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More "Amphitheatre" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... hostile vessel will be able to pass with impunity. Passing this point, we saw before us on the right a perfect forest of masts, with every flag under the sun flying aloft; and behind them appeared, on a low hill rising like an amphitheatre from the harbour, the far-famed city itself. It was a busy, exciting scene. Some of the vessels brought bands of English adventurers; others crowds of Chinese, with round felt hats and long tails; others Malays; and some even seemed to have blacks on board. At a short distance from the ...
— A Voyage round the World - A book for boys • W.H.G. Kingston
... after your Forum and famous Amphitheatre, our pavement must seem a poor trifle—though it by no means exhausts our list of interesting remains. The praefurnium, for instance; I ...
— The Westcotes • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... upon the subject, and Scott was, in the piece here reprinted, making it the starting-point of a vision of the war in the Peninsula. The fatal palace of Don Roderick may have been a fable connected with the ruins of a Roman amphitheatre. The fable, as translated by Scott from a Spanish History of ...
— Some Poems by Sir Walter Scott • Sir Walter Scott
... and he resolved to make them join in combat with a hundred of the fiercest lions ever collected, to make sport for his subjects. The day arrived when the dreadful combat was to take place, and thousands of people assembled in the vast amphitheatre built for the purpose, to which even the huge pyramids seemed as ...
— The Seven Champions of Christendom • W. H. G. Kingston
... went with Lord Shaftesbury to see the charity children. What a sight! The whole central part of the cathedral was converted into an amphitheatre, and the children with white caps, white handkerchiefs, and white aprons, looked like a wide flower bed. The rustling, when they all rose up to prayer, was like the rise of a flock of doves, and when they chanted the church service, ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... delightfully refreshing. The flowers, clustered in thick knots over the little lawn, were raising their languid heads, and breathing their renewed fragrance. All was sweetness and calmness. The sunlight, falling on the amphitheatre of hills, and touching them with diversities of colour as it fell on their various heights and hollows, gave the whole a glittering and fantastic aspect; while the total silence, and absence of all look of life, except an occasional curl of smoke ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... exhibition of a well-timed embarrassment, proclaim the favored object of their evening's ride. Crowds of foot-passengers sauntered along the road-side, looking at the rich display made by the aristocracy and nobility of the republic. At the entrance of the Paseo, in front of the amphitheatre, where on Sundays bulls are tortured to death as a popular amusement, is the equestrian bronze statue of Carlos IV., the work of Tolsa, who, as artist and architect, has won for himself undying renown at Mexico. The ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson
... metal that flowed from it extended even to the Forum. Lastly, the Coliseum, the most beautiful ruin of Rome, terminates this noble enclosure, which embraces all history in its compass. This superb edifice, of which only the stones remain, stript of the gold and the marble, served as an amphitheatre for the combats of the gladiators, with wild beasts. It was thus that the Roman people were amused and deceived by strong emotions, when natural sentiments could no longer soar. The entrance to the Coliseum is by two doors, one consecrated to the victors, and by the other were carried ...
— Corinne, Volume 1 (of 2) - Or Italy • Mme de Stael
... law; next, because it is not reason, but feeling, and, when once it is irritated, it is not apt to confine itself within its proper limits. If it becomes not difference in opinion upon law, but a trial of spirit between parties, our courts of law are no longer the temple of justice, but the amphitheatre for gladiators. No,—God forbid! Juries ought to take their law from the bench only; but it is our business that they should hear nothing from the bench but what is agreeable to the principles of the Constitution. The jury are to hear the judge: the judge is ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... country. Then we went to the Convocation Hall, and afterwards to the theatre, where S——- sat down in the Chancellor's chair, which is very broad, and ponderously wrought of oak. I remember little here, except the amphitheatre of benches, and the roof, which seems to be supported by golden ropes, and on the wall, opposite the door, some full-length portraits, among which one of that ridiculous coxcomb, George IV., was the most prominent. These kings thrust themselves impertinently forward by bust, statue, and ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... speck buzzing nearer, on a line that would bring him straight overhead, with an interest considerably less casual than any I had bestowed on these birds before. There we were, confined in our little amphitheatre; there was that diabolical bird peering down at us, and in another minute, somewhere in that space, would come that earth-shaking explosion—a mingling of crash and vohou'! There was no escaping it, no dodging it, nothing to get ...
— Antwerp to Gallipoli - A Year of the War on Many Fronts—and Behind Them • Arthur Ruhl
... the great heats will be quite over, and then make the best of your way to Naples; where, I own, I want to have you by way of precaution (I hope it is rather over caution) in case of the last remains of a pulmonic disorder. The amphitheatre at Verona is worth your attention; as are also many buildings there and at Vicenza, of the famous Andrea Palladio, whose taste and style of buildings were truly antique. It would not be amiss, if you employed three or four ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... cheerful human sentiment of an approaching harvest and farmers rejoicing in their gains. Looking up, I could see the brown nut peering through the husk, which was already gaping; and between the stems the eye embraced an amphitheatre of hill, sunlit ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... choked with observations. Only to prevent us from being submerged by chaos, nature and society between them have arranged a system of classification which is simplicity itself; stalls, boxes, amphitheatre, gallery. The moulds are filled nightly. There is no need to distinguish details. But the difficulty remains—one has to choose. For though I have no wish to be Queen of England or only for a moment—I ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... he stood alone, with no one to distract him, to impose burdens on him and to claim a right to make inroads on his precious hours. He loved the loneliness in which he sank when he stepped out of the lecture-room and the amphitheatre. He had not felt the need, which others confessed, of some one with whom to share griefs, debate enigmas and communicate projects. Since he saw Rebecca, he had, indeed, had an almost momentary glimpse of a home where a dashing woman, moving silently ...
— The Son of Clemenceau • Alexandre (fils) Dumas
... singing. They were going to a fold of the foot-hills called the Happy Valley, bestowed on the public for such pleasures by the local nobleman whose title is given to a principal street, and to other points and places, I suppose out of the public pride and gratitude. It is a charming amphitheatre overlooked by the lofty tops around, and there on the green slope the Niggers had set up their stage, and ranged the spectators' chairs in the classification of first, second, and third so dear to the British soul. There they cracked their jokes, and there they sang their songs; the songs were newer ...
— Seven English Cities • W. D. Howells
... him. He was clothed with a white robe, embroidered with innumerable pomegranates of gold. He said to me: 'Perpetua, we wait for you, come along.' He then took me by the hand and, led me through very rough places into the middle of the amphitheatre, and said: 'Fear not.' And, leaving me, said again: 'I will be with you in a moment, and bear a part with you in your pains.' I was wondering the beasts were not let out against us, when there appeared a very ill-favored Egyptian, who came to encounter me with others. But ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... moments of scrambling and panting our two travelers gained the divide. Below them sloped a great amphitheatre of sand, falling in irregular gradations; and at the foot of all lay the lake, calmly azure, with its horizon, whether near or far for it was almost impossible to say— mystically vague. On either hand rose other hills of sand, set ...
— Bertram Cope's Year • Henry Blake Fuller
... science. We will lay open the true purpose of Milton, by a single illustration. In describing impressive scenery, as occurring in a hilly or a woody country, everybody must have noticed the habit which young ladies have of using the word amphitheatre: 'amphitheatre of woods'—'amphitheatre of hills,'—these are their constant expressions. Why? Is it because the word amphitheatre is a Grecian word? We question if one young lady in twenty knows that it is; and very certain we are that no word would recommend ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v2 • Thomas de Quincey
... in the heart of the Sierras. It dawned a trifle sooner than we could have wished, but Professor Brewer and Hoffman had breakfasted before sunrise, and were off with barometer and theodolite upon their shoulders, proposing to ascend our amphitheatre to its head and climb a great pyramidal peak which swelled up against the eastern sky, closing the view in ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: Explorers • Various
... proceeded up the canyon it grew narrower, and soon we entered a veritable gorge. It was short, but the floor was exceedingly rough, and made hard going for the horses. Suddenly I was amazed to see the gorge open out into a kind of amphitheatre several hundred feet across. The walls were steep, and one side shelved out, making a long, shallow cave, In the center of this amphitheatre was a deep hole from which the mountain ...
— The Young Forester • Zane Grey
... wide expanse of living verdure, cultivated gardens, shady groves, fertile cornfields, flowed round it like a sea. The foot of the town was washed by the little river Senne, while the irregular but picturesque streets rose up the steep sides of the hill like the semicircles and stairways of an amphitheatre. Nearly in the heart of the place rose the audacious and exquisitely embroidered tower of the townhouse, three hundred and sixty-six feet in height, a miracle of needlework in stone, rivalling in its intricate carving the cobweb tracery of that lace which has for centuries been synonymous ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... her earlier productions; some of them are of a religious cast, others refer to political matters. One of them, which appears among the "Improvisations," is an energetic protest against erecting a new amphitheatre for bull-fights. The spirit in all her poetry is humane and friendly to the ...
— Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant - Household Edition • William Cullen Bryant
... Moro' as the most magnificent bull ever brought into the city, and it soon became known that the girl just advertised was a peasant girl of Espara, who had petted the bull, and fed it and cared for it during the years of it's growth. On the appointed day the vast amphitheatre was filled with an anxious, eager crowd. Several bulls had been killed and dragged away, and then the flourish of trumpets announced the coming of the hero of the day. With a deep, terrific roar, 'El Moro' entered upon the scene. He was truly magnificent; a bovine monarch, black and ...
— Cole's Funny Picture Book No. 1 • Edward William Cole
... specimen of the original type invented by Memnon the Egyptian, and a manuscript of the first play acted by Thespis. These had not exhausted the stock of the dealer: he possessed the skin of a giraffe killed in the Roman amphitheatre; the head of King Arthur's spear; and the breech of the first cannon fired at the siege of Constantinople. The jury, however, thought that the virtuoso having ordered those curiosities, ought to pay for them, and brought in a verdict for ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 366, April, 1846 • Various
... Nose. A short distance from the island, on the main land, was the village or cross-roads of Doodletown. This reach of the river was formerly known as The Horse Race, from the rapid flow of the tide when at its height. The hills on the west bank now recede from the river, forming a picturesque amphitheatre, bounded on the west by Bear Mountain. An old road directly in the rear of Iona Island, better known to Anthony Wayne than to the modern tourist, passes through Doodletown, over Dunderberg, just west of Tompkin's Cove, ...
— The Hudson - Three Centuries of History, Romance and Invention • Wallace Bruce
... occasion of her introductory visit to the Colosseum when, for the first time, she was a spectator at an exhibition of fighting gladiators. She was in a high-strung state of elation and anticipation. Going to the Amphitheatre, in itself, was a soul-stirring experience. Meffia, to Brinnaria's joy, had been on duty that day, along with Numisia. This alone was enough to put Brinnaria in a good humor. Meffia's presence spoiled ...
— The Unwilling Vestal • Edward Lucas White
... as we ascended the hill, the whole scene was instantly before us: a large lake, surrounded by an amphitheatre of mountains, bleak, uncomfortable, and desolate. In the lake itself, about half a mile from the edge next us, was to be seen the "Island," with two or three slated houses on it, naked and un-plastered, ...
— The Station; The Party Fight And Funeral; The Lough Derg Pilgrim • William Carleton
... centuries before by the genius of Christianity. It was monstrous that an emperor calling himself a Christian should preside at such a spectacle. But the martyrdom of Telemachus at last touched the callous and torpid consciences of nominal Christians. Thenceforth the games of the amphitheatre were abolished. But it was too late for repentance. Alike "the incomparable wickedness and the incomparable splendor" of the Imperial City were doomed to destruction. Even the blood of a Christian martyr voluntarily shed would not atone for the blood of hundreds of brave barbarians ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 1 of 8 • Various
... successives sont de grandes plaines, dominees par des rochers qui s'eboulent, et forment des talus. Si dans la succession des siecles, les eboulemens de ces bandes de rochers en amphitheatre finissoient sans emporter les plaines qu'ils soutiennent, et que les torrens eussent creuse leur lit pendant ce tems la a quelque distance des talus tout seroit fini par cette premiere operation. Mais il y a peu de hautes ...
— Theory of the Earth, Volume 2 (of 4) • James Hutton
... into the land; where, save in one direction, the hills close in on every side, knee-deep in verdure and shooting aloft in grotesque peaks. The open space lies at the head of the bay; in the distance it extends into a broad hazy plain lying at the foot of an amphitheatre of hills. Here is the large sugar plantation previously alluded to. Beyond the first range of hills, you descry the sharp pinnacles of the interior; and among these, the same silent Marling-spike which we so often admired from the other side ...
— Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas • Herman Melville
... survey and revision of my Whitman essay, I am making at a rustic house I have built at a wild place a mile or more from my home upon the river. I call this place Whitman Land, because in many ways it is typical of my poet,—an amphitheatre of precipitous rock, slightly veiled with a delicate growth of verdure, enclosing a few acres of prairie-like land, once the site of an ancient lake, now a garden of unknown depth and fertility. Elemental ...
— Whitman - A Study • John Burroughs
... almost the only people present who understood their jokes. In the vast oval of the arena, however, the circus ring looked very little, not half so large, say, as the rim of a lady's hat in front of you at the play; and on the gradines of the ancient amphitheatre we were all such a great way off that a good field-glass would have been needed to distinguish the features of the actors. I could not make out, therefore, whether the 'Clowns Americani' had the national expression or not, but one of them, I am sorry ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... thick Dews shudder from it, and no man would be The stroker of his mane, much less would prick His nostril with a reed. When nations roar Like lions, who shall tame them and defraud Of the due pasture by the river-shore? Roar, therefore! shake your dewlaps dry abroad: The amphitheatre with open door Leads back upon the benches who applaud The ...
— The Poetical Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume IV • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... and its creek fell away to the south. The train ran now across the marshes, flat and green, chequered with dykes, confined to the right by the steep brim of a sea-wall. To the left a line of little hills gained height. They fell back in an amphitheatre, and a farmhouse turned to the sun a garden more austere with the salt air than farmhouse gardens commonly are, and behind it, in the shelter of the curved green escarpment, some tall trees stood ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... held in the Sorbonne amphitheatre, attended by the President, and the notables of political and artistic France, to express the appreciation of the French people for the sympathy and help of Americans during ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 4, July, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... abrupt dip of land and a dense tangle of thickets, the detectives actually lost the two figures they were following. They did not find the trail again for an agonising ten minutes, and then it led round the brow of a great dome of hill overlooking an amphitheatre of rich and desolate sunset scenery. Under a tree in this commanding yet neglected spot was an old ramshackle wooden seat. On this seat sat the two priests still in serious speech together. The gorgeous green ...
— The Innocence of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... was quiet, and my room so pleasant, commanding a view of the sea, confined by an amphitheatre of hanging woods, that I wished to remain there, though no one in the house could speak English or French. The mayor, my friend, however, sent a young woman to me who spoke a little English, and she agreed to call on me twice a day to receive my orders and ...
— Letters written during a short residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark • Mary Wollstonecraft
... wound down to the little haven, to happen on a votive tablet erected to Poseidon or to "Helen's brothers, lucent stars"; nay, to meet with Odysseus' fisherman carrying an oar on his shoulder, or even, in an amphitheatre of the cliffs, to surprise Apollo himself and the Nine seated on a green plat whence a waterfall gushed down the coombe to the sandy beach . . . . This evening on my way along the cliffs—perhaps because ...
— News from the Duchy • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... and sung of "Tibby Fowler o' the glen;" but they may not all be aware that the glen referred to lies within about four miles of Berwick. No one has seen and not admired the romantic amphitheatre below Edrington Castle, through which the Whitadder coils like a beautiful serpent glittering in the sun, and sports in fantastic curves beneath the pasture-clad hills, the grey ruin, the mossy and precipitous ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Vol. XXIII. • Various
... martyrdom. It was during the passion of virgins that miracles of the most abounding grace were worked. Angels bring down to Dorothea celestial roses, which she scatters over her executioners. Virgin martyrs exercise their power over beasts. The lions of the amphitheatre lick the feet of Saint Thecla. The wild beasts of the circus gather together, and with tails interlaced, prepare a throne for Saint Euphemia; in the pit, aspics form a pleasing necklace for Saint Christina. It is not the will of the divine Spouse for whom ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France
... rocks, toward which their rugged path conducted. He paused for an instant, but supposing it to be the muttering of one of those transient thunder-showers which often take place in the mountain heights, he proceeded. Passing through the ravine, they came to a hollow, like a small amphitheatre, surrounded by perpendicular precipices, over the brinks of which impending trees shot their branches, so that you only caught glimpses of the azure sky, and the bright evening cloud. During the whole time Rip and his companion had labored on in silence; for though ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... the twenty-seventh when the "Jonas" passed the rocky gateway of Port Royal Basin, and Lescarbot gazed with delight and wonder on the calm expanse of sunny waters, with its amphitheatre of woody hills, wherein he saw the future asylum of distressed merit and impoverished industry. Slowly, before a favoring breeze, they held their course towards the head of the harbor, which narrowed as they advanced; but all was solitude,—no moving sail, no sign of human presence. At length, ...
— Pioneers Of France In The New World • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... external one. The accidental removal of a quantity of loose stones from above, revealed a narrow passage of from twenty to thirty feet in length, and opening directly into the cave. This internal opening is situated almost immediately over the amphitheatre, one hundred and twenty feet above the floor of the cavern, and (measuring in a plane) is one hundred and eighty feet from the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 363, January, 1846 • Various
... been reasoners; and lastly to the third exclamation, "O HOW WISE!" where I saw a company such as in the world had been confirmators. From these I returned to the first, where there were judges influenced by friendship and gifts, and who were proclaimed "Just." On one side I saw as it were an amphitheatre built of brick, and covered with black slates; and I was told that they called it a tribunal. There were three entrances to it on the north, and three on the west, but none on the south and east; a proof that their decisions were not ...
— The Delights of Wisdom Pertaining to Conjugial Love • Emanuel Swedenborg
... had flocked in their tens of thousands to an amphitheatre of rocks; they were penguins; but the holy man, rendered deaf and purblind by his years, mistook excusably the multitude of silly, erect, and self-important birds for a human crowd. At once he began to preach to them the doctrine of salvation. Having finished his discourse he lost no time ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... patriotism more terribly proved. "The poilu of Verdun," writes M. Joseph Reinach, "became an epic figure"—and the whole battle rose before Europe as a kind of apocalyptic vision of Death and Courage, staged on a great river, in an amphitheatre of blood-stained hills. All the eyes in the world were fixed on this little corner of France. For a Frenchman—"Verdun was our first thought on waking, and was never absent ...
— Fields of Victory • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... palmy days" as a clown in the ring during the regular performance and as a serio-comic vocalist at the concert immediately after the show under the great canvas. Relentless time, however, rings in wondrous changes, and the whilom Professor Rufus Botts, pride alike of the amphitheatre and of the concert stage, is now plain Rufe Botts on a salary of four dollars a week (and found) as Mr. Robbins' man of ...
— The House - An Episode in the Lives of Reuben Baker, Astronomer, and of His Wife, Alice • Eugene Field
... Sam sank back in his seat again. From somewhere had come suddenly the blare of a solitary trumpet that rang in echoes around the amphitheatre of the hills and, a moment later, a dazzling something shot into sight above the mound that looked like a ball of fire, coming in mid-air. The new knight wore a shining helmet and the Hon. Sam chuckled at the murmur that rose and then he sat up suddenly. There was ...
— A Knight of the Cumberland • John Fox Jr.
... the sittings since the opening, and shall now say a word on the subject of the French Parliamentary proceedings. The hall is an amphitheatre, like our own; the disposition of the seats and speaker's chair being much the same as at Washington. The members sit on benches, however, that rise one behind the other, and through which they ascend and descend, by aisles. These aisles separate the different shades ...
— Recollections of Europe • J. Fenimore Cooper
... pilasters. It is built of brick plastered over, and painted with architecture almost all the insides of the houses are in the same manner; and, what is very particular the general ground of all the painting is red. Besides this temple, they make out very plainly an amphitheatre: the stairs, of white marble and the seats are very perfect; the inside was painted in the same colour with the private houses, and great part cased with white marble. They have found among other things some fine statues, some human bones, some rice, ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... correctly Nangasaki, is a town of considerable magnitude, skirting the shores of the bay, and built in the form of an amphitheatre. On the terraces above the town, several large temples with graceful, fluted, tent-like roofs, embowered in sombre and tranquil pine groves, shew out distinctly against the dark background, whilst the thousands of little granite monumental columns of the burying grounds, stud ...
— In Eastern Seas - The Commission of H.M.S. 'Iron Duke,' flag-ship in China, 1878-83 • J. J. Smith
... cloud-capped, appeared to have broken off from the main army, and to have come marching into the plain; and while the mountains were closing in upon us behind, they appeared to be falling back in front, and arranging themselves into the segment of a vast circle. A magnificent amphitheatre had risen noiselessly around us. On all sides save the south, where a reach of the valley was still visible, the eye met only a lofty wall of mountains, hung in a rich and gorgeous tapestry of bright green pasturages and shady pine-forests, with the frequent sunlight ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... wayside, his quick eye scanning the scene: the close file of the ranges about the horizon, one showing above another, and one more faintly blue than another, for thus the distance was defined; then the amphitheatre of the Cove, the heavy bronze-green slopes of the mountains, all with ripple marks of clear chrome-green ruffling in the wake of the wind; in the middle distance the still depths of the valley below, ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... naturally expect to find many blockheads. If these are more plentiful at Rome than at Paris or Bologna, it is because the priests meddle with medical instruction, as with everything else. I never shall forget how I laughed when I entered the amphitheatre of Santo Spirito, to see a vine-leaf on 'the subject' on which the professor was going to ...
— The Roman Question • Edmond About
... plains and touch the river. As at Baroona, the stream runs in through a deep cleft in the table land, which here, though precipitous on the eastern bank, on the western breaks away into a small natural amphitheatre bordered by fine hanging woods just in advance of which, about two hundred yards from the river, stood the house, a long, low building densely covered with creepers of all sorts, and fronted by a beautiful ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley
... come to what seemed a vast semicircle of ice and snow, a huge amphitheatre in the plains. It was wonderful: a great round wall on which the northern lights played, into which the stars peered. It was open towards the north, and in one side was a fissure shaped like a Gothic arch. Pierre pointed to it, and they did not speak till they had passed through it. Like ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... was magnificent and beautiful; for, besides the disposition of the walls, which formed a kind of amphitheatre, the different colours wherewith the several parapets were painted formed ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... we were early afoot in the most brilliant sunshine, under a cloudless sky—really perfect Alpine weather. In the shade the persisting night-frost told of the great height of the marvellous amphitheatre which lay before us. The valley by which we had mounted the previous night abruptly abandons its steep gradient and gorge-like character, and widens into a flat, boulder-strewn plain, a little over a mile in diameter, surrounded, ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester
... original opinion, and, smiling scornfully, assured us that he had seen and heard enough to strengthen him in his verdict. Heine told us that shortly after he and Spontini had taken their seats in the almost empty amphitheatre, and as soon as the Bacchus chorus had started, Spontini had said to him: 'C'est de la Berliner Sing-Academie, allons-nous-en.' Through an open door a streak of light had fallen on a lonely figure behind one of the columns; Heine had recognised Mendelssohn, and concluded ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... battles of the monarchs of the wild And wood—the lion and his tusky rebels Of the then untamed desert, brought to joust In the arena—as right well they might, When they had left no human foe unconquered— Made even the forest pay its tribute of Life to their amphitheatre, as well As Dacia men to die the eternal death 60 For a sole instant's pastime, and "Pass on To a new gladiator!"—Must ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... encompassed by a level belt of pasture-land and corn-fields, the white little town of Inverary glittered like a gem on the sea-shore, while to the right, amid lawns and gardens, and gleaming banks of wood, that hung down into the water, rose the dark towers of the Castle, the whole environed by an amphitheatre of tumbled porphyry hills, beyond whose fir-crowned crags rose the ...
— Letters From High Latitudes • The Marquess of Dufferin (Lord Dufferin)
... of the greenhouse the judge had set up a grandstand, an amphitheatre of benches to hold some five or six thousand pelargoniums in pots—a splendid and famous show. People came to see his geraniums in flower, not only from the neighborhood, but even from the departments round about. The Empress Marie Louise, passing through the town, had honored ...
— The Jealousies of a Country Town • Honore de Balzac
... contrasts in appearance and culture are observable among the inhabitants; they are all negroes, but in different social conditions, more or less liable to injury from the presence of the slaver, and yielding different temperaments and qualities to colonial life. The beautiful and fertile amphitheatre called Whidah, in North latitude 6 deg., with Dahomey just behind it, is populous with a superior race. Where did it come from? The area which it occupies has only about fifty miles of coast and less than thirty of interior; its people are as ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... brow of the hill, as well towards the sea as towards the land; but the ground within having originally been a mount, they have reduced it not to one level, but to several, rising in stages one above the other, like an amphitheatre, each of which is inclosed within its separate pallisade; they communicate with each other by narrow lanes, which might easily be stopt up, so that if an enemy should force the outward pallisade, he would have others to carry before the place could be wholly reduced, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr
... land-locked, buried in woods, the trees coming right down to high-water mark, the shores mostly flat, and the hilltops standing round at a distance in a sort of amphitheatre, one here, one there. Two little rivers, or rather two swamps, emptied out into this pond, as you might call it; and the foliage round that part of the shore had a kind of poisonous brightness. From ...
— Treasure Island • Robert Louis Stevenson
... being utterly averse to and detesting spectacles, he was one day by chance met by divers of his acquaintance and fellow-students coming from dinner, and they with a familiar violence haled him, vehemently refusing and resisting, into the Amphitheatre, during these cruel and deadly shows, he thus protesting: "Though you hale my body to that place, and there set me, can you force me also to turn my mind or my eyes to those shows? I shall then be absent while present, and so shall overcome ...
— The Confessions of Saint Augustine • Saint Augustine
... of Provence, he wished to enjoy the magnificent view which spread to the southern horizon a little longer, he went and sat down on the edge of the ditch which bordered the road, turning his back on the mountains which rise like an amphitheatre to the north of the town, and having at his feet a rich plain covered with tropical vegetation, exotics of a conservatory, trees and flowers quite unknown in any other part ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - MURAT—1815 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... mountains rising beyond mountains, with stupendous masses of rock in the fore ground, here strike the eye with admiration and astonishment. The circular form in which the whole is so wonderfully disposed, induced the governor to give the name of Pitt's Amphitheatre to this offset or branch from the Prince Regent's Glen. The road continues from hence for the space of seventeen miles, on the ridge of the mountain which forms one side of the Prince Regent's Glen, and there it suddenly terminates in nearly a perpendicular precipice ...
— Journals of Two Expeditions into the Interior of New South Wales • John Oxley
... your course is different. Then, you wander along the summits of the cliffs; and looking down, through the hedges of tamarisk and myrtle that skirt the ends of the fields, see the rocks suddenly broken away beneath you into an immense shelving amphitheatre, on the floor of which the sea boils in fury, rushing through natural archways and narrow rifts. Beyond them, at intervals as the waves fall, you catch glimpses of the brilliant blue main ocean, and the outer reefs stretching into it. Often, ...
— Rambles Beyond Railways; - or, Notes in Cornwall taken A-foot • Wilkie Collins
... of a lively green. But I now found that this was occasioned by a single plant, which, with the other natural productions, shall be described in another place. Before I returned to my ship, I ascended the first ridge of rocks, which rise in a kind of amphitheatre above one another. I was in hopes, by this means, of obtaining a view of the country; but before I reached the top, there came on so thick a fog, that I could hardly find my way down again. In the evening, we hauled the seine at the head ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 15 (of 18) • Robert Kerr
... After a noble reply by Captain de Camp, of the Hon. East India Company's service, from Madras, and much applause from the diners, they ascend, to join the ladies; forming, round the drawing-room-fire, a vast amphitheatre, in the centre of which, gladiatorial children contend for nuts and oranges—Captain de Camp filling the post of honour,—making himself at home in Mr. Brown's easy chair and slippers. Mr. Wellesley drags ...
— Christmas Comes but Once A Year - Showing What Mr. Brown Did, Thought, and Intended to Do, - during that Festive Season. • Luke Limner
... "how can you say so? When we go out on the bay in the evening and I look back at the city, it seems to me most beautiful. It is like an amphitheatre, with its tiers of lights rising one above ...
— Rafael in Italy - A Geographical Reader • Etta Blaisdell McDonald
... and comprehensive view bursts upon the vision, and it really requires an effort to tear one's self away, realizing that in all probability I shall never see it again. At one point I seem to be overlooking a vast amphitheatre which encompasses within itself the physical geography of a continent. It is traversed by whole mountain-ranges of lesser degree; it contains tracts of stony desert and fertile valley, lakes, and a river, not excepting even the completing element of a fine forest, and ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... from heretofore giving to beauty its proper meed of admiration and worship. To speak more plainly, I have undertaken, by order of our emperor, the not ungrateful task of weaving a few poetical sentiments to be recited at the opening of our new amphitheatre. And in order that the results of my labor might not lessen my already acquired fame, I judged it most prudent to seclude myself for the past few days from the gayeties of the world, and give myself up to study and meditation. Though, after ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... removed to one of the porticos, and the centre was used for a fireplace, which, if the old prints are to be trusted, was large enough to roast half a score of people at once. We have "A Perspective View of the Inside of the Amphitheatre in Ranelagh Gardens," drawn by W. Newland, and engraved by Walker, 1761; also "Eight Large Views of Ranelagh and Vauxhall Gardens," by Canaletti and Hooker, 1751. The roof of this immense building was covered ...
— Chelsea - The Fascination of London • G. E. (Geraldine Edith) Mitton
... take the waters. It is beautifully situated on both sides of the Avon, and has many fine walks and public buildings. The aspect of the city is markedly cheerful and brilliant, owing to the nature of the white stone of which the principal houses are built, and to the exquisite amphitheatre of hills in ...
— Sir William Herschel: His Life and Works • Edward Singleton Holden
... the woods. Josiah and I are well thought on in Jonesville, and as fur out as Loontown and Piller Pint, and a man soon advanced and gin us an advantageous position, and Josiah hitched the mair and we advanced into the amphitheatre. ...
— Samantha at Coney Island - and a Thousand Other Islands • Marietta Holley
... state-house or the Pelican Hotel. The casual visitor in that capital leaves it with a sense of peace, the echo of church bells in his ear, and (if in winter) the impression of dazzling snow. Comedies do not necessarily require a wide stage, nor tragedies an amphitheatre for ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... Brougham by a string. But without doubt one of the most successful cartoons Leech ever drew, and the most humorous portrait of Brougham, represented him as a clown at Astley's, going up to the splendid ring-master, the Duke of Wellington (as Mr. Widdicomb of Astley's Amphitheatre) and saying "Well, Mr. Wellington, is there anything I can do for you—for to run, for to fetch, for to carry, for to borrow, for to steal?" As Lord Brougham was suspected of undue complaisance towards the Duke at the time, the neatness of the political ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... round their hips; beyond them, on the succeeding terraces were the choral societies in rows, dressed in black with red caps, their standard-bearer in front, grave, important, his teeth clinched, holding high his carved staff; farther down still, on a vast circular space now arranged as an amphitheatre, were the black bulls, and the herdsmen from Camargue seated on their long-haired white horses, their high boots over their knees, at their wrists an uplifted spear; then more flags, helmets, bayonets, and decorations right down to the triumphal arch at the gates; ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... Amphitheatre, at Westminster Bridge, once had in his possession a remarkably fine Barbary horse, forty-three years of age, which was presented him by the Duke of Leeds. This celebrated animal officiated in the character of a waiter in the course ...
— Minnie's Pet Horse • Madeline Leslie
... perpetuated in writing; here am I going seriously into an investigation of this sort—the doings of a person whose deserts entitled him not to be read about by the cultivated, but to be torn to pieces in the amphitheatre by apes or foxes, with a vast audience looking on. Well, well, if any one does cast reflections of that sort upon us, we shall at least have a precedent to plead. Arrian himself, disciple of Epictetus, distinguished Roman, and product of lifelong ...
— Works, V2 • Lucian of Samosata
... round the village. Their cavalry, perhaps a hundred strong, were falling in hurriedly on the sandy ground to the south near the ragged rocks. The curve of the hills, crowned with the dark line of the troops, completed and framed the picture. Within this small amphitheatre one of the minor dramas of war was ...
— The River War • Winston S. Churchill
... of a forest of tall trees—among which are conspicuous the tulip-tree, the white magnolia, cotton-woods, and giant oaks. Those that immediately encircle it are of less stature: graduating inward to its edge, like the seats in an amphitheatre—as if the forest trees stooped downward to kiss the fair flowers that sparkle over ...
— The Wild Huntress - Love in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... make runs far to the left without a break. That to the right we cannot see from this spot; but from the nature of the ground it is not unlikely that it turns round in this direction, making the hither end of the valley like a vast pocket or amphitheatre. As they have studied the ground in other places, they may have done so in this, and have come hither as to a known refuge. Let one man, a ...
— The Lady of the Shroud • Bram Stoker
... Wyoming is sparsely populated, but the riders of the plains think nothing of traveling a hundred miles in the saddle to be present at a "broncobusting" contest. Large delegations, too, had come in by railroad from Caspar, Billings, Sheridan, Cheyenne and a score of other points, so that the amphitheatre that looked down on the arena was ...
— Wyoming, a Story of the Outdoor West • William MacLeod Raine
... the heat, by thirst, by the march, our soldiers charged the enemy, and drove them back as far as the plain of Baylen. There lay extended before us the Spanish army, in front of the little town, in an amphitheatre of hills, covered with olive-trees. The Spanish artillery was formidable: the field-pieces brought up by the French were soon dismounted. The centre of the Spanish army remained solid, and even the charges of cavalry could not break it. When at last the front ranks opened under the shock ...
— Worlds Best Histories - France Vol 7 • M. Guizot and Madame Guizot De Witt
... walks in the midst of the throng, and enjoys the fruits of his crime, while vengeance seeks for him in vain. Perhaps in their own temple's enclosure he defies the gods mingling freely in this throng of men that now presses into the amphitheatre. ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... said, 'we can go away—we can go tomorrow. We'll go tomorrow to Verona, and find Romeo and Juliet, and sit in the amphitheatre—shall we?' ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... destination, a great amphitheatre situated at the further edge of the plain, and about half a mile beyond ...
— The Gods of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... denomination, the venerable Polycarp and Ignatius, after they had both attained the age of eighty years, sealed their faith in the blood of martyrdom. The former was burned at the stake in Smyrna, and the latter devoured by lions in the amphitheatre of Rome, In the second and third centuries, Christianity numbered among its advocates many distinguished scholars and philosophers, particularly among the Greeks. Their productions may be classed under the heads of biblical, controversial, doctrinal, historical, and ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... southern border of the kingdom. Alpine heights rising around them in rugged magnificence, and gigantic grandeur, presented scenery which our traveller had never seen surpassed. The passes of Hairey and of Horza, amid a superb amphitheatre of hills, closely shut in by overhanging cliffs, more than two thousand feet high, were truly striking. Here for the first time in Africa, did nature appear to the English to rival in the production of vegetable life. The trees ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... the Rue Neuve des Petits Champs, from which it is seen to the best advantage; the facade has a handsome appearance, with the statues of Apollo and the nine Muses, supported by doric and ionic columns. The prices of the places are from ten francs to two francs, which last is the amphitheatre; the intermediate charges are seven francs ten sous, six francs, five, four and three francs ten sous the pit, and it is capable of containing 2,000 persons. ...
— How to Enjoy Paris in 1842 • F. Herve
... of Pasmore and the others, the headland, or bluff, which must have been some two hundred feet high, commanded a splendid view of the operations. The British were approaching right across a species of scarred amphitheatre, while the Indians, and such half-breeds as had recently fled from Battleford on the approach of the British and joined them, occupied the deep ravines and wildly irregular country in their immediate neighbourhood. ...
— The Rising of the Red Man - A Romance of the Louis Riel Rebellion • John Mackie
... another deep and winding gorge. This they followed until they reached a part where it was so narrow that the sides seemed almost to touch over their heads. Beyond, the cliffs fell apart, and then apparently curved towards each other again, thus forming an immense amphitheatre. At the entrance to this Ghamba stopped, and said in a whisper that they were now close to ...
— Kafir Stories - Seven Short Stories • William Charles Scully
... wild and impressive. A wooded amphitheatre, surrounded on three sides by precipitous cliffs of naked granite, sloped gently toward the crest of another precipice that overlooked the valley. It was, undoubtedly, the most suitable spot for a camp, had camping been advisable. But Mr. Oakhurst knew that scarcely half the journey to ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... as Egyptian architecture, and the landscape view from east or west is charming beyond the power of description. Freetown is the capital, with about twenty thousand inhabitants, situated on the south side of Sierra Leone River, and hugged in by an amphitheatre of beautiful hills ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams
... Wuchai is steady pulling. Once in an opening in the hill we passed along and then ascended an exceedingly steep spur on one side of a narrow and very deep natural amphitheatre, formed by surrounding mountains. We then came to a lagoon, and eventually the brow of the hill was reached. Thus the Wuchai Valley is arrived at, where, owing to a collection of water, the road is often impassable to man and beast. ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... by Trifina; 3 brought out to the wild beasts; a she-lion licks her feet. 5 Trifina upon a vision of her deceased daughter, adopts Thecla, 11 who is taken to the amphitheatre again. ...
— The Forbidden Gospels and Epistles, Complete • Archbishop Wake
... Christians of Trebizond and Georgia. The castle, in Asiatic warfare, was esteemed impregnable; and the city of Amasia, [74] which is equally divided by the River Iris, rises on either side in the form of an amphitheatre, and represents on a smaller scale the image of Bagdad. In his rapid career, Timour appears to have overlooked this obscure and contumacious angle of Anatolia; and Mahomet, without provoking the conqueror, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... the Romans to pathos appears a priori in their amphitheatre, and its tendency to put out the theatre; secondly, a posteriori, in the fact that their theatre was put out; and also, a posteriori, in the coarseness of their sensibilities to real distresses unless costumed and made sensible as well as intelligible. The grossness ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... the amphitheatre-shaped meadow, beside the old road that leads to the river, stands the farmhouse. It is sheltered from winter winds by the hills and from summer sun by ...
— From the Bottom Up - The Life Story of Alexander Irvine • Alexander Irvine
... this is a fine place!" exclaimed Terence, as he gazed over the wide expanse of the harbour, the plain of Liguania covered with plantations, and dotted with white farm-houses quivering in the beams of a tropical sun. Beyond it rose the magnificent amphitheatre of the Blue Mountains, one piled upon another, reaching to the clouds, and intersected by numerous deep, irregular valleys; one of their spurs, with Rock Fort at its base, appearing directly over the ship's port-quarter; ...
— The Three Lieutenants • W.H.G. Kingston
... power to know, Genius, incarnated in Art, By thee the nations grow. Lawgiver thine, and priest, and sage, Lit up the Oriental age. Persuasive groves, and musical, Of love the illumined mountains all. Eagles and rods, and axes clear, Forum and amphitheatre; These in thy plastic forming hand, Forth leapt to life the classic Land. Old and new, the worlds of light, Who bridged the gulf of Middle Night? See the purple passage rise, Many arch'd of centuries; ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... directly to the spot, hardly a step astray. It was all below the surface of the earth, so that hardly any sound rose above; and there was no sign of any path to it, not a tree, nor shrub, nor blade of grass near, but an amphitheatre of rock, and the beautiful white river, in its leap into the canyon falling a hundred and ninety feet. The cliffs and jagged pinnacles of basaltic rock around it were several hundred feet high. It looked like a great white bridal ...
— Life at Puget Sound: With Sketches of Travel in Washington Territory, British Columbia, Oregon and California • Caroline C. Leighton
... Regla, within the beautiful harbor of Havana. I shall never forget the impression made on my mind by this delicious scene as it first broke on my sight at sunrise, in all the cool freshness of morning. The grand amphitheatre of hills swept down to the calm and lake-like water with gentle slopes, lapped in the velvet robes of richest green, and embroidered, as it were, with lace-like spots of castle, fort, dwelling, and villa, until the seaward points ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... after your first moment of surprise," said he, "are in a position to appreciate the delights of our society. You can see how it combines the excitement of a gaming-table, a duel, and a Roman amphitheatre. The Pagans did well enough; I cordially admire the refinement of their minds; but it has been reserved for a Christian country to attain this extreme, this quintessence, this absolute of poignancy. You will understand ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 4 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... acoustic arrangements of this theatre. Not a sound, so it is said, is lost from the stage upon any part of the house. The lowest sob of a dying heroine, in her very last agony, is heard as plainly by the occupant of the back seat of the amphitheatre, as are the thundering denunciations of the tragic actor in ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... writing on the top of a wild-beast pen of the amphitheatre of Aosta I may note, for one thing, that the Romans were not squeamish, they had no Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. Again, their ladies did not write in the newspapers. Fancy Miss Cato reviewing Horace! They had no Frances Power Cobbes, no . . . s, no . . . s; yet they ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... trying to scale the sides of our highest peaks. I thus examined in succession all the glaciers descending from the majestic summits of Monte Rosa and the Matterhorn, whose numerous crests form a most gigantic amphitheatre, which lifts itself above the everlasting snow. Afterward I visited the sea of ice which, under the name of the glacier of Aletsch, flows from the Jungfrau, the Monch, and the Eiger toward Brieg; thence ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz
... when flogged by lord B—-, in the House,—not Mr. Cartlitch, of Astley's Amphitheatre, in his most pathetic passages, could look more crestfallen, and howl more hideously, than Diabolus did now. "Take another year, Gambouge," screamed he; "two more—ten more—a century; roast me on Lawrence's gridiron, ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... passing under the bridge which he had viewed with so much terror, the path ascended rapidly from the edge of the brook, and the glen widened into a sylvan amphitheatre, waving with birch, young oaks, and hazels, with here and there a scattered yew-tree. The rocks now receded, but still showed their grey and shaggy crests rising among the copse-wood. Still higher, rose eminences and peaks, some bare, some clothed with wood, ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott
... out is the way of the world." Yet in its evaporation it travels as far as any. In summer it is the earth's liquid eye; a mirror in the breast of nature. The sins of the wood are washed out in it. See how the woods form an amphitheatre about it, and it is an arena for all the genialness of nature. All trees direct the traveller to its brink, all paths seek it out, birds fly to it, quadrupeds flee to it, and the very ground inclines toward it. It is nature's ...
— Excursions • Henry D. Thoreau
... lifted. I perceived that it was not so late as I had thought, and that there was much more of the day left than I had supposed from the crimson glare in the west. I threw myself down on one of the grassy gradines of the amphitheatre, and comforted myself with the antiquity of the work, which was so great as to involve its origin in a somewhat impassioned question among the local authorities. Whether it was a Norse work, a ...
— A Pair of Patient Lovers • William Dean Howells
... 17th.—Returned to Nismes; revisited the Amphitheatre and the Maison Caree; beautiful in proportion and execution. Returned to Beacaise; visited the Castle; very high, and remarkably strong; crossed the river to examine a castle, now a prison; historical recollections of both castles. Visited ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... when one of the archbishops gave leave to Simeon, a wandering hermit from Syracuse in Sicily, to take up his abode there; and another turned it into a church dedicated to this saint, though of this change few traces remain. Finally, it has become a national museum of antiquities. The amphitheatre is a genuine Roman work, wonderfully well preserved; and genuine enough were the Roman games it has witnessed, for, if we are to believe tradition, a thousand Frankish prisoners of war were here given in one day to the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 20, August 1877 • Various
... are the mutual relations between the young and the aged. Oh, for a return in our youth to that ancient bowing deference to old age a beautiful instance of which Cicero preserves for us. Into the crowded amphitheatre at Athens, with the multitudes' expectant hush, there staggered an aged man, who made his tottering progress, beneath tier after tier of indifferent or averted faces, looking in vain for a place, until finally he came in front of the section occupied by the Lacaedemonians, ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... latter are frequently arched with perfect symmetry, and the appearance of some of the masses is in consequence most singular. Pernety [8] has devoted several pages to the description of a Hill of Ruins, the successive strata of which he has justly compared to the seats of an amphitheatre. The quartz rock must have been quite pasty when it underwent such remarkable flexures without being shattered into fragments. As the quartz insensibly passes into the sandstone, it seems probable that the former owes its origin to the sandstone having been ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin
... giving an Account of 50,000 People being killed by the Fall of an Amphitheatre at Fidena, during the Time of a Shew of Gladiators, has these Words: "Ceterum post recentem cladem, patuere procerum domus, fomenta & medici passim praebiti; suit urbs per illos dies, quanquam maesta facie veterum ...
— An Account of the Diseases which were most frequent in the British military hospitals in Germany • Donald Monro
... with anything that cannot be clearly explained by dumb-show, is to exhibit a linen scroll, on which is painted, in large letters, the sentence necessary to be known. It so happened that a number of these scrolls had Been thrown aside after one of the grand spectacles at Astley's Amphitheatre, and remained amongst other lumber in the property-room, until the late destructive fire which occurred there. On that night, the wife of one of the stage-assistants—a woman of portly dimensions—was aroused from her bed by the alarm of fire, and in her confusion, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 1, July 17, 1841 • Various
... give it a very moderate height. At Babylon the object was to produce an artificial imitation of a mountain. For this purpose several tiers of arches were necessary; and these appear to have been constructed in the manner of a Roman amphitheatre, one directly over another so that the outer wall formed from summit to base a single perpendicular line. Of the height of the structure various accounts are given, while no writer reports the number of the tiers of arches. Hence there are no sufficient data for ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 4. (of 7): Babylon • George Rawlinson
... at sea. On one side of the town were the royal docks, on the other the Hippodrome, and on appropriate sites the Necropolis, the market-places, the gymnasium, its stoa being a stadium long; the amphitheatre, groves, gardens, fountains, obelisks, and countless public buildings with gilded roofs glittering in the sun. Here might be seen the wealthy Christian ladies walking in the streets, their dresses embroidered with Scripture parables, the Gospels hanging ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... you enjoy such warmth and are not made languid by it. You will perhaps remember that I am always strongest at 98 degrees Fahrenheit. I delight to think that you also can look forth as I do now upon a broad valley and a fine amphitheatre of hills, and are about to watch the stately ceremony of sunset from your piazza. But you have not this lovely Lake, nor I suppose the delicate purple mist which folds these slumbering ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... that it has been brought down the mountain by a heavy snow avalanche, loaded on the ice, then carried away from the shore in the direction of the flow of the glacier. This explains detached moraine-masses. This one seems to have been derived from a big roomy cirque or amphitheatre on the northwest side of this Snow ...
— Travels in Alaska • John Muir
... Warricombe had foreseen, the seats obtainable were none too advantageous; only on one of the highest rows of the amphitheatre could they at length ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... time to listen. The window turned into a chute, and he slid down its polished sides into an amphitheatre. There, across gray sand, the corpse crept toward him on the stubs of arms and legs. The enormous grandstand was empty except for the judge and the informer, who ...
— The Status Civilization • Robert Sheckley
... and went, and I was at the exit of the chasm, staring out upon an enormous amphitheatre of mountains. Yet, of the mountains, and the terrible grandeur of the place, I recked nothing; for I was confounded with amazement to behold, at a distance of several miles and occupying the center of ...
— The House on the Borderland • William Hope Hodgson
... neigh cheerfully given to encourage us in the pursuit. We were getting more unprepared in body, mind and soul for the sanctuary. Meanwhile, quite a household audience lined the fence; the children and visitors shouting like excited Romans in an amphitheatre at a contest with wild beasts, and it was uncertain whether the audience was in sympathy with us or ...
— Around The Tea-Table • T. De Witt Talmage
... idea of the height to which we had arrived. Suddenly the ground broke up on either side of the track into rocky eminences, and we now came to the brow of a sharp descent. The valley of Aroukeen wound as it were like a snake far down at the bottom of an immense hollow, surrounded on all sides by an amphitheatre of savage-looking mountains—great stony swells, made hideous here and there by crags and ravines, and piled away on all sides in shattered magnificence. This is the grandest desert prospect I have yet seen, and must strongly clash with the ...
— Narrative of a Mission to Central Africa Performed in the Years 1850-51, Volume 1 • James Richardson
... two, and in the second or upper gallery, one shilling. And it is the tenants in this upper gallery who, for their shilling, make all that noise and uproar for which the English play-houses are so famous. I was in the pit, which gradually rises, amphitheatre-wise, from the orchestra, and is furnished with benches, one above another, from the top to the bottom. Often and often, whilst I sat there, did a rotten orange, or pieces of the peel of an orange, fly past me, or past some of my neighbours, and once one of them actually hit my hat, without ...
— Travels in England in 1782 • Charles P. Moritz
... cure, or had cured any disease. My venerated instructor, Dr. James Jackson, taught me never to use that expression. Curo means, I take care of, he used to say, and in that sense, if you mean nothing more, it is properly employed. So, in the amphitheatre of the Ecole de Medecine, I used to read the words of Ambroise Pare, "Je le pansay, Dieu le guarist." (I dressed his wound, and God cured him.) Next, I am not in the habit of talking about "the diseases to which flesh is heir." The expression has become rather too familiar for repetition, ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... bills posted about the city that three of the most celebrated fighters of Mexico would have an exhibition in the evening, and combat with animals. As my friend and myself never had seen one we thought we would go. It was an amphitheatre, with circular seats about the pit, with thick planks around it, the seats commencing about twenty feet from the bottom of the pit. There was a door at the side of the pit, which was raised by pulleys, which admitted the bull. They were wild ones. Our seat was about the fifth row back. The ...
— The Adventures of a Forty-niner • Daniel Knower
... was located the cemetery of Suresnes, a cemetery given over to the burial of the American dead. As he spoke of the purposes for which those departed American soldiers had given their lives, a great wave of emotion, such as I have never witnessed at a public meeting, swept through the whole amphitheatre. As he continued his speech, I looked at Mrs. Wilson and saw tears in her eyes. I then turned to see the effect upon some of the "hard-boiled" newspaper men, to whom great speeches were ordinary things, and they were alike deeply moved. ...
— Woodrow Wilson as I Know Him • Joseph P. Tumulty
... exposure to the sun, &c. The lake is of very considerable extent, measuring, I think, about twenty-eight miles at its greatest length, by about twenty-two at its extreme breadth; it is formed by an amphitheatre of mountains, the various streams from which feed it; and its opening or outlet forms the origin of the river Pasig, which, bathing the walls of the fortress of Santiago and the capital of the Philippines, flows into the arm of the sea ...
— Recollections of Manilla and the Philippines - During 1848, 1849 and 1850 • Robert Mac Micking
... lower and more plaintive sound. At length an answer reaches his ears. The snapping of the branches is resumed; and presently the moose is seen stalking into the middle of the moonlit "barren." Our weapons are ready; and as the magnificent animal stands looking eagerly around in the woodland amphitheatre, a rifle ball, laden with death, brings him ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... streets were paved with gold; so that by reason of the natural glory of the city, and the reflection of the sunbeams upon it, Christian with desire fell sick." It was a momentary vision of a vast amphitheatre of splendor, mostly hidden by the trees and ...
— Our Italy • Charles Dudley Warner
... huge, enlarging on the sight, Nature's volcanic Amphitheatre,[22.B.] Chimaera's Alps extend from left to right: Beneath, a living valley seems to stir; Flocks play, trees wave, streams flow, the mountain-fir Nodding above; behold black Acheron![23.B.] Once consecrated to the sepulchre. ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... Valley, bestowed on the public for such pleasures by the local nobleman whose title is given to a principal street, and to other points and places, I suppose out of the public pride and gratitude. It is a charming amphitheatre overlooked by the lofty tops around, and there on the green slope the Niggers had set up their stage, and ranged the spectators' chairs in the classification of first, second, and third so dear to the British soul. There they cracked their jokes, and there they ...
— Seven English Cities • W. D. Howells
... have been called the only maritime cities that approach the natural beauty of situation of San Francisco. The basin of the Bay, into which the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers pour after watering the central garden valley of the state, is an amphitheatre rimmed ...
— Fascinating San Francisco • Fred Brandt and Andrew Y. Wood
... arrived. Suddenly the ground broke up on either side of the track into rocky eminences, and we now came to the brow of a sharp descent. The valley of Aroukeen wound as it were like a snake far down at the bottom of an immense hollow, surrounded on all sides by an amphitheatre of savage-looking mountains—great stony swells, made hideous here and there by crags and ravines, and piled away on all sides in shattered magnificence. This is the grandest desert prospect I have yet seen, and ...
— Narrative of a Mission to Central Africa Performed in the Years 1850-51, Volume 1 • James Richardson
... hollow he had planted shrubs of the lowest growth; behind grew the more lofty sorts; then trees of the ordinary height; and beyond and above all, the venerable and lofty groves which border the circumference. Thus this extensive enclosure appeared, from its centre, like a verdant amphitheatre decorated with fruits and flowers, containing a variety of vegetables, some strips of meadow land, and fields of rice and corn. But, in arranging these vegetable productions to his own taste, he wandered not too far from the designs of Nature. Guided by her ...
— Paul and Virginia • Bernardin de Saint Pierre
... the Iao valley, up which I rode with two island friends, and spent a day of supreme, satisfied admiration. At Iao people may throw away pen and pencil in equal despair. The trail leads down a gorge dark with forest trees, and then opens out into an amphitheatre, walled in by precipices, from three to six thousand feet high, misty with a thousand waterfalls, plumed with kukuis, and feathery with ferns. A green-clad needle of stone, one thousand feet in height, the last refuge of an army routed when ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... could not bear to leave a town where I had two or three very agreeable acquaintance, and one (Mons. Seguier) whose house was filled as full of natural and artificial curiosities, as his head is with learning and knowledge. Here too I had an opportunity of often visiting the Amphitheatre, the Maison Carree, (so Mons. Seguier writes it) and the many remains of Roman monuments so common in and about Nismes. I measured some of the stones under which I passed to make the tout au tour of the Amphitheatre, they were seventeen ...
— A Year's Journey through France and Part of Spain, Volume II (of 2) • Philip Thicknesse
... with their sharp and spreading foliage. The beautiful and the vast blended together; and the moment after you had beheld with delight a bed of geraniums or of myrtles, you found yourself in an amphitheatre of Italian pines. A strange exotic perfume filled the air: you trod on the flowers of other lands; and shrubs and plants, that usually are only trusted from their conservatories, like sultanas from ...
— Henrietta Temple - A Love Story • Benjamin Disraeli
... large, nor was it particularly bright; but sufficient to cast a dim light on the objects within reach of its rays. It was in the precise centre of a bit of bottom land of about half an acre in extent, which was so formed and surrounded, as to have something of the appearance of the arena of a large amphitheatre. There was one break in the encircling rise of ground, it is true, and that was at a spot directly opposite the station of le Bourdon and his companion, where the rill which flowed from the spring found a passage out toward the more open ground. Branches ...
— Oak Openings • James Fenimore Cooper
... carry us through safely—we came to the noble town of Viviers. From afar we saw its tall bell-tower, its beautiful cathedral, its episcopal palace; and as we drew nearer the whole environment of ancient houses and fortifications spread out around those governing points in a great amphitheatre. But what held us most was the gay dash of tri-colour on its bridge, and the crowd there evidently waiting for our coming to manifest toward us their good will. They cheered us and waved their hats and handkerchiefs ...
— The Christmas Kalends of Provence - And Some Other Provencal Festivals • Thomas A. Janvier
... of ice every day, and trying to scale the sides of our highest peaks. I thus examined in succession all the glaciers descending from the majestic summits of Monte Rosa and the Matterhorn, whose numerous crests form a most gigantic amphitheatre, which lifts itself above the everlasting snow. Afterward I visited the sea of ice which, under the name of the glacier of Aletsch, flows from the Jungfrau, the Monch, and the Eiger toward Brieg; thence I went to the glacier of the Rhone, and ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz
... season, king Bhima summoned the kings to the Swayamvara. And hearing of it, all the lords of earth smit with love speedily came thither, desirous of (possessing) Damayanti. And the monarchs entered the amphitheatre decorated with golden pillars and a lofty portal arch, like mighty lions entering the mountain wilds. And those lords of earth decked with fragrant garlands and polished ear-rings hung with jewels seated themselves on their several seats. And that sacred assembly of Kings, graced ...
— Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa Bk. 3 Pt. 1 • Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa
... well-built houses, not in the least rural in their aspect, but that seem rather as if they had been transported from the centre of some stately city entire and at once, sweeps round its inner inflection, like a bent bow; and an amphitheatre of mingled rock and wood rises behind. With all its beauty, however, there hangs about the village an air of melancholy. Like some of the other western coast villages, it seems not to have grown, piece-meal, as a village ought, but to have been made wholesale, ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... was at its side, while back of the buildings themselves, angling off behind the screening shoulder of a steep spur of hillside, stretched a small orchard where only gnarled apple trees and a few "bee-gums" broke a small and level amphitheatre into which the possible ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... to the distant ward. The porter followed. The three surgeons standing by that grim table in the rubber-floored central space of the amphitheatre, fenced in by students' benches, vacant save for half a dozen whispering dressers, looked at one another. Bloused and aproned with sterilised material, masked, rubber-gloved, and slippered, and splashed with the same ominous ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... he said, "See here! what a nice place with the stones sticking out like seats. Why, it's like a little house; let us stay and play a bit here." It was a little hollow in the hill side surrounded by projecting stones like an amphitheatre. The sisters were still afraid, but the sight of this little hollow with its seats of crag had such a charm for them that they promised David they would stop awhile, if he would promise not to shout and awake the echo. David readily promised ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... despite its name, fell on the 1st of June, turned out hardly a more successful exhibition. Napoleon, his brothers, and the great civil functionaries, appeared in theatric dresses, in the midst of an enormous amphitheatre, where the deputies, sent from the departments to swear allegiance to the Emperor and the "additional act," were almost lost in the military among whom the eagles were to be distributed. The enthusiasm was confined to these. The same ominous silence which prevailed at the coronation of 1804 ...
— The History of Napoleon Buonaparte • John Gibson Lockhart
... to the south of the watercourse above the water, and proceeded over the most splendid salt-bush country that one could wish to see, bounded on the left by sandhills, whilst to the right the peculiar-looking flat-topped sandstone ranges form an extensive amphitheatre, through the far side of the arena of which may be traced the dark line of creek timber. At twelve o'clock we camped in the bed of the creek at camp—, our last camp on the road down from the Gulf, having taken four days to do what we then did in one. This comparative rest and the change in diet ...
— Successful Exploration Through the Interior of Australia • William John Wills
... collection of gleaming white houses, and green casements, and red roofs, and old towers and belfries; and then, higher still, and enclosing, as it were, the picturesque little town, the great ethereal amphitheatre of pale blue mountains, with here and there a sprinkling of snow glittering sharply, as if it were quite close at hand. How fresh and cold the morning air was, after the sultry atmosphere of the ...
— The Beautiful Wretch; The Pupil of Aurelius; and The Four Macnicols • William Black
... your account and my own. There are you asking that the memory of an arch-scoundrel should be perpetuated in writing; here am I going seriously into an investigation of this sort—the doings of a person whose deserts entitled him not to be read about by the cultivated, but to be torn to pieces in the amphitheatre by apes or foxes, with a vast audience looking on. Well, well, if any one does cast reflections of that sort upon us, we shall at least have a precedent to plead. Arrian himself, disciple of Epictetus, distinguished Roman, and product of lifelong ...
— Works, V2 • Lucian of Samosata
... of San Francisco is very uneven, embracing a series of hills, of which the highest ones, known as the Twin Peaks, reach to an elevation of 925 feet, and form the crown of an amphitheatre of lower altitudes. Several of the latter are covered with handsome residences, and afford a magnificent view of the surrounding country, with its bordering bay and ocean, and the noble Golden Gate channel, a river-like passage from ocean to bay of five miles in length and one in width. This waterway ...
— The San Francisco Calamity • Various
... of an army, so near yet so powerless to help, the Guides commenced their retirement. With the great mountains as an amphitheatre the drama began to unfold itself before the gaze of waiting thousands. At first so far away were they, so few, so scattered, and clad to match the colour of the hills, that only the strongest glasses could ...
— The Story of the Guides • G. J. Younghusband
... buildings crawled with humanity—not yet packed as it would be by evening—yet already sufficiently filled by the two ever-flowing streams—the one passing downwards to where the grotto lay out of sight on the left, the other passing up towards the lower entrance of the great hall. It resembled an amphitheatre, and the more so, since the roofs of the buildings on every side, as well as the slope up which the steps rose to the churches, adapted now as they were to accommodate at least three hundred thousand spectators, were already beginning ...
— Dawn of All • Robert Hugh Benson
... famous and plentiful mart of many rich and valuable commodities. But the main object for which pilgrims resort thither from so many countries and nations, is, to purchase the pardon of their sins. In the middle of the city there is a temple after the manner of the coliseum or amphitheatre of Rome, yet not built of marble or hewn stone, being only of burnt bricks. Like an amphitheatre, it has ninety or an hundred gates, and is vaulted over. It is entered on every side by a descent of twelve steps, and in its porch is the mart for jewels ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VII • Robert Kerr
... capital leaves it with a sense of peace, the echo of church bells in his ear, and (if in winter) the impression of dazzling snow. Comedies do not necessarily require a wide stage, nor tragedies an amphitheatre for their enactment. ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... old soldier who had wished to end his days in his Prince's civil employment, now that age had obliged him to relinquish his military service. The King stopped, heard his story, and then ordered him to follow him. His Majesty attended the representation in a sort of amphitheatre, in which his armchair was placed; behind him was a row of stools for the captain of the Guards, the first gentleman of the chamber, and other great officers. The brigade-major was entitled to one of these places; the King stopped opposite the seat which ...
— Memoirs Of The Court Of Marie Antoinette, Queen Of France, Complete • Madame Campan
... latter followed close at their heels with loaded rifles. To the no little satisfaction of Pasmore and the others, the headland, or bluff, which must have been some two hundred feet high, commanded a splendid view of the operations. The British were approaching right across a species of scarred amphitheatre, while the Indians, and such half-breeds as had recently fled from Battleford on the approach of the British and joined them, occupied the deep ravines and wildly irregular country in their immediate neighbourhood. ...
— The Rising of the Red Man - A Romance of the Louis Riel Rebellion • John Mackie
... roping it on his pack-horse. As we proceeded up the canyon it grew narrower, and soon we entered a veritable gorge. It was short, but the floor was exceedingly rough, and made hard going for the horses. Suddenly I was amazed to see the gorge open out into a kind of amphitheatre several hundred feet across. The walls were steep, and one side shelved out, making a long, shallow cave, In the center of this amphitheatre was a deep hole from which the mountain stream ...
— The Young Forester • Zane Grey
... amazed for an instant, and then passed on. He was soon in the thick of the wood, and for some time made his way with difficulty. On a sudden, he issued forth into a large open glade, like an amphitheatre, in which there was nothing but a cypress-tree that stood in the middle. The cypress was marked with hieroglyphical characters, mixed with some words in the Syrian tongue which he could read; and these words requested the stranger to spare the fated place, nor trouble the departed ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Vol. 2 • Leigh Hunt
... naturalist in the third voyage of captain Cook, advises physicians to send their patients to Teneriffe, on account of the mildness of the temperature and the equal climate of the Canaries. The ground on these islands rises in an amphitheatre, and presents simultaneously, as in Peru and Mexico, the temperature of every climate, from the heat of Africa to the cold of the higher Alps. Santa Cruz, the port of Orotava, the town of the same name, and that of Laguna, are four places, the mean temperatures ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... moon-dappled beeches, and Grayson turned off into the woods where there was no path, both of us silent. We rode through tremulous, shining leaves—Grayson's horse choosing a way for himself—and, threshing through a patch of high, strong weeds, we circled past an amphitheatre of deadened trees whose crooked arms were tossed out into the moonlight, and halted on the spur. The moon was poised over Morris's farm; South Fork was shining under us like a loop of gold, the mountains lay about in tranquil heaps, and the moon-mist rose luminous between them. There ...
— 'Hell fer Sartain' and Other Stories • John Fox, Jr.
... shields of the Corybantes clash around the infant Zeus; he described to Elenko how one day the sea had frothed and boiled, and undraped Aphrodite had ascended from it in the presence of the gazing and applauding amphitheatre of cloud-cushioned gods. He could depict the personal appearance of Cybele, and sketch the character of Enceladus. He had instructed Zeus, as Chiron had instructed Achilles; he remembered Poseidon afraid of the water, and Pluto of the dark. He called to mind and expounded ancient ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
... the parish had read the poet's then published works, and were anxious to see him. They were all asked to meet him at a late dinner, and the signal of his arrival was to be a white sheet attached to a pitchfork, and put on the top of a corn-stack in the barn-yard. The parish is a beautiful amphitheatre, with the Clyde winding through it—Wellbrae Hill to the west, Tinto Hill and the Culter Fells to the south, and the pretty, green, conical hill, Quothquan Law, to the east. My father's stack-yard, lying in the centre, ...
— Robert Burns • Principal Shairp
... revision of my Whitman essay, I am making at a rustic house I have built at a wild place a mile or more from my home upon the river. I call this place Whitman Land, because in many ways it is typical of my poet,—an amphitheatre of precipitous rock, slightly veiled with a delicate growth of verdure, enclosing a few acres of prairie-like land, once the site of an ancient lake, now a garden of unknown depth and fertility. Elemental ruggedness, savageness, and grandeur, ...
— Whitman - A Study • John Burroughs
... course and made directly for the land. It seemed that we must be dashed upon the headlands we were approaching, but as we drew nearer they parted, and we entered the land-locked harbor of Acapulco, the chief Mexican port on the Pacific. It was an amphitheatre dotted with twinkling lights. Our ship was speedily surrounded by small boats of all descriptions, wherein sat merchants noisily calling upon us to purchase their wares. They had abundant fruits, shells, corals, curios. They flashed them ...
— In the Footprints of the Padres • Charles Warren Stoddard
... would ever conduce to any action or to any result. But each of these combatants had felt,—without daring to announce a hope on the subject among themselves,—that the present arena was only a trial-ground for some possible greater amphitheatre, for some future debating club in which debates would lead to action, and in which eloquence would have power, even though persuasion might be out of ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope
... of human wishes, he has supposed death to be 'kind Nature's signal for retreat,' from this state of being to 'a happier seat[314],' his thoughts upon this aweful change were in general full of dismal apprehensions. His mind resembled the vast amphitheatre, the Colisaeum at Rome. In the centre stood his judgement, which, like a mighty gladiator, combated those apprehensions that, like the wild beasts of the Arena, were all around in cells, ready to be let out upon him. After a conflict, he drives them back into their dens; but not killing ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... hill of Pori, three hundred braccia distant from the city. This water, in the time of the Romans, had been brought first to the theatre, whereof the remains are still there, and from that theatre, which was on the hill where to-day there is the fortress, to the amphitheatre of the same city, on the plain; but these edifices and conduits were wholly ruined and spoilt by the Goths. Jacopo, then, as it has been said, having brought this water below the walls, made the fountain which was then called the Fonte Guizianelli, and which is now named, ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol 2, Berna to Michelozzo Michelozzi • Giorgio Vasari
... of the most ancient and celebrated universities in Europe, is situated amid picturesque environs at the confluence of the Cherwell and the Thames (often called in its upper course the Isis). It is surrounded by an amphitheatre of gentle hills, the tops of which command a fine view of the city with its domes and towers."—BAEDEKER'S Great Britain, in his Handbooks for Travellers. In writing of Oxford, Hawthorne says: "The world, surely, has not another place like Oxford; it is a despair to see ...
— Matthew Arnold's Sohrab and Rustum and Other Poems • Matthew Arnold
... Cassars by moonlight, to inspect amid the silvery rays the crumbling courts and galleries that ages agone had echoed with the proud tread of the elite of barbaric old Rome! Conducted by a guide belonging to the Hotel de France, they set out and were soon standing among the ruins of the great amphitheatre. There they were seized upon by a special cicerone, who seemed to consider the huge wreck of Flavius Vespasian's monument as his particular property and who could not be shaken off. He joined forces with the hotel guide and the twain, jabbering away industriously ...
— Monte-Cristo's Daughter • Edmund Flagg
... had fought with beast, where the soil had sucked thirstily the red wine of life. But a good king does not last forever, and a good king's ways are not always inherited, and Syracuse had been fluttered by the rumor that King Robert the Bad intended to surpass the pagans and to make the ancient amphitheatre again the scene of evil deeds. And by way of consecration to its new-old use, a maiden was to be burned by fire in its arena on a charge of sorcery against the King—burned by fire, unless her appeal to the ordeal of battle could find for her between sky and earth ...
— The Proud Prince • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... gold coin of the Emperor Gordian—the same who built the amphitheatre of El-Djem—which was found here, as well as some lamps and sculptured fragments of stone. Bruce speaks of cipollino columns; they are still to be seen, if you care to look for them, split up, since his time, to mend walls and doorsteps. Tozeur ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... fluctuating light of the struggling morn. From the heart of the torpid city, so soon to vibrate with a thousand passions, there came no sound: the streams of life circulated not; they lay locked under the ice of sleep. From the huge space of the amphitheatre, with its stony seats rising one above the other—coiled and round as some slumbering monster—rose a thin and ghastly mist, which gathered darker, and more dark, over the scattered foliage that gloomed in its ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... immigrated from British Columbia to secure, it is said, greater religious liberty, and at Ketchikan, a thriving town, the boys here gained their first real impressions of Alaskan conditions. They found Skagway a town of about fifteen hundred people, set in a great natural amphitheatre surrounded by mountains capped with perpetual snow. It is connected with the outside world by a cable to Seattle, and by other parts of Alaska by telegraph, and has electric lights and a telephone system. A fine school building and several churches that reminded the young Scouts of many ...
— The Boy Scouts on the Yukon • Ralph Victor
... Eastward the outlook is more cheery: down below are displayed the varied hues of the brand-new, spotlessly clean, little town, with its murmuring, health-giving springs and its babbling, many-tongued throng. Yonder, further away, the mountains tower up in an amphitheatre, ever bluer and mistier; and, at the edge of the horizon, stretches the silver chain of snow-clad summits, beginning with Kazbek and ending with two-peaked Elbruz... Blithe is life in such a land! A feeling akin to rapture is diffused through all my veins. The air is pure ...
— A Hero of Our Time • M. Y. Lermontov
... origin have been discovered at Whitestaunton and Wadeford (near Chard), Whatley (near Frome), Wellow, Newton St Loe, Bratton Seymour, Pitney, Camerton, etc. Traces of Roman mines (such as tools and pigs of lead) have been found at Priddy and Blagdon, and an amphitheatre at Charterhouse-on-Mendip. Many of the British camps enumerated above have at different times been ...
— Somerset • G.W. Wade and J.H. Wade
... Dorchester has cleverly done. It was an idea worthy of a "Mayor of Casterbridge." We lingered a bit, in the car, picking out "landmarks" of resemblance to the book, and there were plenty. You know, there's a magnificent Roman amphitheatre near by; but did we stay to look at it? My friend, we are motorists! And it happened to be a grand day with the car, which, though still very new, has "found" itself. "Apollo" seemed a steed of "pure ...
— Set in Silver • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... out-of-the-way little place that you may only know it by name. There is no hotel, no railway, no factory, no sign of modern civilization. It is on a hill, which has an ancient ruined fortress at the top, and was an old Roman settlement, with the usual Roman mise en scene, baths, amphitheatre, etc., in the days of ...
— From the Easy Chair, vol. 1 • George William Curtis
... these loads they threw down, and disappeared. Next appeared an armed body from the same direction, who fired upon them once and swiftly retreated; and in a few moments the soldiers came upon a large field of standing rice, beyond which lay, like an amphitheatre, the rebel village. But between the village and the field had been piled successive defences of logs and branches, behind which simple redoubts the Maroons lay concealed. A fight ensued, lasting forty minutes, during which nearly every soldier and ranger ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 31, May, 1860 • Various
... thousand feet above the level of the sea, we saw a telegraph in full activity, probably announcing our arrival. The town next came in sight, and with its numerous churches, convents, and handsome houses, rising in an amphitheatre up the side of a mountain, would have offered a noble and pleasing prospect to eyes accustomed to the monotony of a sea view, but that the majestic Peak, that giant among mountains, rearing in the background ...
— A New Voyage Round the World in the Years 1823, 24, 25, and 26. Vol. 1 • Otto von Kotzebue
... plain of Sebaiyeh is bounded by mountains having long, sloping bases, and covered with wild thyme and other herbs, affording a good tenting-ground immediately fronting Sinai, which forms, as it were, a grand pyramidal pulpit to the magnificent amphitheatre below. The width of the plain immediately in front of Sinai is about 1600 feet, but further south the width is much increased, so that on an average the plain may be considered as being nearly one-third of a mile wide, and its length, in ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... three weeks. During that time it seemed to her that her brain was an amphitheatre in which the two men were constantly wrestling. She never saw one without the other. When Hedworth mastered for the moment she was reminded that he was merely playing a familiar tune on her soul-keys. She felt for the man who had first touched ...
— The Bell in the Fog and Other Stories • Gertrude Atherton
... the baths, libraries, and regular amusements. The private munificence of emperors, great patricians, and conquerors, undertook to supply occasional shows of an extraordinary character in the theatres, amphitheatre, and the circus. ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... on the objects of antiquity that meet my eye on every side, and above all on the Amphitheatre and Maison Carree, I am forced to admit that Italy has nothing to equal the two last: for if the Coliseum may be said to surpass the amphitheatre in dimensions, the wonderful state of preservation of the latter renders it more interesting; and the Maison Carree, it must be allowed, ...
— The Idler in France • Marguerite Gardiner
... disarming himself not only for attack but for defense; henceforth he sits at home and awaits the insurrection with which he is daily menaced; he resigns himself to everything, except drawing his sword; his attitude is that of a Christian in the amphitheatre.[2517]—The proposition of a camp outside Paris, however, draws out a protest from 8,000 Paris National Guards. Lafayette denounces to the Assembly the usurpations of the Jacobins; the faction sees that its reign is threatened by this ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 3 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 2 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... shell of a large bedchamber. Its large croisees, which look out in three directions, command an extensive bird's eye view of the Comtat Grignan, surmounted by the long Alpine ridge of Mont Ventou, and an amphitheatre of other smaller mountains: and enough remained of both apartments to give a full idea of the lightness and airiness of their situation, and ...
— Itinerary of Provence and the Rhone - Made During the Year 1819 • John Hughes
... way looking and listening with the closest attention, struck almost directly to the spot, hardly a step astray. It was all below the surface of the earth, so that hardly any sound rose above; and there was no sign of any path to it, not a tree, nor shrub, nor blade of grass near, but an amphitheatre of rock, and the beautiful white river, in its leap into the canyon falling a hundred and ninety feet. The cliffs and jagged pinnacles of basaltic rock around it were several hundred feet high. It looked like a great white bridal veil. It was made up of myriads of snowy ...
— Life at Puget Sound: With Sketches of Travel in Washington Territory, British Columbia, Oregon and California • Caroline C. Leighton
... that this great scourge was the result of Satanic malice; and, in view of St. Paul's declaration that the ancient gods were devils, and of the theory that the ancient gods of Rome were the devils who had the most reason to punish that city for their dethronement, and that the great amphitheatre was the chosen haunt of these demon gods, an ox decorated with garlands, after the ancient heathen manner, was taken in procession to the Colosseum and solemnly sacrificed. Even this proved vain, ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... the pageant wound through the dejected street, pursuing neither method nor set route, till it came to a deserted slag-heap, selected for the speech-making. Slowly the motley regiment swung into that grim amphitheatre under the pale sunshine; and, as I watched, a strange fancy visited my brain. I seemed to see over every ragged head of those marching women a little yellow flame, a thin, flickering gleam, spiring ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... the road that climbs above and bends Round what was once a chalk-pit: now it is By accident an amphitheatre. Some ash-trees standing ankle-deep in brier And bramble act the parts, and neither speak Nor stir." "But see: they have fallen, every one, And brier and bramble have grown over them." "That is the place. As usual no one is here. Hardly can I imagine the drop of ...
— Last Poems • Edward Thomas
... perfectly indescribable. Imagine an amphitheatre of almost geometrical regularity, about eleven miles long by seven miles and a half broad, the semicircle bounded by a series of gently rising wooded hills from 300 to 500 feet high, with a background formed by the abrupt ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka
... noise," says she, "began to spread from the parterre to the orchestra, and from the amphitheatre to the boxes. Soon the news of the occurrence was known all over the house, when, like a sudden clap of thunder, an acclamation burst forth, and the whole audience, with a single undivided look of love, seemed to desire to embrace Bonaparte. What ...
— The Empress Josephine • Louise Muhlbach
... the front of the orchestra, and thus put themselves in ideal connection, as it were, with the dramatis personae there acting. This thymele was in the centre of the whole edifice, all the measurements were calculated, and the semi-circle of the amphitheatre was drawn from this point. It had a double use, a twofold purpose; it constantly reminded the spectators of the origin of tragedy as a religious service, and declared itself as the ideal representative of the audience by having ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... the heart of the Sierras. It dawned a trifle sooner than we could have wished, but Professor Brewer and Hoffman had breakfasted before sunrise, and were off with barometer and theodolite upon their shoulders, proposing to ascend our amphitheatre to its head and climb a great pyramidal peak which swelled up against the eastern sky, closing the ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: Explorers • Various
... top of the building, where we had an excellent view of Oxford and the surrounding country. Then we went to the Convocation Hall, and afterwards to the theatre, where S——- sat down in the Chancellor's chair, which is very broad, and ponderously wrought of oak. I remember little here, except the amphitheatre of benches, and the roof, which seems to be supported by golden ropes, and on the wall, opposite the door, some full-length portraits, among which one of that ridiculous coxcomb, George IV., was the most prominent. These kings thrust themselves impertinently forward by bust, statue, ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... including hill-ponies, all through the mountains. Let us drop in upon them, if such an expression be applicable to a climb of the most tremendous description. It takes us up the steps of the steepest and loftiest slope of the amphitheatre which forms the maharajah's dominions. First, however, we begin by a gentle and pleasant descent down the Jhelam to Lake Wular. Then begins the trouble. We turn northward, and find ourselves at the end of the first stage four thousand ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... this denomination, the venerable Polycarp and Ignatius, after they had both attained the age of eighty years, sealed their faith in the blood of martyrdom. The former was burned at the stake in Smyrna, and the latter devoured by lions in the amphitheatre of Rome, In the second and third centuries, Christianity numbered among its advocates many distinguished scholars and philosophers, particularly among the Greeks. Their productions may be classed under the heads of biblical, controversial, doctrinal, historical, ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... landlocked lakes, out of which there seemed no issue until we chanced upon a miraculous corner where there was an outlet frowned upon by angry rocks; on to the "Caldron," as the Turks called the most imposing portion of the gorge; on through an amphitheatre where densely-wooded mountains on either side were reflected in smooth water; on beneath masses that appeared about to topple, and over shallows where it looked as if we must be grounded; on round a bluff which had hidden ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, August, 1878 • Various
... Pompeii; because the stuff, in which it was buried, is far looser than that which covers Herculaneum. In the former city, although it was anciently reckoned only a third-rate place, there have already been discovered eight temples, a forum, a basilica, two theatres, a magnificent amphitheatre, and public baths. The ramparts, composed of huge blocks of stone, have also been exposed. One of the most remarkable places is the Cemetery. It consists of a broad path covered with pavement, and bordered ...
— Wonders of Creation • Anonymous
... changed. There are tender natures and hard natures, irremediably so. And then the same sight, the same lesson can produce opposite effects. Could anything have hardened me more than having been brought up in a hospital and having played, as a child, in a dissecting amphitheatre? But no one is more sensitive than I am to physical suffering. It is true that I am the son of an extremely humane man, sensitive in the true meaning of the word. The sight of a suffering dog made tears come to his eyes. He did his surgical operations ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... souls—no eye was moistened with regret amongst the multitude that stretched away in compact bodies from the foot of the gallows; the ribald laugh and the blasphemous oath united with their dying breath; and, callously as the Roman mob from the blood-stained amphitheatre, the English masses turned homewards from the fatal spot. But they did not fall unhonoured or unwept. In the churches of the faithful in that same city, the sobs of mournful lamentation were mingled with the solemn ...
— The Dock and the Scaffold • Unknown
... marble palaces, of fair white statues and green gardens; of huge public baths and theatres. On one side stood an enormous building, with a round space in the centre, and tiers of seats rising one above another like a circus. This was an amphitheatre, where shows and ...
— The Bible in its Making - The most Wonderful Book in the World • Mildred Duff
... gradually reach the threshold of Gavarnie. This is aptly called "chaos" which we might fancifully suppose the leavings, "the fragments that were left," of the semicircular wall now visible, thrown up by transhuman builders, insurmountable barrier between heaven and earth. No sooner does the awful amphitheatre break upon the view, than we discern the white line of the principal fall, a slender silvery column reaching, so it seems, from star-land and moon-land to earth; river of some upper world that has overleaped the boundaries ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... Pontoons, with a full supply of balks and chesses, had been prepared for the bridge over the Tennessee, and all things had been prearranged with a foresight that elicited my admiration. From the hills we looked down on the amphitheatre of Chattanooga as on a map, and nothing remained but for me to put my troops in the desired position. The plan contemplated that, in addition to crossing the Tennessee River and making a lodgment on the terminus of Missionary Ridge, I should demonstrate ...
— The Memoirs of General W. T. Sherman, Complete • William T. Sherman
... down into the plains and touch the river. As at Baroona, the stream runs in through a deep cleft in the table land, which here, though precipitous on the eastern bank, on the western breaks away into a small natural amphitheatre bordered by fine hanging woods just in advance of which, about two hundred yards from the river, stood the house, a long, low building densely covered with creepers of all sorts, and fronted by a beautiful garden. Right and left of it ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley
... the earth, as it whirled through naked space, whirled up the moon for him, and he pressed on at a good speed. A wind from Arabia wandering cooled his face. And at last, over the brow of Toft End, he saw suddenly the Five Towns a- twinkle on their little hills down in the vast amphitheatre. And one of those lamps was Constance's lamp—one, somewhere. He lived, then. He entered into the shadow of nature. The mysteries made him solemn. What! A boneshaker, ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... period of the day and year when the tropic sun of Southern Mexico is least endurable. His fervid rays, striking perpendicularly downward, had heated like smouldering ashes the dusty plain of Huajapam, which lay like a vast amphitheatre surrounded by hills—so distant that their blue outlines were almost confounded with the azure sky above them. On this plain was presented a tableau of sadness and desolation, such as the destructive genius of man often composes ...
— The Tiger Hunter • Mayne Reid
... little hills. These are traceable up to one of the great mountain masses of the Alps, forming the S.W. side of the great oval-shaped expansion of the valley, whose shape has been appropriately compared to that of a Florence oil-flask, and which Webb terms "a grand amphitheatre." On the opposite or N.E. side, the boundary of the valley is less regular, following a more or less undulating line up to a point opposite, and a little N. of, the great mountain mass, where it abuts on a shallow quasi enclosure with lofty walls, which, projecting westwards, considerably diminish ...
— The Moon - A Full Description and Map of its Principal Physical Features • Thomas Gwyn Elger
... cross-roads of Doodletown. This reach of the river was formerly known as The Horse Race, from the rapid flow of the tide when at its height. The hills on the west bank now recede from the river, forming a picturesque amphitheatre, bounded on the west by Bear Mountain. An old road directly in the rear of Iona Island, better known to Anthony Wayne than to the modern tourist, passes through Doodletown, over Dunderberg, just west of Tompkin's Cove, to Haverstraw. Here amid these pleasant foothills ...
— The Hudson - Three Centuries of History, Romance and Invention • Wallace Bruce
... have heard and sung of "Tibby Fowler o' the glen;" but they may not all be aware that the glen referred to lies within about four miles of Berwick. No one has seen and not admired the romantic amphitheatre below Edrington Castle, through which the Whitadder coils like a beautiful serpent glittering in the sun, and sports in fantastic curves beneath the pasture-clad hills, the grey ruin, the mossy and precipitous ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Vol. XXIII. • Various
... occurred, crowded with Primula, together with Arenaria, Fumaria of Erak, Ranunculus of Hajeeguk, Carex, etc. From within 1,000 feet of the summit the ascent was easier, over ground composed entirely of small angular bits of granite, which rock protrudes to the north, forming the south wall of a huge amphitheatre, heavily ...
— Journals of Travels in Assam, Burma, Bhootan, Afghanistan and The - Neighbouring Countries • William Griffith
... vast amphitheatre of sward, whose walls banked out the narrow sky above. And here, in the focus of the huge ring, an object appeared which stirred strange melancholy in Lancelot,—a little chapel, ivy-grown, girded ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... explained by dumb-show, is to exhibit a linen scroll, on which is painted, in large letters, the sentence necessary to be known. It so happened that a number of these scrolls had Been thrown aside after one of the grand spectacles at Astley's Amphitheatre, and remained amongst other lumber in the property-room, until the late destructive fire which occurred there. On that night, the wife of one of the stage-assistants—a woman of portly dimensions—was aroused ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... of a like nature. One of these, seventeen days later, provided Horace Walpole with the subject of the first of his many descriptions of the place. "I have been breakfasting this morning at Ranelagh Gardens;" he wrote, "they have built an immense amphitheatre, with balconies full of little ale houses; it is in rivalry to Vauxhall, and costs above twelve thousand pounds. The building is not finished, but they get great sums by people going to see it and breakfasting in the ...
— Inns and Taverns of Old London • Henry C. Shelley
... despairing flashes athwart the swift ebony river; it reached out with momentary gleams to the nearer facades of precipice; it reeled, drooped, and shuddered as if in hopeless horror. Probably, since the world began, no other fire lighted by man had struggled against the gloom of this tremendous amphitheatre. The darknesses were astonished at it, but they were also uncomprehending and hostile. They refused to be dissipated, and ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... colony. Sulla captured it in 89 B.C. by setting on fire the wooden breastwork by which it was defended, and new fortifications were erected. Hadrian, who repaired the Via Appia from Beneventum to this point, made it a colony; it has ruins of the city walls, of an aqueduct, baths and an amphitheatre; nearly 400 inscriptions have also been discovered. Two different routes to Apulia diverged at this point, one (Via Aurelia Aeclanensis) leading through the modern Ariano to Herdoniae, the other (the Via Appia of the Empire) passing the Lacus ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... in the heavens; we passed the river Drance and observed its path through the chasms of the higher and the glens of the lower hills. The Alps here come closer to the lake, and we approached the amphitheatre of mountains which forms its eastern boundary. The spire of Evian shone under the woods that surrounded it and the range of mountain above mountain by ...
— Frankenstein - or The Modern Prometheus • Mary Wollstonecraft (Godwin) Shelley
... of the army in its final retreat can still be traced by the heaps of human bones, with rusty swords or guns or weather-stained saddles lying beside them, under every little shade-giving tree. These skeletons he saw everywhere at very short intervals. Cerro Cora is described as a splendid amphitheatre surrounded by hills, with precipitous sides of red sandstone, and crowned with dark forests. Here and there amid the undulations are grassy knolls flanked by palm trees, and in one of these Lopez, driven to desperation, pitched his tent with a handful of followers. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Volume 15, No. 89, May, 1875 • Various
... stronghold overlooking the narrow sea. Then the earthquakes, ever menacing between Vesuvius and Etna; that of 1783, which wrought destruction throughout Calabria, laid Reggio in ruins, so that to-day it has the aspect of a newly-built city, curving its regular streets, amphitheatre-wise, upon the slope that rises between shore and mountain. Of Rhegium little is discernible above ground; of the ages that followed scarce anything remains but the Norman fortress, so shaken by that century-old disaster that huge gaps show where its ...
— By the Ionian Sea - Notes of a Ramble in Southern Italy • George Gissing
... Saddle; the second flung him quite over the Crupper, and laid him sprawling on the Ground, with his Heels quiv'ring in the Air. Itobad, 'tis true, remounted, but with so ill a Grace, that an universal Laugh went round the Amphitheatre. The third, disdaining to use his Lance, made only a Feint at him: Then catch'd hold of his Right Leg, and whirling him round, threw him flat upon the Sand. The Esquires, who were the Attendants, ran to his Assistance, ...
— Zadig - Or, The Book of Fate • Voltaire
... the middle of a vast plain around three sides of which rose a grand amphitheatre of mountains. The nearest of them was some thirty miles away, yet ordinarily, in this clear, dry, Western atmosphere they were always imminent. Over their eastern ramparts the sun rose to look upon a chill and ...
— The Killer • Stewart Edward White
... one would expect it to be. But "Bemmister" is not by any means a dead town and is, for all its want of direct railway transport, of some importance as the centre of a rich dairy country. The situation at the bottom of a wooded amphitheatre ...
— Wanderings in Wessex - An Exploration of the Southern Realm from Itchen to Otter • Edric Holmes
... Eminent physicians and scientists were encouraged to settle in Rome. The harbor of Ostia was improved, and a road constructed from the Adriatic to the Tyrrhenian Sea, over the Apennines. A temple to Mars was built, and an immense amphitheatre was erected at the foot ...
— History of Rome from the Earliest times down to 476 AD • Robert F. Pennell
... a valley ringed by an amphitheatre of mountains, up the harsh slopes of which spruce forests climb desperately until beaten by the height and rock on the scarps beneath crests which are often snow-capped. Through this broad valley, and winding round slopes into other valleys, run streams ...
— Westward with the Prince of Wales • W. Douglas Newton
... resembled the other houses in construction, and was surrounded by a separate enclosure; but the second, which was placed on higher ground, so far as they could judge at that distance, was roofless, and had all the characteristics of a Roman amphitheatre. At the far end of this amphitheatre stood a huge mass of polished rock, bearing a grotesque resemblance to the figure ...
— The People Of The Mist • H. Rider Haggard
... solemnity and license, the rush and crowding of the undergraduates into their gallery, and their free and easy way of taking the whole proceedings under their patronage, watching every movement in the amphitheatre and on the floor, and shouting approval and disapproval of the heads of their republic of learning, or of the most illustrious visitors, or cheering with equal vigor, the ladies, Her Majesty's ministers, or the ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... they were waiting till the lay of the land suited them. They wanted—no doubt—an absolutely flat piece of country, with no depressions, no hills or stream-beds in which we could hide, but which should be high upon the edges, like an amphitheatre. They would get us in the centre and occupy the rim themselves. Roughly, this is the bit of desert which witnesses our 'last stand.' On three sides the ground swells a very little—the rise is not four feet. On the third side it is open, and ...
— A Deal in Wheat - And Other Stories of the New and Old West • Frank Norris
... flying fish, and the Frank garb ill replaces the graceful Arab dress. The Paris-like block of houses ill replaces the graceful Moorish architecture, undisturbed when the Calypso sailed into the harbour, and the amphitheatre-like city rose before her, in successive terraces of dazzling white, interspersed with palms and other trees here and there, with mosques and minarets rising above them, and with a crown of strong fortifications. The harbour ...
— A Modern Telemachus • Charlotte M. Yonge
... enough. Copping made one clutch at his breast, and then, with a touch that seemed as light as if he were merely throwing his hand into the air unpurposing, he made a push at the breast of Professor Flick, and Professor Flick went down as the bull goes down in the amphitheatre of Madrid or Seville when the hand of the practised swordsman has touched him with the point in just the place where he lived. Professor Flick, as he called himself, was dead, and the whole plot was ...
— The Dictator • Justin McCarthy
... the indiscretion of the person who let out the news, and my own likewise. My Lord March, who did me the honour to lay one hundred pounds upon my skill, insisted that I should make one of a party to the famous amphitheatre near Lambeth. Mr. Astley, the showman, being informed of his Lordship's intention, met us on Westminster Bridge dressed in his uniform as sergeant major of the Royal Light Dragoons and mounted on a white charger. He escorted us to one of the large boxes under the pent-house ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... head of the lake we find ourselves in an enormous amphitheatre of mountains. Glaciers are peering down upon us. Snow-fields glare at us with glistening eyes. Black crags seem to bend above us with an eternal frown. Streamers of foam float from the forehead of the ...
— Fisherman's Luck • Henry van Dyke
... a semicircular amphitheatre, the orchestral conductor may conduct a considerable number of performers alone, all eyes then being able to look towards him. Nevertheless, the employment of a certain number of sub-conductors appears to me preferable to individual direction, on account of the great distance between the ...
— The Orchestral Conductor - Theory of His Art • Hector Berlioz
... surprizing and glorious an Idea as any that arises in the whole Poem. He looks down into that vast Hollow of the Universe with the Eye, or (as Milton calls it in his first Book) with the Kenn of an Angel. He surveys all the Wonders in this immense Amphitheatre that lye between both the Poles of Heaven, and takes in at one View the whole ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... than the first and in measure its vassal, formed an amphitheatre the crest of which was bordered by a fringe of perpendicular rocks as white as dried bones. Under this crown, which rendered it almost inaccessible, the little valley was resplendent in its wealth of evergreen trees, ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... soft and limpid atmosphere of the tropics, I poured forth on the instrument, and for myself alone, the thoughts with which the scene inspired me. And what a scene! Picture to yourself a gigantic amphitheatre hewn out of the mountains by an army of Titans; right and left, immense virgin forests full of those subdued and distant harmonies which are, as it were, the voices of Silence; before me, a prospect of twenty ...
— Great Violinists And Pianists • George T. Ferris
... It contains a very particular description of the tortures inflicted on the Christians in Gallia, and it states that while the persecution was going on, Attalus, a Christian and a Roman citizen, was loudly demanded by the populace and brought into the amphitheatre; but the governor ordered him to be reserved, with the rest who were in prison, until he had received instructions from the emperor. Many had been tortured before the governor thought of applying to Antoninus. The imperial rescript, says the letter, was that the ...
— The Thoughts Of The Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus • Marcus Aurelius
... surpass the authority and discernment of a proconsul. Transportation and beheading were reserved for honorable persons; meaner criminals were either hanged, or burned, or buried in the mines, or exposed to the wild beasts of the amphitheatre. Armed robbers were pursued and extirpated as the enemies of society; the driving away of horses or cattle was made a capital offence, but simple theft was uniformly considered as a mere civil and private injury. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 4 • Various
... is different. Then, you wander along the summits of the cliffs; and looking down, through the hedges of tamarisk and myrtle that skirt the ends of the fields, see the rocks suddenly broken away beneath you into an immense shelving amphitheatre, on the floor of which the sea boils in fury, rushing through natural archways and narrow rifts. Beyond them, at intervals as the waves fall, you catch glimpses of the brilliant blue main ocean, and the outer reefs stretching into it. Often, ...
— Rambles Beyond Railways; - or, Notes in Cornwall taken A-foot • Wilkie Collins
... without danger of maladjustment or injury. This may seem a small detail, but it is really an important auxiliary in the teaching by demonstration with specimens for which this room was peculiarly intended. The ordinary lectures of Professor Virchow were held in a neighboring amphitheatre of ...
— A History of Science, Volume 5(of 5) - Aspects Of Recent Science • Henry Smith Williams
... pleasantly situated on the shores of the Lynn Canal, in an amphitheatre formed by precipitous cliffs, the granite peaks of which almost overhang the little town. A curious effect is produced here by rudely coloured advertisements of some one's chewing gum, or somebody's else cigars with which ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... on the ruins of Verona. The Roman Amphitheatre is, perhaps, the least injured of all the public buildings. On the walls, the four bridges, the castles, and even the churches, the havoc of mines and the disfiguring effects of bullets are every where visible. The poverty that war leaves behind is to be seen in the neglected state ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 399, Supplementary Number • Various
... flash he was up again, wild to close with his rival and get his fingers about his throat. There, in the little natural amphitheatre, with only the ancient trees as silent witnesses, was staged again the oft-fought fight between the boxer and the battler, but the decision was not to rest on points. No Marquis of Queensberry rules governed, no watchful referee ...
— 'Smiles' - A Rose of the Cumberlands • Eliot H. Robinson
... view and addressed ourselves to the task of finding out just when we were going to get there. The first day we bobbed up and over innumerable little ridges of a few hundred feet elevation, crossed several streams, and skirted the wide bowl-like amphitheatre of a basin. The second day we climbed over things and finally ended in a small hanging park named Alpine Meadows, at an elevation of eight thousand five hundred feet. There we rested-over a day, camped under a single pine-tree, with the quick-growing mountain grasses thick about us, a semicircle ...
— The Mountains • Stewart Edward White
... directly over head the grassy slopes of the hill, with here and there a few straggling firs, no human foot ever gained the nearer edge. The bay of the Cova Green is a prison to which the sea presents the only outlet; and the numerous caves which open along its sides, like the arches of an amphitheatre, seem but its darker cells. It is, in truth, a wild impressive place, full of beauty and terror, and with none of the squalidness of the mere dungeon about it. There is a puny littleness in our brick and lime receptacles of misery and languor which speaks as audibly of the feebleness ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume III • Various
... dominations. Remnants of Roman or Gallo-Roman architecture stand with others that belong to the dawn of mediaeval art, and others, again, that are marked by the florid and graceful fancy of the Renaissance. The ruins of the amphitheatre are insignificant compared to those at Nimes and Arles, and there is no beautiful example of Roman art like the Maison Carree at Nimes; but there is an exceedingly curious monument of antiquity, which was long a puzzle to archaeologists, but which is now generally believed to be the ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... meant to go. He just walked straight before him in high dudgeon, taking no notice of the route by which he journeyed, or the flight of time. At length he awoke from his absent condition of mind and looked up. A vast amphitheatre of wooded hills surrounded him, and there, in the heart of a secluded dell, under a clump of trees, were the ...
— The Norsemen in the West • R.M. Ballantyne
... indifferent observer, and the terrific contest only afforded him a spectacle for the amusement of his official leisure. He sits as if two gladiators were crossing swords for his recreation. The cabinet seems to be little better than a box in an amphitheatre, from whence his majesty's ministers may survey the business of blood. There are three parties concerned, the Catholics, the Protestants, and the government: the Catholics advance upon the one ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... no movement, no sound. Things began to seem queer; in the bright blaze of sunshine, and with the parched desert glistening after the welcome rain, there in the midst of the vast amphitheatre of mountains lay the dead horses before the mysterious wagon. But nowhere about was any sign of life, and the wagon might hold within its white walls death for whoever ...
— The Mountain Divide • Frank H. Spearman
... bound, and cut out by the back pasture and climbed through the underbrush to the top of the mountain. Keeping carefully out of sight, I followed the crest along for a couple of miles to a natural amphitheatre in the hills, where the little river raced down out of a gorge and stopped for breath in a large and placid rock-bound pool. That was the spot! I sat down on the croup of the mountain, where I could see all that occurred, and ...
— Moon-Face and Other Stories • Jack London
... as possible," he said. "The trouble with Commodus is that he is growing tired of exhibiting himself as an athlete to invited audiences in the Palace. He is perfectly frantic to show himself off in the Circus or in the Amphitheatre. He oscillates between the determination to disregard convention and to do as he likes and virtuous resolutions, when he has been given a good talking-to by his old councillors and has made up his mind to behave properly. He will break out yet into public ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... went to the Fair of Beaucaire. As we passed Les Arenes, that famous Roman amphitheatre in the centre of our city, I heard my father and his old friend allude to its former uses, without paying much heed to them. I believe they reminded one another that not only wild beasts but Christians had formerly been put to death there, for the recreation of those who were ...
— Jacques Bonneval • Anne Manning
... grandest ruin in Rome is the Colosseum (Plate XXVI.), an amphitheatre which was built by the two Emperors, Vespasian and Titus, and which was finished eighty years after the birth of Christ. The outside walls are nearly 160 feet high. The tiers of benches, which could accommodate 85,000 spectators, were divided into four ...
— From Pole to Pole - A Book for Young People • Sven Anders Hedin
... they will remember them with the probability of renewing, at a finer time, the alliance which binds them together. Cheer up thy noble resolution, therefore, my Prince of the Circus, and think that thou shalt still retain that predominant influence which the favourites of the amphitheatre are sure to possess over the ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... spot, a spur of rock overhanging a green nook in the broken ugliness of the cliffs, sheltered from the sea by an encircling arm of rock, and reached by a steep path down the cliff. Around her towered an amphitheatre of vast cliffs in which the sea sang loud music to the spirit of solitude. In the moaning waters in front of the cove a jagged rock rose from the incomparable green, tilted backward and fantastically shaped, like a great grave face watching ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees
... consequence of this recommendation, many were raised; such as the temple of Hercules and the Muses, by Marcius Philippus; a temple of Diana by Lucius Cornificius; the Court of Freedom by Asinius Pollio; a temple of Saturn by Munatius Plancus; a theatre by Cornelius Balbus [157]; an amphitheatre by Statilius Taurus; and several other noble edifices by ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... characteristic mental states of a congregation of people who assemble there determine the atmosphere of any given assembly-place, church, or cathedral. Its inhabitants so make, so determine the atmosphere of a particular village or city. The sympathetic thoughts sent out by a vast amphitheatre of people, as they cheer a contestant, carry him to goals he never could reach by his own efforts alone. The same is true in regard to ...
— What All The World's A-Seeking • Ralph Waldo Trine
... blinking at each other like owls over their mice? Was it merely to eat and drink that we have assembled? Hearken! I will read that to you which will raise your spirits, to a certainty. To-morrow the games and combats commence in the arena of the new amphitheatre. Well; and is it known to you that I am appointed to read a dedicatory ode before the emperor and in honor of that occasion? I will give you a pleasure, now. I will forestall your joy, and let you hear what I have written. And be assured that this is no small compliment to your ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 6, No 5, November 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... of the church, and our neighbour Gouge has brought the plans, on which, as he says, he has lately altered several churches in the county. The idea is, to remove the pews entirely, converting them into what are called 'slips,' to lower the pulpit, and to raise the floor, amphitheatre fashion." ...
— Home as Found • James Fenimore Cooper
... in the group of three, Andy Wildwood imitated their graceful acknowledgment of the plaudits of the vast concourse in the great metropolitan amphitheatre. ...
— Andy the Acrobat • Peter T. Harkness
... enjoy the magnificent view which spread to the southern horizon a little longer, he went and sat down on the edge of the ditch which bordered the road, turning his back on the mountains which rise like an amphitheatre to the north of the town, and having at his feet a rich plain covered with tropical vegetation, exotics of a conservatory, trees and flowers quite unknown in any other ...
— Widger's Quotations from Celebrated Crimes of Alexandre Dumas, Pere • David Widger
... inequalities, and partially clothed with trees, sloped down to the very brink of the Calder. Winding round the broad green plain, heretofore described, with the lovely knoll in the midst of it, and which formed, with the woody hills encircling it, a perfect amphitheatre, the river was ever an object of beauty—sometimes lost beneath over-hanging boughs or high banks, anon bursting forth where least expected, now rushing swiftly over its shallow and rocky bed, now subsiding into ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... heard the crash of falling roofs. An instant more, and the mountain-cloud seemed to roll toward them, dark and rapid like a torrent; at the same time it cast forth from its bosom a shower of ashes, mixed with fragments of burning stone! Over the crushing vines, over the desolate streets, over the amphitheatre itself,—far and wide,—with many a mighty splash in the agitated sea, fell ...
— The Universal Reciter - 81 Choice Pieces of Rare Poetical Gems • Various
... junks. How astounding the progress that has marked the last half-century! The streets that meandered, as it were, among the valleys, or fringed the water's edge, now girdle the hills like rows of seats in a huge amphitheatre; a railway lifts the passenger to the mountain top; and other railways whirl him from hill to hill along the dizzy height. I Trade, too, has multiplied twenty fold. In a commercial report for the year ending June, 1905, it is stated that ...
— The Awakening of China • W.A.P. Martin
... dwellings way off into the green of the woods. Josiah and I are well thought on in Jonesville, and as fur out as Loontown and Piller Pint, and a man soon advanced and gin us an advantageous position, and Josiah hitched the mair and we advanced into the amphitheatre. ...
— Samantha at Coney Island - and a Thousand Other Islands • Marietta Holley
... Selwyn, while in Italy, shows him to have been a young man of wit, feeling, and taste. It is curious to notice that, at Rome, he singles out, like his cousin in 'Childe Harold' or 'Manfred', as the most striking objects, the general aspect of the "marbled wilderness", the moonlight view of the amphitheatre, the Laocoon, the Belvedere Apollo, and the group of Niobe and her daughters. One other taste he shared with Byron—he was a lover of dogs, and "Rover" was his ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Letters and Journals, Vol. 1 • Lord Byron, Edited by Rowland E. Prothero
... it and Palaviccini's old palace. "Pal himself has gone to the dogs." Another new and handsome caffe had been built in the Piazza Carlo Felice, between the old one of the Bei Arti and the Strada Carlo Felice; and the Teatro Diurno had now stone galleries and seats, like an ancient amphitheatre. "The beastly gate and guardhouse in the Albaro road are still in their dear old beastly state; and the whole of that road is just as it was. The man without legs is still in the Strada Nuova; but the beggars ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
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