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Middle distance   /mˈɪdəl dˈɪstəns/   Listen
Middle distance

noun
1.
The part of a scene between the foreground and the background.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Middle distance" Quotes from Famous Books



... exhibits its wild and rugged grandeur. The cliffs rise to a height of four hundred feet above sea level. The surf-line breaking on the red beach far below on the left, with the broad expanse of sea beyond, is very fine. The cliffs in the middle distance consist of the sands and clays of the lower Greensand formation, and are constantly falling and being eroded by the waves. The breakers on the shore at Blackgang are very grand in stormy weather, the beach being ...
— Pictures in Colour of the Isle of Wight • Various

... George, it looked fresh and sweet as Heaven after that dusty, parching tramp—a mountain meadow deep with mint and juicy green grasses, and all cut up by little rushing streams as cold as ice. There were a lot of girls in pink sunbonnets picking wild strawberries in the middle distance," he added thoughtfully. "It was picturesque, wasn't it? Come, now, George, wouldn't that give you pause?—eight girls in ...
— Iole • Robert W. Chambers

... leather. He was one size smaller than his father and had one-tenth of his brains. With regard to every other measurement, however, there was not the slightest doubt but that in a few years he would equal his distinguished father's outlines, a fact already discernible in his middle distance. In looking around for the missing nine-tenths of gray matter his father had found it under Philip Colton's hat, and the formation of the firm, with himself as special and his son as junior, had ...
— Colonel Carter's Christmas and The Romance of an Old-Fashioned Gentleman • F. Hopkinson Smith

... In the middle distance lies the city, looking as though it floated deep upon the bosom of the ready waters that encompass it about. It is happier in its place of rest than most Dutch towns, and well merited the name of New Amsterdam, given it by its founders. The ground it ...
— Impressions of America - During the years 1833, 1834 and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Tyrone Power

... come in with that on the com again!" Soriki answered with unwonted emphasis. "The sooner I see the old girl standing on her pins in the middle distance, the better I'll feel. You know"—he looked up from his preoccupation with the ration package and gazed out over the city—"this place gives me the shivers. That other town was bad enough. But at least there were people ...
— Star Born • Andre Norton

... picture are three figures,—Christ, the Father, and St. Michael. Christ of course at the right hand of the Father, as Stephen saw him standing; but there is little dignity in this part of the conception. In the middle of the picture, which is also the middle distance, are three or four men throwing stones, with Tintoret's usual vigor of gesture, and behind them an immense and confused crowd; so that, at first, we wonder where St. Paul is; but presently we observe ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume III (of 3) • John Ruskin

... showed themselves through the trees that girdled the high ground or edge along which she rode; the white steam-wreath of a train passing, far away, through strata of blue or pearly mist; an old windmill black in the middle distance; villages, sheltering among their hedges and uplands: a sky, of shadow below widely brooding over earth, and of a radiant blue flecked with white cloud above:—all the English familiar scene, awoke in Chloe Fairmile a familiar sensuous joy. Life was so good—every minute, every ounce of it!—from ...
— Marriage a la mode • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... sun is going down in a red glare behind the smoke of battle, the lurid flames of the burning town, and the royal standard just fluttering down from the battlements of a castle lost by the royal arms at the very close of Cromwell's 'crowning mercy.' Through the smoke of the middle distance can be dimly seen dusky forms in flight, or in the last hopeless conflict. Each of the nobles at the side of the fugitive king is heavily armed, with sword in hand, mounted on heavy, galloping horses going at high speed; and each is looking out anxiously, with head ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No 3, September, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various

... glimpse, far off and apparently lifted up—red towers, purple cliffs, wide-spread apart, hints of color and splendor; on the right distance, mansions, gold and white and carmine (so the light made them), architectural habitations in the sky it must be, and suggestions of others far off in the middle distance—a substantial aerial city, or the ruins of one, such as the prophet saw in a vision. It was only a glimpse. Our hearts were in our mouths. We had a vague impression of something wonderful, fearful—some incomparable splendor ...
— Our Italy • Charles Dudley Warner

... the next example, Fig. 64, the crest in the middle distance is exceedingly fine in its expression of mountain force; the two ridges of it being thrown up like the two edges of a return wave that has just been beaten back from a rock. It is still, however, somewhat wanting in the expression ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin

... the more serious affairs of life, sitting quietly before the horses' feet and requiring to be moved by hand. From the beginning he had his dignity, and was extremely difficult to lift, owing to the length of his middle distance. ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... In the foreground we see the broad quay, with the buildings on one side, and the low parapet wall separating it from the water on the other. In the middle distance we see the diligence just coming out upon the quay from the street by which it came into the town. A little farther on we see the bridge by which the diligence will pass across to the other side of the ...
— Rollo in Geneva • Jacob Abbott

... in this work perhaps the most notable are Ponting's eye for a picture and the mastery he has acquired of ice subjects; the composition of most of his pictures is extraordinarily good, he seems to know by instinct the exact value of foreground and middle distance and of the introduction of 'life,' whilst with more technical skill in the manipulation of screens and exposures he emphasises the subtle shadows of the snow and reproduces its wondrously transparent texture. He is an artist in love with his work, and it was good to hear his enthusiasm ...
— Scott's Last Expedition Volume I • Captain R. F. Scott

... of popples definitely into the clear. A two-storied house of squared logs crested a knoll in the middle distance. Ten acres of grass marsh, perhaps twenty of ploughed land, and then the ash-white-green of popples. We dodged the grass marsh and gained the house. Dick was at ...
— The Forest • Stewart Edward White

... In the foreground, to the right, on a triangular piece of greensward slightly below the level of the fields, there stands an old pear tree, at the foot of which a spring empties into a primitive basin of stone. The middle distance is of meadow land. In the background a pool, bordered by reeds and dotted by water plants, lies in a grove of alder trees and bushes of hazelnut, willow and beech. The meadows extend on either side encircled by immemorial oaks, elms, beeches and birch trees. Between the foliage of the ...
— The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume II • Gerhart Hauptmann

... stake in a pile of stones is likely to be almost anywhere within a liberal quarter of a mile. Then it is guess-work. If the hill is pretty thickly staked out, the chase becomes exciting. In the middle distance you see a post. You clamber eagerly to it, only to find that it marks your neighbour's claim. You have lost your standpoint of a moment ago, and must start afresh. In an hour's time you have discovered every stake on the hill but the one you want. In ...
— The Claim Jumpers • Stewart Edward White

... own. That friend whom the long patience of the angler does not chafe, the protracted pleasures of the sketcher do not weary, because time flies as swiftly with him whilst he pores over his book, or devoutly seeks botanical specimens through the artist's middle distance; that friend, in short—that valuable friend—who is blessed with the great and good quality of riding a hobby of his own, and the greater and better quality of allowing other ...
— Mrs. Overtheway's Remembrances • Juliana Horatia Ewing

... the little fountains, and the nasal psalmist on his perch. On one side was the mosque, into which you could see, with its white walls and cool-matted floor, and quaint carved pulpit and ornaments, and nobody at prayers. In the middle distance rose up the noble towers and battlements of the knightly town, with the deep ...
— Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo • William Makepeace Thackeray

... for ever pursue it. And then it is only to the eye that cannot do without green that the Karroo is unbeautiful. Every other colour meets others in harmony—tawny sand, silver-grey scrub, crimson-tufted flowers like heather, black ribs of rock, puce shoots of screes, violet mountains in the middle distance, blue fairy battlements guarding the horizon. And above all broods the intense purity of the South African azure—not a coloured thing, like the plants and the hills, but sheer colour existing by and ...
— From Capetown to Ladysmith - An Unfinished Record of the South African War • G. W. Steevens

... dined beside Half-moon Pond, and have "laid our course," as the sailors say, by our map and the sun, straight through the Scrub to visit Lake Ella, we come out upon the heights above Lake Hutchinson. The dark greens of the foreground soften into deep-blue shadows in the middle distance. Lake Hutchinson sparkles, a vivid sapphire, against the distant silvery-gray of Lake Geneva, while far away the low blue hills melt, range behind range, into ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, September 1880 • Various

... not sure of their meaning. Hiller, to whom I applied for an explanation, was unable to help me. Perhaps Chopin uses here the word plan in the pictorial sense (premier plan, foreground; second plan, middle distance).] ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks

... chimney pots, pent-houses, skylights and water tanks, in addition to various curious whistle-like protuberances from which white wraiths of steam whirled and danced in the gay breeze. Beyond, in the middle distance, a great highway of sparkling jewels led across the waves to the distant faintly green hills of Staten Island. Three tiny aeroplanes wove invisible threads against the blue woof of the sky above the ...
— Tutt and Mr. Tutt • Arthur Train

... about where the Comic spirit would place us, if we stand at middle distance between the inveterate opponents and the drum-and-fife supporters of Comedy: 'Comme un point fixe fait remarquer l'emportement des autres,' as Pascal says. And were there more in this position, Comic ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... early morning hour by the river-side. We note the many different "tones" of the picture,—the faint soft mist of the distant atmosphere over the marshes, growing darker on the poplars and the hilly bank in the middle distance; the shadow of the bank in the river; the gleam of the sunlight on the calm water mid-stream; the ripples about the jar; the sharply defined figures of the women, dark on the side turned from the sun; and the quivering shadow of the kneeling woman in the ripple-broken ...
— Jean Francois Millet • Estelle M. Hurll

... seem to clear up doubt. Colhuacan, we are informed, continued to be the residence of the great Mother of the Gods. On it she dwelt, awaiting their return from earth. No one can entirely climb the mountain, for from its middle distance to the summit it is of fine and slippery sand; but it has this magical virtue, that whoever ascends it, however old he is, grows young again, in proportion as he mounts, and is thus restored to pristine vigor. The happy dwellers around ...
— American Hero-Myths - A Study in the Native Religions of the Western Continent • Daniel G. Brinton

... and stole across the floor, very gently drew back one of the curtains and looked out. It was dark and she could see nothing— only the Cathedral like a grey web against a sky black as ink. A lamp, across the Green, threw a splash of orange in the middle distance—no other light. The Cathedral seemed to be very close to ...
— The Cathedral • Hugh Walpole

... other,[34] they unite and manifest the Middle Distance, incomprehensible Air, without beginning or end. In this is the Father who sustains all things, and nourishes those things which have a ...
— Simon Magus • George Robert Stow Mead

... now above the indefinable horizon, looming blood-red through the smoky haze. All objects, even in the middle distance, showed vague and shadowy; but, knowing which way the marauders had taken their prey, we went after them, making a slight detour to secure the four horses. But we were just in time to discern a Chinese patrol tailing the same beasts toward a larger detachment, which ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy

... over-lapping folds. The planes of distance up the broad valley were graduated in tone by a succession of screens of luminous vapour that parcelled out the landscape, taking away all colour save that bestowed by the transparent golden grey of the mist. The roofs of Cluhir made a dark profile in the middle distance, the lower part of the houses hidden in the steaming mist, and the beautiful outline of the twin crests of Carrigaholt was like a golden shadow in the sky above them. The spire and the tower of the two churches of Cluhir, rose on either ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross

... one would naturally expect from an early intermediate form, stands half-way in this respect between the two groups, and acts the thankless part of a family mediator; for it has most of its long tail-hairs collected in a final flourish, like the donkey, but several of them spring from the middle distance, as in the genuine Arab, though never from the very top, thus showing an approach to the true horsey habit without actually attaining that final pinnacle of equine glory. So far as one can make out from the somewhat rude handicraft ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen

... ventured to give more of the bright verdure of spring or early summer to the grass and foliage than is commonly attempted in painting. The scene represented was an open glade in a wood. A group of dark Scotch firs was introduced in the middle distance to relieve the prevailing freshness of the rest; but in the foreground was part of the gnarled trunk and of the spreading boughs of a large forest-tree, whose foliage was of a brilliant golden green—not golden from autumnal mellowness, but from the ...
— The Tenant of Wildfell Hall • Anne Bronte

... page 161 [Transcribers Note: Plate XXXVI].—First spear in upright row on the right top of picture, exactly Phi proportion with sides of canvas. Height of gun carried horizontally by man in middle distance above central group, exactly Phi proportion with top and bottom of picture. This line gives height of group of figures on left, and is the most important horizontal line in ...
— The Practice and Science Of Drawing • Harold Speed

... lights glowing through the darkness like fireflies. Out on San Francisco Bay the lights flashed from the mastheads of ships at anchor or from brightly lighted ferryboats plying from mole to mole, while far to the left, Lake Merritt lay like a gray sheet amid the shadows. In the middle distance off Yerba Buena Island two United States gunboats were at anchor, one of them sending the rays of its powerful searchlight here and there across the water, and making a veritable path of silver ...
— Byways Around San Francisco Bay • William E. Hutchinson

... are gossiping away the noon hour; a fisherman with pole and line is daintily sounding the shady nooks of the peaceful river; a few white swans glide gracefully in the shadow of the overhanging willows, while in the middle distance a flock of sheep nibble the rich green herbage. We find the interior of the church but little superior in architecture and ornamentation to most country churches. The tomb of the poet is in the chancel. Just over the grave, in a niche of the wall, is ...
— Foot-prints of Travel - or, Journeyings in Many Lands • Maturin M. Ballou

... meet a soul; only in the middle distance of one of the lower side streets he espied a policeman. Trafalgar Road was a solitude of bright and forlorn gas lamps and dark, ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett

... This man is a Shake-Spear, nay he really is a correct portrait of the Stratford householder, which you will readily perceive if you turn to Dugdale's engraving of the Shakespeare bust, Plate 5, Page 14. In the middle distance the man still holding a spear, still being a Shake-Speare, walks with a staff, he is therefore a Wagstaffe. On his back are books—the books of the plays. In the sky is seen an arrow, no, it is not sufficiently long for an arrow, it is a Shotbolt (Shakespeare, Wagstaffe, Shotbolt, of Camden's ...
— Bacon is Shake-Speare • Sir Edwin Durning-Lawrence

... rising ground at the foot of one of the bold bluffs in the middle distance, a collection of neat wigwams formed, with their surrounding gardens, no unpleasant feature in ...
— Wau-bun - The Early Day in the Northwest • Juliette Augusta Magill Kinzie

... artist. One of his pieces is particularly striking, a skirmish of horse, accompanied by all the scenery in which he so peculiarly delighted. In the foreground is the ruins of an old temple, with its lofty pillars finely displayed in shadow above the summits of the horizon;—in the middle distance the battle is dimly discerned through the driving rain, which obscures the view; while the back ground is closed by a vast ridge of gloomy rocks, rising into a dark and tempestuous sky. The character of the whole is that of sullen magnificence; ...
— Travels in France during the years 1814-1815 • Archibald Alison

... are the paha ridges which the glaciers made. They are not high enough to obstruct the view, nor to mar its ocean-like effect. In the middle distance you may see a farm windmill from sail to platform, but away across the snow-plain sea you catch only the uppermost part of the white sails. The rest is concealed from view by the illusory rise of the foreground toward the horizon—for this twenty-mile stretch of prairie has ...
— Some Winter Days in Iowa • Frederick John Lazell

... horses, the coach upset, and the harvest moon, are depicted in the back scene, which represents besides an illimitable heath, and a gibbet in the middle distance: all this under a glare of light, as indeed it might well be, for the moon is quite as large as the hind ...
— M. or N. "Similia similibus curantur." • G.J. Whyte-Melville

... Behind us lay the Fraser, before us the Skeena. The majestic coast range rose like a wall of snow far away to the northwest, while a near-by lake, filling the foreground, reflected the blue ridges of the middle distance—a magnificent spread of wild landscape. It made me wish to abandon the trail and ...
— The Trail of the Goldseekers - A Record of Travel in Prose and Verse • Hamlin Garland

... is what life comes to in the middle distance,—the man has his work and the woman her children.... But one doesn't marry for ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)

... about little things." Charles's mistress, her pug-dog, the page-boy who tended the dog, nay, the boy's putative father, occupy the foreground: and the poet, the statesman, and the hero retire into the middle distance or the background. What would we not have given to have had Macaulay's History of England continued down to his own time, the wars of Marlborough, the reign of Anne, the poets, wits, romancers, inventors, reformers, and heroes of the eighteenth century, ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison

... ending with the Catskills, is exceedingly fine. The eastern view embraces the Vassar Female College, the noble gift of Matthew Vassar, Esq., to the cause of female education. In the foreground and middle distance are the rich rolling landscapes of Dutchess and the fertile hillsides of Ulster counties, the glittering spires of Poughkeepsie, the lordly Hudson, and southerly are seen the famous Beacons and the ...
— Woodward's Country Homes • George E. Woodward

... sentiment of the railroad side. There was a simple interior at one place,—a small shanty, showing through the open door a cook stove surmounted by the evening coffee-pot, with a lazy cat outstretched upon the floor in the middle distance, and an old woman standing just outside the threshold to see the train go by,—which had an unrivaled value till they came to a superannuated car on a siding in the woods, in which the railroad workmen boarded—some were lounging on the platform and at the open ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... lay at her feet beneath a high arch of changing blue and white. The capricious wind moved in her hair, moved in the rich grasses of the sea-wall, bent at a curtseying angle the red-sailed barges, put caps on the waves in the middle distance, and drew out into long horizontal scarves the smoke of faint steamers in ...
— The Lion's Share • E. Arnold Bennett

... The "Middle Distance," or as I would call it "The Meeting House Neighborhood," is composed of those households from Sites 21 to 41; "the Hotel Neighborhood," of those from Site 42 to 95; and these all, whether regarded as one or as two sections, go habitually to the village ...
— Quaker Hill - A Sociological Study • Warren H. Wilson

... Turner, taken I should imagine at a distance of two miles. The appearance of the building with its lofty tower is grand and imposing. The foreground seems to have been an old quarry. The great lake glitters in the middle distance, from the opposite banks of which the ground gradually rises, and the eminence is crowned by the stately structure. Here are also a fine interior by Van Ostade from Fonthill, representing a noble picture gallery; ...
— Recollections of the late William Beckford - of Fonthill, Wilts and Lansdown, Bath • Henry Venn Lansdown

... filled with a delicious sadness. It was Janet's train. In some first-class compartment Janet and her father were shut together, side by side, intimate, mutually understanding. Again, a beautiful relation! From the summit of a high kiln in the middle distance, flames shot intermittently forth, formidable. Crockery was being fired in the night: and unseen the fireman somewhere flitted about the mouths of the kiln. And here and there in the dim faces of the streets a window shone golden... there were living people behind the blind! It was all beautiful, ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett

... surroundings—the splendid Italian gardens, a miracle of achievement even if lacking, as the miraculous may, an obvious relation with its surroundings; the landscape with its inlaid lake and wood and hill and great arch of bluest sky; the tall, transparent, Turneresque trees in the middle distance;—all this stately serenity seemed to have wrought in her an answering suavity and gladness. There was almost a latent gaiety in her glance, as, with her large, white, securely moving hands, which seemed to express their potential genius ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick

... on the slope of the hills by the river-side, in the middle distance, or near the mountains which form the horizon, are seen hundreds of little villages, and many a white villa scattered among the green vines as daisies on the turf. To the left and right are St. Pere and Akin, two hamlets, which seem like faithful dogs sleeping at ...
— Le Morvan, [A District of France,] Its Wild Sports, Vineyards and Forests; with Legends, Antiquities, Rural and Local Sketches • Henri de Crignelle

... her work was needed only copious rinsing in the running stream. Close beside her, always, was a little fire, whereon rested a little boiler; and thence smoke and steam curled up together amidst the branches of the overhanging trees. On the low bushes near by were spread the drying clothes; in the middle distance stood out the straw-thatched hut; and beyond, for background, were trees and bushes and huts and half-hidden stone walls. And as near her as their perverse spirits would permit them to come were the twins, Antonio and Antonia, scantily clad or not clad at all, usually ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 10 • Various

... chuckling with pleasure, he watched the magnificent, ample gestures of Mother's waving arms. She seemed to brush aside the winds who came a-courting, although wide strokes of swimming really described her movements best. A little farther back, in the middle distance, he recognised by his peaked cap the gendarme, Gygi, as he paused in his digging and looked up to watch the fun; and beyond him again, solid in figure as she was unchanging in her affections, he saw Mrs. Postmaster, struggling with a bed sheet the pensionnaires des ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood

... Philadelphus and Arsinoe, and containing a mass of important information in its long hieroglyphic inscriptions. Behind this, and on either side, the massive brick walls of the store chambers and the inclosing wall of the temple can be traced; while on the right hand, in the middle distance, is a heap of limestone blocks, already collected by Rameses II. for the completion or enlargement of the temple. The excavations were photographed for M. Naville, by Herr Emil Brugsch, of the Boulak Museum, and our illustrations are taken from these ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 401, September 8, 1883 • Various

... shows a mountainous ridge stretching across much of the background. That ridge belongs to the outer wall of the Muldrow Glacier and indicates its general direction. Just beyond the picture, to the right, the ridge breaks down, and the little valley in the middle distance sweeps around, becomes a steep, narrow gulch, and ends at the breach in the glacier wall. This breach, thus reached, is the pass which the Kantishna miners of the "pioneer" expedition discovered and named "McPhee Pass," after a Fairbanks saloon-keeper. The name should stand. There is no other pass ...
— The Ascent of Denali (Mount McKinley) - A Narrative of the First Complete Ascent of the Highest - Peak in North America • Hudson Stuck

... have driven him to a condition not far from madness. Any room that he was sitting in glared at him with innumerable eyes and mouths gaping with a story. There was sometimes no background and no middle distance in his mind. A human face and the pattern on the wall behind it came forward with equally aggressive clearness. It may be repeated, that if ever he who had the strongest head in the world had gone mad, it would have been through this turbulent ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton

... sea before my windows, with purple mountains as a background and silver-topped olives and rich green pines in the middle distance. I wish you could drop down upon us in this golden land for a few days' holiday ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry

... her bows towards the spectator, seen in sharp perspective from stem to stern, with all her port-holes, guns, anchors, and lower rigging elaborately detailed; there are two other ships of the line in the middle distance, drawn with equal precision; a noble breezy sea dancing against their broad bows, full of delicate drawing in its waves; a store-ship beneath the hull of the larger vessel, and several other boats, and a complicated ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin

... grand, fresh and moist, reminiscent of summer's breath while also prophetic of winter's bite, and the Isar swept below them, carrying its hurry of tumult away, away, far into the west, towards a wealth of rose and golden sky. Between the glory and the water, in the middle distance, lay a line of roofs stretching irregularly into the blackness of their own shadows, and beyond them was the forest, to the fringing haze of whose bare branches the distance lent a softness not their own. The banks of the Promenade were still green, but ...
— A Woman's Will • Anne Warner

... group, and then Miss Resker, in her best district-visitor manner, asked if the human language had been difficult to learn. Tobermory looked squarely at her for a moment and then fixed his gaze serenely on the middle distance. It was obvious that boring questions lay outside his ...
— The Chronicles of Clovis • Saki

... to admire the view from the windows. Once we tried to persuade an artist who happened to be in camp to make a sketch from that window. The artist shrank from the task. The far background was well enough, trees on the side of a hill; but the objects in the middle distance were a railway line and a ditch full of muddy water. In the foreground there were two incinerators, a dump of old tins, and a Salvation Army hut. I dare say the artist was right in ...
— A Padre in France • George A. Birmingham

... hear the sound of the sea on the northern coast, you perceive it only as a faint shining line beyond the sinking mountains and the great plain which is unrolled to the southward;—a sublime picture, framed in the foreground by dark rocks covered with pines; in the middle distance by mountains of boldest outline, fringed with superb trees; and beyond these by rounded hills which the setting sun gilds with burning colors, where the eye distinguishes, a league away, the microscopic profile of trees, fine as the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various

... broad, sharp at the point and blunt on the back. The tourniquet ought to be applied immediately above the ankle, having compresses placed over the posterior and anterior tibial arteries. The surgeon should measure with his eye the middle distance between the malleolus externus and the head of the metatarsal bone of the little toe, which is the situation of the articulation between the os cuboides and os calcis. Placing his forefinger here, he ought to place his thumb on the other side of the foot directly ...
— A Manual of the Operations of Surgery - For the Use of Senior Students, House Surgeons, and Junior Practitioners • Joseph Bell

... obliquely across the heavens, or drive them swiftly along, according to their supposed density and the power to be attributed to the wind. An arrangement of set-pieces cut in pasteboard represented the objects in the middle distance: the cupolas of Greenwich Hospital, the groups of trees in the park, the towns of Greenwich and Deptford, and the shipping in the Pool; due regard being had to size and colour, so that the laws of perspective in distance and atmosphere might ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook

... eking out the ramshackle house. Behind it and to the left of it were scrawls that might have been meant for trees. An enclosure of spiky lines might have indicated an orchard-hedge. And there were things in the middle distance, also to the left, that you might accept as beehives or as native kraals. The man who looked at them knew they were native kraals. He drew in his breath sharply, and the fold between his eyebrows deepened, as he scanned ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves

... estimate the proportion; and an exact certainty is not necessary to our present businesse.) And the distance of the Moons Center from the Center of the Earth, to be about fifty six Semidiameters of the Earth, (as thereabouts he doth there estimate it, in its middle distance; and we need not be now very accurate in determining the numbers; wherein Astronomers are not yet very well agreed.) The distance of the Common Center of Gravity of the two Bodies, will be from that of the Earth, about a two and fourtieth ...
— Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society - Vol 1 - 1666 • Various

... of the "Dean" the distances are dreamy and wide, with high horizon-lines touching wooded hills and shutting the Thames into a middle distance toward which a hundred little hills either descend abruptly or decline gently upon broad green meadows. Nature here smiles, not with pure pagan blitheness, but with a tenderer grace, as of a soul grown human and fraught with ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various

... appearance of Hill Street from the appearance of the East Fifties. Mrs. Fowler was obliged by the public opinion she obeyed to appear affluent, while Mrs. Carr was merely constrained not to appear destitute. On the whole Gabriella felt that she preferred the safe middle distance between the two ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow

... up his eyes, looked to the middle distance where the subject ought to be, and examined ...
— The Witness • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz

... engaged in noble works; charity, energy, and inventiveness are amongst the virtues they exhibit; there is no panic, or struggling one with another; no anger or selfishness, excepting only in the boat in the middle distance; a woman helps her children, a man his wife, an old man bears a young man in his arms, Priam carrying AEneas, an even more pathetic imagination than Homer's; others attempt to save their household goods; others erect a tent; others, again, attempt ...
— Michael Angelo Buonarroti • Charles Holroyd

... of all was it scandalous, for the girls were always there, Cousin Maria not having thought it in the least necessary, in order to put herself in accord with French traditions, to relegate her daughters to the middle distance. They occupied a considerable part of the foreground, in the prettiest, ...
— A London Life; The Patagonia; The Liar; Mrs. Temperly • Henry James

... accepting social ruin with her freedom, but she had long nourished a rancorous hatred for the society which had seemed to accept her under protest, for Francesca's sake, and she was ready enough to turn her back on it before it should finally make up its polite mind to relegate her to the middle distance of indifferent toleration. ...
— Casa Braccio, Volumes 1 and 2 (of 2) • F. Marion Crawford

... understanding the value of it, some conception of the elegant phases of early English watercolour painting, and there was one singular piece of a marble well brimming with water, and a greyish-blue sky over it, and dark-green poplars, shaped like wet brooms, menacing the middle distance, which Cotman himself had painted; and this seemed beautiful and curious to me in its dim, flat frame, when it was hoisted to a ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse

... received them in the pretty chintz drawing-room, which opened by French windows on the trim garden, with its croquet lawn, its tennis-net in the middle distance, and its remote rose alley lined with smart dahlias and flaming sunflowers. Her eye met Miss Stanley's understandingly, and she was if anything a trifle more affectionate in her greeting to Ann Veronica. Then Ann Veronica passed on ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells

... and recently ennobled, where almost every other house bore a name which read like a page of French history; and farther still the merry, wicked Latin quarter and the grave Sorbonne, the Pantheon, the Garden of Plants; on the hither side, in the middle distance, the Louvre, where the kings of France had dwelt for centuries; the Tuileries, where "the King of the French" dwelt then, and just for a little ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al

... the middle distance, as they beheld it, was a circular isolated hill, of no great elevation, which placed itself in strong chromatic contrast with a wide acreage of surrounding arable by being covered with fir-trees. The trees were all of one size and age, so that their tips assumed the precise curve ...
— Two on a Tower • Thomas Hardy

... before you; nothing is concealed. In the first plane, the entangling branches of a score of apple-trees are ready to trap a topped ball and bury it under impossible piles of dry leaves. Beyond, the wired tennis-courts give forth a musical, tinny note when attacked. In the middle distance a glorious sycamore draws you to the left, and a file of elms beckon the sliced way to a marsh, wilderness of grass and an overgrown gully whence no balls return. In front, one hundred and twenty yards away, is a formidable bunker, running up to which is a tract of ...
— Murder in Any Degree • Owen Johnson

... thought I was making game of him. He handed me another photograph. It was just a bleak waste of a landscape, barren of trees and vegetation, a shallow canyon with easy-sloping walls of rubble. In the middle distance was a cluster ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London

... "I came up here to forget forever the world's giddy melodrama, the wild chase for money through deserted rooms, shots in the night, cupid in the middle distance. I came here to do—literature—if it's ...
— Seven Keys to Baldpate • Earl Derr Biggers

... the idea for a great picture. It was to be his first masterpiece, his salon picture when he should get to Paris. A British cavalryman and his horse, both dying of thirst and wounds, were to be lost on a Soudanese desert, and in the middle distance on a ridge of sand a lion should be drawing in upon them, crouched on his belly, his tail stiff, his lower jaw hanging. The melodrama of the old English "Home Book of Art" still influenced Vandover. He was in love with this idea for a picture and had determined to call it "The Last ...
— Vandover and the Brute • Frank Norris

... gentleman were looking at a picture of the deluge; the ark was seen in the middle distance, while in the fore-sea an elephant was struggling with his fate. "I wonder," said the gentleman, "that the elephant did not secure an inside place!"—"He was too late, my friend," replied Canning; "he was ...
— Heads and Tales • Various

... restored to me while I lived. All the grace, the beauty, the poetry had gone out of the majestic river! I still keep in mind a certain wonderful sunset which I witnessed when steamboating was new to me. A broad expanse of the river was turned to blood; in the middle distance the red hue brightened into gold, through which a solitary log came floating, black and conspicuous; in one place a long, slanting mark lay sparkling upon the water; in another the surface was broken by boiling, tumbling rings, that ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... Pestiferous little man disturbed nature, and it all seemed so absurd out there on those quiet gray hills. It made me feel, as I slowed down and gazed at the vastness of things, like a superior sort of bug. In the middle distance several hundred troops are of no more proportion than an old cow bawling through the hills after her wolf-eaten calf. If my mental vision were not distorted I should never have seen the manoeuvre at all—only the moon and the land doing what they have done before ...
— Crooked Trails • Frederic Remington

... around, Far and near and middle distance, Still the formula is found In our everyday existence. Everywhere I look I see— Fact or fiction, life or play— Still the little game of Three: B and ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various

... with Indian red and Naples yellow, terre verte forms a series of mild russet greens, of much use in middle distance. ...
— Field's Chromatography - or Treatise on Colours and Pigments as Used by Artists • George Field

... hill; up and up we climbed through the rhododendron forest, along a path crimson with the fallen blossom, till we got to the top, when a glorious view opened out before our delighted eyes. The wooded hills of Jakho and Elysium in the foreground, Mahasu and the beautiful Shalli peaks in the middle distance, and beyond, towering above all, the everlasting snows glistening in the morning sun, formed a picture the beauty of which quite entranced us both. I could hardly persuade my wife to leave it and come into the house. Hunger and fatigue, however, at length ...
— Forty-one years in India - From Subaltern To Commander-In-Chief • Frederick Sleigh Roberts

... watched the tiny craft until it vanished round the wooded point which concealed Otter Creek. Then, to add to the sense of loneliness and peace conveyed by the placid bay and the green slopes beyond, a big whale rolled into view in the middle distance, and blew a column of water high ...
— The Captain of the Kansas • Louis Tracy

... coarse grass I crept thus, to the very entrance of the arroyo, then rose to my feet. In the middle distance the fire leaped red. Its glow fell intermittently on the surges rolling in. The men staggered or lay prone, either as gigantic silhouettes or as tatterdemalions painted by the light. The keg stood solid and substantial, the hub about which reeled the orgy. At the edge ...
— The Mystery • Stewart Edward White and Samuel Hopkins Adams

... he continually reiterated a claim to be regarded as "one of the beardless goats." Thus expressing himself, Yan sank down in his appointed corner and would doubtlessly soon have been floating peacefully in the Middle Distance had not the door been again thrown open and a stranger named ...
— Kai Lung's Golden Hours • Ernest Bramah

... immediate family, after that our own especial friends,—all assuming a gigantic size which puts quite out of the question an occasional bird's-eye view of the world in general. Even objects which might be in the middle distance of a less extended view are quite screened by the exaggerated size of those which seem to concern ...
— As a Matter of Course • Annie Payson Call

... oblong, white blot in the middle distance; a nebulous blur in the painting, as if there had been some chemical impurity in the pigment causing it to fade, or rather as if a long drop of some acid, or perhaps a splash of salt water, had fallen upon the canvas while it was wet, and bleached it. I knew little of the possible causes of ...
— The Ruling Passion • Henry van Dyke

... were looking at a picture of the Deluge: the ark was in the middle distance; in the fore-sea an elephant was seen struggling with his fate. "I wonder," said the gentleman, "that the elephant did not secure an inside place."—"He was too late, my friend," replied Canning; "he was detained ...
— The Jest Book - The Choicest Anecdotes and Sayings • Mark Lemon

... made his first important exhibit at the Salon in 1835, after a visit to England, where he met Constable. This picture, "Environs of Southampton," was typical of the work he was to do. A long waste of land near the sea, the middle distance in deepest shadow, and richly colored storm-clouds racing overhead; the foreground in sunlight, enhanced by the artificial contrast of the rest of the picture; a wooden dyke on which, together with two white horses near by, ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 6, No. 5, April, 1896 • Various

... on the yellow veldt, where we were. A beautiful scene stretched away before us. The veldt was not all yellow, but in low-lying places, after the recent rain, was beginning to be streaked with vivid green. Opposite us, across the flat or gently undulating veldt in the middle distance, were hills and kopjes, while beyond, purple under clouds or light blue in sunshine, rose to the far horizon mountains, pointed, or of that quite flat-topped shape so ...
— Impressions of a War Correspondent • George Lynch

... from the room of detention at a quarter past four. As he came out into the grounds he espied in the middle distance somebody being carried on a stretcher in the direction of the School House. At the same moment Parker loomed in sight, walking swiftly towards the School shop, his mobile features shining with the rapt expression of one who sees much ginger-beer in ...
— Tales of St. Austin's • P. G. Wodehouse

... we give the Deuce of Clubs, from a pack with London Cries (Fig. 27), and another with Fables (Fig. 28), both of which date from the earlier years of the last century, the former with the quaint costume and badge of a waterman, with his cry of "Oars! oars! do you want a boat?" In the middle distance the piers of Old London Bridge, and the house at its foot with overhanging gallery, make a pleasing old-time picture. The "Fables" cards are apparently from the designs of Francis Barlow, and are probably engraved by ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 26, February 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various

... the squadron of cuirassiers drawn up in front of the Opera, the police agents massed on either side, and the regiment of the line under arms in the Rue 4 Septembre close at hand. In the middle distance a squadron of the Garde de Paris came leisurely up the ...
— Mlle. Fouchette - A Novel of French Life • Charles Theodore Murray

... the camp sunk in the somnolence of its seventh-day rest, Susan not to be seen anywhere, Leff asleep under the wagon, the doctor writing his diary in the shade of the cotton-woods, and Daddy John lying on the grass among the whiteness of the week's wash. The hour was hot and breathless, the middle distance quivering through a heat haze, and the remoter reaches of ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner



Words linked to "Middle distance" :   view, panorama, aspect, prospect, scene, vista



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