"Tuscan" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... questions at once, my Son. The country of the holy man is a mystery to us all. He speaks the Tuscan dialect well, but with a foreign accent. Nevertheless, though the wine is not of Hungary, it has a pleasant flavour. I wonder how the rogues kept it so snugly from the knowledge and comfort of their ...
— Devereux, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... France above alluded to, there are other countries, as the north of Spain, the south of Sicily, the Tuscan territory of Italy, the lower Rhenish provinces, and Hungary, where spent volcanoes may be seen, still preserving in many cases a conical form, and having craters and often ...
— The Student's Elements of Geology • Sir Charles Lyell
... time. A man could hardly have started from better things, or been subject at important points of his progress to better influences. Benjamin Silliman was of Revolutionary stock, which had its roots in the soil of the Reformation. The Connecticut Puritan came of Tuscan Puritans, who fled their city of Lucca, and finally passed from Switzerland through Holland to our shores. Brain and heart in him were thus imbued with an unfaltering love of freedom, chastised by religious fervor; and when he became a man, he married with a race of kindred origin in ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866 • Various
... see the Amazon and the Paraguay, I see the four great rivers of China, the Amour, the Yellow River, the Yiang-tse, and the Pearl, I see where the Seine flows, and where the Danube, the Loire, the Rhone, and the Guadalquiver flow, I see the windings of the Volga, the Dnieper, the Oder, I see the Tuscan going down the Arno, and the Venetian along the Po, I see the Greek seaman sailing out of ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... declined. In the fourteenth century men of intellectual genius in Italy resolved to cultivate their own native language and to combine with its grandeur the charms of imagination and the acquirements of classical learning. The poetry of the Tuscan school, the works of Dante, Ariosto, Boccio and Petrarch, have never yet been excelled by four succeeding centuries of genius and literature. The way was open for the revival of classical learning in the fifteenth century, and for the cultivation ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, - Volume I, No. 10. October, 1880 • Various
... is ludicrously amusing. La Tina is the rustic mistress to whom the sonnets are supposed to be addressed; and every one knows that rusticale and contadinesca is that naive and pleasing rustic style in which the Florentine poets delighted, from the expressive nature of the patois of the Tuscan peasantry; and it might have been said of Malatesti's sonnets, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 204, September 24, 1853 • Various
... impulsive Germans of Tacitus. Titus Livius, Plutarch, and Machiavelli, all maintained that the successive invasions of the Germans into Italy were for the sake of the wine to be found there. Plutarch writes that "the Gauls were introduced to the Italian wine by a Tuscan named Arron, and so excited were they by the desire for more that, taking their wives and children with them, they journeyed across the Alps to conquer the land of such good vintages, looking upon other countries as sterile and savage by comparison. Even if this be not history, it is an ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... relievo is said to have been borrowed, with alterations, from Michael Angelo's work on the same subject. In 1765 the north wall of the churchyard was taken down, and replaced by the present railing and coping. In 1800 the gate was removed, and replaced by the present Tuscan gate, in which the sculpture has been refixed. This stood at first on the site of the old one on the north of the churchyard, but was removed to the west side, where it at present stands in an unnoticeable ...
— Holborn and Bloomsbury - The Fascination of London • Sir Walter Besant
... is gained; he turns not aside, but dashes madly through the little street formed by the huts and cottages of the Tuscan vine-dressers. ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds
... be reckoned with that quality of strong common sense, without which she had been no Tuscan girl. She had it in a remarkable degree, as you may judge when I say that it reconciled her to her position of wife to a vast, disorderly, tyrannical man nearly old enough to be her grandfather. It enabled ...
— The Fool Errant • Maurice Hewlett
... gained the shore, concealed himself until the arrival of a Genoese or Spanish vessel, escaped to Spain or Italy, where Mercedes and his father could have joined him. He had no fears as to how he should live—good seamen are welcome everywhere. He spoke Italian like a Tuscan, and Spanish like a Castilian; he would have been free, and happy with Mercedes and his father, whereas he was now confined in the Chateau d'If, that impregnable fortress, ignorant of the future destiny of his father and Mercedes; and all this because he had trusted to ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... leaving France he had recourse, first at Metz and afterwards in Italy, to the assistance of his old and ever well-disposed patron, Cardinal John Du Bellay. On returning to France he obtained from the new king, Henry II., a fresh faculty for the printing of his books "in Greek, Latin, and Tuscan;" and, almost at the same time, on the 18th of January, 1551, Cardinal Du Bellay, Bishop of Paris, conferred upon him the cure of St. Martin at Meudon, "which he discharged," says his biographer Colletet, "with all the sincerity, all the uprightness, and all the ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume IV. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... tenacity of leeches, as purveyors des menus plaisirs, and whose interests are vitally concerned in excluding English talent, and negotiating the concerns of foreign artists, that raise the cry of "pronunciation." It is these gentry who, in phrase that a Tuscan would spurn at, and in a brogue from which a Roman, ear would be averted with disgust, assure our fashionable opera goers that we poor Englishers cannot ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 487 - Vol. 17, No. 487. Saturday, April 30, 1831 • Various
... found her place and name in the padre's pure, soft Tuscan accent, he led the way to the convent door, apologizing for the meagre hospitality he could offer them. "Would the signore like some bread and wine before supper?" What could they know of the hours in an abbey, where it was an almost unheard-of distinction ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various
... of the Austrian empire now rested on the aged shoulders of Radetzky. On April 8, the Sardinian army, in a sharp engagement at Goito, effected the passage of the Mincio. The Austrians lost one thousand men. Siege was now laid to Peschiera. A Tuscan division moved on Mantua, while the bulk of Charles Albert's army cut off Verona from the roads to the Tyrol. Radetzky was driven to take the offensive. In a fight at Cortatone he defeated the Tuscans, but within twenty-four ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... those of his servants who had been taken from the ranks of the Duke's people, and bade his own Tuscan followers, Zaccaria and Lanciotto, see to the packing of his effects, and make all ready to set out ...
— Love-at-Arms • Raphael Sabatini
... in that place of refuge could not but be a mixture of the Tuscans and original Lepontii; and the two languages which met upon this occasion must, at the very first, have had some affinity; as the Tuscan, which derived immediately from the Greek, is known to have had a great share in the formation of the Roman. But as it is generally observed, that the more polished people introduce their native tongue wherever they go to reside in any considerable numbers, ...
— Account of the Romansh Language - In a Letter to Sir John Pringle, Bart. P. R. S. • Joseph Planta, Esq. F. R. S.
... have been the splendour of the colour before the outrages of time (and the cleaner) dimmed it. These delicious pagan amorini are the successors of the angelic putti of an earlier time, whom the Tuscan sculptors of the Quattrocento had already converted into more joyous and more earthly beings than their predecessors had imagined. Such painters of the North, in touch with the South, as Albrecht Duerer, Mabuse, ...
— The Earlier Work of Titian • Claude Phillips
... I wielded then is buried, Broken, and buried in the sand. Oh no. By mortal hands I must be ferried Unto the Tuscan strand. ...
— Ionica • William Cory (AKA William Johnson)
... paths along the stream, Dark Vallombrosa in their dream. They sing, amidst the rain-drenched pines, Of Tuscan gold that ruddier shines Behind a saint's auroral face That shows e'en yet the ...
— Songs and Other Verse • Eugene Field
... thoroughly genuine as far as it went, did not imply that minute and exact knowledge of her charms which characterizes some of our best British poets. They had no Thompson or Cowper. Their country seats were richer in architectural than floral beauty. Tully's Tuscan Villa, so fondly and minutely described by the proprietor himself, would appear to little advantage in the eyes of a true worshipper of Flora, if compared with Pope's retreat at Twickenham. The ancients had a taste for the rural, not for the gardenesque, nor ...
— Flowers and Flower-Gardens • David Lester Richardson
... of Tuscan birth, What country should we give her? Instead of any on the earth, The civic Heavens ...
— The Poetical Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume IV • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... Moon, whose orb The Tuscan artist views through optic glass At evening from the top of Fesole, Or in Valdarno, to descry new lands, Rivers or mountains ...
— Pleasures of the telescope • Garrett Serviss
... Yet nothing prov'd so formidable As the horrid cookery of the rabble; And fear, that keeps all feeling out, 1685 As lesser pains are by the gout, Reliev'd 'em with a fresh supply Of rallied force enough to fly, And beat a Tuscan running-horse, Whose jockey-rider is ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler
... lights on the bridges! what subtile principles enter into the building of such a bridge as the Britannia, where even the metallic contraction of the enormous tubes is provided for by supporting them on cannon-balls! how venerable seems the most graceful of Tuscan bridges, when we remember it was erected in the fifteenth century,—and the Rialto, when we think that it was designed by Michel Angelo! and how signal an instance is it of the progressive application of a true principle in science, that ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 74, December, 1863 • Various
... Greek: and not only seems, but is so. For compared with the great early civilizations, Rome is modern and of the West; while, draw her close as we may to our hearts, Greece brings along with her a breath of the East and a whisper of remote antiquity. A Tuscan gentleman of to-day, like a Roman gentleman of yesterday, is at heart a husbandman, like Cato; he is ruris amator, like Horace; he gets him to his little farm or vineyard (O rus, quando te aspiciam!), like Atticus or ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... Courtrai that the King at last, delivered from the menacing hostility of Rome, had leisure to turn his mind and efforts again toward Flanders. During the year 1303 he had sought to keep the Flemings at bay by bodies of Lombard and Tuscan infantry, whom his Florentine banker persuaded him to hire, and by Amadeus V, Duke of Savoy, who brought soldiers of that country to his aid. Although the long lances and more perfect armor of these troops gave them some advantage over the Flemings, the latter ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... the colour of the hair it might have been a portrait of Lady Loudwater, a faded portrait. It might also very well be a portrait of one of her actual ancestresses, for her grandmother was a lady of an old Tuscan family. ...
— The Loudwater Mystery • Edgar Jepson
... some period which is not defined in our authorities, he was beatified by due ecclesiastical process. His baptismal name was Guido, Giovanni being only his name in religion. He was born at Vicchio, in the Tuscan province of Mugello, of unknown but seemingly well-to-do parentage, in 1387 (not 1390 as sometimes stated); in 1407 he became a novice in the convent of S. Domenico at Fiesole, and in 1408 he took the vows and entered ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 2, Part 1, Slice 1 • Various
... sullen splash of the dark river, did his enemies hurl their showers of arrows and javelins. Then, dexterously warding off the missiles with his shield, he plunged into the Tiber. Although stabbed in the hip by a Tuscan spear which lamed him for life, he ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden
... Mr. Jackson Unthank, a man of wealth and taste, who was resolved on having such a collection of pictures at his house in Baltimore that no English private collection should in any way come near to it; and a Tuscan, from the Italian Foreign Office, to whom nobody could speak except Mr. Harris Hyde Granville Gore,—who did not indeed seem to enjoy the efforts of conversation which were expected of him. The Italian, who had a handle to his name,—he was a Count Buonarosci,—took ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... remember as a thing almost farcical my explanations to Margaret, and how frantically anxious I was to prevent the remote possibility of her coming with me, and how I crossed in the TUSCAN, a bad, wet boat, and mixed seasickness with ungovernable sorrow. I wept—tears. It was inexpressibly queer and ridiculous—and, good God! how I ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... silk embroidered with gold, but had besides more than a thousand devices and thoughts worked on it. And amongst the rest, if I remember right, there was a cock in the act of crowing at daybreak, and out of its mouth was seen coming a motto in Tuscan: IF I ONLY SEE YOU. And in another part a drooping heliotrope with a Tuscan motto: AT SUNSET—with so many other pretty things that it would require a better memory and more time than ...
— Stories from Pentamerone • Giambattista Basile
... interview with Phaon, Lucius's freedman, a sleek, well-oiled Sicilian Greek, who wore his hair very long to cover the holes bored in his ears—the mark of old-time servitude. He was the darling of waiting-maids; the collector of all current scandal; the master spirit in arranging dinners, able to tell a Tuscan from a Lucanian boar by mere taste. He used also to help his patron compose billets-doux, and had, by his twistings and scrapings, repeatedly staved off Phormio, Lucius's importunate creditor. As for Phaon's heart, it was so soft and tender that the pricks of conscience, if he ever had any, went ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis
... one thing he retained in its entirety, and that was blood and marrow in his matter": "Quamvis Tacitus caruerit nitore et puritate linguae, abeunte jam Romano sermone in peregrinas formas atque figuras; succum tamen et sanguinem rerum incorruptum retinuit." Eight years after the famous Tuscan lawyer and scholar, Ferretti, followed by accusing Tacitus in the preface to the edition of his works published at Lyons in 1541, of writing with inelegance and impurity: "consequently," he says, "in the ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross
... dismay they summon, as of yore, The Tuscan sages to the nation's aid. Aruns, the eldest, leaving his abode In desolate Luca, came, well versed in all The lore of omens; knowing what may mean The flight of hovering bird, the pulse that beats In offered victims, and the levin bolt. All monsters first, by most unnatural birth Brought into being, ...
— Pharsalia; Dramatic Episodes of the Civil Wars • Lucan
... what a shepherd's hut must have been in those days, in a narrow valley of the Tuscan hills—the small cottage built of unhewn stones picked up on the hillside, fitted together one by one, according to their irregular shapes, and cemented, if at all, with clay and mud from the river bed—the roof ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... been gathered to his fathers, and his title and estates had descended to his only son, then in his twenty-third year. At an early age Frederic had received a commission as captain of cavalry, but as every body knows that promotion is slower in the army of his Tuscan highness than in that of any other European power, he still remained a captain of cavalry, and probably would do so unto his dying day. It was his determination, as soon as he returned to Florence, to resign his commission, and retire to his paternal estates in ...
— An Old Sailor's Yarns • Nathaniel Ames
... sunny rooms at a nice hotel for myself and Elsie, and hired a ground floor in a convenient house, close under the shadow of the great marble Campanile. (Considerations of space compel me to curtail the usual gush about Arnolfo and Giotto.) This was our office. When I had got a Tuscan painter to plant our flag in the shape of a sign-board, I sailed forth into the street and inspected it from outside with a swelling heart. It is true, the Tuscan painter's unaccountable predilection ...
— Miss Cayley's Adventures • Grant Allen
... Dante-tongue, whereas our rough English can only supply for the word "love" some three or four similar sounds,—which is perhaps a fortunate thing. Angela spoke English and French as easily and fluently as her native Tuscan, and had read the most notable books in all three languages, so she was well aware that of all kinds of human speech in the world there is none so adapted for making love and generally telling lies in, as the "lingua Toscana in bocca Romana." And this particular "lingua" ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... Muscari, most original of the young Tuscan poets, walked swiftly into his favourite restaurant, which overlooked the Mediterranean, was covered by an awning and fenced by little lemon and orange trees. Waiters in white aprons were already laying out on white tables the insignia of an early and ...
— The Wisdom of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... but there surely was knavery at some point of its transit. It was too splendid in its enamelling, too subtle in the chiselling of its gilded silver to have slipped into the byways of the antiquary's trade with the consent of the Tuscan bishop who controlled or should have controlled its sale. For the matter of that, it still contained one of St. Lucy's knuckles, which in case of a regular transaction would have been transferred to a less precious reliquary. No, there must have been ...
— The Collectors • Frank Jewett Mather
... Jove I was dispatcht for their defence, and guard; And listen why, for I will tell ye now What never yet was heard in Tale or Song From old, or modern Bard in Hall, or Bowr. Bacchus that first from out the purple Grape, Crush't the sweet poyson of mis-used Wine After the Tuscan Mariners transform'd Coasting the Tyrrhene shore, as the winds listed, On Circes Hand fell (who knows not Circe 50 The daughter of the Sun? Whose charmed Cup Whoever tasted, lost his upright shape, And downward fell into a groveling ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... to be home again at Casa Guidi, they could not enjoy the midsummer heats of Florence, and so went to the Baths of Lucca. It was a delight for them to ramble among the chestnut-woods of the high Tuscan forests, and to go among the grape-vines where the sunburnt vintagers were busy. Once Browning paid a visit to that remote hill-stream and waterfall, high up in a precipitous glen, where, more than three-score years earlier, Shelley had been wont to amuse himself ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... here is wonderfully to the good. We are perched more than a thousand feet above the sea, looking over the Tuscan hills for twenty or thirty miles every way. It is with them enough sit with the window wide open and yet the air is prior and more bracing than in any place we have visited. Moreover, the hotel (Grande Albergo) ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley
... festivals of his sunny clime, edified my mother with a recipe for making bread of chestnuts, and in the morning, when, after breakfast, his dark sallow face lighted up, and his fierce eyes moistened with grateful emotion as in his own silvery Tuscan accent he poured out his thanks, we marveled at the fears which had so nearly closed our doors against him, and as he departed we all felt that he had left with us the blessing ...
— Our Holidays - Their Meaning and Spirit; retold from St. Nicholas • Various
... or musical sound, of the deepest and simplest attributes of our nature, and therefore most intelligible at last to those souls which have these attributes. In the sculptures of the Greeks, in the masonry of the Romans, and in the pictures of the Tuscan and Venetian masters, the highest charm is the universal language they speak. A confession of moral nature, of purity, love, and hope, breathes from them all. That which we carry to them, the same ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... a gentleman and of ancient lineage, refugees established in Provence, but of Italian origin. The progenitors were Tuscan. The family was one of those whom Florence had cast from her bosom in the stormy excesses of her liberty, and for which Dante reproaches his country in such bitter strains for her exiles and prosecutions. The blood of Machiavelli and the earthquake genius of the Italian ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... him. The scheme took Byron's fancy; but they agreed to try less Quixotic measures before they had recourse to force, and their excitement was calmed by hearing that the man's sentence had been commuted to the galleys. The other affair brought them less agreeably into contact with the Tuscan police. The party were riding home one afternoon in March, when a mounted dragoon came rushing by, breaking their ranks and nearly unhorsing Mr. Taafe. Byron and Shelley rode after him to remonstrate; but the man struck Shelley from his saddle ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... of its construction, its insulated position, together with the noble simplicity of its decoration, perfectly accord with the intention and character of the object proposed. Twenty-five arches, all of equal size, serve each as an entrance. On the ground-floor are pillars of the Tuscan order, supporting vast granaries, the communication to which is by two ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon
... Where the Tuscan olives whiten in the hot blue day, I would hide me from the heat in a little hut of gray, While the singing of the husbandman should scale my lattice green From the golden rows of barley that ...
— The Second Book of Modern Verse • Jessie B. Rittenhouse
... rod and hook, and also a number of human skulls. The latter are carefully arranged on an adjustable shelf, and Creso takes his place behind them, while in his rear a perfect chemist's shop of flasks, bottles, and pillboxes is disclosed. Very soon his singer ceases, and in the purest Tuscan dialect—the very utterance of which is music—the Florentine quack-doctor proceeds to address the assemblage. Not being conversant with the Italian, I am only able to give the substance of his harangue, and pronounce indifferently upon the merit of his elocution. I am assured, however, that ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum
... cession of Parma, Piacenza and Guastalla to Don Carlos; but the hostility of the Bourbon powers continued, resulting in 1733 in the War of Polish Succession, the outcome of which was the acquisition of Lorraine by France, and of Naples, Sicily and the Tuscan ports by Don Carlos, while the power of the Habsburg monarchy in northern Italy was strengthened by the acquisition of Parma, Piacenza and Guastalla. At the same time Spain and Sardinia adhered to the Pragmatic Sanction. Francis, the dispossessed duke of Lorraine, was to be ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... trouble to patch things up) should have said that he would like a "gentleman-like" article from Mr. Hunt for the Edinburgh; and the taunt about the Cockney School undoubtedly derived its venom from this weakness of his. Lamb was not descended from the kings that long the Tuscan sceptre swayed, and had some homely ways; Keats had to do with livery-stables, Hazlitt with shady lodging-houses and lodging-house keepers. But Keats might have been, whatever his weaknesses, his own and Spenser's Sir Calidore for gentle feeling and conduct; the man who called ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... favour; I answered with a faithful recital of my adventures from my arrival at Martorano. He laughed heartily at all I said respecting the poor and worthy bishop, and remarked that, instead of trying to address him in Tuscan, I could speak in the Venetian dialect, as he was himself speaking to me in the dialect of Bologna. I felt quite at my ease with him, and I told him so much news and amused him so well that the Holy Father kindly said that he ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... Sir J. Gardner Wilkinson observes—"The Egyptians did not always confine themselves to the mere imitation of natural objects for ornament; and their ceilings and cornices offer numerous graceful fancy devices, among which are the guilloche, miscalled Tuscan borders, the chevron, and the scroll patterns. They are to be met with in a tomb of the time of the sixth dynasty; they are therefore known in Egypt many ages before they were adopted by the Greeks, and the most complicated form of the ...
— Archaeological Essays, Vol. 1 • James Y. Simpson
... out the purple grapes Crushed the sweet poison of misused wine, After the Tuscan manners transformed, Coasting the Tyrrhene shore as the winds listed On Circe's island fell (who knows not Circe, The daughter of the Sun? whose charmed cup Whoever tasted lost his upright shape, And downward fell ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... in," but it is a miracle that he is not invariably drawn as a portrait-painter. A bird tied to the muzzle of a gun—an enemy who has written a book—an Indian prince under the protection of Giovanni Bulletto (Tuscan for John Bull),—is not more close upon demolition, one would think, than the heart of a lady delivered over to a painter's eyes, posed, draped, and lighted with the one object of studying her beauty. If there be any magnetism in isolated attention, any in steadfast gazing, any in passes ...
— Stories by American Authors (Volume 4) • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... and contented, and we are without anything.) The last line often is "E nui semu cca munnamu li denti" (And here we are picking our teeth), or "Ma a nui 'un ni desinu nenti" (But to us they gave nothing), which corresponds to a Tuscan ending:— ...
— Italian Popular Tales • Thomas Frederick Crane
... remember ever to have seen; they were partly like the old type that his boyhood knew, and partly like types he knew abroad. He saw German eyes with American wrinkles at their corners; he saw Irish eyes and Neapolitan eyes, Roman eyes, Tuscan eyes, eyes of Lombardy, of Savoy, Hungarian eyes, Balkan eyes, Scandinavian eyes—all with a queer American look in them. He saw Jews who had been German Jews, Jews who had been Russian Jews, Jews who ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington
... Florence than it could have been in any other town. For the palaces that still remain from that period are virtually fortresses and the eternal fights between Guelphs and Ghibellines had familiarised the Tuscan ...
— The Borgias - Celebrated Crimes • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... nowhere suffers from the languor of exhaustion in the artist or from repetition of motives. It remains the triumph of North Italian genius, exhibiting qualities of tenderness and self-abandonment to inspiration, which we lack in the severer masterpieces of the Tuscan school. ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... night Alicia wore a Tuscan Sonnet And many humming birds were fastened on it. Caught in a net of delicate creamy crepe The dainty captives lay there dead together; No dart of slender bill, no fragile shape Fluttering, no stir of radiant feather; Alicia looked so calm, I wondered whether She cared ...
— Dickey Downy - The Autobiography of a Bird • Virginia Sharpe Patterson
... containing one hundred and sixty-eight minutely inscribed lines. This monument, now exhibited in the Baths of Diocletian, was in the form of a square pillar enclosed by a projecting frame, with base and capital of the Tuscan order, and it measured, when entire, four metres in height. I believe that there is no inscription among the thirty thousand collected in volume vi. of the "Corpus" which makes a more profound impression on the mind, or appeals more to the imagination than this official report of ...
— Pagan and Christian Rome • Rodolfo Lanciani
... comprises sixteen examples of fifteenth-century work, with an introduction, also containing other information, on some characteristics of Tuscan sculpture ...
— A Mother's List of Books for Children • Gertrude Weld Arnold
... Florence, with its towers and palaces, the Arno running through it like a silver thread, and beyond, the purple of the Tuscan hills. All around on the sheltered hillside were green vines and fruit-trees, olives and cypresses, fields flaming in spring with scarlet anemones or golden with great yellow tulips, and hedges of rose-bushes covered with clusters of pink ...
— Knights of Art - Stories of the Italian Painters • Amy Steedman
... ago retired from public life, and in his Tuscan villa, where he now lived quite alone, seldom seeing his friends, he never regretted the strenuous days of his activity. He had done his work well; he had been more than a competent public servant; as Pro-Consul he proved a pillar of strength to the State, a man whose name at one time was on ...
— Orpheus in Mayfair and Other Stories and Sketches • Maurice Baring
... who "vulgarised" the austere methods of his master for popular Parisian consumption. That Renoir, Raffaelli, and Toulouse-Lautrec owe much to Degas is the secret of Polichinello. This patient student of the Tuscan Primitives, of Holbein, Chardin, Delacroix, Ingres, and Manet—the precepts of Manet taught him to sweeten the wiriness of his modelling and modify his tendency to a certain hardness—was willing to trust to time for the verdict ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... cloud the heavens of to-morrow, or let him make it bright with clear sunshine,—as he pleases; what the flying hour of to-day has already given us he never can revoke. Life is a stream, now gliding peacefully onward in mid-channel to the Tuscan sea, now tumbling upon its swirling bosom the wreckage of flood and storm. The pitiful human being on its banks, ever looking with greedy expectation up the stream, or with vain regret at what is past, ...
— Horace and His Influence • Grant Showerman
... Inquisition "for thinking otherwise in astronomy than his Dominican and Franciscan licensers thought." Milton is the most scholarly and the most truly classical of English poets. His Latin verse, for elegance and correctness, ranks with Addison's; and his Italian poems were the admiration of the Tuscan scholars. But his learning appears in his poetry only in the form of a fine and chastened result, and not in laborious allusion and pedantic citation, as too often in Ben Jonson, for instance. "My father," he wrote, "destined me, while yet a little child, for the study of humane letters." ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... success: the men kept their word and taught me all their tricks, all their exploits. Soon I surpassed my teachers in address and in temerity. I soon became the glory of their band. In the summertime we wandered over the vast Lombard plains and the low Tuscan mountains; in winter we displayed our prowess in Rome, in Naples, in Palermo; we loitered wherever the sun was warm or the people ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, July 1880. • Various
... corner, and from here the two Republican brigades beheld the ancient romantic town in the dawn as they approached. Many beautiful Castilian towers, stately and tapering to needles of stone, rose from among flat roofs and verdure tufts, and pointed upward to a sky as soft and warm as over the Tuscan hills. Other spires were Gothic, and others truncated, but the temples that gave character to the whole were those of Byzantine domes. Lighted by the sun's level rays of early morning, their mosaic colors glittered as in some bright glare of Algeria, but were relieved by the town's ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... to Italy very well and, in due time, the family were installed in the Villa Reale di Quarto, the picturesque old Palace of Cosimo, a spacious, luxurious place, even if not entirely cheerful or always comfortable during the changeable Tuscan winter. Congratulated in a letter from MacAlister in being in the midst of Florentine sunshine, he answered: "Florentine sunshine? Bless you, there isn't any. We have heavy fogs every morning, and rain all day. This house is not merely large, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... javelins by foul rust Corroded, or with ponderous harrow strike On empty helmets, while he gapes to see Bones as of giants from the trench untombed. Gods of my country, heroes of the soil, And Romulus, and Mother Vesta, thou Who Tuscan Tiber and Rome's Palatine Preservest, this new champion at the least Our fallen generation to repair Forbid not. To the full and long ago Our blood thy Trojan perjuries hath paid, Laomedon. Long since the courts of heaven Begrudge us thee, our ...
— The Georgics • Virgil
... springs she saw—two radiant Tuscan springs, What time the wild red tulips are aflame In the new wheat, and wreaths of young vine frame The daffodils that every light breeze swings; And the anemones that April brings Make purple pools, as if Adonis came Just there to die; and Florence scrolls ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various
... as by the more admitted bucks, the law student, and the village shop-boy. All the red cloaks had long since been laid aside to give place to imitation merino shawls, or, in cases of unusual moderation and sobriety, to mantles of silk. As Eve glanced her eye around her, she perceived Tuscan hats, bonnets of gay colours and flowers, and dresses of French chintzes, where fifty years ago would have been seen even men's woollen hats, and homely English calicoes. It is true that the change among ...
— Home as Found • James Fenimore Cooper
... five young ones, and devoured three of them. But what was chief of all, from a cloudless and clear sky there came the sound of a trumpet, so shrill and mournful, that by reason of the greatness thereof men were beside themselves and crouched for fear. The Tuscan seers interpreted this to portend the commencement of a new period, and a general change. They say that there are in all eight periods, which differ in mode of life and habits altogether from one another, ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume II • Aubrey Stewart & George Long
... richly painted with various devices, tasteful both in their form and the arrangement of the colors; among the oldest of which is the Guilloche, often miscalled the Tuscan ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... end of four years we went abroad again, and travel took away the appetite for reading as completely as writing did. I recall nothing read in that year in Europe which moved me, and I think I read very little, except the local histories of the Tuscan cities which I ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... distinguished themselves at the fight of the Jesia, and in the Valteline, until, by the truce which followed that memorable campaign, Pepe again found himself without employment, and in depot at Pavia. His restless spirit would not tolerate repose, and he entered the service of the Tuscan republic, where he continued until the truce of Luneville. An amnesty for Neapolitan political refugees being a condition of the treaty between France and Naples, he might now have returned home; but his hatred of the Bourbons indisposed him to such a step, and he resolved to enter the French ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCLXXVI. February, 1847. Vol. LXI. • Various
... skylight, and had rearranged the rest to her own taste; it was a mingling of order and disorder, of calculation and of careless chance. She had a Victory of Samothrace and a green-and-gold dalmatic from some Tuscan town——But why go on? ...
— Bertram Cope's Year • Henry Blake Fuller
... telescope or a reputed walking-cane; which peaceful and natural part of his appointments will first operate to draw out his lurking forest friend from his advantage; and on closer colloquy, if this friend should turn restive, then the 'Tuscan artist's tube,' contrived of course a double debt to pay, will suddenly reveal another sort of tube, insinuating an argument sufficient for the refutation of any sophism whatever. This is the best compromise which we can put forward with the present dilemma ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v2 • Thomas de Quincey
... the arbiter of style conversed learnedly of Tuscan, Pompeiian, Elizabethan, Louis Quatorze, buhl, marqueterie, &.c., &c., till the head of the proprietor, to whom all these words were strangers, and all his talk Greek, was thrown into ...
— Sevenoaks • J. G. Holland
... the first to speak. He was a grey-haired, broad-shouldered man, of the type which, in Tuscan phrase, is moulded with the fist and polished with the pickaxe; but the self-important gravity which had written itself out in the deep lines about his brow and mouth seemed intended to correct any contemptuous inferences from the hasty workmanship which Nature had bestowed on his exterior. ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... widespread nor more wonderful criminal combine had ever been organized than that headed by The Sparrow, the little old man whom Londoners believed to be Cockney, yet Italians believed to be pure-bred Tuscan, while in Paris he was a true Parisian who could speak the argot of the Montmartre without a ...
— Mademoiselle of Monte Carlo • William Le Queux
... Starting in the Maritime Alps, they extend easterly towards the Adriatic coast, and turn southeasterly hugging the coast through its whole extent. This conformation of the country causes the rivers of any size below the basin of the Po to flow into the Tyrrhenian (Tuscan) Sea, ...
— History of Rome from the Earliest times down to 476 AD • Robert F. Pennell
... forests,—little glades which had escaped the axe,— they resounded with the cries of pintados and cynocephali. [22] Had the yellow crops of Holcus been wheat, I might have fancied myself once more riding in the pleasant neighbourhood of Tuscan Sienna. ...
— First footsteps in East Africa • Richard F. Burton
... creation—poem and language. What Dante thus bewailed was his real warrant for immortality. Had he written his great work in Latin, it would have been consigned, with the Italian latinity of the middle ages, to oblivion; while his Tuscan still delights the ear of princes and lazzaroni. Professorships of the Divina Commedia are instituted in Italian universities, and men are considered accomplished when they know ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... precious sculptures; nor before the Palazzo Communale, another grand Gothic wreck, equally dignified and degraded; nor even beside the great fountain erected six hundred years ago by Nicolo and Giovanni da Pisa, the chiefs and founders of the Tuscan school of sculpture; nor beneath the statue of Pope Julius III., which Hawthorne has made known to all; for there are a score of churches and palaces, each with its priceless Perugino, and drawings and designs ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Vol. XV., No. 85. January, 1875. • Various
... Republic, who thought that it could not fall while I was on my feet, I remember hearing from many visitors from Asia, in which country you then were, that you were emphatic as to my glorious and rapid restoration. If that system, so to speak, of Tuscan augury which you had inherited from your noble and excellent father did not deceive you, neither will our power of divination deceive me; which I have acquired from the writings and maxims of the greatest savants, and, as you know, by a very diligent study of their ...
— Letters of Cicero • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... Romans call it, and invited some few other friends, and among the rest, one Lucius an Etrurian, the scholar of Moderatus the Pythagorean. He seeing my friend Philinus ate no flesh, began (as the opportunity was fair) to talk of Pythagoras; and affirmed that he was a Tuscan, not because his father, as others have said, was one, but because he himself was born, bred, and taught in Tuscany. To confirm this, he brought considerable arguments from such symbols as these:—As soon as you are risen, ruffle the bedclothes; leave not the print ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... the Eternal City. The artist, who contemplates an indefinite succession of winters in this home of art (though his first thought was merely to improve himself by a brief visit), goes forth, in the summer time, to sketch scenery and costume among the Tuscan hills, and pour, if he can, the purple air of Italy over his canvas. He studies the old schools of art in the mountain towns where they were born, and where they are still to be seen in the faded frescos of Giotto and Cimabue, ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume II. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... to westward Have spread the Tuscan bands; Nor house, nor fence, nor dovecot, In Crustumerium stands. Verbenna down to Ostia Hath wasted all the plain; Astur hath stormed Janiculum, And ...
— Poems Every Child Should Know - The What-Every-Child-Should-Know-Library • Various
... tale, though now with years outworn, How elders of Aurunce said that mid these fields was born That Dardanus, who reached at last the Phrygian Ida's walls, And Thracian Samos, that the world now Samothracia calls: From Tuscan stead of Corythus he went upon his ways; Whose throne is set in golden heaven, the star-besprinkled place, 210 Who adds one other to the ...
— The AEneids of Virgil - Done into English Verse • Virgil
... him and sank into the music-seat languidly. But a moment afterwards, as if she could not help herself, she was singing a Tuscan love-song with a subdued passion which thrilled even the blase audience clustered round her. It thrilled Stafford; but only with the desire to be near Ida. A desire that became irresistible; and when she had finished he left the room, caught up his hat and overcoat ...
— At Love's Cost • Charles Garvice
... fourteen regions, or quarters, into which Rome was divided by Augustus, only one, the Janiculum, lay on the Tuscan side of the Tyber. But, in the fifth century, the Vatican suburb formed a considerable city; and in the ecclesiastical distribution, which had been recently made by Simplicius, the reigning pope, two of the seven regions, or parishes of Rome, depended on the church of St. Peter. See ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon
... him to struggle after a higher quality of style, and established standards of successful treatment. For the rest, his choice of form and the proportions of his figures show that Niccola resorted to native Tuscan models. If nothing of his handiwork were left but the bas-relief of the "Inferno" on the Pisan pulpit, the torsos of the men struggling with demons in that composition would prove this point. It remains his crowning merit to have first expressed ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... of Luca della Robbia; something more of a history, of outward changes and fortunes, is expressed through his work. I suppose nothing brings the real air of a Tuscan town so vividly to mind as those pieces of pale blue and white earthenware, by which he is best known, like fragments of the milky sky itself, fallen into the cool streets, and breaking into the darkened churches. And no work is less imitable: like Tuscan wine, ...
— The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... The situation of the church is very fine, and an extensive view of the beautiful vale of the Severn is obtained from it. Telford's design is by no means striking; "being," as he said, "a regular Tuscan elevation; the inside is as regularly Ionic: its only merit is simplicity and uniformity; it is surmounted by a Doric tower, which contains the bells and a clock." A graceful Gothic church would have been more appropriate to the situation, and a much finer ...
— The Life of Thomas Telford by Smiles • Samuel Smiles
... Pittsburg, Washington, and Boston, which is rightly styled the Athens of America, for there artistic taste is most refined. In Boston I had the good fortune to become intimately acquainted with the illustrious poet, Longfellow, who talked to me in the pure Tuscan. I saw, too, other smaller cities, and then I appeared again in New York, where the favour of the public was confirmed, not only for me, but also for the artists of my company, and especially for Isolina Piamonti, ...
— [19th Century Actor] Autobiographies • George Iles
... wounded, in falcon-shape, by the youngest brother—Hahn, No. 70, in which a Drakos, as a cloud, steals golden apples, a story closely resembling the Russian skazka. See also No. 26, very similar to which is the Servian Story in "Vuk Karajich," No. 2—and a very interesting Tuscan story printed for the first time by A. de Gubernatis, "Zoological Mythology," vol. ii. p. 187. See also ...
— Russian Fairy Tales - A Choice Collection of Muscovite Folk-lore • W. R. S. Ralston
... unconsciously tightened its hold on Ortensia's waist, as if to emphasise what he was saying; and though he said little enough, she felt that his blood was up, and that it would be ill for Don Alberto to meet him in his present mood. A Tuscan would have dissolved his temper in a torrent of useless blasphemy, as Tuscans generally do, a Roman would have roared out fearful threats, a Neapolitan would have talked of the knife with many ...
— Stradella • F(rancis) Marion Crawford
... uncouth, ill-clad crew which assembled on those dilapidated paving tiles. Their own grandchildren look almost as far removed from them in dress and civilisation as did my sister in her white worked cambric dress, silk scarf, huge Tuscan bonnet, and the little curls beyond the lace quilling round her bright face, far rosier than ever it had been in town. And what would the present generation say to the odd little contrivances in the way of cotton sun-bonnets, check pinafores, ...
— Chantry House • Charlotte M. Yonge
... flood. To Cam he gave Africa from the Rinocoruras to the straits of Gibraltar with some more of the sons. Europe was chosen for Japhet to people with the rest of the sons begotten after the flood, who were all the sons of Tuscan, whence descend the Tadescos, Alemanes, and the ...
— History of the Incas • Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa
... pale sunbeam, breaking o'er the face Of the wild waters in their hour of warfare. Thus much forgive; and trust, in such an hour, I had not said e'en this, but for the hope That when the voice of victory is heard From the fair Tuscan valleys, in its swell Should mournful dirges mingle for the dead, And I be one of those who are at rest, You may chance recollect this word, and say, That day, upon the bloody field, there fell One who had loved thee long, and loved ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19. No. 538 - 17 Mar 1832 • Various
... was a pertinent and in its way a truly philosophical one. Fiesole crests the ridge of a Tuscan hill, and in America they don't build cities on hill-tops. You may search through the length and breadth of the United States, from Maine to California, and I venture to bet a modest dollar you won't find a single town perched anywhere in a position ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... great Italian historian, and one of the most eminent political writers of any age or country, was born at Florence, May 3, 1469. He was of an old though not wealthy Tuscan family, his father, who was a jurist, dying when Niccolo was sixteen years old. We know nothing of Machiavelli's youth and little about his studies. He does not seem to have received the usual humanistic education ...
— History Of Florence And Of The Affairs Of Italy - From The Earliest Times To The Death Of Lorenzo The Magnificent • Niccolo Machiavelli
... Salabaetto with the utmost joy; then, as first she had commodity, after she had both clipped and kissed him amain, heaving the heaviest sighs in the world, she said to him, 'I know not who could have brought me to this pass, other than thou; thou hast kindled a fire in my vitals, little dog of a Tuscan!' Then, at her instance, they entered the bath, both naked, and with them two of the slave-girls; and there, without letting any else lay a finger on him, she with her own hands washed Salabaetto all wonder-well with musk and clove-scented soap; after which she ...
— The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio • Giovanni Boccaccio
... glorious in her golden shield, prayed; "O Daughter of Jove, grant me with my hand to hurl my victorious spear from this arm home to the breast of my brother, [and slay him who came to lay waste my country."] And when the sound of the Tuscan trumpet was raised, as the torch, the signal for the fierce battle, they sped with dreadful rush toward each other; and like wild boars whetting their savage tusks, they met, their cheeks all moist with foam; and they rushed forward with their lances; but they couched beneath the orbs ...
— The Tragedies of Euripides, Volume I. • Euripides
... discovery of just or equal law, and shall be from day to day developing that law more perfectly. The Greek school of sculpture is formed during, and in consequence of, the national effort to discover the nature of justice; the Tuscan, during, and in consequence of, the national effort to discover the nature of justification. I assert to you at present briefly, what will, I hope, be the subject of prolonged ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... if with witches or enchantresses, Homer has Calypso, and Virgil Circe; if with valiant captains, Julius Caesar himself will lend you himself in his own 'Commentaries,' and Plutarch will give you a thousand Alexanders. If you should deal with love, with two ounces you may know of Tuscan you can go to Leon the Hebrew, who will supply you to your heart's content; or if you should not care to go to foreign countries you have at home Fonseca's 'Of the Love of God,' in which is condensed all that you or the most imaginative mind can want on the subject. ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... against his ear, To listen for a footfall, ere he saw The wood-nymph, stay'd the Tuscan king to hear ...
— The Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Tennyson
... that the traveller, if he knows the Italian language as written in books, the standard Tuscan, still finds himself a stranger in many parts of Italy, unable to comprehend the dialects, with their lively abbreviations and witty slang. That of Venice I had understood somewhat, and could enter into the drollery and naivete of the gondoliers, who, as a ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... Emperor's" mimic domain; step into the town lying beneath this rocky bluff; which is crowned by a fort-it is Porto Ferrajo. Look off for a moment from this rocky eminence, back of the town, and see the wild beauty of these Tuscan mountains on the main land. Now, we will over to the Italian coast, and cross, if you will, from Leghorn to Florence. There, we are now in the very lap of genius and of poetry; let us pause here and breathe the dreamy, soothing, ...
— The Duke's Prize - A Story of Art and Heart in Florence • Maturin Murray
... the right way to apply science to art, by a course on Birds, in Nature, Art and Mythology, and next year by a study of Alpine forms. The historical side was continued with lectures on Niccola Pisano and early Tuscan sculpture, and in 1874 with an important, though unpublished, ...
— The Life of John Ruskin • W. G. Collingwood
... when she addressed her, Bice—that is to say, according to English pronunciation, Beeshee (you would probably call it Beetchee if you learned to speak Italian in England, but the Contessa had the Tuscan tongue in a Roman mouth, according to the proverb), which, as everybody knows, is the contraction of Beatrice. She was called Miss Beachey in the household, a name which was received—by the servants ...
— Sir Tom • Mrs. Oliphant
... fluctuating and rippling in a rocky channel, and bounded by a rising scene of cornfields and orchards. The edifice was slight and airy. It was no more than a circular area, twelve feet in diameter, whose flooring was the rock, cleared of moss and shrubs, and exactly levelled, edged by twelve Tuscan columns, and covered by an undulating dome. My father furnished the dimensions and outlines, but allowed the artist whom he employed to complete the structure on his own plan. It was without seat, table, or ornament ...
— Wieland; or The Transformation - An American Tale • Charles Brockden Brown
... of Hell where Dante beholds the Diviners doomed to pace with backward-twisted faces, and turn forever on the past the rainy eyes once bent too daringly on the future, the sweet guide of the Tuscan poet points out among the damned the daughter of a Theban king, ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells
... of spelt—was a celebrated product of the bakeries of Picentia, a town of lower Italy, near the Tuscan sea, ...
— Cooking and Dining in Imperial Rome • Apicius
... substructions, which were planted on the farther side of the hill, as it sloped steeply away. This garden was a charming place. Its south wall was curtained with a dense orange vine, a dozen fig-trees offered you their large-leaved shade, and over the low parapet the soft, grave Tuscan landscape kept you company. The rooms themselves were as high as chapels and as cool as royal sepulchres. Silence, peace, and security seemed to abide in the ancient house and make it an ideal refuge for aching hearts. Mrs. Hudson had a stunted, brown-faced Maddalena, who wore a crimson ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... Makers of Venice is an admirable literary pendant to the same writer's charming book on Florence, though there is a wide difference between the beautiful Tuscan city and the sea-city of the Adriatic. Florence, as Mrs. Oliphant points out, is a city full of memories of the great figures of the past. The traveller cannot pass along her streets without treading in the very traces of Dante, without ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde |
