"Statuesque" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... through the grounds in the late summer afternoon, her blue-lined parasol making an azure sky over her golden head, her white dress draping her slender figure in a strikingly statuesque way. She is the kind of girl to madden men and win admiration on the right hand and on the left, and he does like the women on whom the world sets a signet of approval. No sweet domestic drudge for him, and if Violet has a fault, it is this tendency. When a man begins to ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... Thelma's white throat—an opening just sufficient to display her collar of diamonds—and every figure seemed either dumpy and awkward, too big or too fat, or too lean and too lanky—when brought into contrast with her statuesque outlines. ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... I saw the fair sex of Holland. Beauty is a rare flower in Holland, as in all other countries; notwithstanding, in a walk of a hundred steps in the wood at the Hague I saw many more beautiful women than I had seen in all the pictures in the Dutch galleries. These ladies do not possess the statuesque beauty of the Romans, the splendid color of the English, nor the vivacity of the Andalusians; but there is about them a refinement, a delightful innocence and grace, a tranquil beauty, a pleasing countenance; they have, as ...
— Holland, v. 1 (of 2) • Edmondo de Amicis
... a tall, fair, handsome man of eight-and-thirty or forty, with one of those cold, intellectual, statuesque faces in which there is a chill harmony, and which are types of a calm temperament, or an extinct volcano. Perhaps it was that cast of countenance which recommended him to the Bowers; yet Leslie was ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... cheerful. He rolled up his sleeves and went to rolling out the pastry. He thought he had never seen a sweeter picture than the young girl in clean dress and apron, with her sleeves rolled above her elbows. There was a statuesque perfection in her well-rounded arms. The heat of the fire had flushed her face a little, and she was laughing merrily at John's awkward blunders in pie-making. John was delighted, he hardly knew why. In fixing a pie crust his fingers touched hers, and he started as if he had touched a galvanic ...
— Duffels • Edward Eggleston
... extending over two months, Professor William P. Jones danced the whole of Gibbon's "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire." The first two volumes were danced in slow time, to the accompaniment of two flutes and a lyre. The poses were statuesque rather than graceful, and the gestures had in them a great deal of the antique. But, beginning with the story of the barbarian invasions in the third volume, Professor Jones's interpretation took on a fury that was almost bacchantic. ...
— The Patient Observer - And His Friends • Simeon Strunsky
... field-gun manoeuvres were at a close, Kincaid spoke from the saddle. Facing him stood his entire command, "in order in the line," their six shining pieces and dark caissons and their twice six six-horse teams stretching back in six statuesque rows; each of the three lieutenants—Bartleson, Villeneuve, Tracy—in the front line, midway between his two guns, the artificers just six yards out on the left, and guidon and buglers just six on the right. At the commander's back was the levee. Only now it had been ...
— Kincaid's Battery • George W. Cable
... been arranged with artistic design, and just such a one would be employed to exhibit a statue of white marble to the best effect. Zulma Sarpy was this living, breathing model, fair as a filament of summer gorse, and statuesque ...
— The Bastonnais - Tale of the American Invasion of Canada in 1775-76 • John Lesperance
... painted in vivid colors? It was not the Bardo, but the pretty village of Bordighera, divided like all those on the coast into two parts, the Marine lying along the shore, and the upper town, connected by a forest of statuesque palms with slender stalks and drooping tops,—veritable rockets of verdure, showing stripes of blue ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... for now Driscoll understood the strategic outlay. Its key was Fra Diavolo, with a pistol at Ney's head, and quite statuesque the romantic Mexican looked. But out of the tail of his eye Fra Diavolo noted the American, at first with contemptuous amusement only. Then, as though such had been the situation from the start, he grew aware of an ugly black muzzle under his chin. For very safety he froze rigid, and dared ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... into the stone, But see yon graceful girl, with straitened zone And statuesque still bearing. You'd say in her the marble must invade The flesh, in so much loveliness arrayed, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98 February 15, 1890 • Various
... broadcloth, bareheaded, with a full head of glossy, raven hair, and his eyes, like some mad animal's, flashing with light and resolution, yet with a certain strange calmness holds aloft in one hand a large knife—walks along not much back of the footlights—turns fully towards the audience, his face of statuesque beauty, lit by those basilisk eyes, flashing with desperation, perhaps insanity—launches out in a firm and steady voice the words, 'Sic semper tyrannis'—and then walks with neither slow nor very rapid pace diagonally across to the back ...
— Lincoln's Yarns and Stories • Alexander K. McClure
... drapery which she wound about her after the fashion Lady Hamilton was said to do, and represented, like her, the Muses, and various statues. With the curtain and one light she managed to give a very statuesque effect. Mr. Lewis was evidently very proud of her grace and talent, and she had a pretty, wilful, bird-like way with him, that was fascinating, and did not seem, as I thought it must really be, mechanical. I felt, more than ever, how idle it must be to talk with her. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... as bad. I hate that particular pose; it's coming up very much now; an imitation of the English, like everything else. A girl who tries to be statuesque at sea—that will act ...
— A London Life; The Patagonia; The Liar; Mrs. Temperly • Henry James
... Mike was introduced to the man of hobbies. Mr Smith, senior, was a long, earnest-looking man who might have been Psmith in a grey wig but for his obvious energy. He was as wholly on the move as Psmith was wholly statuesque. Where Psmith stood like some dignified piece of sculpture, musing on deep questions with a glassy eye, his father would be trying to be in four places at once. When Psmith presented Mike to him, he shook hands warmly with him and started a sentence, but broke off in ...
— Psmith in the City • P. G. Wodehouse
... its feet the knife had found its heart. As Tarzan rose upon the body of his kill to scream forth his hideous victory cry into the face of the moon the wind carried to his nostrils something which froze him to statuesque immobility and silence. His savage eyes blazed into the direction from which the wind had borne down the warning to him and a moment later the grasses at one side of the clearing parted and Numa, the lion, strode majestically into view. His yellow-green eyes ...
— Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... table before me as I write. I look at it critically. She is not what I should describe as exactly a type of English beauty. You know the sort of beauty I mean? Queenly, statuesque, a daughter of the gods, divinely fair. Her charm is not in her features. It is in ...
— Not George Washington - An Autobiographical Novel • P. G. Wodehouse
... an irregular pattern—whose nose has a heavenward inclination—who pretends to no strictness of beauty, according to absurd rules laid down in drawing-books—why is she brought into such fatal juxtaposition with this other severe and classical-looking and statuesque lady! To be merely a foil? Much obliged, Mr. Sherwin! The offended belle expressing angry and ironic gratitude sweeps from the painter's studio, gathering her rustling skirts together that they may not be soiled by the least contact with the canvases and plaster casts, and other art-paraphernalia ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook
... village sports filed around the table, and glee and song once more prevailed, William began to soften in his statuesque attitude, and laughingly proposed that we "go a poaching" on the imprisoned animals and birds that Squire Lucy corraled for his special delectation, to the detriment of honest apprentices and ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce
... their natural height, their faces hidden in masks and their tones mechanically magnified, must have relied for their effects not upon facial play, or rapid and subtle variations of voice and gesture, but upon a certain statuesque beauty of pose, and a chanting intonation of that majestic iambic verse whose measure would have been obscured by a rapid and conversational delivery. The representation would thus become moving sculpture to the eye, and to the ear, as it were, a sleep of music between the intenser ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... sterling!" for so much had been distributed in largesses to the people and the army on the occasion of his inauguration. Meantime, as respected the present, the qualities of the young man were amply fitted to sustain a Roman popularity; for, in addition to his extreme and statuesque beauty of person, he was (in the report of one who did not wish to color his character advantageously) "memor families suce, comptus, decorus, oris venerandi, eloquentice, celsioris, versufacilis, in republic etiam non inutilis." ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... Gwin, statuesque, graceful, dressed in the most suitable manner, made a perfect contrast to poor, excitable Kitty. Kitty's words had been plainly audible, and ...
— Wild Kitty • L. T. Meade
... rampant, as that inopportune charger on which Clark Mills perched General Jackson, at the national Capital. Nor is this "first in peace" by any means "the first" on horseback; the figure being theatric rather than dignified, and the extended arm more gymnastic than statuesque. ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... wasted. Its length is about half a mile, and the descent, which is almost continuous, is at times very rapid. The passage connects a succession of vast and lofty spaces, which are not inappropriately termed salles. In some of these, the dropping water has raised from the floor of the cavern statuesque and awful forms of colossal grandeur. Some of these have been little changed by the smoke, but stand like white figures of fantastic giants. While looking at them, I thought how little I should like to be in the position of a certain cure of Marcillac, ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... messenger! With what grace he opens the carriage door! with what majesty he mounts to his seat by the driver! I wonder if he has a sister. She would be worth a journey to see. I have met such women on their native soil, statuesque, slender, full-breasted, square-shouldered, with jars of water on their heads and clinking silver anklets. What a cursed thing is our American prejudice against color! No other people carries it to such an extent. In the Latin ...
— A Black Adonis • Linn Boyd Porter
... picture post cards for the past two months, Fanny's idea of Jacob was more statuesque, noble, and eyeless than ever. To reinforce her vision she had taken to visiting the British Museum, where, keeping her eyes downcast until she was alongside of the battered Ulysses, she opened ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... of that exquisite tint which in felicitous French phraseology is termed de couleur de fleur de pecher, and swept down from her slender figure in statuesque folds that ended in a long court train, particularly becoming in the pose she had selected. The Elizabethan ruff, with an edge of filmy lace, softened the effect of the bodice cut squares across the breast, ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... presence at such a show was a defiance or mere curiosity. Others gave no heed to these matters, but were engaged in attracting the attention of the ladies, throwing themselves into attitudes more or less interesting and statuesque, flashing diamond rings, especially when they thought themselves the foci of insistent opera-glasses, while yet another would address a respectful salute to this or that senora or senorita, at the same time lowering his ...
— The Reign of Greed - Complete English Version of 'El Filibusterismo' • Jose Rizal
... distinctly: she stood in a shaft of moonlight falling between the sombre firs, and her face was marble-like; her whole pose was statuesque, all the girlish gentleness of the other days seemed to have fled from her, and her hour of tribulation had invested her with a dignity and force of will that sat well upon her stately figure. Harry beheld her with something like terror. This ...
— The Gold-Stealers - A Story of Waddy • Edward Dyson
... which rolled back in shining waves from her blue veined temples. While moulding the figure and features upon a scale almost heroic, nature had jealously guarded the symmetry of her work, and in addition to the perfect proportion of the statuesque outlines, had bestowed upon the firm white flesh a gleaming smoothness, suggestive of fine grained marble highly polished. Majesty of mien implies much, which the comparatively short period of eighteen years rarely confers, yet majestic most properly describes this girl, whose archetype ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... had kindled, proceeded to extinguished Presumptuous belief Ready is the ardent mind to take footing on the last thing done She was not, happily, one of the women who betray strong feeling Shuns the statuesque pathetic, or any kind of posturing Straining for common talk, and showing the strain Style resembling either early architecture or utter dilapidation The people always wait for the winner The system is cursed by nature, ...
— Quotations from the Works of George Meredith • David Widger
... not a whit more warmed by Zenobia's passion than a salamander by the heat of its native furnace. He would have been absolutely statuesque, save for a look of slight perplexity, tinctured strongly with derision. It was a crisis in which his intellectual perceptions could not altogether help him out. He failed to comprehend, and cared but little for comprehending, why Zenobia should put herself into ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... feet away, a strapping great lad in livery stood musing, motionless, statuesque, useless, like that purely decorative warrior whom one sees in the most tumultuous of Mantegna's paintings, lost in dreams, leaning upon his shield, while all around him are fighting and bloodshed and death; detached from the group of his ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... that haunted me. Nora on the ice and Nora at home were so different, that they could not harmonize; nor could the never-to-be-forgotten lineaments of the one be traced in the other. And, could Nora now have been with me in this storm, I doubted whether her face could again assume that marble, statuesque beauty—that immortal sadness and despair, which I had once seen upon it. That face—the true face that I loved—could I ever see ...
— The Lady of the Ice - A Novel • James De Mille
... ceased keeping the world in a turmoil; and when he ceased, as they said after the death of Roland, there was a great quiet upon the earth. But in his best days (I mean, of course, his worst) Flambeau was a figure as statuesque and international as the Kaiser. Almost every morning the daily paper announced that he had escaped the consequences of one extraordinary crime by committing another. He was a Gascon of gigantic stature and bodily daring; and the wildest tales were told of his outbursts ...
— The Innocence of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... amber-bright hair, and tossing her white arms with the tossing surf, in a vain agony of distraction and appeal: poets have sung the flirtation, painters have painted it; the story is an eternal legend of pain and passion, illuminated with lucent tints of age and the warm South, outlined with the statuesque purity of classic scenery and classic diction: but I myself never for a moment believed that Ariadne was a particle more unhappy or pitiable than Nancy Bunker, our seamstress, was, when Hiram Fenn went West ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... boat; hand over hand, buoy by buoy, net by net, holding fast when the pull of the tide is too strong, and pausing irritably to pick out the fish. We stepped the great mast, shifted all the ballast to wind'ard. John came aft to steer, and seated himself on the counter, a strangely powerful, statuesque figure in his wet oilskins. "Have 'ee got the sheet in yer hand?" Tony ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds
... governed by me. In the six days we have been together, she has made very sure that I am the only person likely to take an interest in her; while, for my part, I have ascertained that, for all her statuesque features, she will prove accommodating. She seems to me a kindly soul, but cautious. I have not been able to extract a word of what passed between her and ...
— Letters of Two Brides • Honore de Balzac
... erected under the superintendence of Phidias. The pictures of Polygnotus had nothing of that elaborate grouping, aided by the powers of perspective, so much admired in modern art. His greatness lay in statuesque painting, which he brought nearly to perfection by ideal expression, accurate drawing, and improved coloring. He used but few colors, and softened the rigidity of his predecessors by making the mouth ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume III • John Lord
... long grass, lying down very close with neck stretched out horizontally, and will thus remain until sought by the dam. When very young if found in its hiding-place it will allow itself to be taken, making no further effort to escape. After the fawn has run away the doe still maintains her statuesque attitude, as if resolved to await the onset, and only when the dogs are close to her she also rushes away, but invariably in a direction as nearly opposite to that taken by the fawn as possible. At first she runs slowly, with a limping gait, and ...
— The Naturalist in La Plata • W. H. Hudson
... these, the boy, John, grew up. When he was ten years old, Jacob Perkins, though in some fear, performed the sacred duty promised to his mother on that memorable morning, when he looked upon her pale, statuesque countenance for the last time. A flush covered the boy's face, as he received the locket, and understood from whence it came. He stood for some minutes, wholly abstracted, as if under the spell ...
— The Allen House - or Twenty Years Ago and Now • T. S. Arthur
... open, he glanced at the message eagerly, and a second later, with blanched face, stood rigid, statuesque, as though ...
— The Doctor of Pimlico - Being the Disclosure of a Great Crime • William Le Queux
... marvelous, graceful creatures, who bear the trade-mark of Paris. Pretty? Well, yes and no. Well-made? No, better than that: her waist was too slight, her shoulders too narrow, her breast too full, no doubt; but I prefer those exquisite human dolls to that great statuesque corpse, the ...
— The works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 5 (of 8) - Une Vie and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant 1850-1893
... remuneration for his labor, content to live frugally that he might thus exemplify his art and his devotion. He certainly excelled any artist with whom we are acquainted in causing figures painted on a flat surface to appear to the spectator far below them to stand out with statuesque effect. In this Church of St. John, the Knights seemed to have vied with each other in adding to its ornaments and its treasures, so that the rich marbles, bas-reliefs, and mosaics are almost confusing in their abundance. The floor is closely ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... his hands. His skin-coat was ragged and his fur-cap battered, but he looked alert and virile as he stood by the steaming horses' heads. The gray trunks of the pines made a good background for his tall figure, which had an almost statuesque grace. ...
— The Girl From Keller's - Sadie's Conquest • Harold Bindloss
... surgeon destroys 172:27 manhood, and worms annihilate it. But the loss of a limb or injury to a tissue is sometimes the quickener of manli- ness; and the unfortunate cripple may present more no- 172:30 bility than the statuesque athlete, - teaching us by his very deprivations, that "a man's a man, ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... laying down her knitting, raises her head, and looks full into Kelly's eyes. As she does so, a smile, lovely as it is unexpected, warms all her statuesque face into ...
— Rossmoyne • Unknown
... quiet-looking to attract attention. But one day, the court being at Aranjuez, during a fete champetre, Mademoiselle de Montijo had the good or ill fortune to fall into one of the ornamental fishponds in the garden. She was taken out insensible, and her wet and clinging garments revealed a form of such statuesque perfection that all Madrid went raving about her beauty. She plunged a commonplace girl—she rose a Venus. And when she first attracted the notice of Napoleon she was indisputably one of the loveliest women in Europe. She was tall, slender, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, August, 1878 • Various
... Miss Holmes to Harut who was engaged in putting more tobacco into the bowl, the suspicion of a smile upon his grave and statuesque countenance. Harut received the match with a low bow and fired the stuff as before. Then he handed the bowl, from which once again the blue smoke curled upwards, to Miss Holmes, and gently and gracefully let the antimacassar ...
— The Ivory Child • H. Rider Haggard
... nervous, rapid steps, her hands clasped back of her head and the wide sleeves of the robe slipped back, showing the perfect arms. She seemed a trifle taller than when in Paris that first springtime, and the open robe revealed a figure statuesque, perfect as a sculptor's ideal, yet without the statue's coldness; for the uncovered throat and bosom held delicious dimples where the robe fell apart and was swept ...
— The Bondwoman • Marah Ellis Ryan
... a statue, to which the Academician compared her, she lacked statuesque repose. She bent her body like a reed, or spun around like a weather-vane, or danced like a top. Her features possessed even greater mobility, and in consequence were even less statuesque. They were lighted up beautifully by five dimples: two on one cheek, one on the other, another ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... again with superhuman vigour. Behind me I heard Dona Rita laughing softly, statuesque, turned all dark in the fading glow. I called out to her quite openly, "Do keep your self-control." And she called back to me in a clear voice: "Oh, my dear, will you ever consent to speak to me after all this? But don't ask for the impossible. ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... are under-jawed, which certainly detracts from the sweetness of the female countenance. His delineation of the naked is excellent, as compared with the works of his predecessors, but far unequal to what he attained in his later years,—the drapery, on the contrary, is noble, majestic, and statuesque; the coloring is still pale and weak,—it was long ere he improved in this point; the landscape displays little or no amendment upon the Byzantine; the architecture, that of the fourteenth century, is to the figures that people it in the proportion of dolls' houses to the ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... regarded the evident admiration of the strangers in return. He felt that in the case of Euphemia, who sometimes evinced a laudable curiosity in his pleasures, and a flattering ignorance of his reading, this might be pardonable; but what any one could find in the useless statuesque Clementina passed his comprehension. Could they not see at once that she was "just that kind of person" who would lie abed in the morning, pretending she was sick, in order to make Phemie do the housework, and make him, John Milton, clean her boots ...
— A First Family of Tasajara • Bret Harte
... it. He waited half a moment to see whether Cleer would speak again; he wanted to hear that pleasant voice once more; but as she held her peace, he merely raised his hat, and accepting the dismissal, continued his walk round the cliffs alone. Yet, somehow, the rest of the way, the figure of that statuesque stranger haunted him. He looked back once or twice. The descendant of the Bassets of Tehidy had now resumed his high pedestal upon the airy tor, and was gazing away seaward, like the mystic Great Vision of his own Miltonic quotation, toward the Spanish coast, ...
— Michael's Crag • Grant Allen
... he was barely of the middle size; but every part of his body was so perfectly proportioned that he appeared, in any position, taller than he really was. The upper part of his dress, thrown open from the heat, partly disclosed the fine statuesque formation of his neck and chest. His ears, hands, and feet were of that smallness and delicacy which is held to denote the aristocracy of birth; and there was in his manner that indescribable combination of unobtrusive dignity and unaffected elegance, which in all ages and countries, ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... her bare feet gleaming like marble on the overshadowed matting of the floor. The fall of her lighted shoulders, the strong and fine modelling of her arms hanging down her sides, her immobility, too, had something statuesque, the charm of art tense with life. She was not very big—Heyst used to think of her, at first, as "that poor little girl,"—but revealed free from the shabby banality of a white platform dress, in the simple ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... place, they had to consult Marcos, one of the Iragola brothers. Near a wood, in front of his house in the shade, they found him seated on a stump of a chestnut tree, always grave and statuesque, his eyes inspired and his gesture noble, in the act of making his little brother, still ...
— Ramuntcho • Pierre Loti
... spoken about was Lord Strishfogel, the richest nobleman in Ireland, and a great sea-rover, famous for his steam yachts, and his importance generally. He had admired Lady Jane's statuesque beauty, and had been more particular in his attentions than the rest of her satellites, who for the most part merely worshipped her because it was the right thing to do. Lord Strishfogel had promised to come to Heron's Nest, Lord ...
— Vixen, Volume I. • M. E. Braddon
... yet, in the full and faultless perfection of her form—in her graceful and yielding motions—in her statuesque bust, rounded cheek and night-black hair, she would, to the casual observer, have indicated hardly the half of that age. Her figure was tall and dignified, yet mobile as a willow; her eyes were dark and luminous, and, in their profound ...
— Edmond Dantes • Edmund Flagg
... bloom which any young beauty of the court might have envied. Her figure was graceful and queenly, her gestures and pose full of a natural dignity, and her voice, as he had already remarked, most sweet and melodious. Her face was handsome rather than beautiful, set in a statuesque classical mould, with broad white forehead, firm, delicately sensitive mouth, and a pair of large serene gray eyes, earnest and placid in repose, but capable of reflecting the whole play of her soul, from the merry gleam of humour to the quick flash of righteous anger. An elevating serenity ...
— The Refugees • Arthur Conan Doyle
... although the voice was strange, and shot past me and came out just for a pat on the head. A very sagacious cat; and yet I really felt no particular kindness towards it; the tone was only assumed. Its statuesque figure attracted me, as it sat there like a cat carved out of ebony, with two fiery splendid gems for eyes. I admired the beauty of the thing, that was all. And as with cats so it is with women. Let them once ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... a desperate yawn, while Lesbia smiled her languid smile over Endymion, 'how I wished something would happen—anything to stir us out of this statuesque, sleeping-beauty state of being. I verily believe the spiders are all asleep in the ivy, and the mice behind the wainscot, and ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... unaccustomed to such a mood, or if his features were incapable of assuming the guise, it seems questionable whether he could really have been entitled to a marble immortality. In point of fact, however, the English face and form are seldom statuesque, however illustrious the individual. ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... various ways, appears to have no parallel in ethical history. There is none in the Greek philosophers or the Roman Stoics, high as some of them may soar in their way. Aristotle's ideal man is perfect in its statuesque fashion, but it is not fraternal; it is not even philanthropic. Nor does the Christian character or the effort to create it depart with belief in dogma. Do not men who have totally renounced the dogma still cultivate ...
— No Refuge but in Truth • Goldwin Smith
... most other people, had meant to economize this summer; but now she made a sudden start for Newport. Irene certainly was peerless in her half-mourning, with her statuesque figure. But there was not an eligible at Newport, so they turned their steps Saratoga-ward. And here they found an old admirer of Mrs. Minor's, Gordon Barringer, a widower for the second time, the owner of a silver-mine and a railroad, and Heaven alone knew the length ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas
... look very pure and distant. One of our party, passing in, stood some time at the foot of the waterfall, and added much to its effect, as his height gave a measure by which to appreciate that of surrounding objects, and his look, by that light so pale and statuesque, seemed to inform the place with the presence ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... indescribable grace and charm is in every movement of her sinuous body. Her well-poised head is set upon a neck of ivory. The lustrous dark eyes rove around the circle of eager betters with languishing velvety glances. A smile, half a sneer, lingers on the curved lips. Her statuesque beauty of feature is enhanced by the rippling dark masses of hair crowning her lovely brows. In the silky waves of her coronal, shines one diamond star of surpassing richness. In all the pride and freshness of youth her loveliness is unmarred ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... the Bellinis, Venetian art ceased to be provincial, blossoming out into national. Jacopo Bellini was a teacher—mild, gentle, sympathetic, animated. His work reveals personality, but is somewhat stiff and statuesque: sharp in outline like an antique stained-glass window. This is because his art was descended from the glassworkers; and he himself continued to make designs for the glassworkers of Murano all his life. Considering the time in ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... the deportment and demeanour of chess players at the board shows many varieties: Anderssen and Captain Mackenzie were statuesque; Staunton, not quite so tall as the Rev. J. Owen, seeming to be soaring up aloft. Harrwitz not quite so small as Gunsberg, seemed sinking to the ground, but the story that he once disappeared overawed by Staunton's style and manner of moving, and was, after a search, found under ...
— Chess History and Reminiscences • H. E. Bird
... turning toward the house when Jane appeared in the lane leading a horse. In riding-skirt and blouse she seemed to have lost some of her statuesque proportions, and looked more like a girl rider than the mistress of Withersteen. She was brightly smiling, and her greeting was ...
— Riders of the Purple Sage • Zane Grey
... streaming behind him. The soldiers always lend a brilliancy to the dull hue of civil life, and there is a never-failing sensation in the spectator as they pass afar or near. Of course, the supreme attraction in their sort for the newly arrived American is the pair of statuesque warriors who motionlessly sit their motionless steeds at the gates of the Horse- Guards, and express an archaic uselessness as perfectly as if they were Highlanders taking snuff before a tobacconist's ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... had again raised his cup to his lips. Now he set it down with a suddenness which caused the statuesque Edwards to bend forward in anticipation of a smash. The captain started to speak, thought better of it, and stared at his niece so intently that she colored and dropped ...
— Cap'n Warren's Wards • Joseph C. Lincoln
... to hear Ahmed make his choice of one thing—and one only—from his father's possessions. Ahmed looked less troubled than they expected, the rabbi wore his most benign expression, and Pedro stationed himself in his usual place at the door, statuesque, ...
— Jewish Fairy Tales and Legends • Gertrude Landa
... still, attributed by religious enthusiasts to supernatural agencies, but which are explainable by what we know of hypnotism. The Hesychasts of Mount Athos who remained motionless for days with their gaze directed steadily to the navel; the Taskodrugites who remained statuesque for a long period with the finger applied to the nose; the Jogins who could hibernate at will; the Dandins of India who became cataleptoid by 12,000 repetitions of the sacred word Om; St. Simeon Stylites who, perched on a lofty pillar, preserved an attitude of saint-like withdrawal ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... descendant of the wild Thurstons about whom Musker had discoursed. Now, in spite of his weather-beaten face and hardened hands, he appeared what he was, a man of education and some refinement, and his resolute expression, erect carriage, and muscular frame, rendered lithe and almost statuesque by much swinging of the ax, gave him an indefinite air of distinction. Again she decided that Geoffrey Thurston was a well-favored man, but remembering Musker's stories, she set herself to watch for some trace of inherent barbarity. This ...
— Thurston of Orchard Valley • Harold Bindloss
... fact remained that hundreds of wild horses together in one drove, captive and knowing it, were collected in this great trap. The intense vitality of them, the vivid coloring, the beautiful action of many and the statuesque immobility of the majority, were thrilling and all satisfying to the ...
— Valley of Wild Horses • Zane Grey
... the guise of warfare that morality always presents itself to Browning. It is not a mere equilibrium of qualities—the measured, self-contained, statuesque ethics of the Greeks, nor the asceticism and self-restraint of Puritanism, nor the peaceful evolution of Goethe's artistic morality: it is valour in the battle of life. His code contains no negative commandments, and no limitations; but he bids each man let out all the power that is within him, and ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... put away one as a sentimental souvenir, but to my mind she did not seem the kind of a girl to do that. I knew my reasoning was absurd, for what man can predicate what a woman will do? but at the same time I could not seem to imagine the statuesque, imperial Miss Lloyd tenderly preserving a rose that her lover had ...
— The Gold Bag • Carolyn Wells
... wibble raggle dully pang rubby dub, bob," said the baron, in his best French, addressing the statuesque American with the broad shoulders and the ...
— Castle Craneycrow • George Barr McCutcheon
... answer. The question had turned Joe Lewis's word against him, when a tall Indian arose and spread his blanket open like a wing. He stood for a time silent, statuesque, and thoughtful. The men waited seriously to hear what he ...
— The Log School-House on the Columbia • Hezekiah Butterworth
... table like an empress and like a courtesan. She resembled the Caterina Cornaro, the gallant queen of the island of Cypress, painted by Titian, and whose name she worthily bore. For years Alba had been so proud of the ray of seduction cast forth by the Countess, so proud of those statuesque arms, of the superb carriage, of the face which defied the passage of time, of the bloom of opulent life the glorious creature displayed. During that dinner she was almost ashamed ...
— Cosmopolis, Complete • Paul Bourget
... meanwhile, could, might, would, or should, in nowise, be surrendered, save to the King's Messenger: one old man's life worthless, so it be lost with honour; but think, ye brawling canaille, how will it be when a whole Bastille springs skyward!—In such statuesque, taper-holding attitude, one fancies de Launay might have left Thuriot, the red Clerks of the Bazoche, Cure of Saint-Stephen and all the tagrag-and-bobtail of the world, ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... his knife, and sat statuesque and expressionless. "Go on," he said hoarsely. "Tell me the ...
— The House of Whispers • William Le Queux
... thousand rosy vases were drinking in the sunshine, and ten thousand classic leaves were spreading their blue-green shields below them; all nature smiled and sang. I was loath to exchange my good horse for a gharrie, with a Kling driver draped slightly in Turkey-red cotton sitting on the shafts, who, statuesque as he was, had a far less human expression than Mahmoud and Eblis. In the noonday the indigo-colored Hijan hills, with their swollen waterfall coming down in a sheet of foam, looked cool, but as we dashed through Taipeng I felt overpowered once more by what seems the "wearing world," ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
... there for nearly an hour in the same attitude, when the door of the sitting-room was opened, and a footstep sounded behind her. She knew the step; and although she did not lift her head, her eyes took a new brightness in the summer dusk, and the listless grace of her attitude changed to a statuesque rigidity, though there was no change ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... arms folded across his chest, his blond hair sweeping his shoulders, his blue eyes fixed upon a rocky rib of the mountain behind which the boy had disappeared, Big Pete still stood like a statue. But gradually the statuesque pose resolved itself into a more commonplace posture, and the muscles of the face relaxed until the familiar twinkle hovered around the corners of his eyes. "What did he say when he made those ...
— The Black Wolf Pack • Dan Beard
... the dress of her model had been framed upon a symmetrically attenuated French corset, and the unfortunate Minty's fuller and ampler curves had under her simple country stays known no more restraining cincture than knew the Venus of Milo. The alteration was a hideous failure, it was neither Minty's statuesque outline nor Louise Macy's graceful contour. Minty was no fool, and the revelation of this slow education of the figure and training of outline—whether fair or false in art—struck her quick intelligence with all its full and hopeless significance. A bitter ...
— A Phyllis of the Sierras • Bret Harte
... generation. Unluckily he has long been out of office, and his party is condemned to the Cassandra role of uttering true prophecies which find no credence among those who wield the power of putting them to good account. M. Bratiano's appropriate attitude may be described as statuesque. Occasionally his Press organs commented upon the manifestations of the interventionists in words barbed with bitter sarcasm and utilitarian maxims. "Roumania's blood and money," the Independence Roumaine explained, "must be spent ...
— England and Germany • Emile Joseph Dillon
... magazine To-day from November 1893 to February 1894, was republished in book form by Mr W. Heinemann in 1894. Like Treasure Island it is a tale without a heroine, almost, indeed, without the mention of a woman except Attwater's statuesque native servant and the shadowy personalities of Herrick's mother and fiancee in London, and Captain Davis's wife and his little girl, who died before she got the doll he had so carefully bought for her, ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • Margaret Moyes Black
... Cf. also his comment on Dante's Visual Images, and his Early Illustrators in The Study and Criticism of Italian Art (First Series), p. 13. "We cannot help dressing Virgil as a Roman, and giving him a 'classical profile' and 'statuesque carriage,' but Dante's visual image of Virgil was probably no less mediaeval, no more based on a critical reconstruction of antiquity, than his entire conception of the Roman poet. Fourteenth Century ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... trusted here, and Vasari gives her a bad character, which Browning completes. Andrea painted her often, notably in the fresco of the "Nativity of the Virgin," to which we shall soon come at the Annunziata: a fine statuesque woman by no means unwilling to have the most popular artist in ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... moments, the fishers sat or stood in statuesque silence, eyes on the corks. Then Jacob Isaac showed ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. V, August, 1878, No 10. - Scribner's Illustrated • Various
... enthusiasm of her love for things Roman, took towards the Roman Senate carried her farther from the traditions of her people, and lost her the love of some stern old Gothic warriors. And, moreover, with all her great intellectual endowments, it is clear that this highly cultivated, statuesque, and stately woman had little skill in reading character, little power in estimating the force of human motives. She had read (we may conjecture) Virgil and Sophocles, but she did not know what was in the heart of a child, and she knew ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin
... Her slumber had deepened into that strange stillness which we call death,—and her husband, a statuesque and rigid figure, gazed on her quiet ...
— Innocent - Her Fancy and His Fact • Marie Corelli
... infantry were well out on the field, he followed in glittering column of pieces, his satin-coated horses dancing in sheer exuberance of spirits and his red-crested cannoneers sitting with folded arms, erect and statuesque, upon the ammunition-chests. Mrs. Cram, in her pretty basket phaeton, with Mrs. Lawrence, of the infantry, and several of the ladies of the garrison in ambulances or afoot, had taken station well to the front of the forming line. Then it became apparent ...
— Waring's Peril • Charles King
... costume and appearance no external accident disturbs. Her dress had the look of being moulded on her light little figure; her hair was like brown satin, smooth as a mirror and reflecting the light. She did not possess the large grace of abstract beauty. There was nothing statuesque, nothing majestic, about her, but a kind of mild perfection, a fitness and harmony which called forth the approval of the more serious-minded portion of humanity as well as the admiration of the younger and ...
— A Country Gentleman and his Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... embellishments, let us note one or two differences as to facts. In the book the suddenly converted friends placed him on a chair and asked him to make a speech before the castle door. He did so, and there is a grand statuesque picture of the hero, naked to the waist, and standing on the chair as lofty pedestal. In the torn coat the artist could never have made him look like Apollo. Even the shirt would have been too commonplace; so off went the shirt. Three or four times attention is directed to ...
— The Land-War In Ireland (1870) - A History For The Times • James Godkin
... her face could not be seen, anyone looking at the balance of the head, the statuesque neck, would have surmised ...
— The Four Canadian Highwaymen • Joseph Edmund Collins
... unusually silent meal for a Christmas gathering. My father, as I remembered later, seemed absorbed and dull. Aunt Agnes had shown me by a glance that the events of the previous day were not unknown to her. She sat glum and statuesque; but I did not attempt either to brave or to mollify her displeasure, for I knew that compared with the secret in my possession, the wretched affair with Paul Barr would seem to her a mere trifle. I wondered, however, ...
— A Romantic Young Lady • Robert Grant
... the footman through several wide corridors filled with palms and flowers, which formed a kind of winter-garden, until we crossed a red-carpeted ante-room, where two statuesque sentries stood on guard, and the man conducting me rapped at the great polished mahogany doors ...
— The Czar's Spy - The Mystery of a Silent Love • William Le Queux
... together in the boat, the less said the better; of course, if there were nothing else, they would have been swamped thirty times over during the course of Lantenac's harangue. Again, after Lantenac has landed, we have scenes of almost inimitable workmanship that suggest the epithet "statuesque" by their clear and trenchant outline; but the tocsin scene will not do, and the tocsin unfortunately pervades the whole passage, ringing continually in our ears with a taunting accusation of falsehood. And ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... occasion of Gabe's spring trip he encountered a statuesque blonde person where Effie had ...
— Buttered Side Down • Edna Ferber
... no sound by the standards of human ears, yet to the highly attuned and delicate organs of the beast a message seemed to be borne to the savage brain. A wondrous transformation was wrought in the motionless mass of statuesque bone and muscle that had an instant before stood as though carved out ...
— The Beasts of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... enthusiasm until the night which culminated the tragedy of Ysabel Herrera. Estenega stood enraptured, watching every motion of her body, every expression of her face. The blood blazed in her cheeks, her eyes were like green stars and sparkled wickedly. The cold curves of her statuesque mouth were warm and soft, her chin was saucily uplifted, her heavy waving hair fell over her shoulders to her knees, a glittering veil. Where had The Doomswoman, the proud daughter of the Iturbi y ...
— The Doomswoman - An Historical Romance of Old California • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... gruffly; he opens his mouth to insert food, and closes it with a snap; but he is a humorous old fellow, with a twinkle in his eye; generous if whimsical; and more good-natured than he wishes you to believe. Some of my friends are silent and abrupt; there is the statuesque chaplain who, whatever you may talk of, appears to be preoccupied with something else; there are brisk, bird-like men, who pick up their food and interject disconnected remarks. But the majority are ...
— The Upton Letters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... with a rope of her long hair in one hand, and in the other the brush she was passing over it. On the bridge the man who had found the body made a merit of his discovery which he dramatized to a group of spectators without rousing them to a murmur or stirring them from their statuesque fixity. His own excitement in comparison ...
— Familiar Spanish Travels • W. D. Howells
... blonde, with a riant face, and an animated manner—we had said almost peculiarly Irish—rushing at conclusions, where her more thoughtful and careful sister paused to consider and calculate. The beauty of Jane was statuesque, her deportment serious yet cheerful, a seriousness quite as natural as her younger sister's gayety; they both labored diligently, but Anna Maria's labor was sport when compared to her elder sister's careful toil; Jane's mind was of a more lofty order, she was intense, and felt more than she said, ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... Hotel Cluny at Paris. Its frontispiece is marvellous, the rez-de-chaussee less gracious than the rest perhaps, but with the first story blooming forth as a gem of magnificent proportions and setting. Between the four windows of this first story are posed statuesque effigies of Charles VII, Jeanne d'Arc, Saint Remy and Louis IX. In the centre, in a niche, is an equestrian statue of Louis XII, who reigned when this monument was being built. A balustrade a jour finishes off this story, which, in turn, is overhung with a high, peaked gable, and above rise the ...
— Royal Palaces and Parks of France • Milburg Francisco Mansfield
... after passing insects, returning after each capture to the same stand. The thrushes, ranging all over the globe, afford another striking example. Without speaking of their nesting habits, their relationship appears in their love of fruit, in their gait, flight, statuesque attitudes, and abrupt motions. ...
— The Naturalist in La Plata • W. H. Hudson
... younger daughter's license. She was a statuesque young woman with a pose, ripe lips, flashing white teeth, laughing eyes with an imp of mischief in them, and an exquisitely turned-up nose that was neither the Brentwood, which was severely classic, nor the Grimkie, which was ...
— The Grafters • Francis Lynde
... well, gentle lady! The price is not high With a figure like thine, such a hand, such an eye, Most brilliant accomplishments, statuesque face, Manners, carriage distingu and queenlike in grace,— Nothing wanting whatever, save only a heart, But, instead, double portions of ...
— The Poetical Works of Mrs. Leprohon (Mrs. R.E. Mullins) • Rosanna Eleanor Leprohon
... of Mildred; a recognizable one, or it would not have been humorous. In Alice's hands, so dexterous in this work, her statuesque friend was becoming as ridiculous as a fine figure of wax left to the mercies ...
— Alice Adams • Booth Tarkington
... disposed to intensify his misery. "Did you ever see a more statuesque creature—with those superb broad shoulders and that little head, and that thick braid brought round over the top? Doesn't her face, with that calm look in those starry eyes, and that peculiar fall of the corners of the mouth, remind you of some of those exquisite great Du Maurier women? ...
— Indian Summer • William D. Howells
... lady riding across the moor behind them. She was mounted on one of the Orme horses, was habited by Redfern, who had done justice to her superb and supple figure, and the sunlight which poured from between the clouds fully revealed the statuesque beauty of her face. ...
— At Love's Cost • Charles Garvice
... was a proud lofty solemn Kaiser, infinitely the gentleman in air and humor; Spanish gravities, ceremonials, reticences;—and could, in a better scene, have distinguished himself by better than mere statuesque immovability of posture, dignified endurance of ennui, and Hapsburg tenacity in holding the grip. It was not till 1735, after tusslings and wrenchings beyond calculation, that he would consent to quit the Shadow of the Crown ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume V. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... made out in the distance, flitting indistinctly against the gloomy border of the forest, and near the river two bronze figures, leaning on tall spears, stood in the sunlight under fantastic head-dresses of spotted skins, warlike and still in statuesque repose. And from right to left along the lighted shore moved a wild and ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
... foot advanced, like a sentinel who hears the challenge, or a knight listening for the charge! Tenerani's "Descent from the Cross," in the Torlonia Chapel, outlives in remembrance the brilliant assemblies of that financial house. The outlines of Flaxman, essentially statuesque, seem alone adequate to illustrate to the eye the great Mediaeval poet, whose verse seems often cut from stone in the quarries of infernal destiny. How grandly sleep the lions of Canova at Pope ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... "Luck to our neighbour" was the toast—"luck," and the hope that all his ventures might be as successfully carried through as his practical joke. After that the Maluka gravely proposed "Cheon," and Cheon instantly became statuesque and dignified, to the further diversion of Brown of the Bulls—gravely accepting a thimbleful for himself, and, as gravely, drinking his own health, the Maluka just as gravely "clinking glasses" with him. And from that day to this when Cheon wishes to ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn
... courteous treatment at their hands, and with these qualities they possess a manly independence that is as far removed from servility as forwardness. Some of these men are strikingly handsome, with shapely statuesque figures that recall the Antinous and the Apollo Belvidere. Their life is necessarily a hard one, exposed as they are to all sorts of weather and the dangers incidental to their profession. At a comparatively early age they break down, and extended ...
— Bay State Monthly, Vol. II, No. 1, October, 1884 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... a stern character, might have inspired awe; the more so as her form and limbs were grand and statuesque for her age; but all was softened down to sweet womanhood by long, silken lashes, often lowered, and a gracious face that blushed at a word, blushed little, blushed much, blushed pinky, blushed pink, ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade
... feet, long-leggedly statuesque, and strode toward the antechamber on his right, whence presently he returned with a woman on his arm, he stroking her hand as it rested on his. He introduced Sextus and Norbanus; the others knew her; Galen ...
— Caesar Dies • Talbot Mundy
... other people having or imagining, that little raid I made with Gibberne on the Folkestone Leas, under the influence of the New Accelerator, was the strangest and maddest of all. We went out by his gate into the road, and there we made a minute examination of the statuesque passing traffic. The tops of the wheels and some of the legs of the horses of this char-a-banc, the end of the whip-lash and the lower jaw of the conductor—who was just beginning to yawn—were perceptibly in motion, but all the rest of the lumbering ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... a very picturesque assembly. Indians dress in an endless variety of fashions. Some in their native costumes looked as statuesque and beautiful as the ancient Greeks; others as ridiculous ...
— Oowikapun - How the Gospel Reached the Nelson River Indians • Egerton Ryerson Young
... Christian morality, that for obedience to a precept it substitutes following a Person, and instead of saying to men 'Be good' it says to them 'Be Christlike.' It brings the conception of duty out of the region of abstractions into the region of living realities. For the cold statuesque ideal of perfection it substitutes a living Man, with a heart to love, and a hand to help us. Thereby the whole aspect of striving after the right is changed; for the work is made easier, and companionship comes in to aid morality, when Jesus ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... a point one day a Lynx appeared statuesque on a stranded cake of ice, a hundred yards off, and gazed at the approaching boats. True to their religion, the half-breeds seized their rifles, the bullets whistled harmlessly about the "Peeshoo"—whereupon he turned and walked calmly up the slope, ...
— The Arctic Prairies • Ernest Thompson Seton
... wee bronze savage capering about a stolid squaw in a red sprigged muslin? Indeed, there is indescribable piquancy in this unconscious grouping of the pickers and their freedom from restraint. For each artistic bit—a laughing face in an aureole of amber clusters, a statuesque chin and throat, Indians in grotesquely picturesque raiment, and the yellow visages of the Chinese—the vines make an idyllic framing with a sinking summer sun in the background lending a shimmering ...
— The California Birthday Book • Various
... Vendome, out by the empty Rue Castiglione, down the Rue de Rivoli. So we came into the great beautiful Place de la Concorde; and what a wide and magnificent waste it was. Now and then a wayfarer might be seen crossing its splendid distances, or a taxicab spinning along through the statuesque grandeur of the place. But the few moving objects in the white stretch of marble and cement only accented its lonely aspect. The circle of the French provinces was as desolate as the Pompeiian Forum, and save for the bright colours of the banks of flowers that were heaped ...
— The Martial Adventures of Henry and Me • William Allen White
... among the others, my precious black swan: her quaint, dreamy thoughts are not their practical, sunny clear-headedness, her self-peopled, solitary wanderings are not their merry comradeships, her lovely, statuesque movements are not their athletic tumbles. She stood to-day at her mother's knee in just the attitude S——n painted them for me, her eyes clouded with awe just as the bloom upon her mother's sweeping gown of velvet clouded its elusive blue, the soft plume upon her ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... started in pursuit of the retreating monster, but hardly had he taken two steps forward than there floated to his ear a sound—a voice which seemed to fall from the sky itself. He stopped short in his tracks and stood immovable, statuesque, listening. ...
— The Sign of the Spider • Bertram Mitford
... leather to exclude the cold and guarded by two 'proud young porters' in severe cocked hats and formidable batons, into a broad hall,—threw off our furred boots and cloaks, ascended a carpeted marble staircase, in every angle of which stood a statuesque footman in gaudy coat and unblemished unmentionables, and reached a broad landing upon the top thronged as usual with servants. Thence we passed through an antechamber into a long, high, brilliantly lighted, saffron-papered room, ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... loves of Rinaldo and Tancredi, from the adventures of the Pagan damsels Erminia, Armida and Clorinda. The Gerusalemme is in truth a Virgilian epic, upon which a romantic poem has been engrafted. Goffredo, idealized into statuesque frigidity, repeats the virtues of Aeneas; but the episode of Dido, which enlivens Virgil's hero, is transferred to Rinaldo's part in Tasso's story. The battles of Crusaders and Saracens are tedious copies of the battle in the tenth Aeneid; but the duels of Tancredi ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... development thus indicated she steadily advanced. Her affiliations were with grandeur, purity, and loveliness. An inherent and passionate tendency toward classic stateliness increased in her more and more. Characters of the statuesque order attracted her imagination—Ion, Galatea, Hermione—but she did not leave them soulless. In the interpretation of passion and the presentation of its results she revealed the striking truth that her perceptions could discern those consequences ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... there the holly stood green and statuesque in occasional clumps. And thus we fared on to Mashpee. The Mashpees, very mild and genial descendants of the "Chawums," if descendants they are, live quietly in little yellow houses that do not look prosperous, though the children are fat ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard
... flexibility and grace of motion which seemed to make every nerve, even to his finger-ends, vital with the expression of his soul. The close-shaven crown and the plain white Dominican robe gave a severe and statuesque simplicity to the lines of his figure. His head and face, like those of most of the men of genius whom modern Italy has produced, were so strongly cast in the antique mould as to leave no doubt of the identity of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 52, February, 1862 • Various
... for a few minutes longer. If there is magic in the Stone, let it work, he thought; and so he sat and watched her until he saw that the fixed stare of her eyes and the rigidity of her now perfectly statuesque face convinced him that the magic of the Stone had, as Phadrig had told him, made him the possessor of it, absolute master of the man or woman who had ...
— The Mummy and Miss Nitocris - A Phantasy of the Fourth Dimension • George Griffith
... very merry. He wore his green chiton with a rakishness that proved him anything but a dandy. His companion, addressed as Democrates, slighter, blonder, showed Simonides a handsome and truly Greek profile, set off by a neatly trimmed reddish beard. His purple-edged cloak fell in statuesque folds of the latest mode, his beryl signet-ring, scarlet fillet, and jewelled girdle bespoke wealth and taste. His face, too, might have seemed frank and affable, had not Simonides suddenly recalled an old proverb about mistrusting a man with eyes ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... himself a very striking somebody. He wore only a pareu, as I, of scarlet muslin, with the William Morris design, but he had wound his about so that it was a mere ornamental triangle upon his tall, powerful, statuesque body. His chest and back had a growth of red-gold hair, which, with his bronzed skin, his red-gold beard, dark curls over a high forehead, handsome nose, and blue eyes, made him all of the same color scheme. He was without doubt as near to a Greek deity in ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... drizzle. The warriors began drying their robes and their weapons—preoccupied with the worries so much dampness had wrought for their powder and bow strings. Suddenly one of them raised his head, deerlike, to listen. As wild things they all responded, and the group of men was statuesque as it listened to the beat of horses' hoofs. As a flock of blackbirds leaves a bush—with one motion—the statuary dissolved into a kaleidoscopic twinkle of movement as the warriors grabbed and ran and gathered. They sought their ponies' lariats, but before they could mount a hundred mounted ...
— The Way of an Indian • Frederic Remington
... and put it back in her purse. He was struck by the fact that with this new "personality" that had become a part of her, she was even more attractive than before. A glow had been added. The quiet, dignified, statuesque beauty of before had been mysteriously vitalized by a new kind ...
— Ten From Infinity • Paul W. Fairman
... Opaque and statuesque stood the figure of the baronet behind them. The wind was low. Dense masses of smoke hung amid the darting snakes of fire, and a red malign light was on the neighbouring leafage. No figures could be seen. Apparently the flames had nothing to contend against, for they were making terrible ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... and a couple of robins hopping about in their wild startled manner; in strange contrast to these last appeared that little feathered clodhopper, the chaffinch, plodding over the turf as if he had hobnailed boots on his feet; last, but not least, came statuesque blackbirds and thrushes, moving, when they moved, like automata. They all appear to be finding something to eat; but I Watch the thrushes principally, for these are more at home on the moist earth than the others, and ...
— Birds in Town and Village • W. H. Hudson
... raven hair, and his eyes like some mad animal's flashing with light and resolution, yet with a certain strange calmness, holds aloft in one hand a large knife—walks along not much back from the footlights—turns fully toward the audience his face of statuesque beauty, lit by those basilisk eyes, flashing with desperation, perhaps insanity—launches out in a firm and steady voice the words Sic semper tyrannis—and then walks with neither slow nor very rapid pace diagonally across to the back of the stage, and disappears. ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... difference at all. Here again that process of "vivification," which has been so often dwelt on, makes an astonishing progress—the blood and colour of the novel, which distinguish it from the more statuesque narrative, are supplied, if indirectly yet sufficiently and, in comparison with previous examples, amply. Here you get, almost or quite for the first time in the English novel, those spurts and sparks of animation which only the living voice can supply. Richardson is a humorist ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... wanted to laugh aloud, at the restlessness, superstition, weakness, and folly that had composed her life, and had now produced this egregious interview. And in the midst of this emotion she was touched by his statuesque face, with its glimmering suggestion of gentility cast down, of pride lost in a dread that she might not ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman |
