"Renaissance" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... beyond measure. Your Rubens are also to my taste, as well as your smallest Watteau. In the salon to the right, I have noticed the Louis XIII cadence-table, the tapestries of Beauvais, the Empire gueridon signed 'Jacob,' and the Renaissance chest. In the salon to the left, all the cabinet full of ...
— The Extraordinary Adventures of Arsene Lupin, Gentleman-Burglar • Maurice Leblanc
... of the soul's life. Rather to us, the pictures, the statues, the books, the furniture, the wardrobes, the letters, and the scandals that have been left behind, speak to us of those days; for these we value them. And we are right, the value of the Renaissance lies in these things, I say "the scandals" of those days; for a part of what comes under that head was perhaps the manifestation of a morality based on a wider experience; though its association with obvious vices and its opposition to the old and stale ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore
... for M. de Beriot and Mlle. Garcia, the molds of which were instantly destroyed. The violinist gave a series of concerts assisted by the young singer in Belgium, Germany, and France, and returned to Brussels again on the anniversary of their first concert, where they appeared in the Theatre de la Renaissance before a most crowded and enthusiastic audience. Among the features of the performance which called out the warmest applause was Panseron's grand duo for voice and violin, "Le Songe de Tartini," ...
— Great Violinists And Pianists • George T. Ferris
... Greenbaum, of Scherer, Hunn, Greenbaum & Beck, carefully placed his cigar where it would not char his Italian Renaissance desk and smoothed out the list which Mr. Elderberry, the secretary of The Horse's Neck Extension Copper Mining Company, handed to him. The list was typed on thin sheets; of foolscap and contained the names of stockholders, but as it had lain rolled ...
— Tutt and Mr. Tutt • Arthur Train
... to me. He is tainted with the perfidy of the man who has made a pact with the enemy (with the Church, the aristocracy, with those in power), and then conceals the fact. Philosophically, in spite of his enthusiasm for the Renaissance, he appears vulgar and pedestrian to me, although he towers above all his contemporaries on account of the success of a single invention, that of Don Quixote and Sancho, which is to literature what the discovery of ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja
... two lofty arches, which, springing from the entrance tower, span the street high above our heads. For some time we sat, unwilling to change and it might be impair our sensations by passing inwards. Our reluctance was but too well founded: the whole interior has been modernized in detestable Renaissance style, and in place of highest honor, above the central doorway, sits in tight-buttoned uniform a fitting idol for so ugly a shrine, the double-chinned effigy of the reigning monarch. We turned for comfort to a chapel on the right, where in four sarcophagi ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... and slowly looked about her. The big vulgar writing-table wreathed in bronze was heaped with letters and papers. Among them stood a lapis bowl in a Renaissance mounting of enamel and a vase of Phenician glass that was like a bit of rainbow caught in cobwebs. On a table against the window a little Greek marble lifted its pure lines. On every side some rare and sensitive object seemed ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... remembered, was often regarded as consisting not of the whole body of the faithful, but simply of the clergy, who continued to claim a monopoly of its privileges after they had ceased to enjoy a monopoly of its intelligence and virtue. The Renaissance had been a new birth of secular learning, not a revival of clerical learning. Others besides the clergy could now read and write and understand; town chronicles took the place of monastic chronicles, secular poets of divines; and a middle class that was growing in wealth and ...
— The History of England - A Study in Political Evolution • A. F. Pollard
... some future creative school. As the early Italian artists, by careful imitation, absorbed into their minds the beauty and meaning of old Greek and Roman art; so must the artists of our days by the art of the Middle Age and the Renaissance. They must learn to copy, before they can learn to surpass; and, meanwhile, they must learn—indeed they have learnt—that decay is ugliness, and the imitation of decay, a making money out of the ...
— The Ancien Regime • Charles Kingsley
... is with especial reference to the denial of this principle in modern and Renaissance architecture, that I speak of that architecture with a bitterness which appears to many readers extreme, while in reality, so far from exaggerating, I have not grasp enough of thought to embrace, the evils ...
— Lectures on Architecture and Painting - Delivered at Edinburgh in November 1853 • John Ruskin
... history the fifteenth century is the last of the centuries that form the Middle Ages, which were preceded by the age of racial settlement and followed by that of the great Renaissance. Although the active beginnings of this new era are to be observed in the fifteenth century, yet this century belongs ...
— Life in a Medival City - Illustrated by York in the XVth Century • Edwin Benson
... light of torches, and with the cry of the screech-owl to punctuate the speeches. The scene of Webster's two best tragedies was laid, like many of Ford's, Cyril Tourneur's, and Beaumont and Fletcher's, in Italy—the wicked and splendid Italy of the Renaissance, which had such a fascination for the Elisabethan imagination. It was to them the land of the Borgias and the Cenci; of families of proud nobles, luxurious, cultivated, but full of revenges and ferocious ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... and drapery the figures were of the school of Raphael; but the execution was in the style of the Florentine metal workers—the school created by Donatello, Brunelleschi, Ghiberti, Benvenuto Cellini, John of Bologna, and others. The French masters of the Renaissance had never invented more strangely twining monsters than these that symbolized the evil passions. The palms, ferns, reeds, and foliage that wreathed the Virtues showed a style, a taste, a handling that might have driven a ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... England, one point may be singled out in that long movement, generalized under the name of the Renaissance, as critical, it is the introduction of the Greek and Latin literature:—which has remained ever since conspicuously the most powerful and enlarging element, the most effectively educational, among all blanches ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave
... than to any other living man, yet he speaks scathingly of his master. Plutarch, Cicero, Iamblichus, Pliny, Horace and all the other Roman writers read Plato religiously. The Christian Fathers kept his work alive, and passed it on to Dante, Petrarch and the early writers of the Renaissance, so all of their thought is well flavored with essence of Plato. Well does Addison put into the mouth of ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard
... can play tricks on others by stimulating these processes and then giving them selected data to work upon. A directive idea may be suggested by a series of ideas which lead the recipient of them to expect that the series will be continued. Then he will not perceive if the series is broken. In the Renaissance period no degree of illumination sufficed to resist the delusion of astrology, because it was supported by a passionate fantasy and a vehement desire to know the future, and because it was confirmed by antiquity, the authority of whose opinions was overwhelmingly suggested ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... Crescent, which must do its best to make me forget my new abode. I forget you don't know Venice. Well then, the Palazzo Manzoni is situate on the Grand Canal, and is described by Ruskin,—to give no other authority,—as 'a perfect and very rich example of Byzantine Renaissance: its warm yellow marbles are magnificent.' And again—'an exquisite example (of Byzantine Renaissance) as applied to domestic architecture.' So testify the 'Stones of Venice'. But we will talk about the place, over a photograph, when I am happy ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... England, joined a large and important firm of booksellers, and became an expert. They took him into partnership and he travelled for them and spent some years in New York. But his special subject was Italian Renaissance literature and his joy was Italy, where he now lives. He found himself in a position to retire about ten years ago, being a bachelor with modest requirements. He knew, moreover, that his father must soon pass away and, as his mother was ...
— The Red Redmaynes • Eden Phillpotts
... they would have called the Muse, were certainly not those who had the truest knowledge of Cato, Tully, and Caesar. The 'classic' taste from which Gray helped to deliver us was a taste which hardly deserves to be called a taste. Pardonable perhaps in the first heat of the Renaissance, when 'classic' studies and objects had the charm of novelty, it had become by his day a ...
— Select Poems of Thomas Gray • Thomas Gray
... stiff bust of George Washington. Near it hangs a wonderful Titian portrait, a thing of another world. The furniture looks as if it were, and probably is, plunder from the palace of some prince of the Renaissance. ...
— Mr. Faust • Arthur Davison Ficke
... save for the visit of an occasional librarian from the upper floor, seeking a book. To get to the Spanish Room one had to pass through the Douce Library, the home of treasures beyond price; on one side half the precious things of Renaissance printing, French or Italian or Elizabethan; on the other, stands of illuminated Missals and Hour Books, many of them rich in pictures and flower-work, that shone like jewels in the golden light of ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... middle ages had so long branded with obloquy even the generous impulses of the flesh, and defined the reality to be such that only slavish natures could commune with it, in what did the sursum corda of the platonizing renaissance lie but in the proclamation that the archetype of verity in things laid claim on the widest activity of our whole aesthetic being? What were Luther's mission and Wesley's but appeals to powers which even the meanest of men might ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... the best company, the company of those Boston authors who first inspired it with the life so vigorous yet. It was not given us all to be born in Boston, but when we find ourselves in the "Atlantic" we all seem to suffer a sea-change, an aesthetic renaissance; a livelier literary conscience stirs in us; we have its fame at heart; we must do our best for Maga's name as well as for our own hope; we are naturalized Bostonians in the finest and highest sense. With greater reverence and affection than we can express, we younger and youngest ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... known Don Francisco III. Lorenzana, a magnificent and prodigal prince of the church, who spent the abundant revenues of the archbishopric in building palaces and editing books, like a great lord of the Renaissance. He had known also the first Cardinal Bourbon, Don Luis II., and used to narrate the romantic life of this Infante. Brother of the King Carlos III., the custom that dedicated some of the younger branches to the church had made him a cardinal at nine years old. ...
— The Shadow of the Cathedral • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... nineteen he had made the 'petty tour' with his father, mother, and Winifred—Brussels, the Rhine, Switzerland, and home by way of Paris. Aged twenty-seven, just when he began to take interest in pictures, he had spent five hot weeks in Italy, looking into the Renaissance—not so much in it as he had been led to expect—and a fortnight in Paris on his way back, looking into himself, as became a Forsyte surrounded by people so strongly self-centred and 'foreign' as the French. His knowledge of their language being derived from ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... prominent. This being the case, it has occurred to me that I may be so fortunate as to interest a Cambridge audience while I set before them some of the results at which I have arrived in investigating the position, the arrangement, and the fittings of libraries in the medieval and renaissance periods. It will, of course, be impossible to attempt more than a sketch of so extensive a subject, and I fear that I must omit the contents of the bookcases altogether; but I shall hope, by a selection of typical illustrations, to make you realise what some of the libraries, monastic, ...
— Libraries in the Medieval and Renaissance Periods - The Rede Lecture Delivered June 13, 1894 • J. W. Clark
... most remarkable features of New York is the Grand Central Terminal. The exterior finish is granite and Indiana lime-stone; the style somewhat Doric, modified by the French Renaissance. Over the entrance to the main building is a great arch surmounted by a statuary group wherein Mercury, symbolizing the glory of commerce, is supported by Minerva and Hercules who represent mental and ...
— The Greatest Highway in the World • Anonymous
... that there can be little doubt about the purity of their descent. The same may be said about the modern descendants of the people who created "the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome." And when we consider the period of the Renaissance we cannot say that civilised man of to-day is superior to those people who after centuries of stagnation and general illiteracy were yet able to seize and develop the long-forgotten ...
— The Black Man's Place in South Africa • Peter Nielsen
... independent and commanding position, of its perfection and its subsequent decline. The beginner must not expect to find this story told with as much fulness and certainty as is possible in dealing with the art of the Renaissance or any more modern period. The impossibility of equal fulness and certainty here will become apparent when we consider what our materials for constructing a history of ...
— A History Of Greek Art • F. B. Tarbell
... instructive in this respect. Nearly every one of them has suffered greatly from the want of some such general plan. One has but to visit almost any one of them to see buildings of different materials and styles—classical, Renaissance, Gothic, and nondescript —thrown together in a way at times fairly ludicrous. Thomas Jefferson, in founding the University of Virginia, was wiser; and his beautiful plan was carried out so fully, under his own eyes, that it has never been seriously departed from. At Stanford University, thanks ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... rug, basking in the firelight with superb indifference to the possible ill-humour of Lady Anne. His pedigree was as flawlessly Persian as the rug, and his ruff was coming into the glory of its second winter. The page- boy, who had Renaissance tendencies, had christened him Don Tarquinio. Left to themselves, Egbert and Lady Anne would unfailingly have called him Fluff, ...
— Reginald in Russia and Other Sketches • Saki (H.H. Munro)
... reestablishment, reconstitution, reconstruction; reproduction &c. 163; renovation, renewal; revival, revivessence[obs3], reviviscence[obs3]; refreshment &c. 689; resuscitation, reanimation, revivification, reviction|; Phenix; reorganization. renaissance, second youth, rejuvenescence[obs3],. new birth; regeneration, regeneracy[obs3], regenerateness[obs3]; palingenesis[obs3], reconversion. redress, retrieval, reclamation, recovery; convalescence; resumption, resumption; sanativeness[obs3]. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... at Montpellier; and he had built, for his own residence, at Bourges, the celebrated hostel which still exists as an admirable model of Gothic and national art in the fifteenth century, attempting combination with the art of Italian renaissance. ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume III. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... to possess and explore its new domain. These are the great ages of the world. They could be counted, perhaps, on one hand. The age of Pericles in Athens; the less defined age, when Europe passed, spiritually and artistically, from what we call the Dark, to what we call the Middle Ages; the Renaissance; the period of the French Revolution. Two of them, so far as English literature is concerned, fall within the compass of this book, and it is with one of ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... of the things in history the most to be regretted is that the Christ's own renaissance, which has produced the Cathedral at Chartres, the Arthurian cycle of legends, the life of St. Francis of Assisi, the art of Giotto, and Dante's Divine Comedy, was not allowed to develop on its own lines, but was interrupted and spoiled by the dreary ...
— De Profundis • Oscar Wilde
... photographs of pictures on the walls, Italian saints, the Renaissance, you know, Botticelli and Luini; her writing-table is near the window, and covered with papers; she evidently writes a great deal. Merat tells me she spends her evenings writing ...
— Sister Teresa • George Moore
... something alive, healthy, robust.[19] It is this vein of poetry which awoke Italy to self-consciousness, made her in a few years forget the nightmare of Catharist ideas, and rescued her from pessimism. By it Francis became the forerunner of the artistic movement which preceded the Renaissance, the inspirer of that group of Pre-Raphaelites, awkward, grotesque in drawing though at times they were, to whom we turn to-day with a sort of piety, finding in their ungraceful saints an inner life, a moral feeling which we seek for ...
— Life of St. Francis of Assisi • Paul Sabatier
... accept this resuscitated trio, if at all, very much as they actually went about Tuscany, in long ago discarded young flesh, when the one trait everywhere common to their milieu was the absence of any moral excitement over such-and-such an action's being or not being "wicked." This phenomenon of Renaissance life, as lived in Italy in particular, has elsewhere been discussed time and again, and I lack here the space, and the desire, either to explain or to apologize for the era's delinquencies. I would merely indicate that ...
— The Jewel Merchants - A Comedy In One Act • James Branch Cabell
... others that attempted to discover some principle for the explanation of the natural phenomena. To accomplish this end, mathematics, physics, metaphysics, etc., were resorted to. The other great epoch, which may be termed the Renaissance of Greek Philosophy, was conceived by the Supreme Greek thinker, Socrates, who forms the subject thesis ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... been possible that any survivals of the Edwardian port could have been retained in the astonishing commercial development the city has witnessed, particularly in the last century; and Hull has only one old street which can lay claim to even the smallest suggestion of picturesqueness. The renaissance of English architecture is beginning to make itself felt in the chief streets, where some good buildings are taking the places of ugly fronts; and there are one or two more ambitious schemes of improvement bringing dignity ...
— Yorkshire Painted And Described • Gordon Home
... In summer the shrubs thicken, half concealing one side of Forest Park Boulevard from its other. Houses suddenly take on detached and architectural importance, often as not a gravel driveway dividing lawns, and out farther still, where the street eventually flows into Forest Park, the Italian Renaissance invades, somebody's rococo ...
— Humoresque - A Laugh On Life With A Tear Behind It • Fannie Hurst
... paper-books, are commonplace books of quotable passages, so called because an Italian grammarian, Marius Nizolius, born at Bersello in the fifteenth century, and one of the scholars of the Renaissance in the sixteenth, was one of the first producers of such volumes. His contribution was an alphabetical folio dictionary of phrases from Cicero: "Thesaurus Ciceronianus, sive Apparatus Linguae Latinae ...
— A Defence of Poesie and Poems • Philip Sidney
... the Anglo-Saxons. The native shed something of his insularity and became a traveler, going first to view the places where trade had opened the way, and returning with wider interests and a larger horizon. Above all, the first dawn of the Renaissance is heralded in England, as in Spain and Italy, by the ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... nationalism, cultural as well as political, during the last century. There are now psychological resistances to borrowing, or rather to new sources of borrowing,[165] that were not greatly alive in the Middle Ages or during the Renaissance. ...
— Language - An Introduction to the Study of Speech • Edward Sapir
... a witty interview later in the week with an emotional actress, and by a solemn article compiled after an hour's reading in Lafcadio Hearn and the Encyclopedia—on the "Industrial Renaissance in Japan." ...
— Blix • Frank Norris
... of the present volume is to supplement and complement Professor Donno's collection by making available in facsimile seven minor epics of the English Renaissance omitted from it. With the publication of these poems all the known, surviving minor epics of the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods will for the first time be made available for study in faithful reproductions of the earliest ...
— Seven Minor Epics of the English Renaissance (1596-1624) • Dunstan Gale
... who succeeded in saving his own soul, even at the sacrifice of family and friends. Vampire-like, monasticism fed upon the life-blood of the Empire. The civic life and patriotism of old Rome became a mere tradition, to inspire long after the men of the Renaissance and ...
— Religion & Sex - Studies in the Pathology of Religious Development • Chapman Cohen
... vast hall, furnished after the Renaissance manner. Costly tapestries covered the walls with their imposing pictures, their ...
— A Nest of Spies • Pierre Souvestre
... round with the tail of my eye at the quaint, bright picture that was about me, and could not help some pleasure and a certain childish pride in forming part of it. The book I read was about Italy in the early Renaissance, the pageantries and the light loves of princes, the passion of men for learning, and poetry, and art; but it was written, by good luck, after a solid, prosaic fashion, that suited the room infinitely more nearly than the matter; and the result was that I ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson
... alien tongue can compensate for the neglect of the vernacular. Moreover, the curriculum introduced in the "thirties" was purely academic. It came to India directly from English universities, which had stuck fast in the ruts of the Renaissance. Undue weight was given to literary training, while science and technical skill were despised. Our colleges and schools do not attempt to build character on a foundation of useful habits and tastes that sweeten life; to ennoble ideals, ...
— Tales of Bengal • S. B. Banerjea
... start win universal favor? It is because he had direct genius, the clear vision of a "primitive" (an artist of the pre-Renaissance). His materials were just those of a graduate who, having left college, has satisfied his curiosity. Grasping the simple and ingenious, but strong and appropriate tools that he himself has forged, he starts ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... as a vast oak chest, carved with grotesque Renaissance ornament. The dressing table was in appearance something between a high altar and a cabinet piano, the surface being richly worked in the same style of semi-classic decoration, but the extraordinary ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy
... she replied. "One thing I know quite well, though, is unchanging," she continued, her face losing all the gentle softness which a moment before he had found so fascinating, so reminiscent of those sad, sleepy-eyed women immortalised by the masters of the Renaissance. "That is my hatred of everything and everybody connected ...
— The Profiteers • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... captains—that was the lowest rank in Shelbyville—and the noncommissioned substantial first citizens of the county, were shaking hands among themselves, and nodding and smiling, full of the fine feeling of that moment. It was a triumph of chivalry, they said; they had witnessed the renaissance of the old spirit, the passing of which, and the dying out and dwindling of it in the rising generation, they had so ...
— The Bondboy • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... German Renaissance of the new humanism, the Hellenic has become the truly German.... As the Peloponnesian War divided the States of Hellas into two camps, so this war has divided the States of Europe. But this time it will be Athens and her spiritual power that will conquer.—PROF. A. LASSON, ...
— Gems (?) of German Thought • Various
... to be a buyer for the Ignorant Rich. Make their houses liveable-in. They tell me what they want—I get hold of it for them. Turn them out an Italian drawing-room—Della Robbia mantel-piece, Florentine fire-irons, Renaissance ceiling, tapestries and so on. Things they haven't energy to find for themselves or intelligence to know when they see them. I love finding them, and I'm practised at cheating. One has to cheat if one's poor but eager.... A poor trade, but my own. I can grub about low shops all day, and ...
— The Lee Shore • Rose Macaulay
... of modern science, so Rene Descartes was the father of modern philosophy. Born in 1596, and perplexed by the movement of scepticism produced by the Renaissance, the French thinker endeavoured to find some ground of certainty in the fact that he at least knew of his own existence. Hence his famous saying: Cogito, ergo sum—"I think, therefore I exist." Consciousness, said he, is the basis of ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... shameless cherub on a Renaissance festoon, danced across the tiled floor, and, pausing directly in front of her ...
— Jan and Her Job • L. Allen Harker
... and Geneva with pursuits, homicides and dynamitings. "Nostromo" is a long record of treacheries, butcheries and carnalities. "A Point of Honor" is coloured by the senseless, insatiable ferocity of Gobineau's "Renaissance." "Victory" ends with a massacre of all the chief personages, a veritable catastrophe of blood. Whenever he turns from the starker lusts to the pale passions of man under civilization, Conrad fails. "The Return" is a thoroughly ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... remains of an older temple on a site that seems to have been called Amada, at any rate in the later days, and so named after a city in Nubia, apparently by one of the Amen-hetep Pharaohs who had conquered it. Its style is beautiful, being of the best period of the Egyptian Renaissance under the last ...
— The Ancient Allan • H. Rider Haggard
... very nearly. Most of the writers of the Paston Letters were, though in some cases of good rank and fairly educated, persons entirely unacademic in character, and their society was that of the last trouble and convulsion through which the Early Middle Ages struggled into the Renaissance, so long delayed with us. Ascham was one of our chief representatives of the Renaissance itself—that is to say, of a type at once scholarly and man-of-the-worldly, a courtier and a diplomatist as well as ...
— A Letter Book - Selected with an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing • George Saintsbury
... propinquis suis, salutem. Quod petitis fieri non potest.—Valete. Consult Tiraboschi, Storia della Letteratura Italiana, vol. vii., cap. v.; Gregorovius, Geschichte der Stadt Rom in Mittelalter; Burkhardt, Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien, and Voigt in his Wiederlebung ...
— De Orbe Novo, Volume 1 (of 2) - The Eight Decades of Peter Martyr D'Anghera • Trans. by Francis Augustus MacNutt
... Helen are readily allegorized into the passion of the Renaissance for classical beauty, the passion to which all that is not beauty seemed very dross. This is the idea of the second part of "Faust," in which Helen once more became, as she prophesied in the Iliad, a song in ...
— Helen of Troy • Andrew Lang
... tended to be lost to sight in the naturalistic revival of the Renaissance, which derived its inspiration solely from those periods of Greek and Roman art which were pre-occupied with the expression of external reality. Although the all-embracing genius of Michelangelo kept the "Symbolist" tradition ...
— Concerning the Spiritual in Art • Wassily Kandinsky
... disaster to build anew with larger faith in its destiny. When again, in 1906, earthquake and fire devastated the city its phoenix spirit came to life. The Argonauts lived once more, magnificent in their resolution. The renaissance was a prodigy that made onlookers exclamatory. Jules Jusserand, Ambassador of France to the United States, phrased the wonder of it ...
— Fascinating San Francisco • Fred Brandt and Andrew Y. Wood
... Italians of the word which the classical writers called Eclogues: "AEglogai, as it were aigon or aigonomon logoi, that is, Goatherd's Tales." The book is in its form an imitation of that highly artificial kind of poetry which the later Italians of the Renaissance had copied from Virgil, as Virgil had copied it from the Sicilian and Alexandrian Greeks, and to which had been given the name of Bucolic or Pastoral. Petrarch, in imitation of Virgil, had written Latin Bucolics, as he had written ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... to prevail and to modify the whole trend of English poetry. First of all Jonson was a classicist, that is, he believed in restraint and precedent in art in opposition to the prevalent ungoverned and irresponsible Renaissance spirit. Jonson believed that there was a professional way of doing things which might be reached by a study of the best examples, and he found these examples for the most part among the ancients. To confine our attention to the drama, Jonson objected to the amateurishness ...
— Cynthia's Revels • Ben Jonson
... Mrs. Spangler, glancing at the watch. "We have plenty of time yet. Won't have to hurry. Your time is the same as mine," she added, nodding her head toward a French renaissance clock ...
— A Gentleman from Mississippi • Thomas A. Wise
... Negroes of Georgia to produce a great general like Napoleon when they are not even allowed to carry arms, or to deride them for not producing scholars like those of the Renaissance when a few years ago they were forbidden the use of letters, verges closely upon the outer rim of absurdity. Do you look for great Negro statesmen in states where black men are not allowed to vote? Above all, for southern white men to berate the ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... one night above all others of this strange seclusion, and that was a night of a woman's humiliation. There had been great bustle all day, the coming of oarsmen and of coaches to Henley, and all the aquatic renaissance which prefaces the great regatta. Their own cottage, lying just above the bridge with a shady garden extending to the water's edge, was no longer the place apart that it had been. Strangers now anchored a little way from their boat-house and consumed monstrous packets of ...
— Aladdin of London - or Lodestar • Sir Max Pemberton
... it has not learned all the needed lessons of the situation in which it finds itself, is nevertheless rapidly becoming free from capitalist illusions and is reorganizing itself accordingly, industrially and politically. Of this renaissance, the C.I.O. is the greatest ...
— Labor's Martyrs • Vito Marcantonio
... one which Alice had seen one time at Sweet Springs while convalescing at that fashionable Missouri watering-place from an attack of the jaundice. This cottage was, as I was informed, an ingenious combination of Gothic decadence and Norman renaissance architecture. Being somewhat of an antiquarian by nature, I was gratified by the promise of archaism which Alice's picture of our future home presented. We picked out a corner lot in,—well, no matter where; that delectable ...
— The House - An Episode in the Lives of Reuben Baker, Astronomer, and of His Wife, Alice • Eugene Field
... case, and finally he and Boris disappeared together to visit the Luxembourg Gallery, where a new silver bronze by Rodin and a landscape of Monet's were claiming the exclusive attention of artistic France. I went back to the studio, and resumed my work. It was a Renaissance screen, which Boris wanted me to paint for Genevieve's boudoir. But the small boy who was unwillingly dawdling through a series of poses for it, to-day refused all bribes to be good. He never rested an instant in the same position, and inside of five minutes I ...
— The King In Yellow • Robert W. Chambers
... I lifted our caps to the ladies and went our way; but it was not until we had passed the charming Renaissance house where Louis Quatorze was born, that Waring made ...
— The Car of Destiny • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... once upon a summer night Beneath the pallid moonlight's eerie glimmer I saw where, wrought in marble dimly bright, A ruin of the Renaissance ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... have been the most perfect incarnation of that "accomplished and infamous Italy," which gave us the Borgias and the terrible Elizabethan plays of Tourneur, Webster and Ford, with their plots of incest and murder, that Italy which was a veritable Hell out of which rose the Renaissance. He was the philosophy of that Italy. He first said, in effect, that nothing succeeds like success. He first cast aside Plato and his dreaming and Aristotle and his elements. He was the father of the philosophy of "practical politics." Francis Bacon learned of Machiavelli, who "wrote what men ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... of the strong and simple passions of Iceland lends itself peculiarly to international interpretation. It is with some curiosity, therefore, as well as satisfaction, that we introduce to English readers a young representative of the renaissance of Icelandic literature. How will he be judged by our countrymen, and what will be his place, if any, ...
— Modern Icelandic Plays - Eyvind of the Hills; The Hraun Farm • Jhann Sigurjnsson
... architecture of his town house that he remained conservative, immovable, one might almost say Early-Victorian-Christian. His country house at Dulwich-on-the-Sound was a palace of the Italian Renaissance. But in town he adhered to an architecture which had moral associations, the Nineteenth-Century-Brownstone epoch. It was a symbol of his social position, his religious doctrine, and even, in a way, of ...
— The Mansion • Henry Van Dyke
... characterization of Professor Dowden's Life of Shelley as a "literary cake-walk" is a touch which only Mark Twain could have laid on. Indeed, the "Defense of Harriet Shelly," with those early chapters of Joan at Florence, maybe counted as the beginning for Mark Twain of a genuine literary renaissance. It was to prove a remarkable period less voluminous than the first, but even more choice, containing, as it would, besides Joan and the Shelley article, the rest of that remarkable series collected now as Literary Essays; the Hadleyburg story; ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... the world's poets lived in a period midway between the highest development of Renaissance civilization and the foundation of our modern civilization, and he was thus at once heir to the rich treasures of a glorious past, and endowed with a poetic, or we might say a prophetic insight that makes his works appeal ...
— Shakespeare and Precious Stones • George Frederick Kunz
... pass over these matters which are too vague on account of their antiquity and we will proceed to deal with clearer questions, namely, the rise of the arts to perfection, their decline and their restoration or rather renaissance, and here we stand on much firmer ground. The practice of the arts began late in Rome, if the first figures were, as reported, the image of Ceres made of the money of Spurius Caasius, who was condemned to ...
— The Lives of the Painters, Sculptors & Architects, Volume 1 (of 8) • Giorgio Vasari
... simple, natural, affable mind, and a very happy disposition. Sprung from an excellent father, who, though of no great education, entered with real enthusiasm into the movement of the Renaissance and all the liberal novelties of his time, the son corrected the excessive enthusiasm, vivacity, and tenderness he inherited by a great refinement and justness of reflection; but he did not abjure the original groundwork. ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... ancient and modern, interspersed with illustrative anecdotes and notes on the history of Gardening. Beginning with the Gardens of Antiquity, those of Rome and Greece and the Eastern World, we pass on to the Medieval Gardens, the Gardens of the Renaissance, the Modern Gardens of Europe and Great Britain, and those which are now most ...
— The Cockatoo's Story • Mrs. George Cupples
... crumbled into the dust that lies thick upon the tombs of great men who have fallen. But the words of the Divine Comedy will never be forgotten, and the glory of an epic rests always with Italian literature. All the cold and passionless intellect of the Renaissance can be personified in Lorenzo the Magnificent, who encouraged the pagan creeds that the Prior of San Marco yearned to overthrow. Enemies in life, they serve as opposing types of the fifteenth century Italian, one earnest, ardent, filled with zeal for self-sacrifice, the other an ...
— Heroes of Modern Europe • Alice Birkhead
... a great height like damaged matches. The slim corner towers are scarcely hurt. Everything of artistic value in the structure of the interior has disappeared in a horrible confusion of rubble. The eastern end of the Cloth Hall used to be terminated by a small beautiful Renaissance edifice called the Niewwerk, dating from the seventeenth century. What its use was I never knew; but the Niewwerk has vanished, and the Town Hall next door has also vanished; broken walls, a few bits of arched masonry, and heaps of refuse alone indicate where ...
— Over There • Arnold Bennett
... side might serve very well for that show of improvement which deepens the sentiment of the neighboring antiquity and decay in Latin towns. As for the cathedral, which faced the convent from across the Square, it was as cold and torpid a bit of Renaissance as could be found in Rome itself. A red-coated soldier or two passed through the Square; three or four neat little French policemen lounged about in blue uniforms and flaring havelocks; some walnut-faced, blue-eyed old citizens and peasants sat upon the thresholds of the row of old houses, ...
— A Chance Acquaintance • W. D. Howells
... fascination, we gazed down at the mighty river. Around us was a glow of spring sunshine, above us the renaissance of blue skies. Rags of snow still glimmered on the hills, and the brown earth, as if ashamed of its nakedness, was bursting greenly forth. On the slope overlooking the Klondike, girls in white dresses were gathering the wild crocus. All was ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... preserved in all its parts; while that at Albany is, perhaps, the most curious jumble in the whole history of architecture,—the lower stories being Palladian; the stories above these being, if anything, Florentine; the summit being, if anything, French Renaissance; while, as regards the interior, the great west staircase, which is said to have cost half a million of dollars, is in the Richardsonesque style; the eastern staircase is in classic style; and a circular staircase in the interior is in the most flamboyant Gothic which could be got for ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... and solidity about the English character which does not lend itself to so great a variety of mood as one may find in the peculiarly artistic temperament of the Italians, especially those of the Renaissance period. Even such irregular proceedings as murders have their philosophical after-claps which show their usefulness in the divine scheme of things, while unfortunate love affairs work such beneficent results in character that they are shorn of much of their tragedy of ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... space here to follow its fortunes since. Even after this revival it was not till more than one hundred years later that it began to attain to any wide recognition. And in England this recognition has been mainly due to Mr Pater's delightful essay in his early work "Studies in the History of the Renaissance." Since the publication of this book in 1873, the story of Aucassin and Nicolette has had an ever-growing train of admirers both in England and America, and various translations have appeared on both sides of the Atlantic. It has also been translated into several other European ...
— Aucassin and Nicolette - translated from the Old French • Anonymous
... Filipino conceives of palaces and architectural triumphs, the conception takes the form of a church. There are no art galleries, no palaces, no magnificent public buildings in the Philippines, but there are hundreds of beautiful churches, of Byzantine and Early Renaissance architecture. You may find them in the coast towns and sometimes even in the mountainous interior, their simple and beautiful lines facing the plaza, their interiors rich with black and white tiling and with colored glass. The silver facings ...
— A Woman's Impression of the Philippines • Mary Helen Fee
... undo Stevenson, as though a rat was behind the arras, as in Hamlet. "Stevenson," says he, "is the leader of these countless writers who perceive nothing but the visible world," and these are antagonistic to the great literature, of which Mr Yeats's Secret Rose is a survival or a renaissance, a literature whose watchword should be Mr Yeats's significant phrase, "When one looks into the darkness there is always something there." No doubt Mr Yeats's product all along the line ranks with the great literature—unlike Homer, according to Mr Moore, he never nods, ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... appearance of both men, the supple movements of the one contrasting with the perfect precision of the other, would have delighted those members of the count's society, who regarded these matches as leading to a renaissance of chivalry. ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... some sort of survival from ruder conditions, like a flint axe or a hairy man. Cruelty is, perhaps, the worst kind of sin. Intellectual cruelty is certainly the worst kind of cruelty. But there is nothing in the least barbaric or ignorant about intellectual cruelty. The great Renaissance artists who mixed colours exquisitely mixed poisons equally exquisitely; the great Renaissance princes who designed instruments of music also designed instruments of torture. Barbarity, malignity, the desire to hurt men, are the evil things generated in atmospheres of intense reality when great ...
— All Things Considered • G. K. Chesterton
... ancient Greece for inspiration. The Church of the second and third centuries, when Christian thought claimed and won its place among the intellectual revolutions of the world, did not disdain the analogies of Greek philosophy. The Renaissance owed its rise, and the Reformation much of its fertility, to the study of Greek. And the sea of intellectual activity which now surges round us moves ceaselessly about questions which society has not asked itself since Greece started ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... Gregory VI was the harbinger of an epoch of moral renaissance. The wise Pontiff, whose glory it had been to free the Church from a disgraceful yoke, proved himself worthy of the sovereign power, as much by the zeal with which he wielded as by the noble disinterestedness with ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 5 • Various
... had nestled in such enviable intimacy with that courageous heart. The faint fragrance of her exquisite flesh clung to it still. He held it to his lips and kissed it. Then he stopped, to turn about and look upward at the tall hostelry behind him. High up below the renaissance cornice he beheld the lights glow forth in the rooms which he ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball
... memories is one of these old Italian palaces, with a foundation wall laid in the days of the old Roman Empire, an interior building dating perhaps from the Middle Ages or the Transition period, and an external court with facades and porticoes of Renaissance or sixteenth-century work. Not less reminiscent of many bygone ages are the ornamentation and decorative details; and in the rooms, statuary plundered from the Greek islands or brought by the Crusaders from Constantinople itself, contrasts oddly with pictures, bric-a-brac, ...
— Captain Mansana and Mother's Hands • Bjoernstjerne Bjoernson
... outworn sound. "But the young woman of our day does not pretend to all this; alas, no! She is honestly shorn. There is nothing to do about it; the only thing is to keep the loss within limits. In a few generations we shall probably experience a renaissance; everything comes in cycles. But for the present we are sadly denuded. Only our business life beats with a healthy, strong pulse. Only our commerce lives its deed-filled life. Let us place our faith in that! From it will the ...
— Shallow Soil • Knut Hamsun
... of that Italian splendor the remains of which we still admire, and suggests that it is not beyond hope that the privileged soil of Italy and the genius for the arts which seems inherent in this people may, under their new political circumstances, lead to yet another renaissance. The villa I am alluding to is in the immediate neighborhood of Varese, on a rising ground above the town, commanding the most magnificent views of Monte Rosa, Monte Viso and the country between the lakes of Como and Maggiore. It is a new creation, and is the property and the work ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 17, - No. 97, January, 1876 • Various
... to Paris will have had pointed out to them the so-called "Maison Francois Premier" on the Cour La Reine. This richly ornate and graceful specimen of Renaissance architecture formerly stood at Moret, and bit by bit was removed to the capital in 1820. A spiral stone staircase and several fragments of heraldic sculpture were left behind. Badly placed as the house was here, it seems a thousand pities that Moret should have thus been robbed of an architectural ...
— East of Paris - Sketches in the Gatinais, Bourbonnais, and Champagne • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... put upon so friendly a footing that, in 1540, the bishop-duke began the erection at Anizy of a new chateau, to be surrounded with an extensive and beautiful park. The plans were made by the first architects and artists of the Renaissance; the sculptors of Francis I. were employed to decorate the facade with statues—the new buildings were connected with what remained of the earlier chateau by a grand gallery; pavilions flanked the main edifice and adorned ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... without any apparent sense of incongruity. They mix heathen deities with Christian saints, and the ancient heroes adopt the manners of chivalrous romance without the slightest difficulty. The freedom was still granted to the writers of the renaissance. Milton makes Phoebus and St. Peter discourse in successive stanzas, as if they belonged to the same pantheon. For poetical purposes the old gods are simply canonized as Christian saints, as, in a more theological frame of mind, they are regarded as devils. In the reign of common sense ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... portion in which were the royal rooms that formed the residential centre of the extensive palace. Where this large part of the old edifice had been razed Wren erected, in striking contrast to the Tudor portions left standing north and west of it, the Renaissance building, which is probably remembered by many visitors as the chief feature of Hampton Court. Contrasting strongly with the earlier portions of the Palace the new fronts and the beautiful Fountain Court yet do not clash with them, thanks to the way in which ...
— Hampton Court • Walter Jerrold
... is the consequence, I repeat, of the Renaissance and the Reformation, which, although apparently they lived in a state of internecine war, were twin-brothers. The Italians of the Renaissance were all of them Socinians; the humanists, with Erasmus at their head, regarded Luther, ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... that even in its prime had pretended to more than it really was. It was quite different than my memory had pictured it. Much humbler, smaller - a weak and feeble reflection of the solid marble splendor of antique and renaissance which it affected to imitate. But this very decay now spread over it an involuntary charm. For the garden with its cypresses, mimosas, magnolias and roses had grown all the more beautiful in its neglected wilderness, and we inhabited ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden
... rubbing his nose, "you are a member of 'The Encouragers of Egyptian Renaissance,' and 'The Teutonic Tombs Club,' and 'The Society for the Recovery ...
— The Napoleon of Notting Hill • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... admiration for antique beauty which characterized the humanist movement of the time. In this aspect the Faust legend is an expression of early popular Protestantism, and of its antagonism to the scientific and classical tendencies of the Renaissance. ...
— Faust Part 1 • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... enchanting views of the Channel were frequent and exquisite. It was a palace built in old days upon the Downs, but sheltered and screened from every hostile wind. The full warmth of the south fell upon the vast but fantastic pile of the Renaissance style, said to have been built by that gifted but mysterious individual, John of Padua. The gardens were wonderful, terrace upon terrace, and on each terrace a tall fountain. But the most peculiar feature was the park, which was undulating and extensive, ...
— Endymion • Benjamin Disraeli
... our literature, at the present time, and by our literature I mean English literature in its broadest sense and amplest significance. Perhaps at no period of letters, in the whole history of literature from the days of Chaucer and Raleigh, from the renaissance, through the classic period, to more modern times, to our own day in fact, has the cultured world seen such a brilliant array of brilliant men and women, who write the English prose which delights our fire-sides, and enriches our minds at the present ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... strait-waistcoat of a narrow law; the life of the founder of Christianity was only a momentary gleam of light in the darkness; the Middle Age was a confused turmoil of rude heroism and cunning savagery; the Renaissance a relapse into heathenism and the worship of nature. Yet with the modern ages comes a rift in the blackness; the poets reveal a new spirit; their songs are the songs of peace and not ...
— La Legende des Siecles • Victor Hugo
... of flagging, turning sharply round a stone pillar, led incongruously from the light French furnishings to the chamber where Lavinia was to sleep. A Renaissance bed, made of thick quilting directly upon the floor, was covered with gilt ecclesiastical embroidery; and a movable tub stood in a stone corner. The narrow deep windows overlooked Florence, a somber expanse of roofing; and, coming rapidly toward the ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... certain sharpness of skeleton. Yet it may be beautiful, still; the poets derided the wrinkles of Diane de Poitiers at the very moment when King Henry II idealized her with the homage of a Don Quixote; an atmosphere of physical beauty and decay hangs about the whole Renaissance. ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... that the group seemed to lack flamboyancy. It is true, however, that, except for Guilder's habitual restraint, the celebrated firm of architects was inclined to express themselves flamboyantly, and to interpret Renaissance ...
— Between Friends • Robert W. Chambers
... that the inspiration in Spain came from Islam and in Italy from Christianity produced some consequences. In Spain the Jews followed Arab models of style. In Italy the influence of classical models was felt at the time of the Renaissance. Most noteworthy of all was the indebtedness of the Hebrew ...
— Chapters on Jewish Literature • Israel Abrahams
... a world-wide reputation; but as we advertised to its state of decadence, we think it right also to advert to its renaissance. May it go up and prosper. Whether the salutary reform which has been introduced within its walls has been carried as far as could have been desired, may be doubtful. The important question of the school appears to be somewhat left to the discretion of the new warden. This might have ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... they certainly distinguish many chief literary men of the eighteenth century from most chief literary men of the nineteenth, are not specially characteristic of the eighteenth century itself. They are found in the seventeenth, in the Renaissance, in classical antiquity—wherever, in short, the art of letters and the art of life have had comparatively free play. The chief differentia of Peacock is a differentia common among men of letters; that is to say, among ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... For, saving Dante on his solitary pinnacle, there was no figure in modern literature at the time of the Renaissance to compare with the men of antiquity; there was no art to compete with their sculpture; there was no physical science but that which Greece had created. Above all, there was no other example of perfect intellectual freedom—of the unhesitating acceptance of reason as the sole ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... extended a broad basin from which grassy terraces and broad walks led on the southward to one of the most magnificent edifices raised for the exposition, the Agricultural Building. In style of architecture it pertained to the classic renaissance and was erected at ...
— By Water to the Columbian Exposition • Johanna S. Wisthaler
... Period. That is to say, the time of the beginning of the Renaissance landscape by the Caracci, Claude, and Salvator. First, in their landscapes, shipping begins to assume something like independent character, and to be introduced for the sake of its picturesque interest; although ...
— The Harbours of England • John Ruskin
... it was the Margery of the Wahaskan Renaissance, joyously clad and radiant, who was holding the reins over a big English trap horse, parading down Main Street and ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde
... of Siward, all that he had aroused in her of love, of intelligence, of wholesome desire and sane curiosity—the intellectual restlessness, the capacity for passion, the renaissance of the simpler innocence—had subsided into the laissez faire of dull quiescence. If in her he had sown, imprudently, subtle, impulsive, unworldly ideas, flowering into sudden brilliancy in the quick magic of his companionship, now those flowers were dead under ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... of the romantic school, including, under Art, poetry and painting, literature and sculpture, furniture and the opera. Thus she became a mediaevalist. She was also interested in any treasures that dated from the Renaissance, and employed her allies as so many devoted commission agents. Soon after she was married, she had become possessed of the Rougets' furniture, sold at Issoudun early in 1824. She purchased some very good things at Nivernais and the Haute-Loire. At the New Year ...
— The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... nature only. But they have opposed themselves as a body, to that kind of teaching above described, which only began after Raphael's time: and they have opposed themselves as sternly to the entire feeling of the Renaissance schools; a feeling compounded of indolence, infidelity, sensuality, and shallow pride. Therefore they have called themselves Pre-Raphaelite. If they adhere to their principles, and paint nature as it is around them, with the help of modern science, with the ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... get most out of it; and Jack's elegant disdain of his wife's big balance enabled him, with an appearance of perfect good-breeding, to transmute it into objects of art and luxury. To the latter, I must add, he remained relatively indifferent; but he was buying Renaissance bronzes and eighteenth-century pictures with a discrimination that bespoke the ...
— The Hermit and the Wild Woman and Other Stories • Edith Wharton |
