"Pyramidal" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... preached the pure gospel? No; I esteem their salvation more than this poor body, now appointed unto death." The vestments were removed one by one, each bishop pronouncing a curse as he performed his part of the ceremony. Finally "they put on his head a cap or pyramidal-shaped mitre of paper, on which were painted frightful figures of demons, with the word 'Arch-Heretic' conspicuous in front. 'Most joyfully,' said Huss, 'will I wear this crown of shame for Thy sake, O Jesus, who for me didst wear a ...
— The Great Controversy Between Christ and Satan • Ellen G. White
... this desirable purpose one of those steep, pyramidal hills, which bear a strong resemblance to artificial mounds, and which so frequently occur in the valleys of America. The one in question was high and precipitous; its top flattened, as usual; but with one of its sides more than ordinarily irregular. It possessed no other apparent ...
— The Last of the Mohicans • James Fenimore Cooper
... of St. John the Evangelist, Brescia, the pyramidal effect is accentuated by curtains draped back on either side of the upper part of the composition. In the Madonna of San Giorgio Maggiore, at Verona, we have a much more attractive picture. The "gloria" encompassing the vision is clearly defined, giving so strong an effect of the supernatural ...
— The Madonna in Art • Estelle M. Hurll
... plain, surrounded by a grove of obelisks as tall as palm-trees. Placid sphinxes brooding o'er the Nile—mighty Memnonian countenances calm—had revealed Egypt to me in a sonnet of Tennyson's, and I was ready to gaze on it with pyramidal wonder and ...
— Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo • William Makepeace Thackeray
... effected by a crowd of bees, working in a dark room. Each cell, as is well known, is a hexagonal prism, with the basal edges of its six sides, beveled so as to join an inverted pyramid of three rhombs. These rhombs have certain angles, and the three which form the pyramidal base of a single cell on one side of the comb, enter into the composition of the bases of the three adjoining ...
— The Evolution Of Man Scientifically Disproved • William A. Williams
... fir-tree, a twisted, strange-looking fir-tree, which will be among my last recollections, I know, as it was among my first. It was always before my eyes, when I was three, four, five years old: I see the pyramidal top, rising over a mass of shrubbery; I see it always against a sunset-sky; always in the subdued twilight in which we seem to see things in distant years. These old friends will die, you think; ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 43, May, 1861 • Various
... numbers and initiative is the personnel of the control,—the ruling class, the administration, the official community, the hierarchy of civil and political servants, or whatever designation may best suit; the category comprises that pyramidal superstructure of privilege and control whereof the sovereign is the apex, and in whom, under any dynastic rule, is in effect vested the usufruct of the populace. These two classes or conditions of men, the one of which ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... carafes sparkling with rare liqueurs—all created a picture of colorful luxury, which, we are assured, struck those that looked upon it as "most agreeable." Threading their musical murmurings through all the laughter and badinage, the tossing jets of the pyramidal fountains fell away ...
— The Story of Versailles • Francis Loring Payne
... of the 'Coatepantli,' or 'wall of serpents.' This wall was pierced by huge battlemented gateways, opening upon the four principal streets of the city, and over each gate was a kind of arsenal filled with arms and warlike gear. The teocalli itself was of the usual pyramidal shape, and five stories high, coated on the outside with hewn stones. The ascent was by flights of steps on the outside, and Cortes found two priests and several caciques waiting to carry him up them as they had just carried the emperor; but the ...
— The True Story Book • Andrew Lang
... fixed against piers of the nave. One represents Madonna enthroned among worshippers; members, it may be supposed, of Aragazzi's household. Three angelic children, supporting the child Christ upon her lap, complete that pyramidal form of composition which Fra Bartolommeo was afterwards to use with such effect in painting. The other bas-relief shows a group of grave men and youths, clasping hands with loveliest interlacement; the placid sentiment of human fellowship translated into harmonies of sculptured ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... why we call that house a bungalow," added Sir Modava. "It is the house usually occupied by Europeans here. They are one story high, with a broad veranda, like the one we have just visited. Almost always they have a pyramidal roof, generally thatched, but rarely slated or tiled. When the body is of brick or stone, they call them pucka houses. Doubtless you wished to know the origin of the ...
— Across India - Or, Live Boys in the Far East • Oliver Optic
... "For pyramidal surfaces, such as pediments, a progressive ornament is the fittest. All the buildings in the East, and in the ancient cities of Central America, which are raised on pyramids of steps, show the tendency to this species of effect in giving ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford
... being wild in expression, forms the softest of all forest scenery, for other trees show their trunks and twisting boughs; but the pine, growing either in luxuriant mass, or in happy isolation, allows no branch to be seen. Summit behind summit rise its pyramidal ranges, or down to the very grass sweep the circlets of its boughs; so that there is nothing but green cone, and green carpet. Nor is it only softer, but in one sense more cheerful than other foliage, for it casts only ...
— Frondes Agrestes - Readings in 'Modern Painters' • John Ruskin
... of dancing like that of music depends for a great part of the pleasure, it affords, on repetition; architecture, especially the Grecian, consists of one part being a repetition of another; and hence the beauty of the pyramidal outline in landscape-painting; where one side of the picture may be said in some measure to balance the other. So universally does repetition contribute to our pleasure in the fine arts, that beauty itself has been defined by some writers to consist in a due combination of ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. I - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... long after, they began to build them of stone, and to finish all their buttresses in the same manner." Mr. Murphy observes that spires were introduced in the 12th century, about the time that the practice of burying in churches became general over Europe; and he supposes that the pyramidal form of the spire, was used as the denotation of a church comprising a cemetery. This representation he imagines to have been borrowed "from the ancient Egyptians, who placed the pyramid over their cemeteries, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 13, No. 359, Saturday, March 7, 1829. • Various
... which is subject to the great khan. The inhabitants are idolaters, and have a peculiar language. There was formerly a king in this city, who being on the point of death, gave orders to erect two pyramidal monuments, or towers of marble, near his sepulchre, one at the head and the other at the foot, each of them ten fathoms high, and having a round ball on the top of each. One of these he ordered ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 1 • Robert Kerr
... the Roman tombs. We have, however, only space to remark generally, that the sepulchres were either square, circular, or pyramidal buildings, and with one entrance only, which was invariably on the side farthest from the public road. They usually consisted of a vault in which the urns and sarcophagi were deposited, and a chamber above, in which the statues or effigies of the dead ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 570, October 13, 1832 • Various
... rarely white, very small, in dense, pyramidal clusters. Calyx of 5 sepals; corolla of 5 rounded petals; stamens, 20 to 60; usually 5 pistils, downy. Stem: 2 to 3 ft. high, erect, shrubby, simple, downy. Leaves: Dark green above, covered with whitish woolly hairs beneath; oval, saw-edged, 1 to 2 in. long. Preferred Habitat - Low moist ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... probability of the western nations of the new continent having had communication with the east of Asia long before the arrival of the Spaniards from a comparison of the Mexican and Tibeto-Japanese calendars, from the correct orientation of the steps of the pyramidal elevations towards the different quarters of the heavens, and from the ancient myths and traditions of the four ages or four epochs of destruction of the world, and the dispersion of mankind after a great flood of waters."* (* Humboldt "Aspects ...
— The Naturalist in Nicaragua • Thomas Belt
... is served in halves with one large strawberry in the center of the fruit. The salmon croquettes are molded in pyramidal form, a bit of cress laid on the top, and the mush which has been made the night before is cut in cubes an inch square, dipped in eggs and cracker dust, then dropped in deep fat, the only way to fry mush a delicate brown and preserve its softness. A spoonful ...
— Breakfasts and Teas - Novel Suggestions for Social Occasions • Paul Pierce
... some guns on board." On some flat trucks down there, between two long pyramidal dumps of chests, we saw indeed the outline of wheels, and some slender muzzles. Ammunition wagons, guns and wheels were streaked and blotched with yellow, ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... closer together, and the woods were almost woven into a solid mass, by the lianas and other creeping plants. These were covered with blossoms. In some places a wall of snow-white flowers rose up before you. Pyramidal forms of foliage, green and yellow, over which hung myriads of vine-blossoms, like a scarlet mantle. Still there was no path—at least to be trodden by human foot. Birds flew around, scared in their solitary haunts. The armadilla and the wolf stood at a distance with glaring ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 4 October 1848 • Various
... through Magenta, situated amid fertile corn-fields and plantations of mulberry trees. This was the scene of one of the greatest battles in the war which gained Italy her freedom from the hated rule of Austria. Close to the railway station is a huge pyramidal monument, indicating the spot where the brunt of the battle was borne, and erected to the memory of the brave French who fell in the contest. All along the route are mementoes of the late war. Casting ...
— Fair Italy, the Riviera and Monte Carlo • W. Cope Devereux
... that 'as fire is to air so is air to water, and as air is to water so is water to earth.' He also suggests a molecular hypothesis for these four elements. In this hypothesis everything depends on the shape of the atoms; for earth it is cubical and for fire it is pyramidal. To-day physicists are again discussing the structure of the atom, and its shape is no slight factor in that structure. Plato's guesses read much more fantastically than does Aristotle's systematic analysis; but in some ways they ...
— The Concept of Nature - The Tarner Lectures Delivered in Trinity College, November 1919 • Alfred North Whitehead
... to this group, the general plan of construction of which is throughout very similar. In Britain thirty-nine genera with numerous species are found. With few exceptions the stem grows by means of a pyramidal apical cell cutting off three rows of segments. Each segment gives rise to a leaf, but usually the leaves of the ventral row (amphigastria) are smaller and differently shaped from those of the two lateral rows; in a number of genera they are wanting altogether. Sometimes the leaves retain their ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... crenellated gable parapet rises from a string course with five sculptured masks, and has plain shields on its battlements. Of the gable turrets the northern has, in the last restoration, been made to match the southern. Both are now octagonal, and have two arcaded stories. Their tops are pyramidal, and ribs run down the edges from the curious conical cap, which ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Rochester - A Description of its Fabric and a Brief History of the Episcopal See • G. H. Palmer
... EMPIRE: TOMBS. The monuments of this period, as of the preceding, are almost wholly sepulchral. We now encounter two types of tombs. One, structural and pyramidal, is represented by many examples at Abydos, the most venerated of all the burial grounds of Egypt (Fig.5). All of these are built of brick, and are of moderate size and little artistic interest. The ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Architecture - Seventh Edition, revised • Alfred D. F. Hamlin
... few hours in the progress of our story. At the first grey dawn of the day, which Glaucus had already marked with white, the Egyptian was seated, sleepless and alone, on the summit of the lofty and pyramidal tower which flanked his house. A tall parapet around it served as a wall, and conspired, with the height of the edifice and the gloomy trees that girded the mansion, to defy the prying eyes of curiosity or observation. A table, on which lay a scroll, filled with mystic ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... opposite to one another, seriatim to the top, (as do all cone-bearers) discovering their age; which in time, with their weight, bend them from their natural tendency, which is upright, especially toward the top of aged trees, where the leaf is flattish, and not so regular: The cone great and hard, pyramidal and full ...
— Sylva, Vol. 1 (of 2) - Or A Discourse of Forest Trees • John Evelyn
... in the blue misty sunshine of morning overhung by not less beautiful shades. We were quite glad to get to this sort of mountain scenery again, which we had so enjoyed at Grasmere, and leave smooth, bare, pyramidal Skiddaw and its "ancient" fellows behind. We at last ascended the steep zigzag which begins Sty Head Pass, confirming our resolution now and then by admiring the plodding industry of our mountain horses. It was indeed pleasant when the last gate was opened and we ...
— A Brief Memoir with Portions of the Diary, Letters, and Other Remains, - of Eliza Southall, Late of Birmingham, England • Eliza Southall
... a pyramidal height, her ample moire dress swelling behind her, her gray head magnificently crowned by its lace cap and black velvet bandeau, she swept across the room to where the Dean's wife, Mrs. Winston, sat in fascinated silence observing Lady Kitty. The silence and the attention annoyed ...
— The Marriage of William Ashe • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... be appropriately called an ecclesiastical city, rather than a temple. Within its vast precincts there appear to be contained (as indeed was, in some measure, the case with the area that embraced the various buildings of Solomon's temple) a pyramidal tower, various sanctuaries, sepulchres; a small and a large quadrangular court, one surrounded, as we have said, by cloisters; subterranean initiatory galleries beneath; oracles, courts of justice, high places, and cells or dwellings for the various orders of priests. The whole combination ...
— Diary in America, Series Two • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... the Teotihuacan he learned afterward, and he still saw before him the low mountain, the name of which was Cerro Gordo. But his attention was drawn from the mountain by two elevations rising almost at the bank of the river. They were pyramidal in shape and truncated, and the larger, which Ned surmised to be anywhere from 500 to 1000 feet square, seemed to rise to a height of two or three hundred feet. The other was about two-thirds the size of the larger, both ...
— The Texan Star - The Story of a Great Fight for Liberty • Joseph A. Altsheler
... quantities of sand are to be washed use may be made of the sand ejector system, commonly employed in washing filter sand at large water filtration plants; water under pressure is required. In this system the dirty sand is delivered into a conical or pyramidal hopper, from the bottom of which it is drawn by an ejector and delivered mixed with water into a second similar hopper; here the water and dirt overflow the top of the hopper, while the sand settles and is again ...
— Concrete Construction - Methods and Costs • Halbert P. Gillette
... as through tatters, there protruded here and there naked rock of the wildest shapes. One fragment, I remember, as it caught the slanting sun upon the irregularities of its summit, seemed an immense grey skull. At the base of this mountain, and facing the shore of Nakashima, rises a pyramidal mass of rock, covered with scraggy undergrowth, and several hundred feet in height—Mongakuzan. On its desolate ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... sojourned in Northern Africa is attested by Druidical remains in Morocco and elsewhere. Mr. Richardson mentions the frequent occurrence of pyramidal stones in the Sahara, incidentally, without specifying whether they are rocks in situ, or supposed to be the work of man's hand. The language of Ghadames is one of the Berber dialects; and according to Mr. ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 180, April 9, 1853 • Various
... A pyramidal group with Spring with her flowers in the center of the group. To the right is modest, timid, fresh young Flora, ...
— Palaces and Courts of the Exposition • Juliet James
... mass a man was seen struggling, whose efforts only involved him deeper and deeper in the whirling and liquid gulf; his knees were already buried. In vain he clasped his arms round an enormous pyramidal and transparent icicle, which reflected the lightning like a rock of crystal; the icicle itself was melting at its base, and slowly bending over the declivity of the rock. Under the covering of snow, masses of granite were heard striking against each ...
— Cinq Mars, Complete • Alfred de Vigny
... consisted of a strong bamboo fence, while the three remaining sides were of stone. Within the inclosure, at one side, was a small building, probably the priest's dwelling, and in the centre arose a solid pyramidal structure, on the terraced sides of which were ranged the misshapen figures of several gigantic idols. In front of this, and between four rude tumuli of broken coral, was a low platform, supported by stakes, and resembling the altars used for human sacrifices, ...
— The Island Home • Richard Archer
... all types of Army tents, except shelter and conical wall tents: Mark line of tents by driving a wall pin on the spot to be occupied by the right (or left) corner of each tent. For pyramidal tents the interval between adjacent pins should be about 30 feet, which will give a passage of two feet between tents. Spread tripod on the ground where the center of tent is to be, if tripod is used. Spread the tent on the ground ...
— Manual of Military Training - Second, Revised Edition • James A. Moss
... good. It is the glorious Church of St. Mary the Virgin that seems to bind all the varying charms of the street together. Standing near the centre of the High, it dominates the whole. The stately thirteenth-century tower with its massive buttresses is surmounted by "a splendid pyramidal group of turrets, pinnacles, and windows", from which the spire shoots upwards. To a trained eye this spire is a continual marvel, when seen from a short distance away, on account of the transparency of colour which for some unexplained reason it presents. A silver grey hardly describes ...
— Oxford • Frederick Douglas How
... mesquite. The mesquite is God's best thought in all this desertness. It grows in the open, is thorny, stocky, close grown, and iron-rooted. Long winds move in the draughty valleys, blown sand fills and fills about the lower branches, piling pyramidal dunes, from the top of which the mesquite twigs flourish greenly. Fifteen or twenty feet under the drift, where it seems no rain could penetrate, the main trunk grows, attaining often a yard's thickness, resistant as oak. In Shoshone ...
— The Land of Little Rain • Mary Austin
... on the flat surface of the sands, this world cast a strange and wondrous shadow. Jagged rocks, a pyramidal city, a Gothic cathedral in mid-air—behold the rugged outlines of Mont St. Michel carving their giant features on the shifting, sensitive surface of ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... the various and picturesque appearances of the Peak are beautiful to the highest degree. The stupendous height, which before was lost on the traveller, now strikes him with awe and admiration, the whole island appearing one vast mountain with a pyramidal top. As we proceeded with light winds, at an easy rate, we saw it distinctly for three days after our departure, and should have continued to see it longer, had not the haziness of the atmosphere interrupted our view. The good people of Santa ...
— A Narrative of the Expedition to Botany Bay • Watkin Tench
... rocky hills, WELLINGTON RANGE, commences, of about twenty miles in extent: five miles behind it is the Tor (latitude 11 degrees 54 minutes, and longitude 133 degrees 10 minutes 20 seconds) a solitary pyramidal rock; and seven miles and a quarter West by South, from the latter is ...
— Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia] [Volume 2 of 2] • Phillip Parker King
... blacker, and found in detached pieces, incloses bits of coarse quartz. A red, a dull yellow, and a purplish sand-stone, are also found in small pieces; and pretty large lumps of semi-transparent quartz, disposed irregularly in polyedral pyramidal crystals of long shining fibres. Some small pieces of the common sort are met with in the brooks, made round by attrition; but none hard enough to resist a file. Nor were any of the other stones acted on by aquafortis, or attracted by ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 15 (of 18) • Robert Kerr
... recognized the distant figure of a man, dwarfed to puny proportions by the bulk of the structure in the mazes of which he stood. The man was O'Neil; he was perched upon one of the girders near the center of the longest span, where he could watch the attack upon the pyramidal ...
— The Iron Trail • Rex Beach
... does not exactly tally with that which we should give of the Now. His description is as follows: — "For some weeks previous to laying its eggs, the Brush turkey collects together an immense mass of vegetable matter, varying from two to four cart-loads, with which it forms a pyramidal heap; in this heap it plants its eggs about eighteen inches deep, and from nine to twelve inches apart. The eggs are always placed with the large ends upwards, being carefully covered, and are then left to hatch by the heat engendered ...
— The Bushman - Life in a New Country • Edward Wilson Landor
... 2. Superficial layer of small cells. 3. Layer of small pyramidal cells. 4. Deep layer of small nerve cells. 5. Layer of ...
— Criminal Man - According to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso • Gina Lombroso-Ferrero
... in fascicles of 3, the sheath persistent, from 20 to 30 cm. long; the hypoderm often in large masses, the resin-ducts external, the endoderm with thin outer walls. Cones from 10 to 17 cm. long, short-pedunculate, ovoid-conic; apophyses lustrous or sublustrous nut-brown, more or less pyramidal, the umbo unarmed; seeds as in the ...
— The Genus Pinus • George Russell Shaw
... consists of a framework of cartilages articulated or jointed with one another so as to permit of movement (vide fig. 4). The cartilages are called by names which indicate their form and shape: (1) shield or thyroid, (2) the ring or cricoid, and (3) a pair of pyramidal or arytenoid cartilages. Besides these there is the epiglottis, which from its situation above the glottis acts more or less as a lid. The shield cartilage is attached by ligaments and muscles to the bone (hyoid) in the root of the tongue, a pair of muscles also connect this cartilage ...
— The Brain and the Voice in Speech and Song • F. W. Mott
... varieties of ice are endless, but that of the Vanille is justly a general favourite: not but that you may have coffee, chocolate, punch, peach, almond, and in short every species of gratification of this kind; while the glasses are filled to a great height, in a pyramidal shape, and some of them with layers of strawberry, gooseberry, and other coloured ice—looking like pieces of a Harlequin's jacket—are seen moving to and fro, to be silently and certainly devoured by those who bespeak them. Add to this, every one has his tumbler and small water-bottle by ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Two • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... minarets, tall towers, upright stones, (menhirs), and architectural perpendiculars of every description, and, generally speaking, all erections conspicuous for height and slimness, were representations of the Sworded or of the Pyramidal Fire. They bespoke, wherever found and in whatever age, the idea of the First Principle or the male ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... dug, the mouth of which was also covered by a paving 2-1/2 by upwards of 3 feet in horizontal dimensions. This lower pit consisted of a shaft several feet in depth, by which descent was made into a chamber of inverted pyramidal shape. This chamber approximated 6 by 9 feet in horizontal dimensions and was some 4 or 5 feet deep. At the bottom of this cistern the human remains and most of the relics were deposited. The shaft was filled ...
— Ancient art of the province of Chiriqui, Colombia • William Henry Holmes
... begging for jays, only they belong to different groups of the Garrulinae subfamily. The most abundant and conspicuous of these western forms are the long-crested jays, so called on account of the long tuft of black feathers adorning the occiput. This distinguishing mark is not like the firm pyramidal crest of the eastern jay, but is longer and narrower, and so flexible that it sways back and forth as the bird flits from branch to branch or takes a hop-skip-and-jump over the ground. Its owner can raise ...
— Birds of the Rockies • Leander Sylvester Keyser
... found I bind myself to erect on some eminence near the shore of the island, which can be seen from Cape Olonek, a signal tower of driftwood or earth, like a Cossack mound, not lower than seven feet. On this foundation I shall raise a pyramidal frame of three or more thick logs, on the top of which I shall fix a flagstaff with a pulley block for the flag. The flag is to be flown at least 42 feet from the ground. I shall guard the landmark thus erected until the river freezes. For this purpose ...
— The Voyage of the Vega round Asia and Europe, Volume I and Volume II • A.E. Nordenskieold
... psychosis chooses to assume. Why it is that one paretic greets us with the exalted mien of his grandiose delirium, while another spreads about him the gloom of a depressive delirium—the changes in the pyramidal cells do not explain. There must be, then, factors other than material ones ...
— Studies in Forensic Psychiatry • Bernard Glueck
... Revolutions, American Independences; and Robert Burns is gauger of ale in Dumfries." Poor George the Third! One needs not be a craniologist to know that the eyes which looked out from beneath that retreating pyramidal forehead could see but part even of the commonest men and things before them. How could they see a Robert Burns? To be sure, had Dundas, or whoever got Burns the place of gauger, given him one of the many sinecures of two or ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... in the motor area, and are called, from their shape, the "giant pyramids". They have large dendrites and very long axons, which latter, {53} running in a thick bundle down from the cortex through the brain stem and cord, constitute the "pyramidal tract", the principal path of communication from the cerebrum to the lower centers. The motor area of the brain has no direct connection with any muscle, but acts through the pyramidal tract on the lower centers, which in turn ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth
... had the appearance of one entire orchard of fruit trees, where were mingled together the pyramidal orange, in fruit and in flower, the former in all its stages from green to dropping ripe,—the citron, lemon, and lime—trees, the stately, glossy—leaved star—apple, the golden shaddock and grape—fruit, with their slender branches bending under their ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... the south side of Grant Island, is a line of cliffs, from one to three hundred feet in height. A remarkable pyramidal rock marks the point where this terminates, after which a long range of low hills, covered with scrub, stretches to Cape Wollami, the helmet-shaped headland before-mentioned. A light North-East wind rendered our progress slow towards Cape Patterson, we ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 1. • J Lort Stokes
... The black, pyramidal beacon, called Nix's Mate, is well known to yachtsmen, sailors, and excursionists in Boston harbor. It rises above a shoal,—all that is left of a fair, green island which long ago disappeared in the sea. In 1636 it had an extent of twelve acres, and on its highest point was a gallows ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... similar structures were used in Mexico and Central America. The lower mounds, or most of them, must have been constructed as foundations of the more important edifices of the mound-building people. Many of the great buildings erected on such pyramidal foundations, at Palenque, Uxmal, and elsewhere in that region, have not disappeared, because they were built of hewn stone laid in mortar. For reasons not difficult to understand, the Mound-Builders, beginning their works on the lower Mississippi, ...
— Ancient America, in Notes on American Archaeology • John D. Baldwin
... was not then, nor in them, to be restrained. Colonnade rose over colonnade; the pediment of the western front was lifted into a detached and scenic wall; story above story sprang the multiplied arches of the Campanile, and the eastern pyramidal fire-type, lifted from its foundation, was placed upon the summit. With the superimposed arcades of the principal front arose the necessity, instantly felt by their subtle architects, of a new ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... Didron considers this a most important piece of bronze from an iconographic point of view theologically and poetically. The archaic qualities of the figures are fascinating and sometimes diverting. In the scene of the Baptism of Christ the water is positively trained to flow upwards in pyramidal form, in order to reach nearly to the waist, while at either side it recedes to the ground level again,—it has an ingenuous and almost startling suddenness in the rising of its flood! An interesting comment upon the prevalence of early national forms may be deduced, when one observes that on ...
— Arts and Crafts in the Middle Ages • Julia De Wolf Addison
... Collection at the Louvre at Paris; especially in small pyramids, which were probably the objects of household worship. In one case I found a small pyramid, on the upper part of which appeared the disc of the Sun, with pyramidal rays descending from it on to figures in the Egyptian attitude of adoration. This consists in the hands held up before the eyes—an attitude expressive of the brightness of the object adored. It is associated with the brightness of the Sun, and it still survives in the Salaam, ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... wore a dress of reddish-brown velvet, the skirt of which, adjusted in graceful folds, was held up by big butterflies made of Dresden china; the front was a tablier of cloth of silver, upon which was embroidered an orchestra of musicians arranged in a pyramidal group, consisting of a series of six ranks of performers, with beautiful instruments wrought in raised needle-work. 'Into the night go one and all,' as Mr. Henley sings in his charming Ballade of ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... character. The choice induced so much argument and disagreement that Mr. Beresford was at last appointed head of the clan; and having announced himself formally as The Mackintosh, he was placed on the summit of a hastily arranged pyramidal cairn. He was given an ash wand and a rowan-tree sword; and then, according to ancient custom, his pedigree and the exploits of his ancestors were recounted, and he was exhorted to emulate their example. Now it seems that a Highland chief of the olden ...
— Penelope's Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... devised a double tetrahedron to classify colors, while a student of painting in 1879. It now appears that the sphere was common property with psychologists, having been described by Runge in 1810. Earlier still, Lambert had suggested a pyramidal form. Both are based on the erroneous assumption that red, yellow, and blue are primary sensations, and also fail to place these hues in a just scale of luminosity. My twirling color solid and its completer development in ...
— A Color Notation - A measured color system, based on the three qualities Hue, - Value and Chroma • Albert H. Munsell
... back, and a cigar between his lips. His eyes were turned to the mantlepiece, where since the day the portrait was first suspended, ten months ago, Regina had never failed to keep a fresh dainty bouquet of fragrant flowers. This afternoon, the little vase held only apple-geranium leaves, and a pyramidal cluster of tuberoses; and her guardian had observed that when white blossoms could be bought, coloured ones ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... remarkable difference in the number of the leaves in this plant, the leaves themselves are observed to be much smaller in the winter season, and their ribs less branched; the runners also are slenderer and more productive, and the fruit in general more oblong or pyramidal. As an object of curiosity, this plant is deserving a place in every garden of any extent; nor is its singularity its only recommendation, its fruit being equal to that of the finest Wood Strawberry, with which ...
— The Botanical Magazine v 2 - or Flower-Garden Displayed • William Curtis
... vicinity sent designs and plans. Some of these were very attractive. It happened, however, that a member of my Council, the Hon. Isaac Davis, of Worcester, had returned recently from a visit to Europe. He informed me that he had seen at Lucca in Italy, a pyramidal structure which was considered the finest monument of its sort to be found in Europe. I sent immediately for the proportions of the pyramid and the Sudbury monument was modeled upon the same plan. I am of the opinion that it fully justified the ...
— Reminiscences of Sixty Years in Public Affairs, Vol. 1 • George Boutwell
... page 422 is a single pyramid rather than four pyramids. It is composed of four triangular walls, each of which is called a pyramid for convenience and represents a certain phase of your nature. The great pyramidal I AM is complete only as all sides of your selfhood are fully built up. You are LOOKING ...
— Mastery of Self • Frank Channing Haddock
... Moscou. I knew her as a thin old woman with delicate but insignificant features, with crooked teeth, like a hare's, in a tiny little mouth, with a multitude of finely crimped little yellow curls on her forehead, and painted eyebrows. She invariably wore a pyramidal cap with pink ribbons, a high ruff round her neck, a short white dress, and prunella slippers with red heels; and over her dress she wore a jacket of blue satin, with a sleeve hanging loose from her right shoulder. This was precisely the costume ...
— A Desperate Character and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... of a long tapering shaft or beam, pivoted at a short distance from the butt end on a pair of strong pyramidal trestles. At the other end of the shaft a sling was applied, one cord of which was firmly attached by a ring, whilst the other hung in a loop over an iron hook which formed the extremity of the shaft. ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... where I lost them, and could not discover with certainty any cement glands. I may, however, here mention, that I found in the lower half of the peduncle, numerous, yellowish, transparent, excessively minute, pyramidal bodies, with step-formed sides; of these two or three often cohered by their bases like crystals; I have never seen anything like these in other Cirripedes, but it has occurred to me that they may possibly be connected with the formation ...
— A Monograph on the Sub-class Cirripedia (Volume 1 of 2) - The Lepadidae; or, Pedunculated Cirripedes • Charles Darwin
... not altogether effaced his own image in any region of human habitancy. He has fancy, keenness of conception, desperate but unwilling bravery, scientific faculties, and a quiet delight in the richness of his own lovely islands and pyramidal mountains. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various
... field, for he had had the name of a good soldier. But probably he was a big man in his own line, whatever it was, for the Under-Secretary fellow had talked small in his presence, and so great a man as Gaudian clearly respected him. There must be no lack of brains inside that funny pyramidal head. ...
— Greenmantle • John Buchan
... was that she was taken to be guilty.' Napoleon thought that the King should have taken the case into his own hand. This might have been wisdom for the day, but not for securing the verdict of posterity. The pyramidal documents of the process, still in existence, demonstrate the guilt of the La Mottes and their accomplices at every step, and prove the stainless character ...
— Historical Mysteries • Andrew Lang
... towards the south, and soon reached the slopes of the Assassif, the hill of Sheikh-Abd-el-Qurnah and the district of Qurnet-Murrai—in fact, all that part which the people of the country called the "Brow" of Thebes. On the borders of the cultivated land a row of chapels and mastabas with pyramidal roofs sheltered the remains of the princes and princesses of the royal family. The Pharaohs themselves were buried either separately under their respective brick pyramids or in groups in a temple, ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 5 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... can find out. The cheek of the young party is pyramidal,' said Mr. Tom, as he rang ...
— The Beautiful Wretch; The Pupil of Aurelius; and The Four Macnicols • William Black
... an immense earthen tumulus, piled over the simple-mounded grave, which accumulating portions were severally borne to their hallowed place in the arms alone of each silent mourner, in a certain number of successive days, till the whole was raised into a grand pyramidal mass. ...
— Thaddeus of Warsaw • Jane Porter
... pyramidal cedars, looking down at the new grave, where Salome's wreath hung on the head-board, and hearing approaching footsteps would have moved away, but he ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... with these domestic pictures—pet kittens and children playing close under its shadow, tiny cabbage and tomato beds planted to its very edge-stands the huge, angular, pyramidal pile called ...
— The Roof of France • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... these things that is found for which search is made, and as we live on we seek further. Wherefore it is possible to see that one desirable thing stands under the other in the eyes of our Soul in a way almost pyramidal, for the least first covers the whole, and is as it were the point of the desirable good, which is God, at the basis of all; so that the farther it proceeds from the point towards the basis, so much the greater do the desirable good things appear; and ...
— The Banquet (Il Convito) • Dante Alighieri
... and towers of the real little city of Bethune. Away beyond Bethune one could see the blue hills in which the Germans were strongly entrenched. To the right among these hills projected three sharp-pointed, pyramidal hills, indicating the location of the dumps of French coal mines, then operated by ...
— On the Fringe of the Great Fight • George G. Nasmith
... be obtained in any quantity from nurserymen and collectors. The horticultural forms in cultivation range from thick, low, spreading tufts, through very dwarf, round, oval or conical forms, to tall, narrow, pyramidal varieties. Some have all the foliage tinged bright yellow, cream, or white; others have variegated foliage; another form has drooping branches. The bright summer foliage turns to a brownish color in winter. It is ...
— Handbook of the Trees of New England • Lorin Low Dame
... quality of almost pyramidal solidity characterizes another great enterprise of the Napoleonic period, the codification ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... An arrow with a pyramidal head of iron and copper spiral wings, by which a rotatory motion ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... sashes above streamed cool and fair over the blooms that clung to the wall and adorned the parterres and vases; for this house was set after a fashion of my own, a winter-garden under glass; no stages filled the centre. It was laid out with no stiff rule, but here and there in urns of stone, or in pyramidal stands, gorgeous or fragrant plants ran at their own wild will, while over all the wall and along the woodwork of the roof trailed passion-flowers, roses, honeysuckles, fragrant clematis, ivy, and those tropic vines whose long dead names belie their fervid luxuriance and fantastic growth; ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... also transmitting in, to another screen, from two hundred feet above the village. From the sound outlet came an incessant gibber of native voices. There were over a hundred houses, all small and square, with pyramidal roofs. On the end of the mound toward the Terran camp, animals of at least four different species were crowded, cattle that had been herded up from the meadows at the first alarm. The open circle in the middle of the village was crowded, and more natives ...
— Naudsonce • H. Beam Piper
... companion, who certainly spared me not. Notwithstanding my vigorous resolves to turn a deaf ear to his narratives, I could not avoid learning that he was the director of music to some German prince—that he had been to Paris to bring out an opera which having, as he said, a "success pyramidal," he was about to repeat in Strasbourg. He further informed me that a depute from Alsace had obtained for him a government permission to travel with the courier; but that he being "social" withal, and no ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Complete • Charles James Lever (1806-1872)
... most clearly shown in the case of the animal figures pictured in Cod. Tro. 9a and 22*a, where the stone laid upon and weighing down the horizontal beam is represented by the element cauac. But this explanation must be accepted also, because we find the pyramidal foundation of the temple covered with the element cauac. And where, in Cod. Tro. 15*a, to the Chac who is felling a tree is opposed the death god, also felling a tree, covered by the element cauac, ...
— Day Symbols of the Maya Year • Cyrus Thomas
... With a clear sky above them, they looked down upon the valley of Grindelwald at their feet, while around and below them gathered the Scheideck and the Faulhorn, the pyramidal outline of the Niesen, and the chain of the Stockhorn. In front lay the great masses of the Eiger and the Monch, while to the southwest the Jungfrau rose above the long chain of the Viescherhorner. The first pause of silent wonder and delight, ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz
... warming-pan—a necessary comfort here of cold nights in fireless rooms. By way of ornament, three or four violently-colored lithographs were tacked against the walls, together with a severely formal array—a pyramidal ...
— The Christmas Kalends of Provence - And Some Other Provencal Festivals • Thomas A. Janvier
... on divans sat the chief dignitaries of the Empire, the viziers, the secretaries, the presenters of petitions according to rank, in splendid robes, and with round, pyramidal or beehive-shaped turbans according to the nature of ...
— Halil the Pedlar - A Tale of Old Stambul • Mr Jkai
... known monuments are Hindu makes it improbable that stone buildings on a large scale existed before their arrival. The feature which most clearly distinguishes Cambojan from Indian architecture is its pyramidal structure. India has stupas and gopurams of pyramidal appearance but still Hindu temples of the normal type, both in the north and south, consist of a number of buildings erected on the same level. In Camboja on the contrary many buildings, such as Ta-Keo, Ba-phuong and the Phimeanakas, ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, An Historical Sketch, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Charles Eliot
... The one we saw had fragrant flowers. Its leaves are manufactured into mats and baskets. Its fruit is of a spherical form, from four to six inches in diameter, the surface being exactly divided by projections of a pointed, pyramidal shape. I have already described the bamboos. As we proceeded higher up we found ourselves among lofty fig-trees. Here the number of orchidaceous plants greatly increased, hanging down from the boughs of nearly all the trees, ...
— In the Eastern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... the fame of their elaborate preparations has traveled far and wide. While we are waiting for the vehicles which are to convey us to the railroad station (a long drive inland) many most picturesque groups pass the door; some walking, some riding on ox-carts, and all carrying flowers, pyramidal and gorgeously ornamented cakes, or curious implements for games, totally unknown to us moderns! Our host has a pleasant greeting for all, and receives cordial reply, and sometimes merry jest and repartee from the ...
— Over the Border: Acadia • Eliza Chase
... A pyramidal monument marks the burial place of the Russians who fell at the capture of the city, and the positions of the besiegers are still pointed out; but I believe no traces of the circumvallation are ...
— Overland through Asia; Pictures of Siberian, Chinese, and Tartar - Life • Thomas Wallace Knox
... possible that a bank of intensely hard compact earth, in which were embedded a large number of human skulls, took its place. A very remarkable altar, at present unique, was found at Taanach by the Austrian excavators. It is pyramidal in shape, and the surface is ornamented with human-headed animals in relief. This, like the earliest Babylonian altars, is ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... they assume the appearance of elongated ridges which seem as if they had been planed down to a uniform height by some external force. The next day we passed in succession a series of similar flat-topped hills, some isolated and of a truncated-pyramidal shape, others prolonged to a length of several miles. There is an interval of low country between these and the Almeyrim range, which has a total length of about twenty-five miles; then commences abruptly ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates
... spanned by a lovely rainbow. The walls of rock, bedewed by the ever-falling water, were a series of the most brilliant greens supplied by the luxuriant ferns and mosses, while here and there, where their seeds had found nourishment in cleft and chasm, huge cedars, perfect in their pyramidal symmetry, rose spiring up to arrow-like points a hundred, two hundred feet in the pure air. Flowers dotted the grassy bottom; birds flitted here and there, and sang. There was the delicious lemony odour emitted by the deodars, and a dreamy ...
— Fix Bay'nets - The Regiment in the Hills • George Manville Fenn
... these gorgeous fruits, in multitudinous attendance, a confused array of scarlet runners, tomatoes, cabbages, out-tumbled sacks of glazy purple aubergines, mysterious-looking gigantic pumpkins, buckets full of pyramidal maize-cobs, yellow, white-sheathed. ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham
... expected, many opinions were expressed upon the design. Some wanted the whole to be surmounted by a pyramidal capping. It was objected that the design was a stone construction for what must of necessity be erected of wood. It was pointed out that Walsingham used his upper story as a bell-chamber, and argued that a true restoration should aim at reproducing this feature. In the end Scott's design ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Ely • W. D. Sweeting
... oblong, with a sort of black disc fixed to the top. In the face of the box, just as in the other we had used, were two little square holes, with sides also of cedar, converging inward, making a pair of little quadrangular pyramidal holes which seemed to end in a small round black circle in the interior, ...
— Guy Garrick • Arthur B. Reeve
... districts of West Flanders and the Ardennes. All the places enumerated are thoroughly worth visiting, but obviously only the more important can be dealt with more than just casually here. Mons, on a hill overlooking the great coalfield of the Borinage, with its strange pyramidal spoil-heaps, is itself curiously free from the dirt and squalor of an English colliery town; and equally worth visiting for the sake of its splendid cathedral of St. Wandru, the richly polychromatic effect of whose interior, due to the conjunction of deep red-brick vaulting with the dark ...
— Beautiful Europe - Belgium • Joseph E. Morris
... any means to be allowed that the heart only moves in the lines of its straight fibres, although the great Vesalius giving this notion countenance, quotes a bundle of osiers bound in a pyramidal heap in illustration; meaning, that as the apex is approached to the base, so are the sides made to bulge out in the fashion of arches, the cavities to dilate, the ventricles to acquire the form of a cupping-glass and so to suck in the blood. But the true effect of ...
— The Harvard Classics Volume 38 - Scientific Papers (Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology) • Various
... toward the crystal in order to see better the devouring activity of that pyramidal stomach which had on its sharp point a diminutive parrot head with two ferocious eyes and around its base the twisted skeins of its arms full of projecting disks. With these it pressed the crab against its mouth, injecting under its shell the venomous output of its salivary ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... the altar, opposite Fra Angelico's "Prophets," and arranged in exactly the same pyramidal form, is a magnificent group, representing the "Apostles," the Virgin being seated on the lowest tier with S. Peter and S. Paul. Very noble, impressive figures, powerfully and solidly painted, with broadly-draped, heavy-folded robes, ...
— Luca Signorelli • Maud Cruttwell
... "Pyramidal!" cried Gevrol ironically. "I fear, however, your well-dressed young man must have been just a little embarrassed in carrying a bundle covered with a snow white napkin, which could be so easily ...
— The Widow Lerouge - The Lerouge Case • Emile Gaboriau
... background—i.e., vista. No matter how much it wanders, it returns to that central spot and is held there, keeping hold on all the other elements. Of Hildebrand's example it may be said that the pyramidal composition with the dark and tall tree in the center effectually accomplishes the binding together of the two figures, so that a vista is not needed. A wide background without that tree would leave ...
— Harvard Psychological Studies, Volume 1 • Various
... side, the ice-cap abuts against this extinct volcano at an elevation of about four hundred feet above sea-level; the summit of the mountain rises another eight hundred feet. On the north, the rock descends to the floe. Gaussberg is pyramidal in shape, falling steeply, from a ridge at the summit. The sides are covered with a loose rubble of volcanic fragments, square yards of which commence to slide at the slightest disturbance. This renders climbing difficult ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... mar their fame in spite of the ages through which they have lived. Most prominent is the Douglas Fir, or Douglas Spruce (Pseudotsuga taxifolia), the giant of the forest, growing erect as a plumb-line until it ends in a pyramidal crown two hundred feet or more above the ground. This is the most important tree of the state, for its product houses the people, and for the past ten years has insured Washington first place in lumber production in the United States. Some of the largest trees reach the enormous proportions ...
— The Beauties of the State of Washington - A Book for Tourists • Harry F. Giles
... position both in Shakespeare's day and for some time after the Restoration; an arrangement which was revived by Mr. Steele Mackaye in the Madison Square Theatre, and originally in the first little Lyceum, New York, both now pulled down. The pyramidal pediment above this opening projects above the upper cornice into a coved ceiling, which would appear from the rendering of the drawing to form an apse above the semi-circular stage. Behind the proscenium ...
— Shakespearean Playhouses - A History of English Theatres from the Beginnings to the Restoration • Joseph Quincy Adams
... a European, or an American, who has not visited Egypt, to realize the conception of a Great Pyramid. The pyramidal form has gone entirely out of use as an architectural type of monumental perfection; nay, even as an architectural embellishment. It maintained an honourable position in architecture from its first discovery ...
— Ancient Egypt • George Rawlinson
... at Abusir was the aniconic representative of the sun-god Re, or rather, the support of the pyramidal apex, the gilded surface of which reflected the sun's rays and so made manifest the god's ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... breathless anxiety to see old Neptune take his turn. We had seen the wonders and beauties presented by the other fountains as they shot their silvery columns, and clouds of vapor high into the air, or spanned their pyramidal basins with innumerable liquid arches intersecting each other in every conceivable direction; but the grandest sight, it was said, was still in store for us. All the other fountains had commenced their playing with humble spasms—the ...
— The Youthful Wanderer - An Account of a Tour through England, France, Belgium, Holland, Germany • George H. Heffner
... perfect, and it becomes our happy privilege, in this notice, to commend and to point out, to "lay" readers about Art, the manifold beauties of its technical execution. A critical examination will show that the composition is on the pyramidal principle, and the arrangement of groups principally in threes. In the central portion of the canvas, where the marble pillars of the porch fall off in perspective, the Profligate stands holding up a golden cup in his right hand, as in the act of proposing a toast. ...
— The Aldine, Vol. 5, No. 1., January, 1872 - A Typographic Art Journal • Various
... invisible man, was all that came to welcome him. He walked into the waiting-room, which was lighted by a lamp with a dirty tin reflector behind it, and was furnished with a few well-worn chairs, painted gray, and polished by use; a couple of spittoons, and a pyramidal stove containing the ashes of the day's fire. The plaster walls were ornamented by many-colored railway cards, and by a fly-spotted and dusty map. A clock was fastened over ...
— Bressant • Julian Hawthorne
... volunteers in the next year and was severely wounded at Antietam, after which he was made major-general and commanded the Twenty-third Army Corps in Burnside's campaign of East Tennessee.] He was a large man, of heavy frame; his face was broad, and his bald head, tapering high, gave a peculiar pyramidal appearance to his figure. He was systematic and accurate in administrative work, patient and insistent in bringing the young volunteer officers in his department into habits of order and good military form. His coolness tempered the impulsiveness of his chief, and as they were of ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V1 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... of 1681. This wooden meeting-house, with the truncated pyramidal roof and belfry (to serve as a lookout station), has just been built. A stage ahead, architecturally, of the log meeting-house with clay-filled chinks, thatched roof, oiled-paper windows, earthen floor, and a stage behind ...
— The Old Coast Road - From Boston to Plymouth • Agnes Rothery
... color,—also to change form. They take a lilaceous hue, broken by gray and green lights; and as we draw yet nearer they prove dissimilar both in shape and tint.... Now they separate before us, throwing long pyramidal shadows across the steamer's path. Then, as they open to our coming, between them a sea bay is revealed—a very lovely curving bay, bounded by hollow cliffs of fiery green. At either side of the gap the Pitons rise like monster ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... either by creative interpreters on the stage, or by the creative imagination of the reader in the study. It is as if he carried an immense weight to the landing at the turn of a flight of stairs, and that thence upward the lifting had to be done by other people. Consider the affair as a pyramidal structure, and the dramatist is the base—but he is not the apex. A play is a collaboration of creative faculties. The egotism of the dramatist resents this uncomfortable fact, but the fact exists. And further, the creative faculties are not only those of the author, the stage-director ...
— The Author's Craft • Arnold Bennett
... happen to figures in the best ages of art, as if it had been boned for a pie, was called a fantoccio da cero, a tower-puppet; consequently improved taste, with Cecca to help it, had devised for the magnificent Zecca a triumphal car like a pyramidal catafalque, with ingenious wheels warranted to turn all corners easily. Round the base were living figures of saints and angels arrayed in sculpturesque fashion; and on the summit, at the height of thirty feet, well bound to an iron rod and holding an iron cross also firmly infixed, stood a living ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... standing beside his wife, with his arm round her waist, and they both looked out into the distance to see what he was alluding to. They at length perceived some pyramidal rocks which the vessel rounded presently to enter an immense peaceful gulf surrounded by lofty summits, the base of which was covered with ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... picked up some habits and customs from each of them. She is welcome to wait at table in white cotton gloves and to perch a huge silk bow on her hair, which is redolent of the kitchen, but when it comes to trimming her poor work-worn nails to the fashionable pyramidal shape—she really ...
— The Dangerous Age • Karin Michaelis
... revetment which surrounded it. The platform was about eight feet high, and was apparently case-mated, for immediately in front of me, as I entered, was a door and two windows, through the latter of which streamed into the blackness of the night the feeble rays of a barrack lantern. Pyramidal piles of round shot were stacked here and there about the gravelled court-yard; and upon approaching one of these and passing my hand over the shot, I came to the conclusion that the five guns which I dimly made out as shapeless masses of blackness upon the platform ...
— The Log of a Privateersman • Harry Collingwood
... churches of the town stood out starkly, even while their misshapen spires were kindly hidden in the low, driving storm. Near the railroad-station, the new Methodist chapel, whose resemblance to an enormous locomotive was further heightened by the addition of a pyramidal row of front-steps, like a cowcatcher, stood as if waiting for a few more houses to be hitched on to proceed to a pleasanter location. But the pride of Genoa—the great Crammer Institute for Young Ladies—stretched its ...
— Tales of the Argonauts • Bret Harte
... were growing despondent. Two rifle bullets, fired by running men, sang unsteadily in his wake. He was now so near that he could see the rough wooden gate and the pyramidal nails with which it was studded. He could guess the number of paces between him and safety. He was out of breath and a little tired, for the scramble up the nullah had not been a light one. Again he yelled frantically to the dead walls, ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan
... those around him, and irony settled on his thin lips. Did those men imagine that he could begin such undertakings and be like a blind man among colors? Some begin thus but are ruined! He understood that in our time immense knowledge is the only foundation for pyramidal fortunes, and his memory alone knew the long series of nights which had passed above his head while it was ...
— The Argonauts • Eliza Orzeszko (AKA Orzeszkowa)
... triad of hills. "Trirashmi" or Triple Sunbeam is the name by which the hill is known in seven of the cave-inscriptions, and is held by the learned Pundit who wrote the Gazetter account to refer to its pyramidal or triple fire-tongue shape. But is it not conceivable that the hand which carved the earliest of those priceless inscriptions desired to designate the triad of contiguous hills as "the tripla ray," and not the eastern hill alone in which the caves have been hewn? Who ...
— By-Ways of Bombay • S. M. Edwardes, C.V.O.
... From here I visited the stalactite springs, not far distant, of Naglegbeng. [105] I had expected to see a calcareous fountain, but found the most magnificent masses of silica of infinite variety of form; shallow cones with cylindrical summits, pyramidal flights of steps, round basins with ribbed margins, and ponds of boiling water. One spot, denuded of trees, from two to three hundred paces in breadth and about five hundred in length, was, with the exception of a few places overgrown with turf, covered with ...
— The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes • Fedor Jagor; Tomas de Comyn; Chas. Wilkes; Rudolf Virchow.
... to left his eager glance swept the river's widening reach. Vessels were there in abundance, odd, unwieldy, blunt-bowed craft with huge, rakish, tawny sails; long strings of flat barges, pyramidal mounds of coal on each, lashed to another and convoyed by panting tugs; steam cargo boats, battered, worn, rusted sore through their age-old paint; a steel leviathan of the deep seas, half cargo, half passenger boat, warping reluctantly into the mouth of the Victoria Dock tidal basin,—but no brigantine, ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... reasonably successful. I remember the great delight in marking the difference between oak and birch trees and fitting each with its appropriate effect of color and texture of leaf; and the building of a tall gray-green yucca, with its thick satin leaves and tall white pyramidal groups of velvet blossoms, standing in the very foreground, was as exciting as if it were standing posed for its portrait, ...
— The Development of Embroidery in America • Candace Wheeler
... of science were so wonderfully united, had not been greatly preoccupied with the mathematics of the art of painting. His Madonna of the Rocks, and Virgin on the Lap of Saint Anne, in the Louvre, exhibit the very perfection of pyramidal composition. It is however in his masterpiece, The Last Supper, that he combines geometrical symmetry and precision with perfect naturalness and freedom in the grouping of individually interesting and dramatic figures. Michael Angelo, Andrea del Sarto, and the great Venetians, in whose ...
— The Beautiful Necessity • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... scene outside the house: the farmers and their families were moving about the lawn, among the flowers and shrubs, or along the broad straight road leading from the east front, where a carpet of mossy grass spread on each side, studded here and there with a dark flat-boughed cedar, or a grand pyramidal fir sweeping the ground with its branches, all tipped with a fringe of paler green. The groups of cottagers in the park were gradually diminishing, the young ones being attracted towards the lights that were beginning to gleam from the windows ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... sea. And yet, there is not in all these that immortal intelligence, that living, palpitating soul, which you find in a great book. A man who conceives and writes a great book, my friend, has done more work than all the helots that laboured on these pyramidal futilities. That is why I find no exaggeration in Khalid's words. For when he loafs, he does so in good earnest. Not like the camel-driver there or the camel, but after the manner of the great thinkers and mystics: like Al-Fared and ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... a peach basket; and lines drawn from the most projecting part of the arches and touching the sides of the frontal bone are supposed to meet over the forehead, forming a triangle, for which reason the skull is known as pyramidal. ...
— The First Landing on Wrangel Island - With Some Remarks on the Northern Inhabitants • Irving C. Rosse
... was now giving me some concern; so on again to Madura, en route to Tuticorin, from whence a steamer would take me across to the land of spicy breezes. Madura has a wonderful old temple of immense size, surrounded by gopuras of pyramidal form, in whose construction huge stones of enormous dimensions were utilized; the temple also has much fine carving, etc. The old palace is ...
— Ranching, Sport and Travel • Thomas Carson
... of the six systems enumerated above, the tetragonal—or the quadratic, square prismatic, dimetric, or pyramidal—system has three axes like the cubic, but, in this case, though they are all at right angles, two only of them are equal, the third, consequently, unequal. The vertical or principal axis is often much longer or shorter in this group, but the other two are always equal and lie ...
— The Chemistry, Properties and Tests of Precious Stones • John Mastin
... of a living brood—from the reports of an actual Society, issued in an abridged and doubtless an emasculated form through the columns of a weekly newspaper. One final and unapproachable instance, one transcendant and pyramidal example of classical taste and of critical scholarship, I did not venture to impair by transference from those columns and transplantation into these pages among humbler specimens of minor monstrosity. Let it stand here once more on record as "a good jest ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... cabinet, as beautiful in workmanship as material. It was quadrangular, and about fifteen inches by twelve at the base, standing on four legs, that raised it about half an inch from its pedestal. It was pyramidal in form, about fourteen inches high, and divided into eleven stages. These were separated by a ledge of yellow amber, about one-eighth of an inch in thickness, projecting a little over the under stage, like a cornice. The front of each stage was ornamented with recumbent figures in ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 419, New Series, January 10, 1852 • Various
... On the inner side, above the keystone of the arch, is a lofty brick wall in the shape of a horse-shoe, built exclusively for the purpose of displaying in colossal size, emblazoned in stucco, the city arms, the sun rising above three or four pyramidal mountains arranged above each other. The external facade consists of two pairs of Doric columns of granite and marble flanking the arch, whose colour and beauty have entirely disappeared through exposure ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... entered, and at the other by a broad, square opening, hung with looped-back curtains of a thin silken stuff. Between the two apertures rose against the wall what Theron took at first glance to be an altar. There were pyramidal rows of tall candles here on either side, each masked with a little silken hood; below, in the centre, a shelf-like projection supported what seemed a massive, carved casket, and in the beautiful intricacies of this, ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic
... annually, it does not despair; but, putting forth two short twigs for every one cut off, it spreads out low along the ground in the hollows or between the rocks, growing more stout and scrubby, until it forms, not a tree as yet, but a little pyramidal, stiff, twiggy mass, almost as solid and impenetrable as a rock. Some of the densest and most impenetrable clumps of bushes that I have ever seen, as well on account of the closeness and stubbornness of their branches as of their thorns, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 61, November, 1862 • Various
... his Netherland Subjects. From afar there rose upon the provinces the prophetic vision of a coming evil still more terrible than any which had yet oppressed them. As across the bright plains of Sicily, when the sun is rising, the vast pyramidal shadow of Mount Etna is definitely and visibly projected—the phantom of that ever-present enemy, which holds fire and devastation in its bosom—so, in the morning hour of Philip's reign, the shadow of the inquisition was cast from afar across those warm and smiling provinces—a ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... the pleasure we experience in the sight of an immense tree, springs from the feeling of the infinite which is excited in us by its pyramidal form. The decrease in the different tiers of its branches; the infinitesimal gradations in its shades of green, always lighter at the extremity of the tree than in the rest of its foliage—give it an elevation apparently without limit. We experience the same sensations ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various |
