"Torso" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... evolutionary theory of development. Eve is unlovely, her limbs lanky, her bust mediaeval, her flanks Flemish. In her right hand she holds the fatal apple. Adam's head is full of character; it is Christ-like; his torso ugly, his legs wooden. Yet how superior to the copies which are now attached to the original picture at Ghent. There the figures are clothed, clumsy, ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... hunger in their eyes and a strange wistfulness as they watched Harrigan strip off his shirt, but when they saw the wasted arms, lean, with the muscles defined and corded as if by famine, their faces went blank again. For they glanced in turn at the vast torso of McTee. When he moved his arms, his smooth shoulders rippled in significant spots—the spots where the driving muscles lay. But Harrigan saw nothing save the throat of ...
— Harrigan • Max Brand
... feet tall. His legs were merely blocks, fully as great in diameter as they were in length, supporting a torso of Herculean dimensions. His arms were as large as a strong man's thigh and hung almost to the floor. His astounding shoulders, fully a yard across, merged into and supported an enormous head. The ...
— Skylark Three • Edward Elmer Smith
... poor devil, but anyhow I'm not in a position to be going around with ginger-tea in a spoon, or Ecclesiastes under my arm,—very good things. Your profession has more or less to do with the mind as well as the body, and you may take my word for it that Boyd Madras's mind is as sick as his torso. By the way, he calls himself 'Charles Boyd,' so I suppose we needn't recall to him his former experiences ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... whose coarse, bestial features and massive bull's head were fitter for a galley-slave than a soldier, were the lithe, exquisite limbs and the oval, delicate face of a man from the Valley of the Rhone. Beneath a canopy of flapping, tawny wild-beast skins, the spoils of his own hands, was flung the torso of one of the splendid peasants of the Sables d'Olonne; one steeped so long in blood and wine and alcohol that he had forgotten the blue, bright waves that broke on the western shores of his boyhood's home, save when he muttered thirstily in his dreams of the cool sea, as he was muttering now. ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... soap, and Michael Angelo simply peels off successive strata, apparently extracting a statue without the smallest effort. The three grades are respectively shown in the rough-hewn head of the crouching figure, then in the head of the triumphant youth above him, finally in his completed torso. But each stage is finished relatively. Completion is relative to distance; the Brutus is finished or unfinished according to our standpoint, physical or aesthetic. Moreover, the treatment is not partial or piecemeal; the statue was in the marble from the beginning, ...
— Donatello • David Lindsay, Earl of Crawford
... the first time on this broken fragment of an ichthyolite,—the sole representative and record of an entire genus of creatures that had been once called into existence to fulfil some wise purpose of the Creator long since accomplished,—I bethought me of Rogers's noble lines on the Torso,— ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... shall have you again. Torso, where we are exiled for the present, is only a night's ride from ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... Filippo Neri was wont to give those half-dramatic musical entertainments which, originating in the oratory of the religious community established by him, are now known throughout the world as oratorios. Between these two objects still stands the large torso of a tree which bears the name of "Tasso's oak," because the poet's favourite seat was under its shadow. It suffered much from the violence of a thunderstorm in 1842, but numerous branches have since sprouted from the old trunk, ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... a young man whose hair was not immoderately long, but abundant and curly, and who was otherwise English in his equipment, had just turned his back on the Belvedere Torso in the Vatican and was looking out on the magnificent view of the mountains from the adjoining round vestibule. He was sufficiently absorbed not to notice the approach of a dark-eyed, animated German who came up to him and placing a hand on his shoulder, said with a strong accent, "Come here, ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... a man of about thirty-five, square-built, with a torso inclined to a somewhat heavy slenderness, and a face with blunt but regular features, heavily handsome. One of those fair Englishmen who grow darker after adolescence; hair, moustache and skin acquiring a dull sombreness in fairness. But Brodrick's face gained in its effect ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... appeared, and two hands seized the leather straps hanging on either side of the door and slowly pulled up an enormous body, whose feet striking on the step, sounded like two canes. When the man had hoisted his torso into the compartment I noticed, at the loose edge of his trousers, the end of a wooden leg, which was soon followed by its mate. A head appeared behind this traveller and asked; "Are you all ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... many other photographs—girls and women, most of them; but here is a man, dignified by a place apart upon the bureau. He occupies one side of it by himself, balanced by the sisters at the other. A youngish man in yeomanry uniform he appears only in torso. He has the smooth head of a soldier, and rather a low, but very square, forehead. His eyes are smallish, and set deep. They look to be grey, light grey, but may be light blue. He has a good nose, high-bridged, large, thin, and practically ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett
... protracted and awe-filled pause, She hardly dares to wade the stream and moves As though in dread to wake some sleeping god, Yet still she nears and nears the further bank Where there is shade under a shumac's eaves. The brilliant surface cut her right in two, And the reflection of her bronzed torso Hid all beneath the polished gliding mirror; How her face listened to that sleep divine Whose audible breath was tuned ...
— Miscellany of Poetry - 1919 • Various
... crushed body lay motionless. A pile of boulders, rocks and loose metallic earth was strewn upon his head and torso, illumined by the outer light through a jagged rent where the cliff-face ...
— Beyond the Vanishing Point • Raymond King Cummings
... nose, by which his speech was made thick and very nasal, like that attributed to Capuchins. His hands, which were short and broad, were of the kind that make women say: "You have the hands of a rascal." His legs seemed slender for his torso. In that fat and active body an absolutely lawless spirit disported itself, and a thorough experience of the things of life, together with a profound contempt for social convention, lay hidden beneath the apparent indifference ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... shoulder, with limbs grotesquely slack and awry, as if in unpleasant mimicry of a broken doll. Only the whites of bloodshot eyes showed in her livid and distorted countenance. Arms and legs twitched spasmodically, the ample torso was ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... up on his feet. It was an impressively effortless motion. There was a thick wide torso on short thick legs under the golden fur. The structure was gorilla-like. Pilli might weigh ...
— Legacy • James H Schmitz
... pleasure, Samson proudly stripped off his thin calico jacket and exposed a torso of terrifying power, but beautiful in its play of muscles as ...
— Pieces of Eight • Richard le Gallienne
... distinguished a bare foot emerging from the chaos of color, half-tints and vague shadows that made up a dim, formless fog. Its living delicate beauty held them spellbound. This fragment that had escaped an incomprehensible, slow, and gradual destruction seemed to them like the Parian marble torso of some Venus emerging from the ashes of ...
— The Unknown Masterpiece - 1845 • Honore De Balzac
... my friend of the splendid torso, handcuffed and fettered. When he, too, lurched and fell, I became aware for the first time that the frigate was rocking on a gentle south-westerly swell, and I turned to the bulwarks for a glance overside at the water which, up to an hour ago, had been smooth ...
— Merry-Garden and Other Stories • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... has suffered great losses of territory in the storms and struggles of the past. The Germany of to-day, considered geographically, is a mutilated torso of the old dominions of the Emperors; it comprises only a fraction of the German peoples. A large number of German fellow-countrymen have been incorporated into other States, or live in political independence, like the Dutch, who have developed into a separate nationality, but in language ...
— Germany and the Next War • Friedrich von Bernhardi
... vulgarity, when clothed. The soul not only sits at the windows of the eyes, and hangs upon the gateway of the lips; she speaks as well in the intricate, yet harmonious lines of the body, and the ever-varying play of the limbs. Look at the torso of Ilioneus, the son of Niobe, and see what an agony of terror and supplication cries out from that headless and limbless trunk! Decapitate Laocooen, and his knotted muscles will still express the same dreadful suffering and resistance. None knew this better than the ancient sculptors; ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor
... probably usual enough before CROMWELL, with the iron sides, ordered all such baubles to be removed. In a hole of the upper wall of the Town Hall there is a life-size statuary of SHAKSPEARE, with legs complete, showing that he was not actually deficient in such extremities and a mere gifted Torso: and it is presumable that the reason why only his upper portions are generally represented is, that marble in these parts is too precious a commodity to ...
— Baboo Jabberjee, B.A. • F. Anstey
... feel inclined to groan and shut the book. I have met her so often in the weary ways of fiction! I know every variety of her so well! She consists of nothing but superlatives, and is as conventional as the torso of an Egyptian statue, with her everlasting physical perfection. I think her as repulsive as a barber's block. I confess that a woman who has golden hair and manages to look like a lady, or to be like one even in a book, is a wonder, considering all that is associated with ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... blank out his mind while the meditechs adjusted the neurocontacts to his head and torso. They finished at last and withdrew. He was alone in the booth now, looking at the dead-white walls, completely bare except for the viewscreen before his eyes. The screen finally began to glow slightly, then brightened ...
— The Dueling Machine • Benjamin William Bova
... an Earth mind. They were tremendously tall—twelve feet at least—but as thin as so many animated poles. Their two legs were scarce four inches through, taper-less, boneless, like lengths of pipe; and like two flexible pipes they were joined to a slightly larger pipe of a torso that could not have been more than a foot in diameter. There were four arms, a pair on each side of the cylindrical body, that weaved feebly about ...
— The Red Hell of Jupiter • Paul Ernst
... is not in my teeth, Don Miguel. It is here." And Pablo laid a swarthy hand upon his torso. "There is a sadness in my heart, Don Miguel. Two years has Don Mike been with the soldiers. Is it not time ...
— The Pride of Palomar • Peter B. Kyne
... thought that the unprecedented had happened and some member of the expedition was inside those jealously guarded tent walls with Layroh. Then he saw that the figure must be a mere trick of the shadows cast by the moving light upon some piece of luggage. It looked like the torso of a man, but the head was a shapeless blob and the arms were nothing more than boneless dangling flaps. A moment later the light moved on and both ...
— The Cavern of the Shining Ones • Hal K. Wells
... one grand design, which, when consummated, is a Whole that seems to typify the universe. Others give you but fragments—but such as awaken imaginations of beauty and of power transcendent, like that famous Torso. And some show you Nature glimmering beneath a veil which, nunlike, she has religiously taken; and then call not Nature ideal only in that holy twilight, for then it is that she is spiritual, and we who belong to her feel that we ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... advancing together like soldiers at manoeuvres. The sun at this moment falls perpendicularly on their heads and strange headgear, details their everlasting smile, and then sheds itself on their shoulders and their naked torso, exaggerating their athletic muscles. Each holding in his hand the symbolical cross, the three giants rush forward with a formidable stride, heads raised, smiling, in a radiant ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... virtue. It laves the most mediocre and the most corrupt: and then, in their artists, what a sense of beauty! I remarked that much less in the old days. You taught me to see. My eyes were opened in the light of Rome. Your Renaissance men have helped me to understand these. A page of Debussy, a torso of Rodin, a phrase of Suares, these are all in the direct ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... lighted there. Lounsbury stepped forward and peered down—then recoiled, as startled as if he had happened upon something dead. On the floor was a man—a man whose back was bent rounding, and whose arms and legs were hugged up against his abdomen and chest. Torso and limbs were alike, frightfully shrunken; the hands, mere claws. Lounsbury could not see the face. But the hair was uncovered, and it was the hair that made him "goose-flesh" from head to heel. It was white—not the white of old age, with glancing ...
— The Plow-Woman • Eleanor Gates
... door came the strident tones of the lieutenant's modulating contralto. He had expected to see the general towering over the girl's shrinking figure, but as he entered she was bent earnestly in the middle, and the top of her torso inclined toward General Morrison, who had tilted as far back as ...
— A Fine Fix • R. C. Noll
... studio. On an easel nearly in the middle of the room, and not very far from the portrait of the judge, there was a sketch of Nicolas Arabian's head, neck and shoulders. No collar or clothes were shown. Garstin had told Arabian flatly that he wasn't going to paint a magnificent torso like his concealed by infernal linen and serge, and Arabian had been quite willing that his neck and shoulders should be ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens
... grace that hard work could not make awkward; work only gave her bodily power, brawn, and form. Though no more than seventeen years of age, she was a superb woman, her chest thrown forward, her back like the torso of a Venus de Milo, her head placed on the throat of a Minerva, and the nature of a child molded in the form of a matron. Joyce Basil had black hair and eyes—very long, excessive hair, that in the mornings she tied up with haste so imperfectly ...
— Short Story Classics (American) Vol. 2 • Various
... little cage; in the cage is a bird; and my soul is in that bird." When the bird is seized by the hero of the story, the Rakshas feels that something terrible has occurred. When the bird's legs and wings are pulled off, the Rakshas becomes a mere head and torso; and when the bird's neck is wrung, down falls the Rakshas dead. In like manner, in the tale of "The Demon and the King's Son" (No. 24), the demon dies when the prince has killed a certain bird, the lives of the bird and of the demon being conterminable. ...
— Indian Fairy Tales • Anonymous
... that still air And the song would be of crystal Snapped in silence, or a bronze vase Smooth and graceful, curved and shining. Tell an old tale or a history; It would seem a slow Procession Full of gestures; limbs and torso White ...
— Georgian Poetry 1916-17 - Edited by Sir Edward Howard Marsh • Various
... yellowish pussy green. In the second place, the larger mouth, complete with jaws and impressive musculature, opened not into a digestive system, but into a large closed pouch which comprised most of the animal's torso. There was no proper digestive system at all, only a rudimentary gut, heavily laced with blood vessels, terminating at one end in the small second mouth, at the other in an even smaller anus. Otherwise, the thing had no insides except a good pair of lungs and a stout heart—none at ...
— Cat and Mouse • Ralph Williams
... such distinctions are, more particularly in painting, not available. With Sir Joshua, he considers borrowing justifiable, and that it does not impair the originality of invention. The instances given of happy adoption are the "Torso of Apollonius," by Michael Angelo; of the figure of "Adam dismissed from Paradise," by Raffaelle, borrowed from Massaccio, as likewise the figure of "Paul at Athens;" and for figures of Michael Angelo's, Raffaelle, Parmegiano, Poussin, are all ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... pedal extremities peeping from the unfeminine pyjama; ruby lips, uncarmined, ajar; whilst to port like rocks from the ocean, unshaven chins rise unrebuked from blanket billows, and pyjama button and buttonhole play touch across the unseemly, unrestrained and unconfined masculine torso. ...
— Leonie of the Jungle • Joan Conquest
... sculpture galleries in the British Museum. The statues are not, it is said, the best; broken too, and mutilated, and seen in a dull, commonplace light. But they were shape—divine shape of man and woman; the form of limb and torso, of bust and neck, gave me a sighing sense of rest. These were they who would have stayed with me under the shadow of the oaks while the blackbirds fluted and the south air swung the cowslips. They would have walked with me among the reddened gold ...
— The Story of My Heart • Richard Jefferies
... Huldricksson himself, who must have risen just as I left the cabin. The Norseman had slipped on a pair of pajamas and, giant torso naked under the sun, he strode out upon us. We all of us looked at him a trifle anxiously. But Olaf's madness had left him. In his eyes was much sorrow, but the ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt
... and elegant body turned out to be smoothly and gracefully muscled on the long lines of the Flying Mercury. His bones were small, but his flesh was hard, and his skin healthy with the flow of blood beneath. Orde, on the other hand, had earned from the river the torso of an ancient athlete. The round, full arch of his chest was topped by a mass of clean-cut muscle; across his back, beneath the smooth skin, the muscles rippled and ridged and dimpled with every movement; the beautiful curve of the deltoids, from the point of the ...
— The Riverman • Stewart Edward White
... ornamented nature; than is the Pope's Musaeum calculated to enchain admiration, and fix it in those apartments where sublimity and beauty have established their residence; and those would be worse than Goths, who could think of moving even an old torso from the place where Pius Sextus has commanded it ...
— Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey through France, Italy, and Germany, Vol. I • Hester Lynch Piozzi
... imagined by any who have only seen those of the draped and shod animal. The deeply set yet flexible spine; the taper form of the limbs; the fulness yet perfect elasticity of the GLUTEI muscles. The hollowness of the back, and symmetrical balance of the upper part of the torso, ornamented as it was, like a piece of fine carving, with raised scarifications most tastefully placed; such were some of the characteristics of this perfect "piece of work." Compared with it, the civilised animal, when considered ...
— Journal of an Expedition into the Interior of Tropical Australia • Thomas Mitchell
... her companion. He was graceful in figure, aristocratic in his bearing, and would have been strikingly handsome had it not been for some accident which had shattered his nose and broken all the symmetry of his features. He stood in silence with moody eyes and folded arms, looking at the splendid torso of the prize-fighter as, stripped to the waist, he ...
— The Last Galley Impressions and Tales - Impressions and Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... waist-line, thick-shouldered, with large head and bull throat, his muscular torso tapered down to clean-lined hips, his legs of no greater girth than those of the lean-bodied man confronting him, his feet small in glove-fitting boots. His eyes, prominent and full and a clear brown, were a shade too innocent. ...
— The Bells of San Juan • Jackson Gregory
... of a piece. The crossing-sweeper now has shaggy legs which end in hoofs. His way of looking at young people is very unpleasant;—and one had always thought him such a kindly old man. The butcher's boy—what a torso!—is walking with his arm round the waist of the young lady in Number seven. These are lovers, you see; but it's mostly on her side. He tilts up her chin and gives her a kiss before he goes; and she stands looking after him with shining eyes, hoping that he will turn round before he gets to ...
— Lore of Proserpine • Maurice Hewlett
... men. That is, they had a head, a torso, two arms and two legs apiece. But they were not human. Those huge round eyes, unblinking and browless, were not human, nor were their slitted, sunken mouths. They were not human beings; ...
— The Infra-Medians • Sewell Peaslee Wright
... sufficient to convince me of the horrible truth. The man was stripped to the waist, in order no doubt that his movements might not be impeded, and I beheld a torso like that of some Milo wrought in ebony! The cruel, animal face, the blubber lips, the partly bared teeth—all spoke of the fate designed for me. I knew the type and knew what scant mercy I could look for at his hands. Indubitably this was a mute such as is sometimes ...
— The Green Eyes of Bast • Sax Rohmer
... enchanting foot, a living foot. They stood lost in admiration before this glorious fragment breaking forth from the incredible, slow, progressive destruction around it. The foot seemed to them like the torso of some Grecian Venus, brought to light amid the ruins ...
— The Hidden Masterpiece • Honore de Balzac
... Estra, but shorter, and with a little more flesh about the torso. His forehead bulged directly over his eyes, instead of above his ears, as did Estra's; also his eyes were smaller and not as far apart. His whole expression was equally kind and affable, despite a curiously shriveled appearance of his lips; they made ...
— The Lord of Death and the Queen of Life • Homer Eon Flint
... he marched straight onward, hoping by his untiring efforts first to restore national prosperity and thereafter to secure a peace which would inaugurate a brighter future. His overtaxed strength collapsed when the strain was most tense; and his life therefore figures as a torso, which should not be criticized as if it were the perfect statue. Yet, as moral grandeur is always inspiring, Pitt's efforts were finally to be crowned with success by the statesmen who had found wisdom in his teaching, inspiration in his quenchless hope, enthusiasm ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... the mental construction necessary for the satisfaction of my desires. And yet up to that date I had never seen the nude body of a full-grown adult. I had no knowledge of the extent to which hair in certain instances develops on the torso; indeed, my efforts at characterization centered, for the most part, around the thighs and generative organs. At this time one of my schoolfellows saw a common workman, known to me by name, bathing in a stream with some companions; all his body was, my informant told ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... the physical person; torso, trunk; physique; bulk, mass; axis, centrum; individual, person, creature; system, code; consistency, substance; hulk; cuerpo. Associated Words: physiology, anatomy, bicorporal, embody, embodiment, disembody, disembodiment, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... be said of the posthumous torso and failure,[402] Bouvard et Pecuchet. Nothing ever showed the wisdom of the proverb about half-done work, children and fools, better; and, alas! there is something of the child in all of us, and something of ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... Lotte; isn't it the little man all over, apron and all? I'd go on with my profession at once, as you call it, if the governor would set me up with a studio in London; but as to sculpture at Barchester—I suppose half the people here don't know what a torso means." ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... this torso of Roman History, taking their names from the library of final deposit, but they are not all, by any means, of equal value. First come Mediceus A (referred to in this book as Ma), Vaticanus A, Parisinus A, and Venetus ...
— Dio's Rome, Volume 1 (of 6) • Cassius Dio
... religious obligations, never mind how comical, and could not find it in my heart to undervalue even a congregation of ants worshipping a toad-stool; or those other creatures in certain parts of our earth, who with a degree of footmanism quite unprecedented in other planets, bow down before the torso of a deceased landed proprietor merely on account of the inordinate possessions yet owned and rented in his name. I say, we good Presbyterian christians should be charitable in these things, and not fancy ourselves so vastly superior to other mortals, ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... a better man? Let madame look at the black feather in his cap. The crow did not fly that could furnish a quill he could not take from any man in his brigade. Charle' threw out the arch of his beautiful torso. And he loved her. Madame knew what tears he had shed, what serenades he had played on his fiddle under 'Tite's window, and how he had outdanced her other partners. He dropped his head on his breast and picked ...
— The Black Feather - From "Mackinac And Lake Stories", 1899 • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... indignant hands and kissing them gallantly). George is perfectly right, dear soul. Our Peregrine requires a naked mauley (clenches Aunt Julia's white hand into a fist)—something like this, only bigger and harder—applied to his torso— ...
— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol
... making; but henceforth he must make himself. To that point Nature has led him, out of the primeval slime. She has given him limbs, she has given him brain, she has given him the rudiment of a soul. Now it is for him to make or mar that splendid torso. Let him look no more to her for aid; for it is her will to create one who has the power to create himself. If he fail, she fails; back goes the metal to the pot; and the great process begins anew. If he succeeds, he succeeds alone. His fate ...
— A Modern Symposium • G. Lowes Dickinson
... the plane, the hammer, the chisel, each requires its special muscular energy. The carpenter, unlike the blacksmith, does not put all his brawn into his shoulders, nor develop his torso at the expense of his other muscles, like the mason. It may also be said that, unlike most other occupations, the carpenter has both out-of-door and indoor exercise, so that he is at all times able to follow his occupation, summer ...
— Carpentry for Boys • J. S. Zerbe
... For this is a case of ectopia cordis, my boy,—displacement of the heart; and it is n't every day you get a chance to overhaul such an interesting malformation. And so I managed to do my duty and satisfy my curiosity at the same time. The torso was slight and deformed; the right arm attenuated,—the left full, round, and of perfect symmetry. It had run away with the life of the other limbs,—a common trick enough of Nature's, as I told you before. If you see a man with legs withered from childhood, keep out of the way of his arms, if ...
— The Professor at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.)
... Carefully he removed the great white robe and handed it to an attendant. To another he gave the rose. Shane handed his coat and hat to a saturnine French corporal. Ahmet Ali took his shirt off. Kicked away his sandals. There was the dramatic appearance of an immense bronze torso. The Syrians smiled. The French soldiers looked judicially grave. Ahmet Ali stood talking for an instant with one of his men, a lean bilious-seeming Turk. The Turk was urging something with eagerness. The wrestler's soft girl's face had concentrated into a mask of distaste. He was shaking his head. ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... small, but excellent museum of the antique sculpture, in plaster;—the selection being dictated, it is said, by no less an adviser than Canova. The Apollo, the Laocoon, the Venuses, Diana, the head of the Phidian Jove, Bacchus, Antinous, the Torso Hercules, the Discobolus, the Gladiator Borghese, the Apollino,—all these, and more, the sumptuous gift of Augustus Thorndike. It is much that one man should have power to confer on so many, who never saw him, a benefit so pure ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... Russia, the level plateau of Africa, and the smooth Atlantic slope of North America, with its neatly trimmed outline. Complexity, abounding in contrasted environments, tends to produce a varied wealth of historical development. Africa lies on the surface of the ocean, a huge torso of a continent, headless, memberless, inert. Here is no diversity of outward form, no contrast of zonal location, no fructifying variety of geographic conditions. Humanity has forgotten to grow in its stationary soil. Only where the Suez Isthmus formed ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... was interrupted by a raucous voice overhead, and both boys looked up to see the mate's thick torso hanging over the rail. He was shaking his ...
— The Cruise of the Dry Dock • T. S. Stribling
... them. It had been phrased as an order. He leaned his head out of the window and I saw at once why most of his equipment was located in his torso. Probably his brain as well. There sure wasn't much room left in his head when that cannon ...
— Arm of the Law • Harry Harrison
... used as a museum for the antiquities discovered at Nismes, and contains some admirable specimens. Among these are a torso in marble of a Roman knight, in a cuirass, and another colossal torso, with a charming little draped statue seated in a curule chair, and holding a cornucopia in the left hand; a cinerary monument, enriched with bassi-relievi, ...
— The Idler in France • Marguerite Gardiner
... aggregate, one and all, gross amount, sum, sum total, tout ensemble, length and breadth of, Alpha and Omega, be all and end all; complex, complexus^; lock stock and barrel. bulk, mass, lump, tissue, staple, body, compages^; trunk, torso, bole, hull, hulk, skeleton greater part, major part, best part, principal part, main part; essential part &c (importance) 642; lion's share, Benjamin's mess; the long and the short; nearly, all, almost all. V. form a whole, constitute ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... the study of development of the race. It was he who had planted in her mind that daringly fearless thought of a human perfection as to the Intention of the Creative Cause. They used to look at the child as he lay asleep and note the beauty of him—his hands, his feet, his torso, the tint and texture and line ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... level before the cave mouth, the two great fires burned steadily in the sun. The giant Ook-ootsk, hideous with his ape-like forehead, his upturned, flaring nostrils, his protruding jaw, his shaggy, clay-colored torso, and his short, massive, grotesquely bowed legs—of which one was twisted so that the toes pointed almost backwards—lay sprawling and chuckling benevolently near the entrance, while a swarm of little ...
— In the Morning of Time • Charles G. D. Roberts
... 243. Sala delle Iscrizione.—The walls are covered with Greek and Roman inscriptions, arranged in 12 divisions according to the subject. In this room are also some very interesting ancient sculptures. Among others (315) the Torso of a Faun. Cabinet of the Hermaphrodite.—The most important piece of sculpture here is 306 Hermaphrodite reclining on a lion's skin, avaluable Greek work; 318 Bust of Alexander the Great in suffering. Cabinet of Cameos.—A very precious collection of ...
— The South of France—East Half • Charles Bertram Black
... for example, if the head alone is represented, there should appear, along with the head, as much of the bust as will suggest attachment to the body, in order that it may not seem decapitated! It is because the torso is so obviously a fragment of an ideal whole that we do not feel it to be an uncanny mutilation of a man or woman. In its present condition, the "Venus de Milo" is not the statue of an armless woman, but a statue of part ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... trivialajxo. tripe : tripo. triumph : triumf'i, -o. troop : trupo, bando. tropic : tropiko. trot : troti. trough : trogo. trousers : pantalono. trout : truto. trowel : trulo. tramp : (cards), atuto. trumpet : trumpeto. trunk : (animal) rostro; (tree) trunko; (box) kofro; (body) torso. trust : fidi. try : provi, peni. Tsar : Caro. tuber : tubero. tuft : tufo. tumbler : glaso. tumult : tumulto. tune : ario, melodio; agordi. turbot : rombfisxo. turkey : meleagro. turn : turn'i, -igxi; torni; pivoti; vico. turnip : napo. turpentine : terebinto. turquoise : turkiso. turtle-dove ...
— The Esperanto Teacher - A Simple Course for Non-Grammarians • Helen Fryer
... lieutenant's head and heavy torso, helped turn him face downward on the berth, then stood aside, thoughtfully watching the girl's deft fingers sop absorbent cotton in an antiseptic wash and apply it to ...
— The False Faces • Vance, Louis Joseph
... solid rock, four hundred feet in height, and supported by clusters of colossal Caryatides. See the great rock temple of Ipsambul in Lower Nubia. The sitting colossi are nearly seventy feet in height. But there is a Torso of a statue of Rameses the Second at Thebes, vulgarly called the great Memnon, which measures upwards of sixty ...
— Alroy - The Prince Of The Captivity • Benjamin Disraeli
... to the eastern room. The foundations of a narrow platform or bench extended along the eastern, northern, and western sides, and in the centre of the northern side there was a mass of stone-work which had evidently formed the base for a statue (fig. 2, A). The discovery of a torso of a statue of Athena[24] in this very room indicated what statue had occupied this commanding position, and also what had probably been ...
— The Care of Books • John Willis Clark
... Injun came to the ranch—a very tall, grave man, clad in comic-picture clothes. A battered high hat surmounted his block of midnight hair, and a cutaway coat, built for a man much smaller around the chest, held his torso in bondage. As it was warm on the day he arrived, he had discarded his trousers—a breech-clout was plenty leg-gear, he thought. He bore a letter of recommendation ...
— Red Saunders' Pets and Other Critters • Henry Wallace Phillips
... the ruins. Vine, who, as a pioneer had seen the 'Temple's' torso shaggy in bush and long grass, hardly knew it again. It had been shaven and shorn rather ruthlessly. Some of the ruins, he noted ungratefully, were numbered to correspond with a catalogue. There was, moreover, the glamorous sheen of a wire fence ...
— Cinderella in the South - Twenty-Five South African Tales • Arthur Shearly Cripps
... sculptor possessed. The athlete is represented at the precise instant when he has brought the greatest possible bodily strength into play in order to give to the disc its highest force. The body is bent forward, the toes of one foot cling to the ground, the muscles of the torso are strained, the whole body is in an attitude of violent tension which can endure only for an instant. Yet the face is free from contortion, free from any trace of effort, calm and beautiful. This shows that Myron, intent as he was upon reproducing nature, could yet depart from his realistic ...
— TITLE • AUTHOR
... into many tints, delicate laces, elaborate embroideries, gleaming jewels—these are the never-failing accessories of his compositions. Yet while he loved rich draperies, he was also a careful student of the nude. Examples of his work range from the supple and youthful torso of Icarus to the huge muscular body of the beggar receiving St. Martin's cloak. The modelling of the Saviour's body in the Crucifixion and the Pieta shows both ...
— Van Dyck - A Collection Of Fifteen Pictures And A Portrait Of The - Painter With Introduction And Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll
... as if remembering scraps of conversation he had segregated from the murmur inside, and rolled his long body over until he rested on his belly with the upper part of his torso raised on his elbows. ...
— The Plunderer • Roy Norton
... When about to lead his troops in a charge against the enemy, it was his custom to shout "Let's go! I'll put on my animal dress." Then he took off his uniform, his jacket and shirt and retained only his plumed hat, his leather breeches and his big boots! Thus, naked to the waist, he displayed a torso almost as hairy as that of a bear, which gave him a very strange appearance indeed. Once in his animal dress, as he called it, General Macard, sabre in hand, hurled himself at the enemy horsemen, swearing like a pagan; but it so happened that he rarely reached any of them, for ...
— The Memoirs of General the Baron de Marbot, Translated by - Oliver C. Colt • Baron de Marbot
... years. Already, at the age of four-and-twenty, he had matured his "terrible manner." Already were invented in his brain that race of superhuman beings, who became the hieroglyphs of his impassioned utterance. Madonna has the small head and heroic torso used by this master to symbolise force. We feel she has no difficulty in holding the dead Christ upon her ample lap and in her powerful arms. Yet while the "Pieta" is wholly Michael Angelesque, we find no lack of repose, none of those contorted ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... buoyantly. "They have transferred me to the Indiana division, headquarters at Torso—superintendent of the ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... is sought and taught, graceful movements of the head, arms, legs and torso. In addition to grace and poise, there is need of great muscular strength, and this we are able to develop in our pupils without bunching the muscles of their calves, thighs or arms into unsightly knots. And this fact is not one of the least of the recommendations of our system. We insist ...
— The Art of Stage Dancing - The Story of a Beautiful and Profitable Profession • Ned Wayburn
... nor smiling, she felt as though something unusual were about to happen. Her own body was going hot and cold by turns—her neck and hands. She had a fine figure, finer than she realized, with shapely limbs and torso. Her head had some of the sharpness of the old Greek coinage, and her hair was plaited as in ancient cut stone. Cowperwood noted it. He came back and, without taking his seat, bent over her and intimately took ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... head, suitably mounted upon a white steed, rode a grand marshal who was more than a grand marshal. For in his one person this dignitary combined two parts: not only was he the grand marshal with a broad sash draped diagonally across his torso to prove it, but likewise he was the official trumpeter. At intervals he raised his horn to his lips and sounded forth inspiring notes. That his horn was neither a trumpet nor yet a bugle but a long, goose-necked thing ...
— Sundry Accounts • Irvin S. Cobb
... strange powers even in the sovereign age of Shakespeare, should have waited upward of three hundred years and should still be waiting for the appearance of a second edition. The tragedy of "All's Lost by Lust," published in the same year with Shakespeare's great posthumous torso of romantic tragedy, was evidently a favorite child of its author's: the terse and elaborate argument subjoined to the careful and exhaustive list of characters may suffice to prove it. Among these characters we may note that one, "a simple clownish Gentleman," was "personated ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... you come across the Torso, made famous by that witty tailor called Pasquino, where he placarded his satirical witticisms; his post-office for ...
— The Sunny Side of Diplomatic Life, 1875-1912 • Lillie DeHegermann-Lindencrone
... women that ideal condition of the flesh so prized by sculptors and artists, namely, a firm, solid tissue when the muscles are flexed, and a softness of an infant with muscular relaxation. It develops the entire torso and limbs, it renders one's nerves like steel and is a splendid ...
— Social Life - or, The Manners and Customs of Polite Society • Maud C. Cooke
... high and had curiously broad, square shoulders; but his imposing torso was ill supported. His legs were very thin and long, and they turned out a trifle. With his prominent nose, small head, and bright little slate-grey eyes, he looked rather like a stork. He was ...
— The Red Redmaynes • Eden Phillpotts
... to his appearance. He wore an old iron-gray overcoat decorated with the red ribbon of an officer of the Legion of honor, which met with difficulty over a gastronomic stomach in keeping with a mouth that stretched from ear to ear, and a pair of powerful shoulders. The torso was supported by a spindling pair of legs, while the rubicund tints on the cheek-bones bore testimony to a rollicking life. The lower part of the cheeks, which were deeply wrinkled, overhung a coat-collar of velvet the worse for wear. Among other adornments, the ex-dragoon wore enormous ...
— The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... in several coils, held a long gold scepter with a lotus bud at the end. The rest of his body was wrapt in drapery of the finest linen, minutely plaited, bound about the waist by a belt inlaid with small enamel and gold plates. Between the band and the belt his torso appeared, shining and polished like pink granite shaped by a cunning workman. Sandals with returned toes, like skates, shod his long narrow feet, placed together like those of the ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VIII (of X) - Continental Europe II. • Various
... our fitful climes And laughed when tempest drenches, And shaken off the dust that grimes Pews, cushioned stalls and benches, Survived the counterblasting Row, And Summer gales that roar so— I ne'er imagined such a foe Could trounce me to a torso. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, September 17, 1892 • Various
... the island of Maui suggests a truncated statue, the west end representing the head, very old and wrinkled and grooved by time and trouble, the peninsula the well-proportioned neck, and broad-breasted Haleakala forming the trunk. What a torso it is, fire-born and basking there in the ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs
... fragment, called the Torso, Michael Angelo is said to have constructed his forms. If this be true,—and we have no reason to doubt it,—it could nevertheless have been to him little more than a hint. But that is enough to a man of genius, who stands in ...
— Lectures on Art • Washington Allston
... Jackson held up between two big palms, and with the long yellow hair of his beard flowing over the strings of the guitar lying on the table; Karain's upright and motionless pose, his tone—all this made an impression that cannot be forgotten. He faced us across the table. His dark head and bronze torso appeared above the tarnished slab of wood, gleaming and still as if cast in metal. Only his lips moved, and his eyes glowed, went out, blazed again, or stared mournfully. His expressions came straight from his tormented heart. His words sounded low, in a sad murmur as of running water; at times ...
— Tales of Unrest • Joseph Conrad
... off, but the wakeful Babalatchi sat thinking deeply, sighing from time to time, and slapping himself over his naked torso incessantly in a vain endeavour to keep off an occasional and wandering mosquito that, rising as high as the platform above the swarms of the riverside, would settle with a ping of triumph on the unexpected victim. The moon, pursuing her silent and toilsome path, attained her highest elevation, ...
— An Outcast of the Islands • Joseph Conrad
... Exquisiteness of quality is its most attractive characteristic. Touch one of these African figures and it will remind you of the rarest Chinese porcelain. What delicacy in the artist's sense of relief and modelling is here implied! What tireless industry and patience! Run your hand over a limb, or a torso, or, better still, over some wooden vessel; there is no flaw, no break in the continuity of the surface; the thing is alive from end to end. And this extraordinary sense of quality seems to be universal amongst them. I think I never saw ...
— Since Cezanne • Clive Bell
... cemetery he could examine that first collection of antiques which inspired the Tuscan artists, the sarcophagus, with the story of Phaedra and Hippolytus, which Nicholas of Pisa took for his model. He could see at Pistoja the pulpit carved by William of Pisa, with the magnificent nude torso of a woman, imitated from the antique. At Florence the Palazzo Vecchio, which was not yet called thus, was finished; so were the Bargello, Santa-Croce, Santa-Maria-Novella. Or-San-Michele was being built; the Loggia of the ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... legs shuffling along on the sidewalk, with the stumps bound with leather, carrying a little tray of lead-pencils which nobody seemed to buy. He felt like that cripple. A man living to-day in the heart of civilization, where money is in reality legs and wings and hands, is nothing more than a torso without it, he thought. He felt mutilated, unspeakably humiliated. It seemed more out of his ability to get any honest employment than it had ever done before. A number of laborers with their dinner-satchels, and their pickaxes over their ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... evidently quite strangers to the colonists. They were both rather old men, but very athletic, and of commanding air and stature, the body of one was painted with pipe-clay, that of the other with yellow ochre; and through these tints their well-defined muscles, firm as those of some antique torso, stood out in bold relief in the beams of the setting sun. The two made a fine group on which dress would have been quite superfluous, and absolutely a blot ...
— Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, Vol 1 (of 2) • Thomas Mitchell
... at the end—he stood still at the gates of the court, which were opened as the rest of the party came up; and, as they crossed and entered the hall, they beheld, through the open door of the drawing-room, two figures in the window—one, a dark torso, perched outside on the sill; the other, in blue skirt and boy-like bodice, negligently reposing on one side of the window-seat, her dainty little boots on the other; her coarse straw bonnet, crossed with white, upon the floor; the wind playing tricks with the silky glory of her flaxen ringlets; ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... persistence, one face rose again and again before his mental vision, clear, vital—the face of the enigmatic Thomery, with his silver white hair, his red face, his light blue eyes, that Yankee head of his, well set on his robust torso.... ...
— Messengers of Evil - Being a Further Account of the Lures and Devices of Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre
... muscular torso, and his face expressed pity, regret, embarrassment, and, perhaps, a certain ...
— The New Book Of Martyrs • Georges Duhamel
... chorus is one vast riot of rococo sculpture, representing I do not know what mystical event; but down through the midst of the livingly studied performance a mighty angel comes plunging, with his fine legs following his torso through the air, like those of a diver taking a header into the water. Nothing less than the sublime touch of those legs would have satisfied the instinct from which and for which the artist worked; they gave reality to the affair ...
— Familiar Spanish Travels • W. D. Howells
... compliment implied in your recommendation of him to me as a husband," said Lady Judith, drawing herself up with that Juno-like air which made her seem half a head taller, and which accentuated every curve of her superb torso. "He is apparently a gentleman whom it would ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... knickerbocker ancestors before him clear back to the time when New York was not New York but New Amsterdam. To complete his costume, a floppy felt hat, distinctly Rembrandtish in effect, perched half on his head and mostly over one ear; a sixpenny, white cotton undershirt covered his torso; and from a belt about his middle dangled a tobacco pouch, a sheath-knife, filled clips of cartridges, and a huge automatic pistol in ...
— Jerry of the Islands • Jack London
... eyes on them. "Now I am independent for at least three years: I can shut myself up in my room and work. I have money for colours now; for food and lodging—no one will annoy and disturb me now. I will buy myself a first-class lay figure, I will order a plaster torso, and some model feet, I will have a Venus. I will buy engravings of the best pictures. And if I work three years to satisfy myself, without haste or with the idea of selling, I shall surpass all, and may become ...
— Taras Bulba and Other Tales • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... discovered at Barcola, the finest of which is a male torso with the greater part of the legs, prehistoric objects, coins, a personification of Istria, things found at Pirano, and three splendid large Chinese bronzes. The copies of the mosaics of the Apostles from S. Giusto are on the ceiling ...
— The Shores of the Adriatic - The Austrian Side, The Kuestenlande, Istria, and Dalmatia • F. Hamilton Jackson
... irregularity in the road, the bathtub contraption bounced on its springs, bow and stern rising and falling like a small ship in a rough sea. Its nearer approach revealed that the giant torso apparent above its rim was encased in a double breasted khaki garment which might have marked the wearer as either the master of a four in hand or a Mississippi steamboat of the antebellum type. The enormous shoulders, ...
— "And they thought we wouldn't fight" • Floyd Gibbons
... elegantly observes, that "the reign of Titus, the delight of human kind, is totally lost, and Domitian has escaped the vengeance of the historian's pen." Yet Tacitus in fragments is still the colossal torso of history. Velleius Paterculas, of whom a fragment only has reached us, we owe to a single copy: no other having ever been discovered, and which has occasioned the text of this historian to remain incurably corrupt. Taste and criticism have certainly incurred an irreparable loss in that Treatise ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... had met and taken to punishment. A dozen pictures of her rose before him, all of them mental snapshots snatched from his experience of the night. Now he was struggling to hold her down, his knees clamped to her writhing, muscular torso. Again he held her by the strong, velvet-smooth arms while her eyes blazed fury and defiance at him. Or her stinging words pelted him as she breasted the hill slopes with supple ease. Most vivid of all were the ones at her father's camp, especially those when she was under ...
— Man Size • William MacLeod Raine
... vacation: it is his hour for study, but I think he looks more out of the front window than at his book. He looks very much from the window"—there was a muttering of subterranean thunder somewhere, which I was able to locate in the professor's torso, and took to be his expression of a chuckle—"yes, very much, since the passing of that charming lady ...
— The Guest of Quesnay • Booth Tarkington
... only had the nose and brow of a sun-god (who is not supposed to be a very intellectual person), but also his arms and his torso; and sat for these, too. I have been vain ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al
... allowed his head to sink still farther into the vast bulk of his immense torso, strangely resembling, in this position, the fabled anthropophagi whose heads are reputed thus ...
— Tutt and Mr. Tutt • Arthur Train
... torcxo. Toreador toreadoro. Torment turmenti. Torment turmento—ado. Torpedo torpedo. Torpedo boat torpedboato. Torpid sensenta. Torpidity sensenteco. Torpor sensento. Torrent torento. Torrid varmega. Torsion tordo. Torso torso. Tortoise testudo. Tortuous torda. Torture turmentego. Torture turmentegi. Tory konservativulo. Toss skui. Toss (throw) jxeti. Total tuto, a. Totality tuteco. Totter sxanceli. Touch tusxi. Touch (feel) palpi. Touch lightly tusxeti. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... who opened the door. Because the night was hot he had shed coat and shirt, and his fine torso, bare to the shoulders and at the neck, gleamed in the electric light. Willy Cameron had not seen him since those spring days when he had made his casual, bold-eyed visits to Edith at the pharmacy, and he had a swift insight into ...
— A Poor Wise Man • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... took in his friend. The upper half of his body was almost naked. Both face and torso were raw with angry burns. Eyebrows had disappeared and eyes were so swollen as to be almost closed. He was gaunt, ragged, unshaven, and bleeding. Shorty, too, appeared to have gone ...
— Gunsight Pass - How Oil Came to the Cattle Country and Brought a New West • William MacLeod Raine
... of the French Revolution reached Italy this was one of the best establishments of the kind in that kingdom. In the hall of the academy were some admirable examples of Correggio, as well as several statues of great merit, particularly a small bust of Vitellins, and a torso of Agrippina, of most exquisite beauty. The academy of the arts, which had been long established at Florence, fell into decay, but was restored in the end of the 18th century. In it there are halls for ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... and its small, foreheadless head surrounded its colossal body like a cannon ball on a hill top. One arm was at least twelve inches longer than its mate, which was itself long in proportion to the torso, while the legs, similarly mismated and terminating in huge, flat feet that protruded laterally, caused the thing to lurch fearfully from side to side as it lumbered ...
— The Monster Men • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... him now as he stood before me—a thick-set man with a magnificent torso, but with legs which ought to have been longer. For that body he ought to have been six feet tall. When he is seated he appears to be a very large man. You would know that he was a physician from the way he shakes hands—even from ...
— Abroad with the Jimmies • Lilian Bell
... Corbelan, whom Decoud had seen from the balcony turning into the gateway of the Casa Gould, had addressed no one since coming in. The long, skimpy soutane accentuated the tallness of his stature; he carried his powerful torso thrown forward; and the straight, black bar of his joined eyebrows, the pugnacious outline of the bony face, the white spot of a scar on the bluish shaven cheeks (a testimonial to his apostolic zeal from a party of unconverted Indians), ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... fa bel tempo," or "fa cattivo tempo," as the case may be. This is no less a person than Beppo, King of the Beggars, and permanent bore of the Scale di Spagna. He is better known to travellers than the Belvedere Torso of Hercules at the Vatican, and has all the advantage over that wonderful work, of having an admirable head and a good digestion. Hans Christian Andersen has celebrated him in "The Improvvisatore," and unfairly attributed to him an ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... technicians, the sergeant-driver and corporal-gunner of his own car. The other fifty-odd were Ulleran natives. They stood erect on stumpy legs and broad, six-toed feet. They had four arms apiece, one pair from true shoulders and the other connected to a pseudo-pelvis midway down the torso. Their skins were slate-gray and rubbery, speckled with pinhead-sized bits of quartz that had been formed from perspiration, for their body-tissues were silicone instead of carbon-hydrogen. Their narrow heads were unpleasantly saurian; they had small, double-lidded red eyes, and slit-like ...
— Uller Uprising • Henry Beam Piper, John D. Clark and John F. Carr
... exquisite paintings which ornamented these places of luxury and pleasure. From amid their ruins have been dug out the most priceless of the statues which ornament the museums of Italy—the Farnese Hercules, the colossal Florae, the Torso Farnese, the Torso Belvidere, the Atreus and Thyestes, the Laocoon, beside granite and basaltic vases beautifully polished, cameos, bronzes, medals, and other valuable relics of ancient art. To supply these baths new aqueducts were ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... on the afternoon of the third day, the captain of the junk, whose name was Hoang, presented himself upon the quarter-deck. He was naked to the waist, and his bare brown torso was gleaming with oil and sweat. His queue was coiled like a snake around his neck, his hatchet thrust ...
— Moran of the Lady Letty • Frank Norris
... growing a little below the outer edge of the path, swished at my calves. Castro stopped. The cornice ended as a broken stairway hangs upon nothing. A tall, narrow arch stood back in the rock, with a sill three feet high at least. Castro clambered over; his head and torso, when he turned about, were lighted up blindingly between the inner walls at every flash. Seeing me lay hold ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... She provided it with an engraved portrait of that Holy Nail which was venerated in the neighboring church of San Pantaleon; and she apparently aimed to supply it with playthings of a religious and saving character like that piece of ivory, which resembled a small torso, and which Bettina described as "A bit of the Lord, Signor,"—and it was, in fact, a fragment of an ivory crucifix, which she had somewhere picked up. To Bettina's mind, mankind broadly divided themselves into two races, Italians and Germans, to which ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... to the bed in three strides. He was stripped to the waist, and excepting some few professional athletes, I had never seen a torso to compare with that which, brown and glistening, now bent over Nayland Smith. The muscular development was simply enormous; the man had a neck like a column, and the thews around his back and shoulders were like ivy ...
— The Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... in an arc, at the same time bending at the hips, until he has completed the circle and reached a hip-bending position, with the fingers of one hand touching the floor, the other extended vertically. This gives a stretching movement to all of the muscles of the torso, side, back, and abdomen, as well as considerable play to the muscles of the legs ...
— Keeping Fit All the Way • Walter Camp
... body beautiful. Its flesh was smooth and brown, flowing in frictionless ease over muscles that escaped bulkiness; its shoulders swung with a sort of gladiatorial freedom. But the Hellenic sculptor would have found the head suited to his use as well as the torso and limbs, for it was a head well shaped and well carried, dominated by eyes alert with intelligence, and enlivened ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... AND SIANG (Kapuas river, tributaries). — Concerning these tribes Nieuwenhuis says but little [9, p. 452], merely noting that the men are first tatued with discs on the calf and in the hollow of the knee and later over the arms, torso, and throat, whilst the women tatu the hands, knees, and shins. Two colours, red and blue, are used, and the designs are tatued free-hand, the instrument employed being a piece of copper or brass about four inches long and half an inch broad, with one end bent down at a right angle and sharpened ...
— The Pagan Tribes of Borneo • Charles Hose and William McDougall
... dung fires smoldered. From the doorway of one of the mud huts came a lean man, his naked torso streaked with wet ashes, his matted hair hanging in knots and tangles on his emaciated shoulders. His aspect was exceedingly filthy; he was a holy man, which in this mad country signifies physical debasement, patience and fortitude such as would have ...
— The Adventures of Kathlyn • Harold MacGrath
... seated on a stone at the foot of the cross, supporting the body of her son upon her knees, gazing sadly at his wounded side, and gently lifting her left hand, as though to say, "Behold and see!" She has the small head and heroic torso used by Michelangelo to suggest immense physical force. We feel that such a woman has no difficulty in holding a man's corpse upon her ample lap and in her powerful arms. Her face, which differs from the female type he afterwards preferred, resembles ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... reclines in an easy attitude on a rock; under him are spread his mantle and the skin of a panther or some such animal. In Fig. 129 we have, beginning on the right, the head of one of Selene's horses and the torso of the goddess herself, then a group of three closely connected female figures, known as the "Three Fates," seated or reclining on uneven, rocky ground, and last the body and thighs of a winged goddess, Victory or Iris, perhaps belonging in the western pediment. Fig. 130, from the northern ...
— A History Of Greek Art • F. B. Tarbell
... the wings, which exactly fitted the tiny torso of the butterfly. They could discern the footprints, one of which had broken the ant's road, while another was completely covered ...
— Darrel of the Blessed Isles • Irving Bacheller |
