in the lobbies, a lavish display of African onyx, Scotch granite and Russian porphyry. The crowd would pass in between Venus and Apollo, holding flowers and lights; and there would be music everywhere; gaiety, noise, red and gold everywhere; all cares would be laid aside and forgotten on entering; it would be a hall containing every modern convenience, ...
— The Bill-Toppers • Andre Castaigne
... Stanyhurst's lines will always stand as a noted specimen of inept translation and ridiculous versification. Equally inartistic was his version of some of the Psalms in the same metre. In Latin he wrote a profound commentary on Porphyry, the Neo-Platonic mystic. Stanyhurst, who was uncle to James Ussher, the celebrated Protestant archbishop of Armagh, was himself a convert to Catholicity, and on the death of his second wife became a priest and wrote in ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... gold, of statues and flowers and fountains, Vases of onyx and jasper from Indian emperors sent; Pictures out of the heart of tropical sunlit mountains, Of rocks of porphyry piled at the gates of ...
— The Coming of the Princess and Other Poems • Kate Seymour Maclean
... of the cliffs. At luncheon-time, when I was about half-way, I sat down with my Zeiss glass—my mother's farewell gift—to look for the valley. But valley I saw none. The wall—reddish purple it looked, and, I thought, of porphyry—was continuous and unbroken. There were chimneys and fissures, but none great enough to hold a river. The top was sheer cliff; then came loose kranzes in tiers, like the seats in a gallery, and, below, a dense thicket of trees. I raked the whole line for a break, but there seemed none. ...
— Prester John • John Buchan
... the mutilation of Uranus by the Maori tale of Tutenganahau. The child-swallowing he connects with Punic and Phoenician influence, and Semitic sacrifices of men and children. Porphyry {61b} speaks of human sacrifices to Cronus in Rhodes, and the Greeks recognised Cronus in the Carthaginian god to whom children were ...
— Custom and Myth • Andrew Lang
... friend," said the Benedictine, "if you expect any thing there but the mouldering dust of a human heart, closed in an inner case of porphyry." ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... surprised me. Gold, painting, sculpture, the richest ornaments of all kinds, are distributed everywhere with prodigality but taste. The architecture is correct and admirable, the marble is most exquisite; jasper, porphyry, lapis, polished, wreathed, and fluted columns, with their capitals and their ornaments of gilded bronze, a row of balconies between each altar with little steps of marble to ascend them, and the cage encrusted; the altars and that which accompanied them admirable. ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, Complete • Duc de Saint-Simon
... downfall of the conventual libraries, exclaims, like Rachel weeping for her children, that if the Papal laws, decrees, decretals, clementines, and other such drugs of the devilyea, if Heytesburg's sophisms, Porphyry's universals, Aristotle's logic, and Dunse's divinity, with such other lousy legerdemains (begging your pardon, Miss Wardour) and fruits of the bottomless pit,had leaped out of our libraries, for the accommodation of grocers, candlemakers, soapsellers, and other worldly occupiers, we might ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... in the narrow noisy street. The beauty of an Oriental palace is inside the walls. Within the blank outer wall of stone and mud-brick, arched roofs, painted and gilded within, were upheld by slender round pillars of fine stone—marble, jasper, porphyry, onyx, red syenite, highly polished and sometimes brought from old palaces and temples in other lands. Intricate carving in marble or in fine hard wood adorned the doorways and lattices, and the ...
— Days of the Discoverers • L. Lamprey
... noble gallery, and above it four famous horses, cut in brass by the ancient Romans, and seem all moving, and at the very next step must needs leap down on the beholder. About the church are six hundred pillars of marble, porphyry, and ophites. Inside is a treasure greater than either, at St. Denys, or Loretto, or Toledo. Here a jewelled pitcher given the seigniory by a Persian king, also the ducal cap blazing with jewels, and on its crown a diamond and a chrysolite, each as big as an almond; ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... and Napoleon's tomb we rode to Flagstaff Hill to search for fossil shells. The whole soil that I saw was composed of decomposed old volcanic rocks; but I saw no rock but basalt in different stages of decomposition; sometimes it assumed the form of porphyry. I also saw veins of quartz, gypsum, and jasper. On a part of Flagstaff Hill there was a thin stratum of calcareous earth, in which shells are found. My hip was so painful that I could not climb to the point where these were, but an ...
— Journals Of Two Expeditions Of Discovery In North-West And Western Australia, Vol. 2 (of 2) • George Grey
... of an Eastern city, men find a slab of porphyry or malachite so gorgeously grained, that not many whole and perfect works of art can stand undimmed and undiminished beside it. Such ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... him. I had talked with others about the mine of Injun Jim, and one man (who owned cattle and called mines a gamble) told me that he doubted the whole story. A prospectors' bubble, he called it. Free gold, he insisted, did not belong in this particular formation; it ran in porphyry, he said,—and then he ran into mineralogy too technical for me now. I repeated his statement, however, and saw Casey ...
— Casey Ryan • B. M. Bower
... entered a terrible defile, which seemed planned by Nature for treachery and ambush. The great, black, barren rocks of porphyry and trachyte rose three hundred feet above our heads, their lower and nearer ledges being all so many natural parapets to fire over, loop-holed with chinks to fire through. There were ten rifles in our party. We ran them out, five on a side, ready ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... the ravine, and in some places the banks rose almost perpendicularly from the bed of the dry torrent, presenting on both sides vast walls of black porphyry—for this is the principal rock composing the giant chain of the Andes. Above their heads screamed small parrots of rich plumage of the species Conurus rupicola, which make their nestling places, and dwell upon these rocky ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... your palace, in your dress, nay, in the very costume of your incomparable slave, who has done me the honor to call here in your service. But now have you given of it the last and highest proof. Never has the wit of man before compounded an essence like that which lies buried in this porphyry vase.' ...
— Aurelian - or, Rome in the Third Century • William Ware
... so, and with her pallor and her wasted, thin face she looked deathlike. At a turn of the path where a great crag of purple porphyry closes the view of the lowlands, I saw her open her eyes. I rode just behind her holding the little girl with my right arm. 'The child is all ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... a notion of Norman work in them. They are, every atom, done by Greeks, and are as pure Greek as the temple of AEgina; but more rich and refined. I drew with accurate care, and with measured profile of every moulding, the tomb built for Roger II. (afterwards Frederick II. was laid in its dark porphyry). And it is a perfect type of the Greek-Christian form of tomb—temple over sarcophagus, in which the pediments rise gradually, as time goes on, into acute angles—get pierced in the gable with foils, and their sculptures thrown outside on their flanks, and become ...
— The Pleasures of England - Lectures given in Oxford • John Ruskin
... of order and prosperity after the ravages of the conquest and the tyranny of Rufus—Henry I. In that reign the Abbot of Croyland, to gain money for the rebuilding of his abbey, set up a school where, we are told, Priscian's grammar, Aristotle's logic with the commentaries of Porphyry and Averroes, Cicero and Quintilian as masters of rhetoric, were taught after the manner of the school of Orleans. In the following reign a foreign professor, Vacarius, roused the jealousy of the English monarchy and baronage by teaching Roman law in the schools of Oxford. ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith |
