"Landscape" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... a ray of sunlight upwards against the indistinguishable tower. But if we were to climb the hill again after dinner, you would have something to report. So, in the broad daylights of humanity, such as that Victorian Age in which you narrowly escaped being (and I was) born, when the landscape is as clear as on Frith's Derby Day, the ruined tower of Petronius stands unremarked; it is only when the dark night of what is called civilisation has gathered that his clear beam can penetrate the sky. Such a night was the Imperial Age in Rome, when this book was written; ...
— The Satyricon • Petronius Arbiter
... Thy brows with Indian feathers crowned, Waving in thy snowy hand An all-commanding magic wand, Of power to bid fresh gardens blow, 'Mid cheerless Lapland's barren snow, Whose rapid wings thy flight convey Through air, and over earth and sea, While the vast various landscape lies Conspicuous to thy piercing eyes. O lover of the desert, hail! Say, in what deep and pathless vale, Or on what hoary mountain's side, 'Mid fall of waters, you reside, 'Mid broken rocks, a rugged scene, With green and grassy dales between, 'Mid ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... the Asiatic islands. The Major and his wife embarked on board the steamer "The India," in May 1844. The view from the Point de Galle is striking. The town is shaded by trees, which give it the look of richness and freshness that contributes such a charm to the Oriental landscape. On the left of the bay is a headland clothed with tropic vegetation. In front are two islands, giving variety to the bay. Behind is the esplanade, shut in by hills covered with cocoa-nut trees. At the foot of those hills is the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... Hawthornes now entered for a period of three years and more was one of village quiet and country happiness. Concord was a characteristic town of eastern Massachusetts, with woodland, pasture, and hill lying unevenly in a diversified landscape, and in the midst the little river winding its slow way along by the famous bridge. The neighbors were few, and for the most part were members of the literary group of residents or visitors which gave Concord its later distinction. Yet even here, amid this rural peace and ...
— Nathaniel Hawthorne • George E. Woodberry
... alive with his bounty. This kind friend was a wag too, and couldn't resist the idea that had come to him. The old man wanted something that glittered. So the American had bethought him of those big lettered signs which on the face of saloons brighten the American landscape—signs announcing somebody or other's "extra." This it was that now glittered in front of me as—the ...
— Pieces of Eight • Richard le Gallienne
... There shall broad streets their stately walls extend, The circus widen, and the crescent bend; There, ray'd from cities o'er the cultur'd land, Shall bright canals and solid roads expand. Embellish'd villas crown the landscape scene, Farms wave with gold, and orchards blush between; While with each breeze approaching vessels glide, And northern treasures dance on every tide!" Then ceas'd the nymph: tumultuous echoes roar, And Joy's loud voice was heard from shore to shore. Her graceful stops descending press'd the plain, ...
— The History of Tasmania, Volume I (of 2) • John West
... Suriname); most of the low-lying landscape (three-quarters of the country) is grassland, ideal for cattle and ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... around us which is one of the most encouraging characteristics of the day. Even in the midst of his outburst of delight at a hard frost ("I like," he says, "the bright sunshine that generally accompanies it, the silver landscape, and the ringing distinctness of sounds in the frozen air"), we see him haunted by a sense of the way in which his pleasure contrasts with the winter misery of the poor. "I would rather give up all the pleasures of the frost than indulge them, poisoned as they are by the misery of so many of ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... water. Their streaming hair and fluttering skirts, the elastic grass beneath their feet, the boughs that rustled in the morning air - the flashing leaves, the speckled shadows on the soft green ground - the balmy wind that swept along the landscape, glad to turn the distant windmill, cheerily - everything between the two girls, and the man and team at plough upon the ridge of land, where they showed against the sky as if they were the last things in the world - seemed ...
— The Battle of Life • Charles Dickens
... him an idea, through the application of measurement to the earth's surface, of that order and beauty of those mathematical principles after which the Creator built the universe. It opened his eyes to the vast modification of the landscape, and the earth itself, by man's work upon its crust. It gave him the engineer's eye. Henceforth he became interested in the capacity of every portion of the country, which came under his notice, for the roads, fields, gardens, and parks of peace, and for the making of forts, military ...
— Charles Carleton Coffin - War Correspondent, Traveller, Author, and Statesman • William Elliot Griffis
... extraordinary landscape, was the Peak of Scartaris, which seemed lost in the great void of ...
— A Journey to the Centre of the Earth • Jules Verne
... where Moses stood, And view the landscape o'er: Not Jordan's stream nor death's cold flood, Should ...
— The Children's Portion • Various
... now found himself was very beautiful, the soft grass beneath his horse's feet being sprinkled with bright flowers, while clumps of trees stood here and there to break the monotony of the landscape. ...
— The Enchanted Island of Yew • L. Frank Baum
... only in his own mind and imagination. A Turner sunset is, as Oscar Wilde points out, in a sense incomparably superior to one provided by nature. It not only gives the beautiful sensations to be had in a landscape suffused with the sunset glow; it infuses into this experience the passionate and penetrating insight of a genius. The artist, to an extent, imitates nature. But, if that were all he did, he would be no more than ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... botanist! Think, too, of an artist here for the first time—what sketches to be made at sunrise and sunset! You may call your little world dull, monotonous, uneventful, since, reared in the green landscape with farmlands and woods around, you are bound through custom to neglect the pleasures of imagination, and see ...
— When the Birds Begin to Sing • Winifred Graham
... silent, falling into reveries when others were talking, and much given to long, lonely wanderings. Accustomed as he had been in boyhood to a solitary life in beautiful scenery, there was something in a fine landscape that was to him like a friend and companion; and he sometimes felt that it would have been worse if he had been in a dull, uniform country, instead of among mountain peaks and broad wooded valleys. Working hard, too, helped him not a little, and conic sections ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... us, we meddle not with the mists: we rather like the delicious glow of their luminous dimness, which glorifies the past if it clouds it; and which softens off the hardness of our prosaic modern life, as a summer haze our English landscape. ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, March 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... doors on opposite sides of the stage, and a practicable window at the back, through which in the last scene a view of houses or landscape is visible, and ...
— Up the Chimney • Shepherd Knapp
... boat after boat. John, stretched at the bottom of a canoe with two wounded Highlanders, wondered where he had heard the voice before. His wits were not very clear yet. The canoe's gunwale hid all the landscape but a mountain-ridge high over his right, feathered with forest and so far away that, swiftly as the strokes carried him forward, its serrated pines and notches of naked rock crept by him inch by inch. He stared at these and prayed for the moment when the sun should drop ...
— Fort Amity • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... mists of night were still hovering on the landscape as our party left the castle. It was a raw, comfortless morning—a kind of drizzling fog hung heavily over the scene, dimming the light of the sun, which had now risen, into a pale and even a grey glimmer. As the appointed hour was fast approaching, it was proposed that we should ...
— The Purcell Papers - Volume I. (of III.) • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... and fair to the eye of the gazer. Outside the walls were beautiful gardens where the citizens were wont to repair for recreation; and farther away groves and pleasure houses, and scattered villages and orchards, gave variety to the landscape. ...
— The Boy Crusaders - A Story of the Days of Louis IX. • John G. Edgar
... impressions so masterfully that the reader often has the feeling of a physical experience; and it is but natural that up to his thirty-fifth year, before he discovered his literary talent, he had dreamed of being a landscape painter. Hebbel's epigram, "Know ye why ye are such past masters in painting beetles and buttercups? 'Tis because ye know not man; 'tis because ye see not the stars," utterly fails to do justice to Stifter's poetic individuality. But in avoiding the great ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... architecture, resolved itself into one unbroken forest between the heights of the Janiculum and the Monte Mario, drowned in a silvery vapour, far off, infinitely immaterial, reminding one a little of a lunar landscape, calling up visions of some half extinct planet peopled by shades. The dome of St. Peter's, shining with a peculiar metallic lustre in the blue atmosphere looked gigantic and so close that one might have thought to touch ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... below the surface for the author's meaning, his performance would merely resemble the accurate execution of a solfeggio by a conscientious scholar. It would have the same relation to high artistic effort as the photographic reproduction of a landscape bears to the same scene as viewed and transmitted to canvas by a ...
— Style in Singing • W. E. Haslam
... the position of a special pleader was not my ambition. The lookout, in fact, was anything but encouraging from the fifth floor of No. 3 Elm Court—I mean prospectively. It was a region not inaccessible, of course, but it looked on to a landscape of chimney-pots, not one of which was likely to attract attorneys; it was cheap and lonely, dull and miserable—a melancholy altitude beyond the world and its companionship. Had I been of a melancholy disposition I might have gone mad, for ...
— The Reminiscences Of Sir Henry Hawkins (Baron Brampton) • Henry Hawkins Brampton
... into is matching a bright scarlet with a green. On one occasion, a color blind gentleman found fault with his wife for wearing, as he thought, a bright scarlet dress, when in point of fact she was wearing a bright green. Another color blind who was very fond of drawing, once painted a red tree in a landscape without being aware that ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 822 - Volume XXXII, Number 822. Issue Date October 3, 1891 • Various
... enforced—though far less than nature demanded, after such a meal—the work went on again with greater alacrity, since every timber showed. Rib by rib the great frame grew, and those perched aloft, pinning the posts and stays, rejoiced in the broad, bright landscape opened to their view. They watched the roads, in the intervals of their toil, and announced the approach of delayed guests, all alert for the ...
— The Story Of Kennett • Bayard Taylor
... loved to resort, where I might enjoy at once the richness of the extensive landscape, and the charm of uninterrupted solitude. One day, when I was seated at the foot of the cottages, and contemplating their ruins, a man, advanced in years, passed near the spot. He was dressed in the ...
— Paul and Virginia • Bernardin de Saint Pierre
... he muttered, half aloud; "she will leave me, and what then will all the beauty of the landscape seem in my eyes? And how dare I look up to her? Even if her cold, vain mother—her father, the man, they say, of forms and scruples, were to consent, would they not question closely of my true birth and origin? And if the one blot were overlooked, is there no other? His early ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... took heart for the run to Havre, and except for feeling at twilight the wistfulness that comes out of the Norman landscape—the melancholy of things forgotten but not gone, dead but still brooding wraith-like over the valley of the Seine, haunting the hoary churches, and the turreted chateaux, and the windings of the river, and the long lines ...
— The Street Called Straight • Basil King
... and yet have we not had it irresistibly borne in upon our minds, that we have done all this before! signed the same paper in the same presence! heard the same voices speak the same words! noticed the same faces in the same positions! or recognized the mountains perhaps, and the trees, the landscape, the rocks, the very brook, as acquaintances of old; although the broad Atlantic had never yet been crossed ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, May 1844 - Volume 23, Number 5 • Various
... in full view of this ravishing landscape that Sir John awoke. For the first time in his life, perhaps, the morose and taciturn Englishman smiled at nature. He fancied himself in one of those beautiful valleys of Thessaly celebrated by Virgil, beside the sweet slopes of Lignon sung by Urfe, whose birthplace, ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas
... is not merely what we see and are; it is all the past and all the future, it is inheritance; the fields we have always ploughed, the landscape and the sea, the tongue we speak, the verse we know by heart, all we hope for, all we love and venerate, under God. And there abides a sense of old times gone, of ancient law, ...
— England of My Heart—Spring • Edward Hutton
... farm, and which commanded a distant view of one of the loveliest reaches of the Hudson. Our side of the river, in general, does not possess as fine views as the eastern, for the reason that all our own broken, and in some instances magnificent back-ground of mountains, fills up the landscape for our neighbours, while we are obliged to receive the picture as it is set in a humbler frame; but there are exquisite bits to be found on the western bank, and this was one of the very best of them. The water was as placid as molten silver, and the ...
— Afloat And Ashore • James Fenimore Cooper
... head for a moment. Rightly; he considers that to talk at large with a couple of friends is the most important thing in the world. In my day we would talk about anything, from the Greek feeling about landscape to the principles the Romans would have taken as the basis of actuarial tables, if they had had them. We unsphered Plato, we speculated as to what Euripides would have thought of Henry James, or whether Sophocles would have enjoyed Miss—-'s ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... tell whether Pinto was goin' to finish under the wire, or out in the landscape. His eyes seemed to be sort of moverble, but like enough they'd get sot when he went to runnin'. Then he'd run whichever way he was lookin' at the time, or happened to think he was lookin'; and dependin' additional on what he thought he saw. And law! A whole board of supervisors and ...
— Heart's Desire • Emerson Hough
... deep cuts and tunnels, over romantic gorges of dark depth, and along cliffs whose heights we could not see, the train climbed and crossed a mountain range. As the car emerged from tunnel or cut, changing scenes of wild and savage landscape appeared near by, and charming glimpses of distant valleys far below. The torrents and waterfalls of the river Gaudiara added to the weird beauty of the scene. A stanza in Southey's poem, "The Cataract of Lodore," fittingly describes the wildness of the river that we crossed ...
— A Trip to the Orient - The Story of a Mediterranean Cruise • Robert Urie Jacob
... long lines of low houses, diversified by the multitudes of pyramidal temples, the Teocalli, or houses of God—canoes covering the mirrored lakes—the lofty trees, the flowers, and the profusion of water now wanting to the landscape—the whole fertile valley enclosed by its eternal hills and snow-crowned volcanoes—what scenes of wonder and of beauty to burst upon the eyes ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca
... eye as he walked with a reverent attention on all that surrounded him."[444] Somewhat like a rejoinder sounds another remark of Scott's, in phrases that Wordsworth would have detested. Scott said cheerfully, "As to the actual study of nature, if you mean the landscape gardening of poetry ... I can get on quite as well from recollection, while sitting in the Parliament house, as if wandering through wood and wold."[445] At another time he said, "If a man will paint from nature, he ...
— Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature • Margaret Ball
... its axis, finishing by facing the opposite way to that in which we were travelling. Where the roads are not very slippery they are as hard as iron. A curious result is that you have a thick dust raised over a snow-covered landscape ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... leaves. In like manner, on a moonlight night, when the rays of the moon entered his room, he seldom failed to awake, and to place himself at the window. Here he would remain for a considerable time, motionless, with his neck extended, and his eyes fixed on the moonlight landscape, and wrapped in a kind of contemplative ecstasy, the silence of which was interrupted only by profound inspirations, accompanied by a slight ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 446 - Volume 18, New Series, July 17, 1852 • Various
... convulsive snort. "Death trap" sounded very funny, applied to this particular bit of harmless landscape. Behind him, Bland was imploring him to hurry, ...
— The Thunder Bird • B. M. Bower
... Dol Kenor, after one glance into the plate. "It is indeed a relief, after all this coldness and glare, to see such a soft, warm landscape—even though I have never expected to behold quite such a violent bit of jungle," and under his guidance the projection flashed over hundreds of miles of territory. To the eyes of the Terrestrials the screen revealed only a blank, amorphous ...
— Spacehounds of IPC • Edward Elmer Smith
... heart to say his evening prayer. He spoke the words earnestly when he asked God to take care of his mother and grandfather. He was very happy. He looked out through the crevices in the walls, and saw the stars and the moon flooding the landscape with silver light. There was sweet music in the air,—the merry melody of the water murmuring by the mill, the cheerful chirping of the crickets, and the lullaby of the winds, near at hand and far away, putting ...
— Our Young Folks, Vol 1, No. 1 - An Illustrated Magazine • Various
... in the wild canyons of Sonoma Mountain and fringed the mountain with posses of peace-officers and detachments of armed farmers. More terrible to them than any mountain lion was a man-killing man astray in their landscape. The telephone on the Kennan Ranch, and the telephones on all other ranches abutting on Sonoma Mountain, had rung often and transmitted purposeful ...
— Michael, Brother of Jerry • Jack London
... dilapidated wall threatened to fall altogether, and enormous stems of ivy had invaded and stifled vigorous trees; in the remoter portions of the park briers barred the road and made walking almost impossible. This disorder was not destitute of charm, and at an epoch when landscape gardening consisted chiefly in straight alleys, and in giving to nature a cold and monotonous symmetry, one's eye rested with pleasure on these neglected clumps, on these waters which had taken a different course to that which ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... preferring a simple background from which the figure has atmospheric detachment, he frequently used the scenic setting which Reynolds and Gainsborough had made the vogue. His idea, however, was that a landscape background should be exceedingly unassertive—"nothing more than the shadow of a landscape; effect is all that is wanted"—and, always executing them himself, his are invariably subordinate to the figure. But the essential quality ...
— Raeburn • James L. Caw
... that it was the surface of the walls that shone in this delicate yet luminous way. I put my hand on the wall nearest to me—it was quite cold to the touch, yet bright to the eyes, and was no more fatiguing to look at than the sunshine on a landscape. I could not understand how the light was thus arranged and used, but its effect was beautiful. As I walked to and fro, looking at the various graceful and artistic objects which adorned the room, I perceived an easel, on which a picture was placed with a curtain of dark ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... off the train and fade away into the landscape somewhere hereabouts!" declared Dave with a ...
— Boy Scouts Mysterious Signal - or Perils of the Black Bear Patrol • G. Harvey Ralphson
... you talk so sensible. And if you will just come into the garden you shall know more of my inclinations in this matter." They now sallied out into the garden and took seats beneath some pomegranate trees, the night being clear, and the moon shedding a bright light over the landscape. Feeling sure no one would overhear him, Mr. Tickler said to the general: "I would have you know, sir, that nothing would so grieve me as to break faith with my Angelio. But how can a man brought up ...
— The Life and Adventures of Maj. Roger Sherman Potter • "Pheleg Van Trusedale"
... know how to use and apply tone color and tone character, the impressive, persuasive, fervent voice. The singer must idealize not only the tone, but the words of the song; "just as the painter idealizes the landscape, so the musical artist must use his powers of idealization in interpreting the work of the composer." To be able to do this, his diction must be as pure, his language as polished, as that ...
— The Renaissance of the Vocal Art • Edmund Myer
... foreground"; "The White Horse in the Riding School"; "A Lady Playing the Virginal"; "Peasants Drinking Outside a Tavern"; "Peasants Drinking in a Tavern"; "Peasants Gambling Outside a Tavern"; "Brick-making in a Landscape"; "The Wind-mill"; "The Water-mill"; "Peasants Bringing Home the Hay". And so on, and so on. If we meet with a military skirmish, we are not told where the skirmish took place, nor what troops took part in ...
— Modern Painting • George Moore
... had determined upon; although the villa as it stands seems to have the air of a philosopher, meant to rebuke the extravagance of other villas. Yet, after all, that addition will be pleasing. I praised your landscape gardener: he has so covered everything with ivy, both the foundation-wall of the villa and the spaces between the columns of the walk, that, upon my word, those Greek statues seemed to be engaged in fancy gardening, and ...
— Letters of Cicero • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... taken out upon the pleasant road, leading from Warwick to Coventry, where the beautiful river Avon, by which, long afterwards, WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE was born and now lies buried, sparkled in the bright landscape of the beautiful May-day; and there they struck off his wretched head, and stained the dust ...
— A Child's History of England • Charles Dickens
... went. They spoke no more, but communed with each other through a more subtle channel of silence. Celestial melodies rang in their ears; the celestial landscape gladdened their eyes; the peace of God, their Father, was in their hearts. They walked hand in hand for the last time ...
— Added Upon - A Story • Nephi Anderson
... prairie country do not come very often, but they are very depressing when they arrive. The landscape is not of the luscious kind; it has no close correspondence with a picture by Corot or Constable; sunlight is needed to give it the touch of the habitable and the homelike. It was, therefore, unfortunate for the spirits of the Lebanon people that the meeting summoned by local agitators ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... or laughed and put them by, when they were quite impossible. Many of them related to the comparative merits of English and American railroads, and what he thought himself of these. Mrs. Lander noted the difference of the English stations; but she did not see much in the landscape to examine him upon. She required him to tell her why the rooks they saw were not crows, and she was not satisfied that he should say the country seat she pointed out was a castle when it was plainly deficient in battlements. ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... him, and then looked with keen sadness far into the changed landscape. "Ah, well, my dear," she said, with apparent irrelevance, "we must take hold of life with both hands." She made a movement to rise, and he, jumping to his feet, helped her. As if the moment had some special significance, something to be underlined, he kept her hand ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... how can the Word be free to do what it likes? The answer to this is contained in another maxim: "Every creation carries its own mathematics along with it." You cannot create anything without at the same time creating its relation to everything else, just as in painting a landscape, the contour you give to the trees will determine that of the sky. Therefore, whenever you create anything, you thereby start a train of causation, which will work out in strict accordance with the sort of thought that started it. The stream always has the quality of its source. Thought which ...
— The Law and the Word • Thomas Troward
... man who has made no study of these phenomena is like one color-blind: he has never seen a landscape." ...
— The Shadow World • Hamlin Garland
... are the outward manifestations of health. But to marry a handsome figure without character, fine features unbeautified by sentiment or good-nature, is the most deplorable of mistakes. As even the finest landscape, seen daily, becomes monotonous, so does the most beautiful face, unless a beautiful nature shines through it. The beauty of to-day becomes commonplace to-morrow; whereas goodness, displayed through the most ordinary features, is perennially lovely. Moreover, this kind of beauty improves with ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... days after the evening mentioned in the last chapter the weather was dull. Not in quick, sudden showers did the rain come down, but in constant drizzle, blotting out all colour from the surrounding landscape, and filling the air with fine gray mist, until people breathed more water than air. At such times the consciousness of the nearness of the vast unseen sea acted as a dreary depression to the spirits; but ...
— Sylvia's Lovers — Complete • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... longer the scarlet poppies of hate, of jealousies and mad ambition shall bud and blossom into war. War over forever, swords beaten into ploughshares and spears into pruning hooks. Every man the same right as any other man, the right to sunshine, to air, to water, the beauty of the landscape and all the usufruct ...
— Why I Preach the Second Coming • Isaac Massey Haldeman
... the wonders I had seen In Rome's stupendous shrines and halls, I felt the veil of sleep serene Come o'er the memory of each scene, As twilight o'er the landscape falls. Nor was it slumber, sound and deep, But such as suits a poet's rest— That sort of thin, transparent sleep, Thro' which his day-dreams shine the best. Methought upon a plain I stood, Where certain wondrous men, 'twas said, With strange, miraculous power ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... occasionally—we should have had here food for poems sufficient to fill the side of a newspaper. Mountain rills, gushing rivulets, and murmuring waters! Here they were in abundance, rolling down the rocky mountains from unknown heights, and lending an additional charm to the landscape! Is it necessary to dilate on such beauties?—for if words were conjured in the most delicate and exquisite language imaginable, the glories of Loch Ness and its surroundings are, after all, things to be seen before they can be fully appreciated. The loch is over twenty miles long, ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... glaring down upon him. He frequently met his former friend, but passed him with a careless "How d'ye do?" which presently dwindled into a nod. "In one week's time," says poor Typee, "he gave me the cut direct, and lounged by without even nodding. He must have taken me for part of the landscape." ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 380, June, 1847 • Various
... feline race, not only across the back, but from that to each house door. On this private path, above the heads of boys and dogs, they spent much time. This was their Broadway, and at the same time their point of outlook, where they might survey the landscape and decide when and where to enter their secluded domain. How admirable the facility with which these mysterious beasts pass up or down high fences! Ladders or stairs are superfluous. How can one possibly walk several steps down a perpendicular board ...
— Upon The Tree-Tops • Olive Thorne Miller
... new friends and their mysterious errand. As I have already intimated, this tavern with the curious name (a name totally unsuggestive, by the way, of its location on a perfectly straight road) had for its southern aspect the road and a broad expanse beyond of varied landscape which made the front rooms cheerful even on a cloudy day; but it was otherwise with those in the rear and on the north end. They were never cheerful, and especially toward night were frequently so ...
— Room Number 3 - and Other Detective Stories • Anna Katharine Green
... like a veil abruptly torn aside. The landscape had become suddenly filled with tragedy. Those shapeless eyes which the bark of trees delineates on the trunks were gazing—at what? At something terrible and ...
— The History of a Crime - The Testimony of an Eye-Witness • Victor Hugo
... virgin forests of Borneo are still a wonderland full of strange questions and half-suspected discoveries. Woodhouse carried a small lantern in his hand, and its yellow glow contrasted vividly with the infinite series of tints between lavender-blue and black in which the landscape was painted. His hands and face were smeared with ointment against the attacks ...
— The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... began to dawn, so that we could discern each other's faces, and made sure that we were not a party of shadows, for besides the obscurity, a mixture of sleepiness and placid delight had hitherto kept us all silent, we looked round on the landscape, as little by little it assumed form and consistency. The fires from the hacienda were still visible, but growing pale in the beams of morning, vanishing like false visions from before the holy light of truth. ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon De La Barca
... down to the shrinking sloughs, where the muskrat houses stood high and dry, stranded on the cracked swamp-beds like beached boats. The river, for weeks a wide-spread, muddy stream, was now but a chain of trickling pools. Drought was abroad with its burning hand, and the landscape lay bared and brown. ...
— The Biography of a Prairie Girl • Eleanor Gates
... and watched their trunks tumbled out of the baggage car ahead and the train start, gather speed, and go rumbling on its way. Then the girl looked around her to discover that the primitive station was really the only barren spot in the landscape. ...
— Mary Louise in the Country • L. Frank Baum (AKA Edith Van Dyne)
... is very flat and highly cultivated. In all directions, as far as the eye can see, broad stretches of corn wave in the gentle breeze, while brilliant patches of clover or the quieter-coloured onion crops vary the green of the landscape. The scent of flowering bean-fields fills the air, and the hum of wild bees is heard above the other sounds of the fields. Palm groves lift their feathery plumes towards the sky, and mulberry-trees and dark-toned tamarisks shade ...
— Peeps at Many Lands: Egypt • R. Talbot Kelly
... beauty spot—the beauty spot of all Montana, I believe," agreed the dying man. "But you need something more than a beautiful landscape." ...
— The Girl from Sunset Ranch - Alone in a Great City • Amy Bell Marlowe
... opportunity. It was two minutes of intensest strain, of hurried though orderly work; and then a sudden rush of sunlight put an end to all. The mysterious vision had withdrawn itself; the colour rushed back to the landscape, so corpse-like whilst in the shadow; the black veil slid rapidly from off the sun; the heat returned to the air; the ...
— The Astronomy of the Bible - An Elementary Commentary on the Astronomical References - of Holy Scripture • E. Walter Maunder
... hear him. The meeting was fixed for the very next morning. It was summer time; we rose at daybreak. He took me out of the town on to a high hill above the river Po, whose course we beheld as it flowed between its fertile banks; in the distance the landscape was crowned by the vast chain of the Alps; the beams of the rising sun already touched the plains and cast across the fields long shadows of trees, hillocks, and houses, and enriched with a thousand gleams of light ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... comedy; the comedian spends hours in his garret rehearsing tragedy; most preachers have an idea that they could have made a quick fortune in business, and many businessmen are very sure that if they had taken to the pulpit there would now be fewer empty pews. So the greatest landscape-painter of recent times imagined himself a poet. Hamerton says that for remarkable specimens of grammar, spelling and construction Turner's verse would serve well to be given ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... shepherd raised his head from his work, for he thought he heard a loud laugh somewhere in the near distance. But all seemed silent and he turned back to his willows. The beauty of the landscape about him was much too familiar a thing that he should have felt or seen its charm. The violet hue of the distant woods, the red gleaming of the heather-strewn moor, with its patches of swamp from which the slow mist arose, the pretty little village with its handsome old church and attractive ...
— The Case of The Pool of Blood in the Pastor's Study • Grace Isabel Colbron and Augusta Groner
... group of huts that handed down the great inheritance of discipline, and made an iron channel whereby, even to us, the antique virtues could descend as a living memory? It must be so; for the villages and ruins in one landscape comprised all the first generations of the history of Rome. The stones we admire, the large spirit of the last expression came from that rough village and sprang from the broils of that one plain; Rome was most vigorous before it could speak. So a man's ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... dense foliage from spreading boughs. The austere and scanty vegetation of Northern climes, which gives a distinct outline and value to every leaf and flower, has nothing in common with the prodigal and passionate beauty of the tropical landscape, where the wealth of earth is flung broadcast at our feet in mad profusion. Day by day the marvellous gardens of Buitenzorg take deeper hold of mind and imagination. The early dawn, when the dark silhouettes of ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... An infinite silence broods over the land—all is buried in deep sleep. The animals hibernate in their dens, the streams have ceased to flow, disappearing beneath the ice and snow; the earth, of a dazzling whiteness in the centre of the landscape, but grey in the distance, nowhere offers a single object to arrest the gaze. The monotony of endless space is broken by no abrupt lines or vivid tints. The only contrast with the dull expanse of land is the everlasting azure sky, along which the sun creeps ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various
... flocks in its shadow. Benches of unhewn stones and of turf they found set about it. And she had not been mistaken, for there sat her Hermann, and rested,— Sat with his head on his hand, and seemed to be viewing the landscape That to the mountains lay: his back was turned to his mother. Toward him softly she crept, and lightly touched on the shoulder; Quick he turned himself round; there were tears in his eyes as ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... that burn on all the hills Light up the landscape grey, The arid desert land distills ...
— India's Love Lyrics • Adela Florence Cory Nicolson (AKA Laurence Hope), et al.
... raised his eyes from the paper and gazed out of his window on the cheerless evening landscape. The river lay quiet beside the empty distillery and from time to time a light appeared in some house on the Lucan road. What an end! The whole narrative of her death revolted him and it revolted him to think that he had ever ...
— Dubliners • James Joyce
... declare how the whole earth is beautiful, and all human beings beautiful. I have never been able to say this in sculpture so well as I wish and as I feel it affirmed within me. For poets Beauty has always been some particular landscape, some particular woman; but it should be all women, all landscapes. A negro or a Mongol has his beauty, however remote from ours, and it must be the same with their characters. There is no ugliness. When I was young I made that mistake, as others do; I could not ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 5 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... there were bits of railroad bank that were as green as the sward beside the Mall, and every now and then there was an enthusiastic maple in the wet lowlands that hung the air as full of color as any maple that reddened the flying landscape when I first got beyond the New York suburbs on my way north. At Portsmouth the birds were singing the same songs as in the Park. I could not make out the ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... sutler's quarters on the east; while the hypothenuse of the right-angled triangle thus limited was the unsightly fence that bounded the back-yards of officers' row. Mr. Dick Swiveller's delightful view "of over the way" was a gem of landscape in comparison. ...
— Marion's Faith. • Charles King
... out of the window at the flying landscape. "I never was so happy in my life before—except for one thing." Her face clouded a little and she bit ...
— The Outdoor Girls in Army Service - Doing Their Bit for the Soldier Boys • Laura Lee Hope
... monotony of green and gold with squares of dark green foliage and the brown of the tall, bare trunks. Between the meandering stream and the cultivated land and the woods and the heather and the distant hills, there was such a variety as cannot be often gathered into the compass of one landscape. ...
— Kate Carnegie and Those Ministers • Ian Maclaren
... eye had looked forth. It was no human creature that sat there. Then came the dead man's boat. The two shadows rowed noiselessly together, and as they disappeared in the mist that was now settling on the landscape, an unearthly laugh rang over the lake; then all was still. When Nockawando reached the camp that night he was a raving maniac. The Indians never found the bodies of the pair, but they believed that while water remains in Pontoosuc its surface ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... probably do the same thing, especially if I had your luck. Blame you? No! Not in the least. The cigarettes are there. You've not given up smoking too? No, that's right. A man without a small vice is as uninteresting as a woman without a past or a landscape without shadows. Cigarettes never hurt anybody. Look at me! I used to smoke fifty a day when ...
— Whosoever Shall Offend • F. Marion Crawford
... moment, the chanting suddenly ceased. The organ went on, as though musically meditating to itself in minor cords, through which soft upper notes, like touches of light on a dark landscape, flickered ripplingly,—one monk separated himself from the clustered group, and stepping slowly up to the altar, confronted the rest of his brethren. The fiery Cross shone radiantly behind him, its beams seeming to gather in a lustrous halo round his tall, majestic ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... a man athirst, that I am like one athirst who eyes looks upon a running stream, the landscape's eye, yet may yet may not drink a single not drink a draught of draught of all that he doth streams that rail ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... head of the gang-plank, and while courteously receiving his visitors, with a word of welcome for each, he looked often up the road to see if his little friend was coming. He thought the gleam of red hair would brighten the landscape; but it came not, and the Skipper was not one to neglect a possible customer. Now and again he would touch some one on the arm, and murmur gently, "In a few moments presently, other exhibition in the cabin, to ...
— Nautilus • Laura E. Richards
... rosy he rose in the morning; sharp and defined in outline the leafless trees rose against the piercing blue of the sky; the frozen ground rang to every footstep; thin patches of snow diversified the landscape; and the healthful air braced even invalid nerves. Boston is a very fine city, and the whole of it, spread out as a panorama, can be seen from several neighbouring eminences. The rosy flush of a winter dawn had scarcely left the sky when I saw ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird
... of man. These," said he, showing the verses, "are the cast-off, useless feathers of my soul; it has moulted since then, and spread its bolder wings for eternity!" He then continued to burn and destroy, while I looked out of the broken window at the dreary landscape. ...
— Raphael - Pages Of The Book Of Life At Twenty • Alphonse de Lamartine
... the Abbey of Newburg, with its village and the surrounding landscape," replied the eager ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... very pretentious one, for no one would expect boys and girls to be landscape gardeners. But many boys and girls have excellent taste and taste is the foundation stone of landscape gardening. This work has often been likened to the painting of a picture. Your art-work teacher has doubtless told you that a good picture should ...
— The Library of Work and Play: Gardening and Farming. • Ellen Eddy Shaw
... him catch the Princess by the arm and both stood as though instantaneously frozen. Then, as the secretary came panting up, Murat handed the Princess to him, and taking a few steps forward and apparently addressing the landscape, for Celio saw no one said in a voice of calm but inflexible authority: "Lay down your gun, and come from ...
— Romance of Roman Villas - (The Renaissance) • Elizabeth W. (Elizbeth Williams) Champney
... May. The Crimes and Cruelties of this Prince, were too numerous to be mentioned, (as this history I trust has fully shown;) and nothing can be said in his vindication, but that his abolishing Religious Houses and leaving them to the ruinous depredations of time has been of infinite use to the landscape of England in general, which probably was a principal motive for his doing it, since otherwise why should a Man who was of no Religion himself be at so much trouble to abolish one which had for ages been established in the Kingdom. His Majesty's 5th Wife was the Duke of Norfolk's ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... these beautiful brilliant flowers towering upward above dry soil, particularly where the woodsman's axe and forest fires have devastated the landscape, illustrate Nature's abhorrence of ugliness. Other kindly plants have earned the name of fireweed, but none so quickly beautifies the blackened clearings of the pioneer, nor blossoms over the charred trail in the wake of the locomotive. Whole ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... now the 20th of July, and the hawk was about five weeks old. In a day or two he was walking or jumping about the grounds. He chose a position under the edge of a Norway spruce, where he would sit for hours dozing, or looking out upon the landscape. When we brought him game, he would advance to meet us with wings slightly lifted, and uttering a shrill cry. Toss him a mouse or sparrow, and he would seize it with one foot and hop off to his cover, where he would bend above it, spread his plumage, look this way and that, ...
— Bird Stories from Burroughs - Sketches of Bird Life Taken from the Works of John Burroughs • John Burroughs
... the holiday makers were not the blithesome creatures of her imagination. Some were reading, many sleeping, and the rest, for the most part, talking in strange tongues of anything but the beauties of the landscape. The Britons among them seemed to be brooding on glaciers. A party of lively Americans were playing bridge, and a scrap of gossip in English from a neighboring compartment revealed that some woman who went to a dance at Montreux, "wore a cheap voile, my dear, a last year's bargain, ...
— The Silent Barrier • Louis Tracy |
