"Masterpiece" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... head of the new force. The very man! Finds out everything that happens, from the fall of a pin to an attempt at revolution, and if Donna Roma will only say a word for him.... Thanks!... What a beautiful bust! Yours, of course? A masterpiece! Fit to put beside the masterpieces ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... distilled and fermented liquors, the laws for their import and export, the monopoly of their manufacture, etc. It is remarkable how the budget is balanced by the aid of the alcoholic intoxication of the people, and how people are made to believe that a masterpiece of political economy is thereby achieved. In reality, the health and strength of the nation are sacrificed. This kind of political economy can only be qualified as false and deceitful. We cannot too often ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... always divergent from us on many important points. But indeed there was by no means complete unanimity among any portion of us, nor had any of us adopted implicitly all my father's opinions. For example, although his Essay on Government was regarded probably by all of us as a masterpiece of political wisdom, our adhesion by no means extended to the paragraph of it in which he maintains that women may, consistently with good government, be excluded from the suffrage, because their interest is the same with that of men. From this doctrine, I, and all those who formed ...
— Autobiography • John Stuart Mill
... out, not sorry to escape with his dignity and so cheap a masterpiece. Kloot was left, with swinging legs, dominating the situation. In idle curiosity and with the simplicity of perfectly bad manners, he took up the poet's papers and letters and perused them. As there were scraps of verse amid the mass, Pinchas ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... the pith of their doctrine. It was, as Professor Bain[80] thinks, an 'impelling and a guiding force' in the movement which culminated in the Reform Bill. The younger Utilitarians regarded it, says J. S. Mill, as 'a masterpiece of political wisdom';[81] while Macaulay[82] taunts them for holding it to be 'perfect and unanswerable.' This famous article is a terse and energetic summary of the doctrine implied in Bentham's Works, but there obscured under elaboration ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... This masterpiece of Defoe is before its time by a hundred years; nothing can be found in the realm of the English prose short-story to approach it in symmetry until the Ettrick Shepherd ...
— The Great English Short-Story Writers, Vol. 1 • Various
... its emaciated strength, and the serpent with its vital writhe and deadly reverted bite, are both characteristic of the finest Lombard work. The dog's head is 14th century Gothic—a masterpiece of broad, subtle, easy sculpture, getting expression with every touch, and never losing the least undulation of surface, while it utterly disdains the mere imitation of hair, or attainment of effect ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... without metallic ring is like teeth without enamel; they may be sound and healthy, but they are not brilliant.... In speech there are several colours—a bright, ringing quality; one soft and veiled. The bright, strident hues of purple and gold in a picture may produce a masterpiece of gorgeous colouring; so, in a different manner, may the harmonious juxtaposition of greys, lilacs and browns on a canvas by Veronese, Rubens, ...
— Style in Singing • W. E. Haslam
... inspiration for his art. The Aran Islands from which Synge gained his inspiration are rapidly losing that sense of isolation and self-dependence, which has hitherto been their rare distinction, and which furnished the motivation for Synge's masterpiece. Whether or not Synge finds a successor, it is none the less true that in English dramatic literature "Riders to the Sea" has an historic value which it would be difficult to over-estimate in its accomplishment and its possibilities. A writer in The Manchester Guardian ...
— Riders to the Sea • J. M. Synge
... navel or 'meditate while at stool' or cut my finger I will get new material with much less hardship. The last thing a composer or writer or painter needs is material; it is from excess of material he is the besotted creature he is. He may lack leisure or energy or ability or an active colon, but no masterpiece ever was or conceivably could be thwarted ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... That Idalian Ganymede was therefore fetched by Jupiter into heaven, Hephaestion dear to Alexander, Antinous to Adrian. Plato calls beauty for that cause a privilege of nature, Naturae gaudentis opus, nature's masterpiece, a dumb comment; Theophrastus, a silent fraud; still rhetoric Carneades, that persuades without speech, a kingdom without a guard, because beautiful persons command as so many captains; Socrates, a tyranny, "which tyranniseth ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... a year after the review in the Hamburgischer unpartheyischer Correspondent, which has been cited, the Jenaische Zeitungen von gelehrten Sachen in the number dated March 1, 1765, treats Sterne's masterpiece in its German disguise. This is the first mention of Sterne's book in the distinctively literary journals. The tone of this review is further that of an introducer of the new, and the critique is manifestly inserted in the paper ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... granted, and the company, being incorporated by Act of Parliament, assumed the title by which it has ever since been known. The minister took great credit to himself for his share in this transaction, and the scheme was always called by his flatterers "the Earl of Oxford's masterpiece." ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... and composing for other courts. In the winter of 1780-1, he made use of his leave of absence by writing and bringing out at Munich, with triumphant success, the splendid serious opera of Idomeneo, always so great a favourite with himself, and which is still regarded as a masterpiece. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... sensible of the beauty of Tintoretto's great picture of the Assembly of the Blessed in the same place, can discern in Michael Angelo's Last Judgment, in the Sistine chapel, any general idea, or one pervading thought, in harmony with the stupendous subject. He who will contemplate Raphael's masterpiece, the Transfiguration, and will go away into another chamber of that same Vatican, and contemplate another design of Raphael, representing (in incredible caricature) the miraculous stopping of a ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... this, despite its beauty, there is still a soupcon of formalism, a lingering trace of powder from the eighteenth century periwig, dimming the bright locks of poetry. Only the literary student reads that little masterpiece, the Ode to Evening, which sometimes heralds the Shelleian strain, while other passages are the sole things in the language comparable to the miniatures of Il Penseroso. Crashaw, Collins, Shelley—three ricochets of the one pebble, three ...
— Shelley - An Essay • Francis Thompson
... to that," said Beale, radiant with delight; "you're a fair masterpiece, you are; you earned it honest if ever a kid done. Pats you on the napper, she does, and out with 'arf a dollar! A bit of all ...
— Harding's luck • E. [Edith] Nesbit
... remarkable country Portugal is! Born dumb, she spoke twice: once when she gave Asia to Europe, again when she presented the Lusiades to the world. Her history is resumed in two miracles, a discovery and a masterpiece. But when the Cape of Good Hope was succeeded by Camoens, once more she relapsed into a silence that was broken only when she shouted ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... it might delight future generations," he said, taking the newly filled cup from Flamby. "Besides, it really is a compliment, kid, to ask you to pose for a big thing like The Dreaming Keats. It's going to be my masterpiece." ...
— The Orchard of Tears • Sax Rohmer
... were added to the already superfoliated wreath of Lord Justice Pimblekin by this fresh masterpiece of judicial wisdom. ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 29, May 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... doubt that many competent critics would argue that they belong to the first rank. Form, after all, is the important thing. It is design that counts, not decoration—design and organization. The pillars of a musical masterpiece are like the pillars of the Parthenon; they are almost as beautiful bleached white as they were in all their ...
— Damn! - A Book of Calumny • Henry Louis Mencken
... Jaloux' are models of lightness and brilliancy, whatever may be thought of their musicianship. 'Richard Coeur de Lion' is the one instance of Gretry having successfully attempted a loftier theme, and it remains his masterpiece. The scene is laid at the castle of Duerrenstein in Austria, where Richard lies imprisoned, and deals with the efforts of his faithful minstrel Blondel to rescue him. In this work Gretry adapted his style to his ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... looking for mules to carry our baggage to Teniet. At the hotel, there was a very celebrated picture by Horace Vernet, for which one of the Dutchmen offered a thousand francs, but the offer was declined by Madame Gerard. In my opinion, the picture was far from being a masterpiece. ...
— Notes in North Africa - Being a Guide to the Sportsman and Tourist in Algeria and Tunisia • W. G. Windham
... School, the president of the Court, and so forth. The poet, poor fellow, was feted so magnificently, and so belauded, that anybody but a young man of two-and-twenty would have shrewdly suspected a hoax. After dinner, Chatelet drew his rival on to recite The Dying Sardanapalus, the masterpiece of the hour; and the headmaster of the school, a man of a phlegmatic temperament, applauded with both hands, and vowed that Jean-Baptiste Rousseau had done nothing finer. Sixte, Baron du Chatelet, thought in his heart ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... crude frankness that amounts to lasciviousness. On the side of feminism there is hope in the widespread disgust with Cristabel Pankhurst's "Plain Facts on a Great Evil" as compared with the very general approval of Louise Creighton's polished masterpiece, "The Social Evil and How to Fight It." This represents exactly the present attitude of numerous men and women who calmly discuss together the great problems of life fearlessly and without any elements of lasciviousness such as some people seem to think is necessarily associated with ...
— Sex-education - A series of lectures concerning knowledge of sex in its - relation to human life • Maurice Alpheus Bigelow
... of one and the same woman. The following novel, His Royal Highness (1909), shows how a prince, educated in aloofness from life, is saved from a living death through love for an American heiress. Finally, there appeared only last year a masterpiece in the most exquisite style, the narrative Death in Venice (1913). It is a heart-felt confession, taking as its theme the chilling apprehension of approaching old age and death. In the late-awakening impulse of love for a young boy there is here a generally misunderstood ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... that great impostor, has been a great masterpiece of the devil: she has confessed unnatural lust, which is known to some of your number; she sat near the door where the charm of hair was found, which the girl declared did keep up her tongue; and upon burning thereof, it was loosed. The girl fell in fits upon ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant
... especially his cough, become unendurable. People who cough in clubs are generally amateurs of the art. They are huskier, more wheezing, more pertinacious in working away at a cough till they have made it a masterpiece than any other mortals. We believe that club Asthmats (it is quite as good a word as "AEsthetes") practise in the Reading Room of the British Museum, where they acquire their extraordinary compass and mastery of various notes. Be this as it may, the cough which drives every one but its owner out ...
— Lost Leaders • Andrew Lang
... severe discipline and architectonic design. Instead of one presiding, all-determining idea, we must be prepared to welcome a wealth of separate beauties, wrought out by men of independent genius, whereby each part is made a masterpiece, and many diverse elements become a whole of picturesque rather ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... this year, as he himself phrases it, he descended into hell; that is, he began those weary wanderings in exile which ended only with his life, and which stirred in him the deeps that found expression in his mighty poem, the Divina Commedia.[1] Throughout his masterpiece he speaks with eager respect of the old Roman writers, and of such Greeks as he knew—so we have admiration of the ancient intellect. He also speaks bitterly of certain popes, as well as of other ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... occasion fair and happy, Upon this page to thus record My gratitude to Patty. Within my album she hath wrought A picture of red roses, All painted with most cunning skill, The prettiest of posies. Had I but talent, in return A masterpiece I'd draw her, But failing that, I pen these lines Which now ...
— The Nicest Girl in the School - A Story of School Life • Angela Brazil
... there is, He must be above His highest creature, but—is there such a being? "The ground," says the Rev. Charles Voysey, "on which our belief in God rests is man. Man, parent of Bibles and Churches, inspirer of all good thoughts and good deeds. Man, the masterpiece of God's thought on earth. Man, the text-book of all spiritual knowledge. Neither miraculous nor infallible, man is nevertheless the only trustworthy record of the Divine mind in things pertaining to God. Man's reason, conscience, and affections are the only true ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... interest and selfishness. Somewhere, in that beautiful apartment of his there must be clues which will send him to the electric chair on former crimes: Warren is an artist who has handled other brushes than the ones he used on this masterpiece. He is not a beginner. So, I must ransack ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball
... Thackeray brought out his "History of Henry Esmond," a masterpiece of English historical fiction. In the dedication to Lord Ashburton, Thackeray thus announced his departure for America. "My volume will reach you when the author is on his voyage to a country where your name is as ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... was the question they were both every moment intently asking themselves. It was not a very important piece of literary workmanship, to be sure; only a social leader for a newspaper, to be carelessly skimmed to-day and used to light the fire to-morrow, if even that; and yet had it been the greatest masterpiece ever produced by the human intellect Ernest could not have worked at it with more conscientious care, or Edie watched him with profounder admiration. When Shakespeare sat down to write 'Hamlet,' it may be confidently asserted that neither Mistress Anne Shakespeare nor anybody else awaited the result ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... had misjudged the police in the matter of caution. It almost seemed that my labors had been useless; for surely these portentous preparations indicated some masterpiece of strategy. What an anticlimax it would be when the defenders of the fort were found to be dead! But what a still greater anticlimax if they were ...
— The Uttermost Farthing - A Savant's Vendetta • R. Austin Freeman
... which is considered the masterpiece of the firm of Becquet, is six feet in height and four and a half in width, made entirely of wrought iron, with triple sides, and divided into isolated compartments in ...
— File No. 113 • Emile Gaboriau
... himself by building, Villiers had a monomania for bricks and mortar, yet he found time to write 'The Rehearsal,' a play on which Mr. Reed in his 'Dramatic Biography' makes the following observation: 'It is so perfect a masterpiece in its way, and so truly original, that notwithstanding its prodigious success, even the task of imitation, which most kinds of excellence have invited inferior geniuses to undertake, has appeared as too arduous to be attempted with regard ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton
... to study. The citadel stood on ground but little, if at all, higher than that upon which the town was situated. It was pentagonal in form, and was built in 1565, and was the earliest fortification in Europe in this style, and was considered a masterpiece. It was separated from the town by its glacis. A deep fosse ran along the foot of the wall. The town itself was walled, and extended to the foot of the citadel, and was capable of offering a sturdy resistance ...
— Won by the Sword - A Story of the Thirty Years' War • G.A. Henty
... his work; when, to his great wonder, there stood the shoes all ready made, upon the table. The good man knew not what to say or think at such an odd thing happening. He looked at the workmanship; there was not one false stitch in the whole job; all was so neat and true, that it was quite a masterpiece. ...
— Grimms' Fairy Tales • The Brothers Grimm
... communicate to that sentence the stamp of infallibility, if I could regard it as anything but a mere encouragement of my Muse. More than this a deep feeling of my weakness will not let me think it; but if my strength shall ever climb to the height of a masterpiece, I certainly shall have this warm approval of your Excellency alone to thank for it, and so will the world. For several years I have had the happiness to know you from the public papers: long ago the splendour of the Mannheim theatre attracted ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... in Europe there hang, side by side, Rembrandt's first picture, a simple sketch, imperfect and faulty, and his great masterpiece, which all men admire. So in the two names, Simon and Peter, we have, first the rude fisherman who came to Jesus that day, the man as he was before Jesus began his work on him; and second, the man as he became during the years when the friendship of Jesus had warmed his heart and enriched ...
— Personal Friendships of Jesus • J. R. Miller
... man's floating prisons from the frequent descriptions given to them by John Adams, and especially from a drawing made by him, years ago, on the back of an old letter, representing a full-rigged man-of-war. This masterpiece of fine art had been nailed up on the walls of John Adams's hut, and had been fully expounded to each child in succession, as soon after its birth as was ...
— The Lonely Island - The Refuge of the Mutineers • R.M. Ballantyne
... in 1842, is the great prose classic of Russia. That amazing institution, "the Russian novel," not only began its career with this unfinished masterpiece by Nikolai Vasil'evich Gogol, but practically all the Russian masterpieces that have come since have grown out of it, like the limbs of a single tree. Dostoieffsky goes so far as to bestow this tribute upon an earlier work by the same author, a short story entitled The ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... a chaos of pictures, suggested by the scenery of Lauterbrunnen and Grindelwald, half animated by vague personifications and sensational narrative. Like Harold, and Scott's Marmion, it just misses being a great poem. The Coliseum is its masterpiece of description, the appeal, "Astarte, my beloved, speak to me," its nearest approach to pathos. The lonely death of the hero makes an effective close to the moral tumult of the preceding scenes. But the reflections, often striking, are ...
— Byron • John Nichol
... he has produced a masterpiece, if you please! I suppose it was not meant to amuse us at all, but that he arranged the performance and fumigated us with sulphur to demonstrate to us how plays should be written, and what is worth acting. I am tired of him. ...
— The Sea-Gull • Anton Checkov
... marvellous sense of justice, produced that noble masterpiece, the negotiorum gestio. When the property of an oppressed person is in danger, any man may step forward to save it. This man is the gestor, the director of affairs not strictly his own. He has received no warrant—that is, ...
— The Jewish State • Theodor Herzl
... "La Nouvelle Heloise," resumed his book, saying: "Then, I shall not have time to finish M. Jean-Jacques Rousseau's masterpiece, and upon my word I don't regret it, for it is the most utterly false and wearisome book I ever read in ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas
... stage, and victory seemed to rest with the shot, when the war came to an end on the very day when Nicholl had completed a new armor-plate of wrought steel. It was a masterpiece of its kind, and bid defiance to all the projectiles of the world. The captain had it conveyed to the Polygon at Washington, challenging the president of the Gun Club to break it. Barbicane, peace having been declared, ...
— Jules Verne's Classic Books • Jules Verne
... with explaining in a few words who Isis was, which interested him but moderately. His masterpiece, as a faithful reproduction of nature, is his marsh ranunculus, which I had introduced to him under the Latin name of ranuncula scelerata. He has so exquisitely represented these insignificant little yellow flowers that it is impossible not to ...
— Stories of Modern French Novels • Julian Hawthorne
... little masterpiece in its vividness and condensation. The passions of hate and jealousy have seldom been so well portrayed. The time and place are probably France and the sixteenth or seventeenth century. Berdoe has called attention in his Browning Cyclopaedia, ...
— Browning's Shorter Poems • Robert Browning
... from a filthy heart. What and who in it are immoral? Not Valjean! Not Fantine even, nor Cosette! Not Marius! Not Javert, the detective! Is the chapter on Cambronne's surrender the offending fragment of the great literary masterpiece? That chapter is the sublimity of disgust! There never was anyone hurt spiritually or morally by the great French masterpiece of fiction. The man who can say the book is defiling, would draw defilement from the fount of Castaly. The Philadelphia school board ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... a company of ancients, who were in those days called prophets and sybils, whose majesty was that of the mind alone at its intensest. And this painting was acknowledged through ages and ages to be the summit and masterpiece of art. Of course we cannot believe such a tale literally. It is only a legend. We do not believe in archangels; and the notion that thirty thousand years ago sculpture and painting existed, and had even reached ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... Exhibition opened, and the portrait, showing Sir Jee in his robe and chain and in a chair, was instantly hailed as possibly the most glorious masterpiece of modern times. All the critics were of one accord. The committee and Sir Jee were reassured, but only partially, and Sir Jee rather less so than the committee. For there was something in the enthusiastic criticism which gravely disturbed him. An enlightened generation, thoroughly ...
— The Grim Smile of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... the student must agree with the investigator that the Tarik e Soudan is a masterpiece. Barth, the distinguished German scholar, says that the book forms "one of the most important additions that the present age has made to the history of mankind."[205] Lady Lugard, another writer in this field, believes that it is not merely an authentic narrative but is an unusually ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... Justices dissenting (Black, Douglas, Rutledge, Jackson), Justice Jackson alone filed a written opinion. To him the decision is "an example of the manner in which, in the law of domestic relations, 'confusion now hath made his masterpiece,'" but for the first Williams case and its progeny, the judgment of the Connecticut court might properly have held that the Rice divorce decree was void for every purpose because it was rendered ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... own day! Mistral's name has long been European, and other English writers have charmingly described the Feux Floraux of the olden time and the society of Lou Felibrige with its revival of Provencal literature. But forty years ago, and twenty years before his masterpiece had found a translator here, he was known and highly esteemed by ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... retribution followed him no further. Extracts from one of these "Lives" are, for what they are worth, printed in the Appendix, together with his posthumous Account of the Poisoning of the late Mr. Francis Blandy, a counterblast to Mary's masterpiece. This tract includes the text of three letters, alleged to have been written by her to her lover, and dated respectively 30th June, 16th July, and 1st August, 1751; but as, after his death, all his papers were, by order of Lord Cranstoun, sealed up and sent to his lordship ...
— Trial of Mary Blandy • William Roughead
... a pity that these cameos of romance should suffer the same fate as Mr. Lang's version of Aucassin et Nicolete, which has been swept off the face of the earth by the Charge of the Six Hundred, who were lucky enough to obtain copies of the only edition of that little masterpiece of translation. Mr. Morris has, therefore, consented to allow his versions of the Romances to be combined into one volume in a form not unworthy of their excellence but more accessible to those lovers of books whose purses have a habit of varying ...
— Old French Romances • William Morris
... performed. A little crowd of people gathered about him on the stoop, peeping over each other's heads with huge admiration,—fat Otis Hodge, and the tall stage-driver, and the little boys, all declaring that it was the masterpiece of sights. Some few coppers did the man obtain, as well as much praise. He had come over the high, solitary mountain, where for miles there could hardly be a soul to ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 1 • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... actual satin let into the picture, after the pre-Raphaelite or realistic tendency commonly found in such juvenile works of art, hung over the narrow painted mantelpiece. The fond mother had had this masterpiece framed and glazed in the days when her son was still a little lad, unspoiled by University life and those splendid aspirations which afterwards made his home hateful to him. There were some tattered books upon a shelf by the bed—school prizes, an old Virgil, ...
— Fenton's Quest • M. E. Braddon
... colors, says the great naturalist Buffon. The stones and metals polished by our arts are not comparable to this jewel of Nature. She has it least in size of the order of birds, maxime miranda in minimis. Her masterpiece is the Humming bird, and upon it she has heaped all the gifts which the other birds may only share. Lightness, rapidity, nimbleness, grace, and rich apparel all belong to this little favorite. The emerald, the ruby, and the topaz gleam upon its dress. It never soils them with the ...
— Birds, Illustrated by Color Photography, Vol. II, No 3, September 1897 • Various
... Lastly, one of Claude's setting summer suns would have glorified the whole. Oh, believe me, God's creatures fighting, fin for fin, a thousand miles from land, and with the round horizon for an arena; is no ignoble subject for a masterpiece. ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... London between 1812 and 1816 certainly increased his tendency to cynicism, as did his divorce from his wife. While these experiences distorted his personal character, they supplied him, however, with much of the irony wrought into his masterpiece, "Don Juan." His poetic genius derived its strongest stimulus from his imbittered domestic life and from his travels in Spain, Italy and Greece. This twofold character of the poet it is that is revealed in his best poems, "Childe Harold" ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... life is an end. That is what we must tell ourselves in order really to live in this world. Hence the obligation to perfect life, to make it high and beautiful, to make a masterpiece of it. Hence too our contempt and hatred for those who wish to tarnish life, either by their thoughts or by ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 4, July, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... only too readily to fancifulness and unreality, which were among the most besetting sins of Miss Barrett's genius. The minor poems were incomparably more popular, and the favourite of all was that masterpiece of rhetorical sentimentality, 'Lady Geraldine's Courtship.' It must have been a little mortifying to the authoress to find this piece, a large part of which had been dashed off at a single heat in order ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... my brain, each claiming from my hand Its immortality. But thou, my child, Remind'st me of mine oath, my sacred pride, The eternal hatred lodged within my breast. Philip of Spain shall wait. I will not deign To add to-day the final touch of life Unto this masterpiece. ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... which his instinctive refinement and delicacy of taste enabled him to combine, with all the higher powers of the man, the courtly graces of the gentleman and scholar—still his happiest effort, the masterpiece of his genius, in which his own mind is displayed in the most agreeable light, and his inspiration breathes forth with the greatest brilliancy and beauty, will be found to be dictated by the associations of his early rustic days. When I reflect, therefore, how copious, how graphic, how true ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various
... sacred head,— Lookest down in mournful majesty On thy brethren's figures Lying scatter'd At thy feet! In the shadow of the bramble Earth and rubbish veil them, Lofty grass is waving o'er them Is it thus thou, Nature, prizest Thy great masterpiece's masterpiece? Carelessly destroyest thou Thine own ...
— The Poems of Goethe • Goethe
... his elbow, on concluding each of the foregoing short sentences, could be surpassed by nothing but the exultation with which he fell back and eyed him when he had finished this brilliant display of eloquence and sagacity; his great blue waistcoat heaving with the throes of such a masterpiece, and his nose in a state of violent inflammation from ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... grinning at Neal. "It's going to take me a long time, I reckon, but you said I had something like ten hours for sleep, so I guess I can spare two or three for this effort at literary composition. I figure, sheriff, that this'll be my masterpiece." ...
— The Coyote - A Western Story • James Roberts
... out the transforming thing," said Anne softly. "There'll be love there, Phil—faithful, tender love, such as I'll never find anywhere else in the world—love that's waiting for me. That makes my picture a masterpiece, doesn't it, even if the ...
— Anne Of The Island • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... of Pisa, circular, of marble, with dome two hundred feet high, embellished with numerous columns, is a notable work of the twelfth century. The pulpit is a masterpiece of Nicola Pisano. Casa d'Oro at Venice is noted for its elegance. It was built in the fourteenth century. The Cathedral of Lisieux dates chiefly from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and contains many works of art. The Palais de Justice is of the fifteenth century. ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... as the Word that is God, Spirit, and Truth. This Word cor- [25] rects the philosopher, confutes the astronomer, exposes the subtle sophist, and drives diviners mad. The Bible is the learned man's masterpiece, the ignorant man's dictionary, the wise ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy
... for John Dryden the poet, her second cousin, was reproached with having been an Anabaptist in his youth, and Johnathan Swift, a more distant connection, feared nothing in heaven or earth. It is no wonder, then, that even an enemy wrote of her as "the masterpiece of women's wit," or that her husband followed her lead with a devotion that never swerved. She had married him at Alford in Lincolnshire, and both were members of Mr. Cotton's congregation ...
— Anne Bradstreet and Her Time • Helen Campbell
... current education and habits of life? Ceci tuera cela,[28] the last great poet might have said of the first circulating library. An insatiable appetite for new novels makes it as hard to read a masterpiece as it seems to a Parisian boulevardier to live in a quiet country. Until a man can truly enjoy a draft of clear water bubbling from a mountain side, his taste is in an unwholesome state. And so he who finds the Heliconian spring insipid should look ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... irritating of his creditors, George Henry indicted his masterpiece. He admitted his obligation, he expressed his satisfaction at paying an interest which made it a good investment for the creditor, and then he entered into a little disquisition as to the creditor's manner and scale of thought and existence, followed by certain ...
— The Wolf's Long Howl • Stanley Waterloo
... entrapping her into a marriage, are admirably drawn, as is its companion or counterpart, when Badman, in his widower-hood, suffers an infamous strumpet to inveigle him into a miserable marriage, as he so richly deserved. The death-bed scene of the pious broken-hearted Mrs. Badman, is a masterpiece. In fact the whole is a series of pictures drawn by a most admirable artist, and calculated to warn and attract the ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... Lychwr in Carmarthenshire being the spot where he first saw the light. He was an excellent poet, and displayed in his compositions such elegance of language, and such a knowledge of prosody, that it was customary, long after his death, when any masterpiece of vocal song or eloquence was produced, to say that it bore the traces of Lawdden's hatchet. At the request of Griffith ap Nicholas, a powerful chieftain of South Wales, and a great patron of the Muse, he drew up a statute relating to poets and poetry, and ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... suggestiveness of the artist's method. But, whether it be reptile or quadruped, the spirit of repletion broods over the canvas with irresistible force. Mr. Thaddeus Tumulty sends some admirable drawings in pise de terre, one of which, called "The Pragmatist at Play," is a masterpiece of osteological bravura.... ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, April 5, 1916 • Various
... artist with results as shown; But his ideal was not as yet attained; It needed this, as palace needs a throne, But throne a king—then is perfection gained, When his great masterpiece hangs in its place, And the great artist looks in ...
— Gleams of Sunshine - Optimistic Poems • Joseph Horatio Chant
... side, and measured 220 by 100 feet on the top of the stylobate. It was the work of Ictinus and Callicrates, built to enshrine the noble statue of the goddess by Phidias, astanding chryselephantine figure forty feet high. It was the masterpiece of Greek architecture not only by reason of its refinements of detail, but also on account of the beauty of its sculptural adornments. The frieze about the cella wall under the pteroma ceiling, representing in low relief with masterly skill the Panathenaic procession; the sculptured groups in the ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Architecture - Seventh Edition, revised • Alfred D. F. Hamlin
... passages, . . . . till we reached the picture-gallery of the Vatican, into which I had never been before. There are but three rooms, all lined with red velvet, on which hung about fifty pictures, each one of them, no doubt, worthy to be considered a masterpiece. In the first room were three Murillos, all so beautiful that I could have spent the day happily in looking at either of them; for, methinks, of all painters he is the tenderest and truest. I could not enjoy these pictures now, however, because ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... ring, which is still more precious from the virtue of the talisman which rendered you the possessor of it. But," continued he, "you ought to have informed yourself at what time, how, and by whom that wonderful masterpiece of art was composed." ...
— Eastern Tales by Many Story Tellers • Various
... was our masterpiece! He happened along-street (his jaw tied up where Sebastian had clouted him) when we were trundling the first demi-cannon ...
— Puck of Pook's Hill • Rudyard Kipling
... Thermidor has seemed to men of all parties since a masterpiece of tactical ineptitude. If Robespierre had been a statesman instead of a phrasemonger, he had a clear course. He ought to have taken the line of argument that Danton would have taken. That is to say, he ought ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley
... the hill, the girl screaming pointlessly meanwhile. There was just time—you'll have to take my word for this; Ferguson explained it all to me in the most meticulous detail, but I can't repeat that masterpiece of exposition—for Ferguson to decide. To decide again, you understand, precisely as he had decided on the Argentina. Rotten luck, wasn't it? He could just have flung tow-head out of the way by getting under the ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... into the Territory again. A lot of them had purchased a site for a town on the Lake shore, and they gave me a lot. When you come out, I'll build you a house on it. The Lake seems more supernaturally beautiful now, than ever. It is the masterpiece of the Creation. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... married at Milan to a daughter of Count Giovanni Borromeo, and on this occasion, doubtless, he employed the gifted Roman sculptor to design the magnificent doorway which now adorns the Louvre and is a masterpiece of classic elegance. But now a fresh invitation reached Cristoforo ...
— Beatrice d'Este, Duchess of Milan, 1475-1497 • Julia Mary Cartwright
... towards the world. It is commonly said that the only one of the writer's novels which contains a sufficient amount of charity and sweetness is Humphry Clinker. The statement is not quite true. Greaves is not so strikingly amiable as Smollett's masterpiece only because it is not so striking in any of its excellences; their lines are always a little blurred. Still, it shows that ten years before Clinker, Smollett had learned to combine the contradictory elements of life in something like ...
— The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves • Tobias Smollett
... setting for the final exit of a man whom Life had equipped to conquer, and Fate, in her most ironic mood, had challenged to battle; with the sting of death in victory if he won. He had beaten her at her own game. He had always aimed at consummation, the masterpiece; and here, in his final ...
— Sleeping Fires • Gertrude Atherton
... that as a whole this book is equal to "The Young Visiters." Only once in a decade or so is it vouchsafed the writing craft that one among us shall create a masterpiece, destined in time to become a classic and a thing immortal. Only once in an eon or so is it vouchsafed a writer to write a masterpiece at the age of nine years. Very few among us ever produce a second perfect work on top of a first ...
— Daisy Ashford: Her Book • Daisy Ashford
... chest. Amidst the folds of the glossy satin that enveloped his throat gleamed a turquoise, of such value as a jeweller might have kept for fifty years before he could find a customer rich and frivolous enough to buy it. The very head of his cane was a masterpiece of art, and the man himself, so elegant despite his strength, and so fresh despite his years!—it is astonishing how well men wear when they think of no ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... or less extended backward. This is notably apparent in the work of the Van Eycks: in the Eve in the Brussels Gallery; in the wife of Arnolfini in the highly finished portrait group in the National Gallery; even the virgins in the great masterpiece of the Van Eycks in the Cathedral at Ghent assume the ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 4 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... Aldis Wright's: still, which is the later, which the earlier, it were hard to determine on internal grounds. For, as has befallen many a greater poet, FitzGerald's alterations were by no means always improvements. One sees this in the various editions of his masterpiece, the 'Rubaiyat.' However, by a comparison of the date (1856) on the fly-leaf of my father's notebook with that of a published letter of FitzGerald's to Professor Cowell (May 28, 1868), I am led to conclude that my father's copy is ...
— Two Suffolk Friends • Francis Hindes Groome
... thus they found us; the two girls chatting over the perfection of the tombs of the constable and his wife; the soldier blind to the charms of his sister's companion, and wrapped in reverent contemplation of a wooden masterpiece. ...
— The Car of Destiny • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... to see it, and the corporation bought it for the cathedral. The city of Basel bespoke another just like it. This order aroused the jealousy of the authorities, who tried to make the mechanic promise that he would never repeat his masterpiece for another town. "Heaven gave me not my talents to feed your vain ambition," said the man of craft: "the men of Basel were quicker to recognize my skill than you were. I will make no such promise." Upon that the rejected suitor, who was among the magistrates, persuaded his colleagues ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 31. October, 1873. • Various
... was to overthrow the great Greek poet, it must have been a bitter disappointment to Marivaux to see that his burlesque passed almost unnoticed by his contemporaries and was soon forgotten. The same year he wrote a Telemaque travesti, a parody on the masterpiece of Fenelon. This work was not published until 1736, when it was received with such disapprobation that he hastened to ...
— A Selection from the Comedies of Marivaux • Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux
... said, "before a masterpiece of sea and rock, such as only Richards can paint. It was a view of Land's End, Cornwall, and in the artist's very best vein. My admiration made me totally unmindful of my surroundings, so much so, indeed, that, although the gallery was crowded, I caught myself expressing my delight ...
— The Darrow Enigma • Melvin L. Severy
... to-day, sir," he ventured. "As we have been bowling along, my mind has unconsciously been dwelling on Jane Austen. Think of it, sir, only one hundred years ago and no railroads. Have we really lost or gained? Marvelous girl, that, sir. Masterpiece of literature when she was twenty-one, and no background but an untidy English village. You've heard ...
— Best Short Stories • Various
... glory, in one campaign, of defeating, in pitched battle, the best general and most powerful army possessed by France, and capturing its strongest frontier fortress, the masterpiece of Vauban, under the eyes of one hundred and twenty thousand assembled from all quarters for its relief. He put the keystone at the same time into this arch of glory, by again declining the magnificent ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 364, February 1846 • Various
... house all by our two selves that I want to enjoy myself for a space. For a month, a whole month longer, I am going to play and have the good of life. Then I shall shut myself up and say farewell to the world while I create a masterpiece that will rend your heart and your tear glands. Only," she dropped down on a footstool beside him; "only I do hope that Allyn and Babe will return to their wonted habits, and that this new cook will learn that one doesn't usually ...
— Phebe, Her Profession - A Sequel to Teddy: Her Book • Anna Chapin Ray
... and other novels. "Gene" Rhodes had the "right tune." He achieved a style that can be called literary. The Hired Man on Horseback, by May D. Rhodes, is a biography of the writer. Perhaps "Paso Por Aqui" will endure as his masterpiece. Rhodes had an intense loyalty to his land and people; he was as gay, gallant, and witty as he was earnest. More than most Western writers, Rhodes was conscious of art. He had the common touch and also he was a writer for writing men. The elements of simplicity and the ...
— Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest • J. Frank Dobie
... a poetic fervor and a lily-like kimono, recited with tremulous intensity this masterpiece of ...
— The Re-echo Club • Carolyn Wells |
