"Picturesqueness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... reconstructed States of the South." These and similar outgivings attracted the attention of a large element of the Republican party, and he was nominated for the Presidency, against General Grant, in 1872. Mr. Greeley's canvass was one of great picturesqueness and industry. He made a series of speeches extending over a tour from New England to the West, and returning to New York, which were marked by a most wonderful originality, freshness, and brilliance; but nothing could avail to stem the tide of prejudice which rose against him and in favor ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various
... expatiated on the picturesqueness of the country and from time to time, as if by chance, his eyes met those of Jeanne, and she felt a strange sensation at the quickly averted glance which betrayed tender admiration and ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... contempt, admiration, or envy, as the case may be, but who is incontestably modifying Western Europe, even if he is not, as many journalists and globe-trotters are fond of asserting, "Americanizing" the world. Interesting as it is to glance at him against that European background which adds picturesqueness to his qualities, the "Man from Home" is still more interesting in his native habitat. There he has been visited by hundreds of curious and observant foreigners, who have left on record a whole literature of bewildered and bewildering, irritating and flattering and amusing testimony concerning ...
— The American Mind - The E. T. Earl Lectures • Bliss Perry
... were about two Greek texts, the learned would admit that these points in A (Scott) are not derived from B (Sharpe). Scott's additions have an obvious motive, they add picturesqueness to his clan. But the differences which I have noticed do nothing of that kind. When they affect the poetry they spoil the poetry, when they do not affect the poetry they are quite motiveless, whence I conclude that ...
— Sir Walter Scott and the Border Minstrelsy • Andrew Lang
... conspicuously as in costume. Now, we all wear one conventional dress, one conventional face; we have no bond of union but pecuniary interest; we talk anything that comes uppermost for talking's sake, and without expecting to be believed; we have no nature, no simplicity, no picturesqueness: everything about us is as artificial and as complicated as our steam-machinery: our poetry is a kaleidoscope of false imagery, expressing no real feeling, portraying no real existence. I do not see any compensation for the poetry ...
— Crotchet Castle • Thomas Love Peacock
... I am sorry you told me. It robs my visit of all its picturesqueness and adventure. I thought I was perilling my head by coming here, and you tell me I have saved it. One is sure to be disappointed if one tries to get romance out of ...
— Vera - or, The Nihilists • Oscar Wilde
... the home of the spiritual ruler whose sway reaches over the whole earth. When Nicholas began his reign, the old Church of St. Peter was the church of the Western world, then, as now, classical in form, a stately basilica without the picturesqueness and romantic variety, and also, as we think, without the majesty and grandeur, of a Gothic cathedral, yet more picturesque if less stupendous in size and construction, than the present great edifice, so majestic in ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 8 - The Later Renaissance: From Gutenberg To The Reformation • Editor-in-Chief: Rossiter Johnson
... more than a few years, was inserted about a foot from the ground. Then the wall, being quite insufficient to stand the heavy drift of weather to which it is exposed, was dabbled over with two coatings of plaster on the outside, the outermost being given a primitive picturesqueness by means of a sham surface of rough-cast pebbles and white-wash, while within, to conceal the rough discomfort of the surface, successive coatings of plaster, and finally, paper, were added, with a wood-skirting at the foot thrice ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... consideration for a rearrangement of streets, which will afford easier access from the Campus to the Hospitals and the boulevards and river drives. These will give to this portion of the future University grounds an irregularity and picturesqueness wholly lacking on the flat hilltop occupied by the present Campus. One of the difficulties in this plan is the old "Cat-hole," the end of a ravine, whose steep hillsides extend from the river practically to the northeast corner of the Campus. Though this unsightly boghole ...
— The University of Michigan • Wilfred Shaw
... Mycenae from any side without being struck with the picturesqueness of the site. If you come down over the mountains from Corinth, as soon as you reach the head of the valley of the Inachus, which is the plain of Argos, you turn aside to the left, or east, into a secluded corner—"a recess of the horse-feeding Argos," as Homer calls it—and then you find on the edge ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Vol VIII - Italy and Greece, Part Two • Various
... its base vines and growing things began to creep defiantly in and out the widening fissures that rent its foundation. Almost imperceptibly year by year dissolution went on, the crude structure melting into picturesqueness and taking on the gentle charm of a ruin until Martin Howe and Ellen Webster, its present-day guardians, beheld it an ignominious heap of stone that lay crumbling amid woodbine ...
— The Wall Between • Sara Ware Bassett
... to follow in detail a career so well known. Every particular of it, and even the sermons with all their heads, may be found in the Historie of the Reformation in Scotland, which yields in interest, in picturesqueness and the most living and graphic power of narrative, to none of the primitive chronicles. No professional word-painter has ever put a dramatic scene, a contention, a battle, such as those which were everyday occurrences ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... serve as introduction and comment to the letters of Carlyle and Emerson during these years,—Lowell speaks of the impression made by this remarkable discourse. It "was an event without any former parallel in our literary annals, a scene to be always treasured in the memory for its picturesqueness and its inspiration. What crowded and breathless aisles, what windows clustering with eager heads, what enthusiasm of approval, what grim silence of foregone dissent! It was our Yankee version of a lecture by Abelard, our Harvard parallel to the last public appearances of Schelling."—My ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, - 1834-1872, Vol. I • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... through the moon-vine. Out on the wide veranda was the long table. They were a happy group at luncheon there. Even the taciturn Brand Williams had been persuaded to come. His native picturesqueness was rather effaced by a black, characterless ...
— Overland Red - A Romance of the Moonstone Canon Trail • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... below, and a small garden of pot-herbs, inclosed by a strong fence of timber, lay on the sunny side of a spacious rambling forest lodge, only one story high, built of solid timber and roofed with shingle. It was not without strong pretensions to beauty, as well as to picturesqueness, for the posts of the door, the architecture of the deep porch, the frames of the latticed windows, and the verge boards were all richly carved in grotesque devices. Over the door was the royal shield, between a pair of magnificent antlers, ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte M. Yonge
... less elevated and less pure than the old Zoroastrian creed, must be pronounced to have possessed a certain loftiness and picturesqueness which suited it to become the religion of a great and splendid monarchy. The mysterious fire-altars on the mountain-tops, with their prestige of a remote antiquity—the ever-burning flame believed to have been kindled from on high—the worship in the open air under the blue canopy ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 3. (of 7): Media • George Rawlinson
... does not strike one as anything out of the common, because the composition is so true, so perfectly natural and simple. I cannot remember having seen a single picture in which the peculiar style and picturesqueness of those days is so vividly expressed, as in the figures of these two men calmly walking ...
— Rembrandt • Josef Israels
... fathers, brothers and husbands, sumptuously to ship themselves to other lands, should begin to rule these lands also? Betty, in her growing up, heard all this intimated. At twelve years old, though she had detested Rosalie's marriage, she had rather liked to hear people talk of the picturesqueness of places like Stornham Court, and of the life led by women of rank in their houses in town and country. Such talk nearly always involved the description of things and people, whose colour and tone had only reached her through the medium of books, ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... deeds are usually unconscious of their picturesqueness. For two nights previous to the assault upon Fort Wagner, the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Regiment had been afoot, making forced marches in the rain; and on the day of the battle the men had had no food since early morning. As they lay there in the evening twilight, hungry and wet, against the cold ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... themselves with sending their liveried servants to represent them. Soldiers formed the escort. The crowd in the street fell on its knees as the procession passed. Flowers, incense, music, the faithful with their foreheads in the dust, all contributed to the picturesqueness of the scene. A week later the ceremony was repeated with almost equal pomp. On the Sunday following, there was another procession in the northern suburbs. Naked boys, leading lambs, represented Saint John the Baptist; Magdalens eight years old, walking by their nurses' side, wept over their sins; ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... theater, in that the stage can rise to the loftiest heights of philosophic poetry and that it can fall also to the lowest depths of the show-business. An audience has ears, but the spectators who compose it have eyes also; and the born playwright never fails to provide the picturesqueness and the visible movement which satisfy the senses, whatever may be the more serious appeal to the mind. In the modern theater the stage is withdrawn behind a picture-frame; and it is the duty of the dramatist to satisfy our demand ...
— Inquiries and Opinions • Brander Matthews
... to the ground in the back over an ell covering the kitchen, added in the shape known as a lean-to, or, as it was called by country folk, the linter. This sloping roof gave the one element of unconscious picturesqueness which redeemed the prosaic ugliness of these bare-walled houses. Many lean-to houses are still standing in New England. The Boardman Hill House, built at North Saugus, Massachusetts, two centuries and a half ago, and the two houses of ...
— Home Life in Colonial Days • Alice Morse Earle
... that in many robust and energetic people the sense of what is beautiful is so far atrophied that it can only be aroused by scenes and places of almost melodramatic picturesqueness, by ancient buildings clustered on craggy eminences, great valleys with the frozen horns of mountains, wind-ravaged and snow-streaked, peering over forest edges, the thunder and splendour of great sea-breakers plunging landward under rugged headlands ...
— Joyous Gard • Arthur Christopher Benson
... New England; well adapted to exposed situations on highlands or along the seacoast; grows in almost any soil, but thrives best in sandy or gravelly moist loams; valuable among other trees for color-effects and occasional picturesqueness of outline; mostly uninteresting and of uncertain habit; subject to the loss of the lower limbs, and not readily transplanted; very seldom offered in quantity by nurserymen; obtainable from collectors, but ...
— Handbook of the Trees of New England • Lorin Low Dame
... of them; they've had no nurture.' That was her word. So being a just child, she has to wonder how Englishmen 'with nurture' can so demean themselves to get money. In short, my friend, your daughter—for love of us both maybe—is taking our picturesqueness too honestly. She inclines to find a merit of its own in poverty. It is high time we ...
— Brother Copas • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... clergyman, who still sat together on the mossy tree-trunk waiting to receive her. Just where she had paused, the brook chanced to form a pool so smooth and quiet that it reflected a perfect image of her little figure, with all the brilliant picturesqueness of her beauty, in its adornment of flowers and wreathed foliage, but more refined and spiritualized than the reality. This image, so nearly identical with the living Pearl, seemed to communicate somewhat of its own shadowy and intangible quality to the child herself. It was strange, the ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... in an open box-sleigh. To see the frozen meat thus manipulated in the midst of the snow had struck Sophia as one of the most novel features of their present way of life. Miss Bennett, however, could hardly be expected to feel its picturesqueness. Her parents did not fancy this vendor's meat, and at present they usually killed their own. Her father, she said, had grown quite dexterous ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... that Mr. Allen's account of the influences which surrounded Mr. Darwin's youth, if tainted with picturesqueness, is still substantially correct. On an earlier page he had written:- "It is impossible to take up any scientific memoirs or treatises of the first half of our own century without seeing at a glance how every mind of high ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... through Bun Hill was like the British Empire or the British Constitution—a thing that had grown to its present importance. Unlike any other roads in Europe the British high roads have never been subjected to any organised attempts to grade or straighten them out, and to that no doubt their peculiar picturesqueness is to be ascribed. The old Bun Hill High Street drops at its end for perhaps eighty or a hundred feet of descent at an angle of one in five, turns at right angles to the left, runs in a curve for about thirty yards to a brick bridge over the dry ditch that had once been the Otterbourne, ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells
... commonplace beauty about "Orchard House"—a kind of spiritual sturdiness underlying its quaint picturesqueness—a kind of common triad of the New England homestead, whose overtones tell us that there must have been something aesthetic fibered in the Puritan severity—the self-sacrificing part of the ideal—a value that seems ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... nearly around the whole. Over the further bank dance the sparkling waters of a broad estuary, flashing in the glance of the sunshine or tossing its white-capped billows in angry mimicry of the sea. The gleam of white sails is never lacking to add variety and picturesqueness to the scene. In the dead, hushed calm of a summer evening, when the lifted oar rests on the gunwale, unwilling to disturb with its dip the glassy surface, one has a strange, dreamy sense of being suspended in space, the sky, in all its changing ...
— The Best Ghost Stories • Various
... we found out how beautiful a nook we had got into. Besides the charming picturesqueness of its lines, the colors about it, brightened by the rain, made a fine study. Viewed from the shore, there was first a margin of dark-brown algae, then a bar of yellowish-brown, next a dark bar on the rugged ...
— Travels in Alaska • John Muir
... and died in 1832, and all that is special in his life belongs to the last six years of it. Even so the materials for the story are of the simplest—enough, perhaps, under the hand of an artist to furnish forth a tale of the length of Trollope's The Warden. In picturesqueness, in color, in wealth of episode and peripeteia, Scott's career will not compare for a moment with the career of Coleridge, for instance. Yet who could endure to read the life of Coleridge in six volumes? De Quincey, in an essay first published the other day by Dr. Japp, calls the story ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... knew that Edward was a prince of a man, but we did not know, or rather appreciate, that he has a princely estate and in as fine order as any in the island. When I say 'fine order,' I do not mean that it is laid out like the Bois de Boulogne, nor is there quite as much picturesqueness in a level plain of sugar canes as in the trees and shrubbery of the gardens of Versailles; but it is a rich and well-cultivated estate of some fourteen hundred acres, gradually rising for two or three miles from the sea-shore to the mountains, including some of them, ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume II • Samuel F. B. Morse
... striking events of the war centre around the use of the airplanes or dirigibles, and aside from the picturesqueness and thrilling atmosphere that seem to surround their use, the operator of the aircraft has proved himself one of the most valuable servants in modern warfare. He has reduced the proudest cavalry to second place in the matter of reconnoissance, ...
— Kelly Miller's History of the World War for Human Rights • Kelly Miller
... was the amount of inner emotion there was in the drama, which is very advantageous to the music. Music gives expression to feelings which the characters cannot express, and accentuates and develops the picturesqueness of the piece; it makes acceptable what would not even ...
— Musical Memories • Camille Saint-Saens
... is a wealth of imagery, a luxury of picturesqueness, together with that straightforward simplicity so alluring in the story- teller. Not only is our attention so captivated that we seem under a spell, but our sympathy is invoked and retained. We actually wince before the cruel blows of the wicked queen. And ...
— Malayan Literature • Various Authors
... Sir David Lyndsay to his purpose, presenting him, even as he presents the stately and venerable Angus, with faithful and striking picturesqueness. Bishop Douglas is exactly suited to his share in the development of events; and had room likewise been found for the Court poet Dunbar—author of James's Epithalamium, the 'Thrissill and the Rois'—it would have been both a fit and a seemly arrangement. Had Scott remembered ...
— Marmion • Sir Walter Scott
... heathen kingdoms to accept the cross was Mercia, which corresponds very roughly to what we call the Midlands. The unbaptized king, Penda, has even achieved a certain picturesqueness through this fact, and through the forays and furious ambitions which constituted the rest of his reputation; so much so that the other day one of those mystics who will believe anything but Christianity ...
— A Short History of England • G. K. Chesterton
... unpleasing feature of what must be, in spite of Signor P——, a delightful Italian garden in sunny weather. The ground is not so flat as elsewhere in Padua, and this inequality gives an additional picturesqueness to the place. But as we were come in search of horrors, we scorned these merely lovely things, and hastened to immure ourselves in the dungeons below. The custodian, lighting a candle, (which ought, we felt, to have been ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 117, July, 1867. • Various
... outlet conducted us into Red Cedar Lake, a handsome body of water which we were an hour in passing through, say four or five miles. The men raised their songs, which had not been heard for some time. It presents some islands, which add to its picturesqueness. Formerly there stood a single red cedar on one of these, which gave the name to the lake, but no other tree of this species is known in the region. Half a mile south of its banks the Indians procure a kind of red ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... study of language with a view to obtaining some special effect in the communication of ideas or feelings, such as picturesqueness in description, vivacity in narration, lucidity in exposition, vehemence in persuasion, or literary charm. Some of these ends are often gained in spite of faulty syntax or faulty logic; but since the few whom bad grammar saddens or incoherent arguments divert are not carried away, ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... actual drovers and dominies, ladies and lairds, whom Sir Walter used as his models, figure here, living their own richly characteristic and romantic lives with unabated picturesqueness. Mr Crockett's identifications are all based on strict evidence, the result is that we are given a kind of flowing sequel to the novels, containing situations, dialogues, anecdotes, and adventures not included in the books. The forty-four illustrations comprise many contemporary ...
— Law and Laughter • George Alexander Morton
... window had either then or previously been deprived of all its tracery, and was an expanse of plain glass with only a little remains of a cusp at the top of the arch. The bells were in one of the true Hampshire weather-boarded square towers, of which very few still exist in their picturesqueness. There were the remains of an old broken font, and a neat white marble one, of which the tradition was that it was given by a parish clerk named David Fidler, and it still exists as the lining of the ...
— John Keble's Parishes • Charlotte M Yonge
... course, not to be supposed that Siro had lectured upon mythology as such. But the Epicurean teachers, despite their scorn for legends, employed them for pedagogical purposes in several ways. Lucretius, for instance, uses them sometimes for their picturesqueness, as in the prooemium and again in the allegory of the seasons (V. 732). He also employs them in a Euhemeristic fashion, explaining them as popular allegories of actual human experiences, citing the myths of Tantalus and Sisyphus, for example, as expressions ...
— Vergil - A Biography • Tenney Frank
... who go abroad for their health who prefer a sailing ship, on account of the great length of the voyage, in allusion to which steam people call sailing ships "wind jammers," while the sailors retort on steamers by dubbing them "iron tanks" and "old coffins." There is no doubt that the picturesqueness of a sea voyage is quite destroyed by a steamer. There are no, or very few, regular sailors on board; so much of the work is now done by steam. There are no "chanties" or sailors' songs, which help the work to go easily. In a steamer ...
— Six Letters From the Colonies • Robert Seaton
... not that he lacked strength; on the contrary, he was tall and well, if loosely, built. Grace is not a common manly attribute, but he possessed it to an eminent degree. There was a careless ease in his manner, an unconscious picturesqueness in his poses, a turn, that would have smacked of haughtiness had there been the slightest element of pride in his disposition, in the curve of the neck, ...
— A Girl of the Commune • George Alfred Henty
... was not so keenly alive to the picturesqueness of the scenes through which he passed as the modern visitor, and in the account of his travels he took no note of the long lines of laden boats going up or down stream, nor of the vast sheet of ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 9 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... prose, that it is needless for me to dwell at length upon its delights, which, I am inclined to think, are greater in imagination than in reality. It has been called the Venice of the East, and in some respects it certainly does remind one of the 'Bride of the Sea,' both in its picturesqueness and (when one gets into the small and tortuous canals) its unsavouriness. Even at the time of which I am writing it was dilapidated, and the houses looked exactly like those made by children out of a pack of cards, which a puff of wind might be ...
— Forty-one years in India - From Subaltern To Commander-In-Chief • Frederick Sleigh Roberts
... delighted with the beauty of the scenery which on every side met our eyes—woods and green fields, and hills and valleys, diversified the banks of the river, which branched off in different directions, and added much to the picturesqueness of the landscape. From the accounts we received of the barbarities committed by the Spaniards, we longed to meet them, to chastise them as they deserved. They had just before this made an attack on the settlement, where they had destroyed a large amount of property, and carried ...
— Hurricane Hurry • W.H.G. Kingston
... ugliest tenement street Christmas brings something of picturesqueness, of cheer. Its message was ever to the poor and the heavy-laden, and by them it is understood with an instinctive yearning to do it honor. In the stiff dignity of the brownstone streets up-town there may be scarce a hint of it. In the homes of the poor it blossoms on stoop and fire-escape, looks ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis
... not also see in imagination the wild creatures of the forest with their snouts of many shapes, with their fur of all kinds? But in Anglo-Saxon poetry you will not find anything like that. Anglo-Saxon Rune songs create no images. It is this picturesqueness, this actuality of imagery that is distinctive ...
— Books and Habits from the Lectures of Lafcadio Hearn • Lafcadio Hearn
... another line. Occasionally he played upon a word, though often he did not disguise it greatly; nor did he intend to. In many more instances, he presented no counterfeit whatever. For picturesqueness and appropriateness, in conjunction with the lives of the individuals of which his novels abound, one could hardly improve on many actual ...
— Dickens' London • Francis Miltoun
... quarrel should come and then another; Cherry was young and undisciplined, perhaps not more selfish than other girls of her age, but self-centred and unreasonable. She had to learn self- control, and she hated to control herself. She had to economize when poverty possessed neither picturesqueness nor interest. They were always several weeks late in the payment of domestic bills, and these recurring reminders of money stringency maddened Cherry. Sometimes she summed it up, with angry tears, reminding him that she was still ...
— Sisters • Kathleen Norris
... is characterised by variety, liveliness, and picturesqueness. 'As a master of style Livy is in the first rank of historians. He marks the highest point which the enlarged and enriched prose of the Augustan age reached just before it began to fall into decadence.... The periodic structure of Latin prose, which had been developed ...
— Helps to Latin Translation at Sight • Edmund Luce
... Ventimiglia!" poor lady, she had an awakening before her. Not only was there no Prince, but there was no best hotel. Old Ventimiglia, in its huddled picturesqueness, must delight any man with eyes in his head; new Ventimiglia must disgust any man with a vacancy under his belt. As we sat in the shabby dining-room of a seventh-rate inn (where the flies set an example of attentiveness the waiters did not follow), pretending to eat macaroni hard as walking-sticks ...
— My Friend the Chauffeur • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... when they were part of rustic festivity and worship. The popular ballads have passed away with the conditions which produced them. Modern poets have, in several instances, written ballads of striking picturesqueness and power, but as unlike the ballad of popular origin as the world of to-day is unlike the world in which "Chevy Chase" was first sung. These modern ballads are not necessarily better or worse than ...
— The Book of Old English Ballads • George Wharton Edwards
... it to enhance the life, either of the body or soul; Donatello and Michael Angelo, no less than the sculptors of Gothic chivalry, ennoble armor in the same way; but base sculptors carve drapery and armor for the sake of their folds and picturesqueness only, and forget the body beneath. The rule is so stern, that all delight in mere incidental beauty, which painting often triumphs in, is wholly forbidden to sculpture;—for instance, in painting the ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... irregularities to which they were condemned by the configuration of the ground. Such difficulties were, in fact, a frequent source of inspiration; and Philae shows with what skill the Egyptians extracted every element of beauty and picturesqueness ...
— Manual Of Egyptian Archaeology And Guide To The Study Of Antiquities In Egypt • Gaston Camille Charles Maspero
... Annals supplies materials for studying the human mind and the motives of human conduct: in imparting a knowledge of events respecting the Roman nation, the writer of the History, who is gifted with graphic power, places images before us, whereas the writer of the Annals, aware that in picturesqueness he was inferior to Tacitus, gives us impressions, while he investigates social phenomena and elucidates the principles of human nature. One work is historic, the other philosophic. One man generalizes, the other particularizes. ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross
... most interesting play or novel,' and you get strange glimpses of the ways of thinking and living among classes otherwise unknown to you. These criminal courts, he says in another letter, are a 'never-ending source of interest and picturesqueness for me. The little kind of meat-safe door through which the prisoners are called up, and the attendant demon of a gaoler who summons them up from the vasty deep and sends them back again to the vasty deep for terms ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... we visited was like the introduction of a new picture. There was no sameness between any of them. Each had aimed at picturesqueness or stately magnificence, and neither had failed to obtain it. Looking back as I now do upon Mizora, it presents itself to me as a vast and almost limitless landscape, variegated with grand cities, lovely towns and villages, majestic hills ...
— Mizora: A Prophecy - A MSS. Found Among the Private Papers of the Princess Vera Zarovitch • Mary E. Bradley
... the Nebraska who had never before traversed the "Inside Passage" were loud in the praises of its picturesqueness, while those to whom the route was familiar seemed to find an ever-fresh fascination in its ...
— The Iron Trail • Rex Beach
... miles farther down, where it falls into the Havel, on its way to the Elbe. The waters, I think, are drab-colored, not peat-brown: and here, at the source, or outfall from that mesh of lakes, where Reinsberg is, the country seems to be about the best;—sufficient, in picturesqueness and otherwise, to ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. X. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—At Reinsberg—1736-1740 • Thomas Carlyle
... he seemed to be wandering without an object, or with such a dreamy object as that which led Middleton's own steps onward. He was a plain old man enough, but with a pale, strong-featured face and white hair, a certain picturesqueness and venerableness, which Middleton fancied might have befitted a richer garb than he now wore. In much of their conversation, too, he was sensible that, though the stranger betrayed no acquaintance with literature, nor seemed to have conversed with cultivated minds, yet the results of such ...
— Sketches and Studies • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... bright moonlight nights for two lines of men to sit facing each other and to clap—one can hardly call it ring—these bells vigorously, but in good time, accompanying this performance with a monotonous song, while the delighted women and children dance round. The learned doctor evidently sees the picturesqueness of this practice, but notes that the words of the songs are not "tiefsinnige" (profound), as he has heard men for hours singing "The shark bites the Bubi's hand," only that over and over again and nothing more. This agrees with my own observations ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... will not deny that the actor and the actress can supply part of the picturesqueness ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... shutting all the windows and doors. For the first few nights, as a matter of fact, we had to sleep in these rooms on straw ourselves, and in the greatest luxury. No one who has slept all his life in a bed would ever realize how comfortable straw is, and for picturesqueness ...
— A Surgeon in Belgium • Henry Sessions Souttar
... the Squire had no money to spend on new furniture, he and his wife had the knack of making the best of the old. He was no despicable joiner; she had a kind of grace in whatever she did, and imparted an air of elegant picturesqueness to whatever she touched. Besides, they had brought many rare things from the Continent; perhaps I should rather say, things that were rare in that part of England—carvings, and crosses, and beautiful pictures. And then, again, wood was plentiful in the Trough ...
— Curious, if True - Strange Tales • Elizabeth Gaskell
... himself in a chair, and plunged into tea and small talk as though to the manner born. But all the time Cynthia, while approving his naval uniform, and his general picturesqueness, was secretly wondering what he had come about. For although he was enjoying a well-earned leave, the first for two years, and had every right to idle, the ordinary afternoon call of country life, rarely, as she knew, came into the scheme of his day. The weather ...
— Helena • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... outlook upon ways where no traveller for mere pleasure was to be seen; none but people bent on business of one sort or another. Yet everything was delightful to Dolly's eyes; the novelty was perfect, the picturesqueness undeniable. What she could see of the lagoon, of the vessels at anchor, the flying gondolas, the canals and the bridges over them, and the beautiful Riva, put Dolly in a rapture. Her eye roved, her heart swelled. "O mother!" ...
— The End of a Coil • Susan Warner
... at Paris, a reforming Archdeacon in Wales, the wittiest of Court chaplains, the most troublesome of bishops, Gerald became the gayest and most amusing of all the authors of his time. In his hands the stately Latin tongue took the vivacity and picturesqueness of the jongleur's verse. Reared as he had been in classic studies, he threw pedantry contemptuously aside. "It is better to be dumb than not to be understood," is his characteristic apology for the novelty of his style: ...
— History of the English People, Volume I (of 8) - Early England, 449-1071; Foreign Kings, 1071-1204; The Charter, 1204-1216 • John Richard Green
... and the lack of which kept one forever falling short of the higher sort of contentment. And I soon recognized that it was the element that gives to the wicked outer world all its moral style, expressiveness and picturesqueness,—the element of precipitousness, so to call it, of strength and strenuousness, ...
— Talks To Teachers On Psychology; And To Students On Some Of Life's Ideals • William James
... Brussels is a city of shady boulevards, open spaces, and pleasant parks as is Paris; and the beautiful Bois de la Cambre on its outskirts compares very favorably with the world-renowned Bois de Boulogne as regards rural charm and picturesqueness. ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 4 (of 10) • Various
... our new literature, has not corrupted the older handicraftsmen among us. Not one record of travel in a hundred deserves to be mentioned in the same breath with 'Oceana;' there are not very many books of the kind in the language which excel it in variety, in vigour of style, in picturesqueness of description, or in vivid glimpses of insight into personal character. Baron Huebner is a more genial, discursive, and garrulous traveller. He tells us everything that comes into his mind, and has a note about everything he saw. We must add that these notes ...
— The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886 • Various
... talk about our symptoms, we are never particularly interested in listening to those of others, still less in seeing them portrayed upon the stage. On account of their slow course, utter absence of picturesqueness, and depressing character, the vast majority of diseases are quite unsuitable for artistic material. In fact, the literary worker is almost limited to a mere handful, at one extreme, which will produce sudden and dramatic effects, like heart failure, ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson
... cannot be given to the translators for the manner in which they have rendered the legend into pure and delightful English, whilst preserving the beauty of thought and the romantic picturesqueness of the original.' ...
— Historical Mysteries • Andrew Lang
... wearing away. Trees grow in some of the deserted apartments, and ivy creeps along the walls; though the ruins have little of the picturesqueness of decay. The best point of view, or north-west, is represented in the Engraving; a short distance hence lies the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 566, September 15, 1832 • Various
... generous, elevated, human and humane picturesqueness to the caricatured strolling player is shown with such admirable truth by Claretie, that his "Brichanteau" deserves permanency ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... Rossetti anywhere displayed a more sustained picturesqueness. One episode stands forth vividly even among so many that are conspicuous. The mother has left her daughter in a swoon to seek help of the priest who has knelt unweariedly by the dead body of her daughter's lover, now lying on the ingle-bench in the hall. When ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... almost as much as the banner, he was jubilant under his dignified mask, enjoyed the picturesqueness of these Savoyard village streets, so different from the too neat, too varnished Swiss village, looking like a new toy; he enjoyed the contrast of these hovels scarcely rising above the ground, where the stable fills the largest space, with the grand and sumptuous hotels five storeys ...
— Tartarin On The Alps • Alphonse Daudet
... all his nature-poetry the traces of the heredity of the early settler, the keen enjoyment of the fresh and unhackneyed in nature, even of the angularity of the New England farmhouse and the brightness and newness of the villages, so crude to the tastes founded in the picturesqueness of the Old World. Not even Emerson, with all his indifference to the mere form of things, took to unimproved and uncivilized nature as Lowell did, and his free delight in the Wilderness was a thing to remember, and perhaps by ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... this season of enchantment hold, it is said, at midnight, high carnival on the islands of this upper and beautiful river. Be that as it may, they certainly add to the attractions of a sail along this "Father of Waters," and give picturesqueness to the landscape which, before seeing, we had not credited with so much of interest and beauty as we found ...
— Minnesota; Its Character and Climate • Ledyard Bill
... their fellow-artists. Perhaps it is taken for granted that the musician is a fool—the British public is so intuitive. Yet it takes the same view of the poet, without allowing him a like immunity. And, by the way, what a fine conception of his part had Tennyson—of the dignity, the mystery, the picturesqueness of it! Tennyson would have felt it an artistic crime to look like his publisher; yet what poet is there left us to-day half so distinguished-looking ...
— Prose Fancies (Second Series) • Richard Le Gallienne
... rambling sketch of Southern travel does not refer, as might be understood, to the wonderful picturesqueness of the Southern mountains and valleys, their ever-varying beauty of sunshine and shadow, nor to the spiritual, moral or intellectual condition of the people; but is a salutation, embodying in its brevity an invitation to the stranger ...
— The American Missionary — Volume 54, No. 3, July, 1900 • Various
... m. from Sparkford. It lies in pretty country, and has a church to which the possession of a slender spire adds picturesqueness. Internally there is little that calls for remark. There is a squint in one of the piers, and a piscina in ...
— Somerset • G.W. Wade and J.H. Wade
... house, misnamed "hotel," was the most prominent building in Misericorde. It would not have ornamented a more respectable locality but, on the whole, possessed a certain picturesqueness, among these hovels, and arrested the Ontarian's steps. Stained a dark grey by at least fifty years of exposure, yet slightly tinted with the traces of a by-gone coat of green, it lifted a high peaked roof in air, which ...
— The Young Seigneur - Or, Nation-Making • Wilfrid Chateauclair
... Moguls have been converted into barracks, arsenals and storerooms, and their decorations have been covered with whitewash. The only object of interest that has been left is an armory containing a fine collection of ancient Indian weapons. But, although the city has lost its medieval picturesqueness, it has gained in utility, and has become the most important educational and industrial center of northern India. The university and its numerous affiliated schools, the law college, the college of oriental languages and the manual training ...
— Modern India • William Eleroy Curtis
... of the dragon watching the tower from the sunny hillside is justly admired for its picturesqueness, power, and suggestiveness. The language is extremely simple, but the effect is awe-inspiring. It has been compared with Turner's great painting of the Dragon ...
— Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Book I • Edmund Spenser
... here and there with casual dwellings, while the gaps are filled in roughly as time goes on and space grows more precious every year. This haphazard arrangement has no doubt resulted in a certain picturesqueness of disposition and perspective, and even in a tortuous maze of buildings very difficult for any foreign enemy to assault; but it is obvious that the city's internal plan has owed nothing either to military or aesthetic considerations at the outset. For these ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook
... rock garden are, primarily, an element of picturesqueness that nothing else can provide, and the possession of a place in which can be grown some of the loveliest flowers on earth that, if they flourish at all, will never do as well in the ordinary garden as ...
— Making A Rock Garden • Henry Sherman Adams
... not supposable that the early settlers selected the site of their plantation on account of its picturesqueness. They were influenced entirely by the lay of the land, its nearness and easy access to the sea, and the secure harbor it offered to their fishing-vessels; yet they could not have chosen a more beautiful spot had beauty been the sole consideration. The first settlement was made at Odiorne's ...
— An Old Town By The Sea • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... home was romantically situated amid the umbrageous woods and pastoral meadow-lands through which the Shannon flows at its confluence with the little Ovaan River. His infancy thus cradled in a landscape rich in the diversified picturesqueness of storied ruin and historic tradition, what wonder that Gerald at a very early age should feel the inspiration of his poetic surroundings as he looked towards the winding river, the green fields, the islands mirrored in ...
— Donahoe's Magazine, Volume 15, No. 1, January 1886 • Various
... had been in full swing; and the business had a plenty of mystery and picturesqueness to bite it upon a child's memory. All the summer through, day after day, at low water, the Islanders would be out upon the beaches cutting the ore-weed and dragging it in sledges up the foreshore, where they strewed it above high-water mark, to dry in the sun. On sunny days ...
— Major Vigoureux • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... well to remember that they were intended to give delight, and that they rarely fail of their object. When one has read the stirring Marmion or the more enduring Lady of the Lake, felt the heroism of the Crusaders in The Talisman, the picturesqueness of chivalry in Ivanhoe, the nobleness of soul of a Scotch peasant girl in The Heart of Midlothian, and the quality of Scotch faith in Old Mortality, then his own opinion of Scott's genius will be of more value than all the criticisms that ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... a chair and sat down, drawing from his pocket a silver cigarette case, which he offered to the Englishman. There was a certain picturesqueness in the man's attitude and manner. His face and movements possessed a suggestion of energy which seemed out of place here in the sleepy South, and stamped him as a native not of dreamy Andalusia, but of La Mancha perhaps, where the wit of Spain is concentrated, or of fiery ...
— In Kedar's Tents • Henry Seton Merriman
... St. Peter to be "mitred"? "Two massy keys he bore." Is this, then, the power of the keys claimed by the Bishops of Rome, and is it acknowledged here by Milton only in a poetical license, for the sake of its picturesqueness, that he may get the gleam of the golden keys to help his effect? Do not think it. Great men do not play stage tricks with doctrines of life and death: only little men do that. Milton means what he says; and means it with his might too—is going to put the whole strength of his spirit presently ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... has convinced me that it will, and if my Midas's extra booms the stock and the boom develops, I shall oppose the income tax. Poor old Plattville will be full of strangers and speculators, and the 'Herald' will advocate vast improvements to impress the investor's eye. Stagnation and picturesqueness will flee together; it is the history of the Indiana town. Already the 'Herald' is clamoring with Schofields' Henry—you remember the bell-ringer?—for Main Street to be asphalted. It will all come. The only trouble with young Fisbee is that he has ...
— The Gentleman From Indiana • Booth Tarkington
... certain great city, on the road to Edelweiss, one filled with excitement, eagerness and boyish zeal, the other harrassed by the sombre fear that a grave disappointment was in store for him. Through the glamour and the picturesqueness of the adventure there always crept the unconquerable feeling that he was on a fool's errand, that he was committing a deed so weak and brainless that it was sure to make him a veritable laughing-stock when it became known. After all, who was Miss ...
— Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... enjoy Morlaaes wholly for its past. You cannot enjoy it for its present. It is a poor, dejected, straggling street, noticeable only for mud and stones and dun-coated hovels. It does not, like Fuenterrabia, retain the picturesqueness of its antiquity. There, it is the old town's to-day that carries us delightfully back into its yesterday. But at Morlaaes there ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix
... many grand distinctive features. The broken ranges of hills and mountains, abounding in Piedmont Virginia, here present themselves in softly rounded outline, gradually sinking down into the plains, giving great diversity and picturesqueness to the landscape. They are remarkable for their parallelism, regularity, rectilineal direction and evenness of outline, and constitute what is by far the most conspicuous feature in the topography of Loudoun. Neither snow-capped ...
— History and Comprehensive Description of Loudoun County, Virginia • James W. Head
... Glenolden, where hill and dale, wood and meadow and a beautiful stream, offer all the picturesqueness that can charm an enthusiastic or artistic eye, together with good building-sites and every advantage that fertile and forest-clad land can give to one who would exchange the heat and pavements of a city for rural life. From Glenolden it is but a short distance ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 28. July, 1873. • Various
... accidental intelligence which, though without education, learns everything. He possessed an inexhaustible, imperturbable store of talk. His words gushed forth abundantly in original remarks, laughable images, the metaphors that flow from the comic genius of crowds. He had the natural picturesqueness of the unadulterated farce. He was brimming over with amusing stories and buffoonery, rich in the possession of the richest of all repertories of house-painter's nonsense. Being a member of divers of the low haunts called lists, he knew all the new tunes and ballads, and he was never tired of ...
— Germinie Lacerteux • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
... view the spot where St. Paul once instructed the Athenians in lessons of Christianity. We traveled some little through the country districts outside of Athens, and I noticed that the peasantry, in point of picturesqueness of dress and color of complexion, were not unlike the gypsies we see at times in America. They had also much of the same shrewdness, and, as far as I could learn, were generally wholly uneducated, ignorant, indeed, except as to one subject—politics—which I was told came to ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... something like that which one might imagine a spirit's to be." Whether political, or sociological, or mystical, or sentimental, or impossible, there is about all that Mrs. Browning has written an enduring charm of picturesqueness, of romance, and of a pure enthusiasm for art. "Art for ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... beauties of nature, and had a keen sense for discovering them. They had a delicate and profound appreciation of the delights of the country, and loved to describe the beauties that surrounded their habitations. Nature in its loveliness and wild picturesqueness was a reflection of God's beauty, a temple of His light and goodness. Moreover they built their monasteries amidst forests and wild scenery, far from the haunts of men, seeking solitude, wherein they could renew their souls ...
— English Villages • P. H. Ditchfield
... is all gain, or the milder method more effectual than the old one, I would hesitate to affirm. He would be a bold man who would assert any lack of burnworthy books. The older custom had perhaps a certain picturesqueness which was lost with it. It was a bit of old English life, reaching far back into history—a custom that would have been not unworthy of the brush of Hogarth. For all that we cannot regret it. The practice became so common, and lent itself so readily to abuse by its indiscriminate ...
— Books Condemned to be Burnt • James Anson Farrer
... embodies indeed the very poetry of debris, and comes nearer than any other poem has done to expressing the pathos and picturesqueness of a low-class pawnshop. "This," which Browning bought for a lira out of this heap of rubbish, was, of course, the old Latin record of the criminal case of Guido Franceschini, tried for the murder of his wife Pompilia in the year 1698. And this again, it ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... "I shouldn't have urged you to come, but I was hoping you would like it—its picturesqueness, the unconventionality, and the dozen-and-one other things which appeal to me so strongly. In my enthusiasm, perhaps ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... hundred and fifty or two hundred letters addressed to his family, I believe this is the only landscape. Slightly later, but infrequently, the new aviator gave a few details of observation, the accuracy of which lent them some picturesqueness; but in this letter he yielded to the intoxication of the air, he enjoyed flying as if it were his right. He experienced that sensation of lightness and freedom which accompanies the separation from earth, the pleasure of cleaving the wind, of controlling ...
— Georges Guynemer - Knight of the Air • Henry Bordeaux
... those of the artists, are of very little assistance to the identification of the latter. Many of them possess a vigour and an originality which would at once stamp their designers as men of more than ordinary ability. For picturesqueness, and for the care and attention paid to the minutest details, it may be doubted if either B.Picart in France, or J.Pine in this country, has ever been excelled. The examples of the former come perhaps more in the category of vignettes than of Printers' Marks, although the charming little ...
— Printers' Marks - A Chapter in the History of Typography • William Roberts
... a very bad one, whom I had met in Rome, and I still remembered his pictures. He had a genuine enthusiasm for the commonplace. His soul palpitating with love of art, he painted the models who hung about the stairway of Bernini in the Piazza de Spagna, undaunted by their obvious picturesqueness; and his studio was full of canvases on which were portrayed moustachioed, large-eyed peasants in peaked hats, urchins in becoming rags, and women in bright petticoats. Sometimes they lounged at the steps of a church, ...
— The Moon and Sixpence • W. Somerset Maugham
... land comparable with India in the variegated expressions of its beliefs which add picturesqueness to the country and ...
— India, Its Life and Thought • John P. Jones
... Italy of 1844; Dickens charmed with its untidy picturesqueness; he is idle for a few weeks; his palace at Genoa; he sets to work upon "The Chimes"; gets passionately interested in the little book; travels through Italy to read it to his friends in London; reads it on December 2, 1844; is soon back ...
— Life of Charles Dickens • Frank Marzials
... would be abundantly worth while to learn the language in order to read it. The Anabasis is an admirable work of art, unique in its combination of concise and rapid narrative with colour and picturesqueness. Herodotus wrote a prose epic, in which the author's personality is ever before us. Xenophon, with curiosity and love of adventure which mark him of the same race, but self-forgetful in the pursuit of a new ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... dashed the spurs into her mare and galloped off at the height of her speed into camp—a very city of canvas, buzzing with the hum of life, regulated with the marvellous skill and precision of French warfare, yet with the carelessness and the picturesqueness ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... costumes copied from family pictures, or in the dress of hereditary offices still held by the representatives of the ancient houses. For it was the sons and daughters of the great nobles of England that held high revelry in Buckingham Palace that night. There was an additional picturesqueness, as well as a curious vividness, lent to the pageant by the circumstance that in many cases the blood of the men and the women represented ran in the veins of the ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen V.1. • Sarah Tytler
... her brow, her penetrating gaze, her straight nose, high cheek bones and delicately molded lips and chin and grace of her supple, sinuous body, together with the picturesqueness of her costume, presented ...
— When Dreams Come True • Ritter Brown
... The novel, in the modern acceptation of the term, presupposes a prosaically ordered reality. But working from the basis of this reality, and moving within its own circle, the novel, both as regards picturesqueness of incident and as regards characters and their fate, retrieves for poetry (so far as the above presupposition permits) ...
— An Estimate of the Value and Influence of Works of Fiction in Modern Times • Thomas Hill Green
... the beautiful Phoenix Park on the one side, and by the ridge of the Palmerstown hills on the other. Its situation, therefore, is eminently picturesque; and factory-fronts and chimneys notwithstanding, it has, I think, even in its decay, a sort of melancholy picturesqueness of its own. Be that as it may, I mean to relate two or three stories of that sort which may be read with very good effect by a blazing fire on a shrewd winter's night, and are all directly connected with the altered ...
— J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 4 • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... passages already quoted from the Troades and the Phaedra, touches of genuine poetry are most rare.[198] In certain of the long descriptive passages (H.F. 658 sqq., Oed. 530 sqq.) we get a stagey picturesqueness, but no more. It is for different qualities that we read the iambics of Seneca, if we read them ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... The burghers arrived in the customary picturesqueness of woollen shirts, round hats, rough coats, and leathern veldt-broeks. Dingaan, amiable to excess, insisted that they should accompany him to his kraal, and there make a formal leave-taking. They were requested to leave their arms outside as an earnest of ...
— South Africa and the Transvaal War, Vol. 1 (of 6) - From the Foundation of Cape Colony to the Boer Ultimatum - of 9th Oct. 1899 • Louis Creswicke
... by habitations of modern date, they were mostly small, built entirely of wood, and typical of the most plodding uniformity of common life. Doubtless, however, the whole story of human existence may be latent in each of them, but with no picturesqueness, externally, that can attract the imagination or sympathy to seek it there. But as for the old structure of our story, its white-oak frame, and its boards, shingles, and crumbling plaster, and even the huge, ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... passageway was its most striking feature. Of the time of the first Edward, there were signs of decay in tower and still more ancient keep. Crevices bare of mortar gave rare holding ground for moss and wall flower, and ivy and clematis mantled chapel and turrets with a dank shroud that added to the picturesqueness ...
— In Doublet and Hose - A Story for Girls • Lucy Foster Madison
... old Cartier the name of Isle of Bacchus. For two hours farther down the river either shore is bright and populous with the continuous villages of the habitans, each clustering about its slim-spired church, in its shallow vale by the water's edge, or lifted in more eminent picturesqueness upon some gentle height. The banks, nowhere lofty or abrupt, are such as in a southern land some majestic river might flow between, wide, slumbrous, open to all the heaven and the long day till the very set of sun. But no starry palm glasses its crest in the clear ...
— A Chance Acquaintance • W. D. Howells
... furnishes the streets with an additional element of picturesqueness. These charming vehicles are not used, however, by Europeans during the day. Then the Anglo-Saxon instinct for respectability (or some more subtle reason) prescribes the use of the ghari, which is practically a four-wheeled cab with Venetian blinds substituted ...
— A Visit to Java - With an Account of the Founding of Singapore • W. Basil Worsfold
... said. "The picturesqueness of stage scenery that is not real, not alive. It's like a landscape by a clever painter, yet without true imagination. Soulless—that's the ...
— Three More John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... branches, is charming to look at and never to be forgotten; but when this moist greenness spreads itself to one's bones, especially when it creeps up to the parts that work together, then the soul of man longs for less picturesqueness and more easy-going joints. Jone says the English take their climate as they do their whiskey; and he calls it climate-and-water, with a very little of the first and a good deal of ...
— Pomona's Travels - A Series of Letters to the Mistress of Rudder Grange from her Former - Handmaiden • Frank R. Stockton
... future on Horeb. Then comes a significant pause. The basses begin, "And when the Lord would take him away;" another brief pause, and the full chorus pictures in vivid color the coming of the fiery chariot and the whirlwind by which he was caught up into heaven. The picturesqueness and dramatic intensity of this splendid chorus can hardly be described in words. One more tenor aria ("Then, then shall the Righteous shine") and a brief soprano solo introduce the chorus, "Behold ...
— The Standard Oratorios - Their Stories, Their Music, And Their Composers • George P. Upton
... gave a name to the place, is at the meeting of two rivers—one flowing from Spirillen Lake and the other from the Randsfjord, and was at one time beautiful. Now, however, its picturesqueness is marred by the presence of a barn-like structure containing the pulping works, while the fall itself is utilized to drive the machinery. And, it must be confessed, all this has been brought about by an Englishman, for here at Hoenefos is made ...
— Peeps at Many Lands: Norway • A.F. Mockler-Ferryman
... Culpepper, a trim little village, lying in the hollow of several hills. A couple of steeples added to its picturesqueness, and a swift creek, crossed by a small bridge, interposed between myself and the main part of the place. It looked like Sunday when I rode through the principal street. The shutters were closed in the shop windows, the dwellings seemed tenantless, no citizens were abroad, no sutlers ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... preserving the habits and customs of the Scandinavian races. In no country of Europe, excepting perhaps Russia and Turkey, have the people adhered to the manner and costumes of their fathers so tenaciously as in Sweden, and the life of past generations is preserved in its picturesqueness. The conservatism of the people, their tenacious preference for their own ways and means has kept out innovations, and very few changes have been made since the beginning of the eighteenth century. But fearing that the peasants of Sweden, like all other peoples, ...
— Norwegian Life • Ethlyn T. Clough
... all upside down, interwoven with strips of turquoise sky and green waters—a bewildering, intoxicating jumble of tatters and tangles, maddening in detail, brilliant in color, harmonious in tone: the whole scintillating with a picturesqueness beyond the ken or brush of ...
— Outdoor Sketching - Four Talks Given before the Art Institute of Chicago; The Scammon Lectures, 1914 • Francis Hopkinson Smith
... of it, as well as of the sacred grove of ilexes which covers the slope to the south of the springs. The vestibule is supported by four marble pillars, but, the intercolumniations having been filled up by Urban VIII. in 1634, the picturesqueness of the effect is destroyed. Here Herodes dedicated to the memory of his wife a statue, minutely described in the second Triopian inscription, alluded to above. Early Christians took possession of the temple and consecrated it to the memory of Pope Urbanus, ...
— Pagan and Christian Rome • Rodolfo Lanciani
... home in the domain of Ermansdorf, which they called Zillerthal, after their native village. The Countess Reden, an excellent Christian lady, was authorised to do everything for their comfort. She had cottages built in the true Tyrolese style, with balconies and all the picturesqueness of Swiss chalets. Schools were established, and every means taken to benefit the exiled families. The good Countess Reden arranged for Mrs. Fry meeting the Zillerthallers, who came in their national costume, and heard words of kind and earnest counsel from the English ...
— Excellent Women • Various
... his concentration give him a picturesqueness which his rivals lack. He stands apart from the human race in a chill and solitary grandeur. He seeks advertisement as little as he hankers after pleasure. The Sunday-school is his dissipation. A suburban villa is his palace. He seldom speaks to the ...
— American Sketches - 1908 • Charles Whibley
... terrifying prospect. I could not trust myself. In a way, I envy the man who can hold his own under such circumstances. His transcendent powers enable him to preserve his sturdy humanness of character, his charming simplicity of diction, his graphic picturesqueness of phrase, and his exquisite winsomeness of behaviour without the extraneous assistance which the children render to some of us. But I could not do it. I should go all to pieces. And so, when I dream that I have entered a pulpit from which I can ...
— Mushrooms on the Moor • Frank Boreham
... theory of men's characters was based by moral analysis before the rise of modern ethical schools, fictitious as it was in general application, would have almost hit off the truth as regards Captain De Stancy. Removed to some half-known century, his deeds would have won a picturesqueness of light and shade that might have made him a fascinating subject for some gallery of illustrious historical personages. It was this tendency to moral chequer-work which accounted for his varied bearings ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... country, rather than the English freedom she enjoys. But we cannot venture to pronounce dead or idle the Greek tradition, and we must confess that the romanticism which brought into literary worship the trumpery picturesqueness of the Middle Ages was ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... freight and express traffic of those days lacked the picturesqueness of the passenger coaches, nothing illustrates so conclusively what the great road meant to an awakening West as the long lines of heavy Conestogas and rattling express wagons which raced at "unprecedented" speed ...
— The Paths of Inland Commerce - A Chronicle of Trail, Road, and Waterway, Volume 21 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Archer B. Hulbert
... every sword seems a flash of the Northern Lights, and the successive armed kings and Emperors dash by, like a charge of crowned centaurs? Not wholly unworthy of a place in that gallery, are these sea battle-pieces of Garnery. The natural aptitude of the French for seizing the picturesqueness of things seems to be peculiarly evinced in what paintings and engravings they have of their whaling scenes. With not one tenth of England's experience in the fishery, and not the thousandth part of that of the Americans, they have nevertheless furnished both nations with the only finished ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... further disappointed in Hodshon's lack of picturesqueness. He was like no detective she had read about between Sherlock Holmes and Philo Gubb. He was like no detective at all. It was almost impossible to accept ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... north-east direction, gradually rising to the height of several hundred feet. The most striking peculiarity of the surroundings of Monzie is the combination of wild and mountainous scenery with cultivation and picturesqueness. One of the finest views in the whole of Strathearn can be had from the Highland Road, to the east of the church. In the foreground are the luxuriant woods, the rich pastures, and the Castle of Monzie, and at a distance of seven or eight miles is the Aberuchill range, towering in majesty on ...
— Chronicles of Strathearn • Various
... times, and ran the thing as a charity—a fashionable amusement, in fact. The malgamite industry is neither better nor worse than the other dangerous trades, and no man need go into it unless he likes. But the man who started this thing—whoever he may be—supplied that picturesqueness without which the public cannot be moved—and lo! We ...
— Roden's Corner • Henry Seton Merriman
... sounds and smells one hurries past suggest that Panama may even have outdone Central America before Uncle Sam came with his garbage-cans and his switch. Further on, down at the old harbor, lingers a hint of the picturesqueness of Panama in pre-canal days. Clumsy boats, empty, or deep-laden with fruit from, or freight to, the several islands that sprinkle the bay, splash and bump against the little cement wharf. Aged wooden "windjammers" doze at their moorings, everywhere are jabbering natives with that shifty half-cast ...
— Zone Policeman 88 - A Close Range Study of the Panama Canal and its Workers • Harry A. Franck
... the theories concerning it. At so great a distance, and with the hot sunlight shining full upon it, the fort might have been a strip of white sand; later it was decided to be a tribunal of unusual proportions, and at last when it loomed full upon us in all the picturesqueness of its gray, moss-grown walls, with weeds trailing in luxurious profusion from every crevice, we decided that there lived the American inhabitants of Misamis. Soldiers gathered under the roof of the nearest watch-tower to observe our entrance into the harbour, while still others, unmindful of the ...
— A Woman's Journey through the Philippines - On a Cable Ship that Linked Together the Strange Lands Seen En Route • Florence Kimball Russel
... all think I'm horribly greedy," said the brown gentleman apologetically. And then at once, having noticed that Mr. Enwright was gazing up at the great sham oak rafters that were glued on to the white ceiling, he started upon this new architectural picturesqueness which was to London and the beginning of the twentieth century what the enamelled milking-stool had been to the provinces and the end of the nineteenth century—namely, a reminder that even in ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... frame-building with two deep verandahs, standing on a well-kept lawn planted with exotic trees, is the most imposing building in Hilo. All the foreigners have carried out their individual tastes in their dwellings, and the result is very agreeable, though in picturesqueness they must yield the plain to the native houses, which whether of frame, or grass plain or plaited, whether one or two storied, all have the deep thatched roofs and verandahs plain or fantastically latticed, which are so in harmony with the surroundings. These lattices and single and double ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... battlefield during the wars of the Barons and the wars of the Roses; but the ancient character of the town was almost entirely destroyed by the great fire of 1675,—not without benefit to the health, though at the expense of the picturesqueness of ...
— Rides on Railways • Samuel Sidney
... themselves have made excellent themes for reports and leaders. But the personality of the man arrested, and the Big Bow Mystery Battle—as it came to be called—gave additional piquancy to the paragraphs and the posters. The behavior of Mortlake put the last touch to the picturesqueness of the position. He left the hall when the lights went out, and walked unnoticed and unmolested through pleiads of policemen to the nearest police station, where the superintendent was almost too excited to take any notice ...
— The Big Bow Mystery • I. Zangwill
... timid walks there, under the fiery-fingered leaves of early autumn,—she had been prevailed upon to invite Arpad to her home. She regretted her imprudence the moment he entered. All his footlight picturesqueness vanished in the cold, hard light of an unromantic Brooklyn breakfast-room. He seemed like a clumsy circus hero as he scraped his feet over the parquetry and attempted to kiss her hand. She drew ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... Gillett is clear, manly, and discriminating. If, in respect of show, sparkle, nervous energy, verbal felicity, and picturesqueness, it is not equal to that of our chief American historians, yet it is not deficient in ease, grace, or vigor. He is almost always careful, always unambitious, always in good taste. To complain that the style is not equal to Mr. Motley's, simply on the ground that the book is large and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 79, May, 1864 • Various
... followed the disappearing forms with an appreciation of their purpose rather than of the picturesqueness of their appearance. The flaming lights grew silent as the distance became too great for his ear to catch their sizzling. They danced hither and yon,—now scattered, now flashing in a bunch. He followed the course of a very bright one as ...
— A Tar-Heel Baron • Mabell Shippie Clarke Pelton
... needs of children lies in its lively (p. 144) narrative form, and the picturesqueness of many of the ...
— A Mother's List of Books for Children • Gertrude Weld Arnold
... sketches of his that all London talked about, after the Regent Street exhibition that he didn't even try for leave to see! The critics spoke of the mysterious, spiritual quality of his work, which gave "without sentimentality" picturesqueness to the shell-holes and mud, the shattered trees and wooden crosses, under ...
— Everyman's Land • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... is not the secret of the success of this book. Its flowing style, the use of short Anglo-Saxon words,[3] its picturesqueness, the power of description, the philosophic arrangement all contribute to it, but chiefly, I believe, the enthusiasm of the young Dana, his sympathy for his fellows and interest in new scenes and strange peoples, and with it all, ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... some points thirty feet—but the rivulet seldom exceeded three, while its greatest width was about eight. Its bottom and banks were as those of the pond—if a defect could have been attributed, in point of picturesqueness, it ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... the way for the new faith by a series of vigorous polemical writings, the style of which proclaims him the founder of modern Swedish prose. Centuries passed before the effective simplicity and homely picturesqueness of his style were surpassed. He became, furthermore, Sweden's first dramatist. The Comedy of Tobit, from which Strindberg uses a few passages in slightly modernized form at the beginning of his play, is ...
— Master Olof - A Drama in Five Acts • August Strindberg
... have as much regard for the ones of our own intimate family circle. We should be happy to do most for them who do most for us. One of our students of human happiness says to us: "Get into the way of idealizing what you have; let the picturesqueness of your own imagination play round the village where you do live, instead of the one where you wish to live; weave a romance round the brother you have got, instead of round the Prince Perfect of a husband whom you have not got." And Marcus ...
— The Girl Wanted • Nixon Waterman
... heavenly night. Snow on the ground and all the stars out. The children met in the schoolhouse and we started in a procession. They all wore simple little costumes, just some bit of bright color draped to give them a quaint picturesqueness. One of the boys led a cow, and there was an old ewe. Then riding on a donkey, borrowed by Mr. David, came the oldest Mary in our school. I chose her because I wanted her to understand the sacred significance of ...
— Mistress Anne • Temple Bailey |
