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More "Background" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... never forget my first sight of Rosetta Rosa as, robed with the modesty which the character of Elsa demands, she appeared on the stage to answer the accusation of Ortrud. For some moments she hesitated in the background, and then timidly, yet with what grandeur of mien, advanced towards the king. I knew then, as I know now, that hers was a loveliness of that imperious, absolute, dazzling kind which banishes from the hearts of men all moral conceptions, all considerations ...
— The Ghost - A Modern Fantasy • Arnold Bennett
... the effect which the varying conditions of light, background, etc., have upon the apparent distance of the object. Don't be content to memorize the following data, but go after the underlying reason in ...
— The Plattsburg Manual - A Handbook for Military Training • O.O. Ellis and E.B. Garey
... party, together with the Whites, were only spectators in the background, and the procession into church consisted of just the absolutely needful persons—-the bride in a delicate nondescript coloured dress, such as none but a French dressmaker could describe, and covered with transparent lace, like, as Mysie averred, a hedgeback full of pig-nut flowers, ...
— Beechcroft at Rockstone • Charlotte M. Yonge
... picture; Perchance you have one too. Mine is not set in frame of gold; 'Tis first a bit of blue, And then a background of dark hills— A river just below, Along whose broad, green meadow banks The wreathing elm ...
— Happy Days for Boys and Girls • Various
... feet of certain Celestial cacophonists, and made himself adept. He fathomed the, to us, obscure laws of their theory, and for this work made a careful selection of Chinese musical ideas, and used what little harmony they approve of with most quaint and suggestive effect upon a splendid background of his own. The result has not been, as is usual in such alien mimicries, ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... transport bound for New York stood the Broncho Rider Boys casting their last glance shoreward as the sun was setting behind the mountains that form the background of the city of Vera Cruz. Over the city still waved the Stars and Stripes, and as the darkness fell and the tip of Mt. Orizaba gradually faded from sight, Billie turned to the others and in a voice tinged with ...
— The Broncho Rider Boys with Funston at Vera Cruz - Or, Upholding the Honor of the Stars and Stripes • Frank Fowler
... get the last in—it will irritate, it cannot hurt him. There—you see!—he is furious now, and I am quite helpless. One more prod, another kick: now he is a mere lunatic! Stand behind me; I am quite helpless!' Mr. Romaine, I am asking myself as to the background or motive of this singular jest, and whether the name of it should not ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... who had just returned from the telegraph office, where they had sent word at once to their homes telling of their safe arrival in America. O'Connor who had come ashore at Harry's earnest solicitation, stood in the background talking with Mr. Hamilton, to whom he had briefly outlined the adventures of the three boys since they had been ...
— A Voyage with Captain Dynamite • Charles Edward Rich
... Rosalie forward to join Delancy, and, side by side, they crept ahead, keeping a clump of scrub hemlock between them and the edge of the clearing. It was the Green Pass feed-ground, a rocky strip of pasture climbing upward toward Lynx Peak; and there, clean cut against the snowy background, three dark objects were moving, trotting nervously here and there, nosing, nuzzling, tunnelling the snow with ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... given him soothed her that night as she lay tossing in her bed, and it was on this night and for the first time since she left Kilgobbin that the recollection of Pinckney came before her otherwise than as a shadow. He stood with the Hennessey circle as his background, a bright, good-looking figure and a ...
— The Ghost Girl • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... singing; no one is, indeed, more tuneful in the upper notes. But even while he sings the song of the Sirens, he still hearkens to the barking of the Sphinx. Jarring Byronic notes interrupt the flow of his Horatian humours. His mirth has something of the tragedy of the world for its perpetual background; and he feasts like Don Giovanni to a double orchestra, one lightly sounding for the dance, one pealing Beethoven[24] in the distance. He is not truly reconciled either with life or with himself; and this instant war ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... trees. Of the faces which came out fresh and vivid as though painted in yellow and red, the most prominent was a girl's face. By a trick of the firelight she seemed to have no body. The oval of the face and hair hung beside the fire with a dark vacuum for background. As if dazed by the glare, her green-blue eyes stared at the flames. Every muscle of her face was taut. There was something tragic in her thus staring—her age ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... generations, a plusieurs reprises. Everybody knows the fatal pollution of the marriage pomps on the reception of Marie Antoinette in Paris; the numbers who perished are still spoken of obscurely as to the amount, and with shuddering awe for the unparalleled horrors standing in the background of ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... did come, was indeed sudden and unexpected. A shout came from one of the men watching at the loopholes; and, darting forward, Henri discerned at once numbers of figures, which, dashing from the background, were rushing across the hall towards them. Indeed, half a dozen of the Brandenburgers were already at the exit from the hall, and as he looked through a loophole they leapt on the first step of ...
— With Joffre at Verdun - A Story of the Western Front • F. S. Brereton
... memory, in the glowing picture which they drew. He declares that he no longer wonders at the prevalence of this robber mania among the mountains; for he felt at the time, that had he been a young man and a strong man, and had there been no danger of the galleys in the background, he should have been half tempted himself ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... of hoofs was heard on the gravel outside, speedily followed by a peal on the bell; and Mr. Cottrell emerged from the dining-room just in time to see Jim open the hall door to Laura Chipchase, attired in hat and habit, with Miss Sylla mounted and holding her cousin's horse in the background. ...
— Belles and Ringers • Hawley Smart
... impression disappeared—or, rather, retired to the background—even as it became definite. And once more he was seeing the charms of physical loveliness, of physical—and moral, and mental—mystery that had a weird power over him. As they shook hands, a quiver shot through him as at the shock of a terrific ...
— The Grain Of Dust - A Novel • David Graham Phillips
... arisen, and the unblushing paper commenced to run "Tom Tiddler's School-days" again. So went the whirligig. But at Christmas, when the blue-nosed waifs carol in the cold and boys have extra pennies, Tom Tiddler himself slunk into the background, lost in the ample folds of a "Double Number," the same blazoned impudently, as though it did not demand double money. But the extra pennyworth was all ghosts: ghosts, ghosts, ghosts; full measure, pressed down and running over; not your Ibsenian shadows ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... six peers, eleven Members of Parliament, and some of the leading public men in Munster was refused a hearing by Mr Birrell. Though the act was the act of Mr Birrell, all the world knew that the sinister figure in the background was Mr Dillon. And they have both paid the penalty since then of their follies, not to say crimes—though a nation still ...
— Ireland Since Parnell • Daniel Desmond Sheehan
... It is interesting to see, from this, that he could be almost conventional and courtly in moments when he held Laura farthest aloof; and when it is compared with the depths of solemn emotion in his later sonnets, it seems like the soft glistening of young birch-leaves against a background of pines. ...
— Oldport Days • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... training and a new environment they had succeeded best in realizing those conditions, social and political, which alone make their clear statement possible. The measure of success and validity of any social doctrine, no matter how abstract, is to be found in its harmony with the background from which it springs and in the extent to which it actually succeeds in effecting needed social adjustments. It was perfectly natural that our forefathers should wish to proclaim as a new and unalterable truth, the everlasting possession of themselves and of ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... had spread through the country, but nowhere was it so effective and well esteemed as in cities of the type of Zenith, commercial cities of a few hundred thousand inhabitants, most of which—though not all—lay inland, against a background of cornfields and mines and of small towns which depended upon them for mortgage-loans, table-manners, art, social philosophy ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... elbowed into the background, rose quietly and crossed to the other end of the room. Brooks followed her for a moment with regretful eyes. Her simple gown, with the little piece of ribbon around her graceful neck, seemed almost distinguished by comparison with the loud-patterned ...
— A Prince of Sinners • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... level with the strip of turf that formed the land's margin. Fifty yards back was the outer edge of a belt of dark wood that covered the flat lands and swept up the sides of the hills that lay off ten or twelve miles to the east. Against such a background nothing would be visible in the darkness. Across on the Gatcombe side were the steep sandstone cliffs, storm-washed and clean, ...
— Sea-Dogs All! - A Tale of Forest and Sea • Tom Bevan
... to suck the radiance along. It became a great cone of glowing light that, arrow-like, raced away upward. For a long instant the black length of the ship, and the greenish fan of flame, were outlined against the scarlet background of Jupiter. Then the freighter rocket, flinging herself upward at three gravities or better, passed the edge of the ...
— The Indulgence of Negu Mah • Robert Andrew Arthur
... Blake observed. "There every one is so expert that I used to feel like a great bungler. Seeing others do so beautifully made me feel as though I were particularly awkward, and I really did keep in the background because I was so ashamed of my clumsy performances. Perhaps though, that was only an excuse for my not being able to do better, and one ought not to offer excuses, ought one? Is there any pond near here on which we ...
— The Governess • Julie M. Lippmann
... the Warden, on each side, are two figures in sleeveless copes, tippets and pilei, without hoods—doctors in theology or degrees. More in the background are other pileati, wearing both tippet and hood; and through the armholes of their outer garments show the tight sleeves of the cassock. These may be secular doctors, or they may be bachelors of divinity ...
— The Customs of Old England • F. J. Snell
... case is thrown exclusively upon the independent voters of the country; and, if elected, they will have conferred a favor on me for which I shall be unremitting in my labors to compensate. But if the good people in their wisdom shall see fit to keep me in the background, I have been too familiar with disappointments ...
— The Story of Young Abraham Lincoln • Wayne Whipple
... diamond (the latter from the background of a third day's shirt) shone on him together; and ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... arrangements of blue spires or spikes on the horizon, and, here and there, an attempt at representing an overhanging rock with a hole through it; but merely in order to divide the light behind some human figure. Lakes! No, nothing of the kind,—only blue bays of sea put in to fill up the background when the painter could not think of anything else. Broken-down buildings! No; for the most part very complete and well-appointed buildings, if any; and never buildings at all, but to give place or explanation to some circumstance of human conduct." And then he would look up again to the ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... author, we may say that the work is in style excellent reading, and that if it were not so, the narratives themselves are so thrilling, possess such a heart-reaching interest, that if these were literary crudities, they would be entirely placed in the background in the concentrated blaze of light which the author pours upon the bloody pathway of these victims of injustice, from 1851, when the terrors of the Fugitive Slave Law began, to the hour when Slavery and Rebellion were washed ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still
... farm brought scantier profit than it ought to have brought, it was probably no weak solace in the background of a life of harassing interests and perpetual disappointments. Burke was happier at Beaconsfield than anywhere else, and he was happiest there when his house was full of guests. Nothing pleased him better than to drive a visitor over to Windsor, where he would expatiate with enthusiasm ...
— Burke • John Morley
... to meet the two big men, leaving Mrs. Scharpe sobbing in the background. The poor woman felt terrible, he knew; but there was nothing he could do about that. "Then let us go," he said, and marched off. Feeling that one more effect wouldn't hurt, he led the way to the Town Hall; let them figure out how he had known just ...
— Wizard • Laurence Mark Janifer (AKA Larry M. Harris)
... Even if it had been my own idea three years ago, I wouldn't repeat it, and I certainly won't have it said that I copy my competitors. No, what I want you to do is go out there and find out what's going on. Get a full background on it. We'll figure out the presentation angle when we get some idea of what he's going to do this time." Winstein eased himself off the corner of Elshawe's desk and stood up. ...
— By Proxy • Gordon Randall Garrett
... erotic wishes in disguised and symbolically veiled form." (Jb.; ps. F., p. 519, and Trdtg., p. 117.) In this formula the wish fulfillment, following Freud's view, is preponderant, yet it would appear to me that it is given too exclusive a role in the (chiefly affective) background of the dream. An important point is the infantile in the dream, in which connection we must mention ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer
... through his wonderful picture gallery, showed me his tapestries, his enamels, his jewels, his carved ivories, made me wonder at the strange loveliness of the luxury in which he lived; and then told me that luxury was nothing but a background, a painted scene in a play, and that power, power over other men, power over the world, was the one thing worth having, the one supreme pleasure worth knowing, the one joy one never tired of, and that in our century only the rich ...
— An Ideal Husband - A Play • Oscar Wilde
... background for the utilization of his intellectual powers in this process, the commander requires knowledge of the capabilities and limitations of the technique of his profession and of the weapons of his calling. To the ...
— Sound Military Decision • U.s. Naval War College
... it to be a conservative Mussulman village, where the Turkish women, besides keeping themselves veiled with orthodox strictness, seldom go abroad, and the women who are not Mohammedan, imbibing something of the retiring spirit of the dominant race, also keep themselves well in the background. A round score of dogs, great and small, and in all possible conditions of miserableness, congregate in the main street of Eski Baba at eventide, waiting with hungry-eyed expectancy for any morsel of food or offal that may peradventure find its way within their reach. The Turks, to their credit ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... lake that stretched for a mile or more ahead of them, and she turned to nod her head at the spruce and cedar shores with their colourings of red and gold, where birch, and poplar, and ash splashed vividly against the darker background. ...
— God's Country—And the Woman • James Oliver Curwood
... preface. Am I then in a position to pass judgment? Yes, I am; for I can claim to be literally more informed on the subject than most people, having above my share of friends and relations who have been there. I have the clearest possible picture of the country—a stretch of sand, some pyramids in the background, and, in the centre foreground, smiling enigmatically—not the Sphinx, but my friend or relation. I at once gave Mr. LOW five marks out of ten upon discovering that none of his illustrations reproduced ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, March 11, 1914 • Various
... calling of natives across the valleys. Far out towards the sea a thunderstorm flashed; and after a long interval the rumblings came to us. So very distant was it that we paid it little attention, save as an interesting background to our own still evening. Almost between sentences of our slow conversation, however, it rushed up to the zenith, blotting out the stars. The tall palms began to sway and rustle in the forerunning breeze. Then with a swoop it was upon us, a tempest of fury. We turned in; and all ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White
... floors of soft Majorcan sandstone cut in small rectangles like wooden blocks. The rooms still boasted the old-time splendor of vaulted ceilings, some dark, with skilfully fitted paneling, others with a faded and venerable gilding forming a background for the colored escutcheons which were emblazoned with the coat of arms of the house. In some rooms the high walls, simply whitewashed, were covered by rows of ancient paintings, and in others were concealed by rich hangings of gay colors which time had failed to destroy. The sleeping room ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... that he acted on impulse, not realizing. You can't judge him by ordinary standards. It isn't fair," pleaded Juliet. "There was probably some extenuating circumstance in the background—something we don't know about. I hope you haven't been very ...
— The Obstacle Race • Ethel M. Dell
... would be impracticable as well as unsafe and impolitic. Indeed, in his conduct of the Times, Raymond was again in accord with the Republicans, but he did not seek to renew his former relations with the party. Being complimented for "keeping in the background,"[1126] he replied that "when, a year ago, he declined a re-election to Congress, it was for the purpose of devoting himself wholly to the editorship of the Times, a position more to his taste than any other, and which carries with it as much of influence, honour, and substantial reward as any ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... various plateaus which form so many degrees which must be crossed, and which are not visible from below, appeared from the Brevent, and threw the so-much-desired summit, by the laws of perspective, still farther in the background. The Bossons glacier, in all its splendour, bristled with icy needles and blocks (blocks sometimes ten yards square), which seemed, like the waves of an angry sea, to beat against the sides of the rocks of the Grands-Mulets, ...
— A Winter Amid the Ice - and Other Thrilling Stories • Jules Verne
... introspection is afforded by the study of after-images. Look for an instant at the glowing electric bulb, and then turn your eyes upon a dark background, and observe whether the glowing filament appears there; this would be the "positive after-image". This simple type of introspection is used by physiology in its study of the senses, as well as by psychology; and it gives such precise ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth
... private secretary, passing through the picturesque and interesting native bazaars. The narrow whitewashed streets lined with little shops, gaily decorated with gold and bright colours, form a fitting background to the smartly dressed groups moving about among them. We did not pause to make any purchases, but stopped the carriage at many points to admire the motley crowd and the curious and ...
— The Last Voyage - to India and Australia, in the 'Sunbeam' • Lady (Annie Allnutt) Brassey
... of avowed reference to his own case throughout; and yet from first to last we are aware of young Mary Powell in the background. Inability for "fit and matchable conversation": this is that supreme fault in a wife on which the descant is from first to last, and from which, when it is plainly ingrained and unamendable, the right of divorce is maintained to be, by the law of God and all civil reason, the due deliverance. Hopeless ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... The Kew rose-garden has a wealth of roses, but it has, too, a wealth of old tree stems and broken branches which a garden meant for nothing but roses would hide. The herbaceous border grows luxuriant phloxes and delphiniums, but the background of glass houses sets a wrong light about it. The rock garden shows more rock and fewer masses of Alpine flowers than other English gardens more lately made, with better knowledge of what ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... which Napoleon had conferred upon the man he could not trust, but dare not openly distrust or dismiss, any more than could Louis XVIII. Even in the calmest and most peaceful times the Duke of Otranto remained menacing and terrible. The background which I see when I think of Fouch is not the Convention or the Committee of Public Safety. I see him as he is described to us by the youth who went to Lyons, to plead with him for the right to cross into Switzerland. He found Fouch busy. He was doing his best to execute ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... some object standing out against the vast background of sand, and soon was able to declare positively that there were two palm-trees ...
— Five Weeks in a Balloon • Jules Verne
... walked toward St. Andrew's Church and Tanfield Hall, where he insisted on taking me to get the "proper historical background," he told me about the great Disruption movement. He was extremely eloquent,—so eloquent that the image of Willie Beresford tottered continually on its throne, and I found not the slightest difficulty in giving an unswerving allegiance to the principles ...
— Penelope's Progress - Being Such Extracts from the Commonplace Book of Penelope Hamilton As Relate to Her Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... face—a smile which seemed to Anne at once triumphant and taunting. In reality it was nothing of the kind. Gilbert was merely smiling with appreciation of the whole affair in general and of the effect produced by Anne's slender white form and spiritual face against a background of palms in particular. Josie Pye, whom he had driven over, sat beside him, and her face certainly was both triumphant and taunting. But Anne did not see Josie, and would not have cared if she had. She drew a ...
— Anne Of Green Gables • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... friendship more than willingly, vexed at being no longer able to gather any fruit from it for the advantage of the State or himself, wholly abandoned as he was to his Paris pleasures and to his minister. The conviction of my complete inutility more and more kept me in the background, without the slightest suspicion that different conduct could be dangerous to me, or that, weak and abandoned to Dubois as was the Regent, the former could ever exile me, like the Duc de Roailles, and Cariillac, or disgust me into exiling myself. ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... thousand scimitars flash in the sunlight, and thrice ten thousand dancing-girls strew flowers. Then, follow white elephants caparisoned in countless gorgeous colours, and infinite in number and attendants. Still the Cathedral Tower rises in the background, where it cannot be, and still no writhing figure is on the grim spike. Stay! Is the spike so low a thing as the rusty spike on the top of a post of an old bedstead that has tumbled all awry? Some vague period of drowsy laughter must be devoted to ...
— The Mystery of Edwin Drood • Charles Dickens
... her, as if she clutched my bleeding heart, and would clutch it till the last drop of life-blood ebbed away. She was my wife, and we hated each other. Gradually the hearth, the dim library, the candle-light disappeared—seemed to melt away into a background of light, the green serpent with the diamond eyes remaining a dark image on the retina. Then I had a sense of my eyelids quivering, and the living daylight broke in upon me; I saw gardens, and heard voices; I ...
— The Lifted Veil • George Eliot
... Hohenberg had been treated as enjoying equal privileges with her husband. During his short stay in Roumania the Archduke had the pleasure of seeing his wife treated as his equal and not as a person of slight importance, always relegated to the background. At the court balls in Vienna the duchess was always obliged to walk behind all the archduchesses, and never had any gentleman allotted to her whose arm she could take. In Roumania she was his wife, and etiquette was not concerned with her birth. The Archduke ...
— In the World War • Count Ottokar Czernin
... jerks, between puffs, of his adventures; his first shot at a tiger, some trouble with hillmen at Peshawur, a row at a mess-table, in which two chaps lost their heads, and one his papers. He had been present as a guest, but had kept well in the background. There had been a lot of drinking done—luckily he was all right. He had a good head, you see; could carry a lot ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett
... mother. He'd come back to me a stranger. He'd come back a little ashamed of his shabby prairie mater, with her ten-years-old style of hair-dressing and her moss-grown ideas of things and her bald-looking prairie home with no repose and no dignifying background and neither a private gym nor a butler to wheel in the cinnamon-toast. He'd be having all those things, under Uncle Chandler's roof: he'd get used to ...
— The Prairie Child • Arthur Stringer
... very unfavourably with Melbourne or Sydney. However, I soon modified my somewhat hasty judgment. We had seen the town's worst aspects, and later I noticed some attractive-looking shops; the imposing Houses of Parliament, in their enclosed grounds, standing out sharply defined against the hazy background of Table Mountain; and the Standard Bank and Railway-station, which would hold their own in any city. At the same time, as a place of residence in the summer months, I can well understand Cape Town being wellnigh deserted. Those who can ...
— South African Memories - Social, Warlike & Sporting From Diaries Written At The Time • Lady Sarah Wilson
... Mr. Ambassador," he grinned. "Extraterritoriality. Wonderful thing, extraterritoriality." He looked at Hoddy, who, for the first time since I had met him, was trying to shrink into the background. "And diplomatic immunity, too. Ain't ...
— Lone Star Planet • Henry Beam Piper and John Joseph McGuire
... much of it in Hannah's back yard as in either Virginia's or Nellie's—perhaps even a little more had drifted into the fence corners. Hannah's joy in discovering that in this respect she had not been slighted crowded her troubles into the background. Immediately after breakfast, bundled up snugly, she stood in her yard and threw snowballs toward her neighbors' homes, while she squealed with delight. In a very few minutes, three little girls were playing where ...
— The Little Mixer • Lillian Nicholson Shearon
... white. The euphorbia, acacia, and baobab or calabash-tree were all in bloom; and here and there, through openings between the trunks of the mangroves, glimpses were caught of rich splashes of deep orange-colour, standing out like flame against the dark background of shadowed foliage, that subsequent investigation proved to be clumps of elegant orchids. It appeared that we had entered the river at precisely the right time of the year to behold it at its brightest and best, ...
— The Pirate Slaver - A Story of the West African Coast • Harry Collingwood
... Only such a background as this could have evolved the conception of "Architecture, sculpture, and painting in motion" and given authenticity to its presentation. The validity of Lindsay's analysis is attested by Freeburg's ...
— The Art Of The Moving Picture • Vachel Lindsay
... from distant parts of the North and West, and camped on the shores in the immediate vicinity of the town. When the fair was in full operation, a scene was represented well worthy of the bold brush of a Dore. The royal mountain, then as now, formed a background of rare sylvan beauty. The old town was huddled together on the low lands near the river, and was for years a mere collection of low wooden houses and churches, all surrounded by palisades. On the fair ground were to be seen Indians tricked out in their savage finery; coureurs ...
— Canada • J. G. Bourinot
... When the reason at length occurred to me, I felt very much disgusted with myself for being puzzled over so very simple a matter. After rain a flying swan may be visible to the eye at a vastly greater distance than during fair weather; the sun shining on its intense white plumage against the dark background of a rain-cloud making it exceedingly conspicuous. The fact that swans are almost always seen after rain shows only that ...
— The Naturalist in La Plata • W. H. Hudson
... what life would be like with her beauty and talent if there were no vulgarly extravagant, unprincipled mother in the background, no insistent need to earn money, no gnawing ambition for a fame she already began to feel ...
— Winding Paths • Gertrude Page
... don't," said John; "I've never had a chance to prove it. For years I have been kept in the background by your family. I'm never allowed to make a joke, and if I do nobody laughs. This is my chance. I'm going to be in the limelight now. I shall be the life of the party, and it's no good trying to stop me. In fact," he finished confidentially, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, December 22, 1920 • Various
... tell you what I do know—get my own knowledge of the background straight, so to speak. Now, as I understand it, the courts have agreed—temporarily, at least—that any person convicted of certain types of crimes must undergo a psychiatric ...
— Nor Iron Bars a Cage.... • Gordon Randall Garrett
... sky blue background representing the endless sky and a gold sun with 32 rays soaring above a golden steppe eagle in the center; on the hoist side is ...
— The 1995 CIA World Factbook • United States Central Intelligence Agency
... I give, of course, no theological opinion on its correctness: but as professor of Modern History, I am bound to set before you opinions which had the most enormous influence on the history of early Europe. Unless you keep them in mind, as the fixed and absolute background of all human thought and action for more than 1000 years, you will never be able to understand the doings ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley
... to remark, that while in all the other Slavic popular poetry, the musical element is prominent, it is in the Servian completely crowded into the background. Even the little lyric pieces, or female ballads, are not only in a high degree monotonous, but even without the peculiar sweetness of most popular airs. They also are ...
— Historical View of the Languages and Literature of the Slavic - Nations • Therese Albertine Louise von Jacob Robinson
... northward, we reached the entrance to the Midway Plaisance, directly east of which stood, encompassed by luxuriant shrubs and beds of fragrant flowers, like a white silhouette against the background of old and stately oaks, the daintily ...
— By Water to the Columbian Exposition • Johanna S. Wisthaler
... was raised above the level of the water, and shewed conspicuously; for the moonbeams reached the body before they fell on the surrounding water; for that reason then it was the body presented a strange and ghastly object against a deep, dark background, by which it ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... thing had happened in the strangest silence. Except for a feeble moaning from Aunt Jane, like the bleating of a sheep, which broke forth at intervals, nobody spoke or made a sound. The three riflemen in the background, standing like images with their weapons raised, looked like a well-trained ...
— Spanish Doubloons • Camilla Kenyon
... again, and as soon as the paint was dry went carefully over the letter part with gum, so delicately that the red colour was not disturbed nor the background smeared. ...
— The King's Sons • George Manville Fenn
... conscientiousness, and the heads are often wrought out with minuteness and fidelity, and have so much expression that they tell their own story clearly enough; but it seems not to have been the painter's aim to effect a lifelike illusion, the background and accessories being conventional. The trees are no more like real trees than the feather of a pen, and there is no perspective, the figure of the picture being shadowed forth on a surface of burnished gold. The effect, when these ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... O Zarathustra, wouldst view the ground of everything, and its background: thus must thou mount even above thyself—up, upwards, until thou hast even thy stars ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche
... no mouse-totem in the background. I do not feel quite convinced—the mouse being a totem, and a sacred or tabooed animal, in India and Egypt. {82a} But I am content to remain in a balance of opinion. That the Mouse is the Night (Gubernatis), ...
— Modern Mythology • Andrew Lang
... upon the Doraine. The illusion was startling. The ship seemed to be lying absolutely motionless; it was the land that approached instead of the other way round. A thin white beach suddenly emerged from the green background to the left, to the right an ugly mass of rocks took shape, stretching as far as the eye could reach. Farther inland rose high, tree covered hills, green as emeralds in the blazing sunlight. On a sea of turquoise lolled the ...
— West Wind Drift • George Barr McCutcheon
... long line of white uniformed Cuirassiers in burnished corselets and black-plumed helmets; with the Lake for a background, and rank on rank of spectators on either side. In front, were the carriages of the Aristocracy of the Capital; and, as I galloped down to take post after the review, I could not but wonder how many ...
— The Colonel of the Red Huzzars • John Reed Scott
... own shortcomings lay; and then he began to go over the outlines again in the most simple fashion. After that, he sought, by scraping them off, to lose there, to mingle there, all the tones of the head and those of the background; and the face had assumed consistency and the shades vigour—the whole work had a look of greater firmness. At length the Marechale came back again. She even indulged in some hostile criticisms. The painter naturally persevered in his own course. After getting ...
— Sentimental Education, Volume II - The History of a Young Man • Gustave Flaubert
... sketch of this great book. It will at least serve to recall to the memory of some readers thoughts and words which long ago stirred their blood in youth. No volume could so fitly be chosen as a background against which to view the modern surge of the age-long battle. But the charm of Sartor Resartus is, after all, personal. We go back to the life-story of Teufelsdroeckh, out of which such varied and such lofty teachings sprang, and we read ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... continue to do the world's work, as they are best fitted to, these qualities in their representatives that have resulted in the present prejudice against them must be relegated to the background. The corporations must come out into the open and see and be seen. They must take the public into their confidence and ask for what they want, and no more, and be prepared to explain satisfactorily what advantage will accrue to the public if ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... in the dear old land of ready money, where the accident of birth doesn't give any man the right to sit on somebody else's neck, you'd be a big gun. You'd have money and a pull and probably, before you got through, you'd be investigated. Over here, you are deliberately kept in the background. You are the Patsy." ...
— The Slim Princess • George Ade
... pictures as she had never seen, the world locked in the embrace of winter, glistening icicles as big as her body, cliffs thrown into strange, grotesque shapes, fields of untracked white with perhaps the sweep of a stream seeming ink black against the dazzling white background. ...
— The Short Cut • Jackson Gregory
... Oliver had arranged his palette the club had settled itself for work, the smoke from the pipes floating in long lines toward the ceiling, befogging the big white albatross that hung from a wire in the skylight. Munson, who had rubbed in a background of bitumen over a square tile, sat next to Fred, who was picking out, with the end of a wooden match, the outlines of an army-wagon sketched on a plate smeared with color. Simmons was looking over a portfolio that Watson, a new member, had brought with him, filled with a lot of his summer sketches ...
— The Fortunes of Oliver Horn • F. Hopkinson Smith
... did not pronounce the word with his lips, his mind kept repeating: "Marechal—Marechal," as if to raise and challenge the shade. And on the black background of his closed eyelids, he suddenly saw him as he had known him: a man of about sixty, with a white beard cut in a point and very thick eyebrows, also white. He was neither tall nor short, his manner was pleasant, his eyes ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant
... point to Mr. Gladstone's agitation against Lord Beaconsfield's attitude at that period—was the drawing of the Prime Minister, leaning back comfortably reading in his armchair, declaring that he can see nothing at all about "Bulgarian Atrocities" in the Blue Books, though the background of the picture itself is all violence and butchery. Yet nobody recalled the fact that the artist had made a similar cartoon of Cobden and Palmerston in ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... remembered the morning, three days later, when Bruce went away. How blue the sky was, how clear the sunshine, how glorious the autumn pageant of the hills! Beside the gate a young maple burned like a shaft of flame. True, Bruce was only going to school now, but there was France in the background, a beckoning possibility with all that it meant of triumph and heroism and pain. That idea of France, and the fiery splendor of the hills, seemed to invest Bruce's strong young figure with a kind ...
— The Camerons of Highboro • Beth B. Gilchrist
... but love stories are women's affairs, and you know how good the boy is to me. A mother's word sometimes has more effect than a father's blow, and it is in life as it is in war; the light forces of archers go first into the field, and the heavily armed division stays in the background to support them; then, if the enemy will not yield, it comes forward and decides the battle. First let me speak to the lad. It may be that he threw the rose into Sirona's window only in sport, for she plays with his brothers and sisters as if she herself were one of them. I will question him; ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... rivers and roads running down on each side, has extended, and will further extend, the power of modern education, of unhampered ideas, of science and of humanity. From this magnificent view-point Sofia stretches along the low hill with the dark background of the Balkan beyond. Against that background now stands out the new embodiment of Bulgarian and Slavonic energy, genius, and freedom of mind, the great cathedral, with its vast golden domes brilliantly standing out from the shade behind them. In no other capital is a ...
— Bulgaria • Frank Fox
... American Republic, not from love of it, but on account of his detestation of England, provoked by her conduct during his desperate struggle against his Continental enemies, is, of course, on such occasions diplomatically kept in the background. ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... subject by "Phiz." A remarkable contrast in treatment; there is the suggestion of the pair being surprised. We see how the fat boy came on them. The old Manor Farm in the background, with its gables, etc., is a pleasing addition, and like all "Phiz's" landscapes, delicately touched in. The scared alarm on the two faces is first-rate—even Miss Wardle's foot as well as Tupman's is expressive. There appears to be ...
— Pickwickian Manners and Customs • Percy Fitzgerald
... corner; a most vicious chest of drawers snarled at her from between the windows. It was no relief to escape from those monsters to the looking- glass, for the reflection said, "What? Is that you all alone there? How you stare!" And the background was all a ...
— Tom Tiddler's Ground • Charles Dickens
... a huge, much-dinted musical instrument, hanging up outside against a background of uniforms, civil and military. Then, proudly and impetuously, he followed ...
— A Prince of Bohemia • Honore de Balzac
... pink candytuft for the border and single pink hollyhocks for the background with foxgloves right in front of them to cover up the stems at the bottom where they haven't many leaves and a medium height phlox in front of that for ...
— Ethel Morton's Enterprise • Mabell S.C. Smith
... crew, the one who made the most sensible suggestions, and to whom—though they teased her a little and called her "Grannie"—they all turned in the end for help and advice. Jess was slightly out of her element in a southern setting. Her appropriate background was moorland and heather and gray loch, and driving clouds and a breeze with fine mist in it, that would make you want to wrap a plaid round your shoulders and turn to the luxury of a peat fire. Quite unconsciously she suggested all these things. Peachy once ...
— The Jolliest School of All • Angela Brazil
... that, fresh from the tropic forests, and with their forms hanging always as it were in the background of my eye, I was impressed more and more vividly the longer I looked, with the likeness of those forest forms to the forms of our own Cathedral of Chester. The grand and graceful Chapter-house transformed itself into one of those green bowers, which, once ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... log, near a small rustic bridge, beneath which flowed a limpid, gurgling stream. On a log beside him sat a girl of perhaps eighteen years, exceedingly handsome with the flaming kind of beauty like a poppy's, striking to the eye, shallow-petaled. She was vividly effective against the background of deep green spruces and white birch in her bright pink dress and large drooping black hat. Her coloring was brilliant, her lips full, scarlet, ripely sensuous. Beneath her straight black brows her sparkling, black eyes gleamed with restless ...
— Wild Wings - A Romance of Youth • Margaret Rebecca Piper
... against the background of dark foliage, were silently and dexterously manoeuvred by small, yellow, naked men, with long hair piled up on their heads in feminine fashion. Gradually, as we advanced farther up the green channel, the perfumes became more ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... of the Aryan family, and contain the revelation of Brahm which was preserved by tradition and collected by Vyasa, a name which means compiler. The word Veda, however, should be taken, as a collective name for the sacred literature of the Vedic age which forms the background of the whole Indian world. Many works belonging to that age are lost, though a large number ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... brightness wanted a foil, it was there; the gold glittered upon a cloudy background. My treasure was not exactly in my hand to enjoy. There might be many days before Thorold and I saw each other's faces again. Dangers lay threatening him, that I could not bear to think of; although I knew they were there. And even were ...
— Daisy in the Field • Elizabeth Wetherell
... controlled. I passed behind him once, and the odour that smote my olfactory sense told me too plainly that he had fortified himself with a stimulant on his way from the apartment to the laboratory. Of course O'Connor and Dr. Leslie were there, though in the background. ...
— The Dream Doctor • Arthur B. Reeve
... medium of sentiment and pathos? All this may be true. But the Yankee, after all, is a man, and as such his history, could it be got at, must have more or less of poetic material in it; moreover, whether conscious of it or not, he also stands relieved against the background of Nature's beauty or sublimity. There is a poetical side to the commonplace of his incomings and outgoings; study him well, and you may frame an idyl of some sort from his apparently prosaic existence. Our poets, we must needs think, ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... spirits;' but what is their ministry, what the nature of their work, what their relationship to human beings?—all that was part of the instruction given in the Lesser Mysteries, as the actual communication with them was enjoyed in the Greater, but in modern days these truths have sunk into the background. For the Protestant the ministry of angels is little more ...
— The Life Radiant • Lilian Whiting
... a menace to the social order. Their beauty shone out too boldly against a conventional background. But anxious mothers need have felt no alarm. They mistook the mettle of their sons. The respect for respectability was stronger than any ...
— My Antonia • Willa Sibert Cather
... the future had Maxfield painted into the background. He loved the place as his own, as his sphere in life, as his destiny. Was that a dream after all? Were all his castles in the air to vanish, and leave him a mere dependant in ...
— Roger Ingleton, Minor • Talbot Baines Reed
... across the way I sought to go, while right and left, and within a foot of me, were two more burly figures. They were all in motion now, and as the lantern was borne closer it was thrown open, and, in what one of my neighbours would have called an augenblick, I saw in the background on one side the tilt of a wagon, and on the other the ...
— Charge! - A Story of Briton and Boer • George Manville Fenn
... had to be given to the scene that was going up in the background, borrowed from the Pan-Elocutionists. It was ...
— The Peterkin Papers • Lucretia P Hale
... external stimulus has been cut off. This "positive after-image" is like the main sensation, only weaker. There is also a "negative after-image", best got by looking steadily at a black-and-white or colored figure for as long as fifteen or twenty seconds, and then directing the eyes upon a medium gray background. After a moment a sensation develops in which black takes the place of white and white of black, while for each color in the original sensation the complementary color ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth
... how many ways this feeling appeals to us; it seems to be the background of our whole ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... while a skilled person, hired at a high price, rules in the dairy. The son rides a-hunting, and is glib on the odds. The 'offices'—such it is the fashion to call the places in which work was formerly done—are carefully kept in the background. The violets and snowdrops and crocuses are rooted up, all the sweet and tender old flowers ruthlessly eradicated, to make way for a blazing parterre after the manner of the suburban villa—gay in the summer, in the ...
— Hodge and His Masters • Richard Jefferies
... successful only in the event of her being willing to be known and come out into the open. Suppose you write to her in care of the publishers. They would certainly forward the letter to wherever she may be. If she does not want you to know who she is she will ignore your letter and remain in the background. If, on the contrary, she has no fear of you, and is willing to meet you, she ...
— The Lion and The Mouse - A Story Of American Life • Charles Klein
... New Inn, the background of this story, and one of the last surviving inns of Chancery, has recently passed away after upwards of four centuries of newness. Even now, however, a few of the old, dismantled houses (including ...
— The Mystery of 31 New Inn • R. Austin Freeman
... the struggle, the moon broke out from behind a great dark cloud, and there was seen struggling and labouring in the gale a ship whose sails caught the moonlight. She shone out vividly against the black background, but the lifeboatmen were horrified to see that, attracted by the lights of the Champion, she was heading straight for the terrible sea on the western jaw of the swatch, where she apparently thought she would find safe anchorage in ...
— Heroes of the Goodwin Sands • Thomas Stanley Treanor
... animated songs that were thus overloaded with meaningless embroideries by the sopranists and the prima donnas that followed them. Slow movements, which ought to breathe a spirit of melancholy, appear to have been especially selected as background for these vocal fireworks. I need not dwell on the unnaturalness of this style. To run up and down the scale wildly and persistently in singing a slow and sad song, is as consistent as it would be for an orator to grin and yodle ...
— Chopin and Other Musical Essays • Henry T. Finck
... Finally, the stage opened a third time to show a new group, and this finished the representation. There were, then, only three movements to be made, that of the doors, that of the eyes, and that of the change of background. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 385, May 19, 1883 • Various
... say?" pursued Lepany. "Shall I say that the Ideal is, as it were, the Real distilled and sublimated in the alembic of the imagination? Shall I say that the Ideal is an image projected by the soul of genius upon the background of the universe? That it is that dazzling, that unimaginable, that incommunicable goal towards which the suns in their orbits, the stars in their courses, the spheres with all their harmonies, have been chaotically tending since time began! Ideal, say you? Call it ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards
... became general, artists were largely dependent on commissions in order to do any work except drawing. Fresco needed a wall, and work done in that manner could not be removed from place to place. The old-fashioned panel work with its gold background was so expensive that few artists could afford to paint pictures on the mere chance of selling them. But the facilities and the economy of pure tempera work, and work in oils, soon ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... manfully, and to do the world good service; but yet he may never win the smallest recognition or admiration in his school-days, while all the glory and honour and credit is still reserved for the graceful, attractive, high-spirited athlete, who may have nothing else in the background. ...
— Where No Fear Was - A Book About Fear • Arthur Christopher Benson
... to bringing some relief to the guests at entertainments of this kind, I have endeavoured to construct one or two little winter pastimes of a novel character. They are quite inexpensive, and as they need no background of higher arithmetic or ancient history, they are within reach of the humblest intellect. Here is one of them. It is called Indoor Football, or ...
— Literary Lapses • Stephen Leacock
... Mikado's subjects on the opposite shores. Fusan has been nominally in the hands of the Japanese from very ancient times, although it was only in 1876 that a treaty was concluded by which it was opened to Japanese trade. The spot on which the settlements lie is pretty, with its picturesque background of high mountains and the large number of little islands rising like green patches here and there in the bay. Maki, the largest island, directly opposite the settlement, is now used as a station for breeding horses of very small size, and it possesses good pastures on ...
— Corea or Cho-sen • A (Arnold) Henry Savage-Landor
... replaced. And with all there are stories of gallantry, of sea rescues, of moving incidents wherein there is nothing but good to tell of the human animal. Would that it were all so. But it is not. The ruthlessness of the German rears itself like a sordid shadow against the background of Anglo-Saxon and Latin gallantry and heroism—a diminishing shadow, thank God, and thank, also, the navy of Great Britain ...
— Our Navy in the War • Lawrence Perry
... carefully before he aroused Nadia, who hurried into the control room. Looming large in the shortened range of the plate, their objective hurtled onward in its eternal course, its enormous velocity betrayed only by the rapidity with which it sped past the incredibly brilliant background of infinitely distant stars. Apparently it was a wild jumble of separate fragments; a conglomerate, heterogeneous aggregation of rough and jagged masses varying in size from grains of sand up to enormous chunks, ...
— Spacehounds of IPC • Edward Elmer Smith
... out of the window across a dull and apparently uninviting prospect of roofs and chimneys, to where in the background a faint line of silver and a wheeling flock of sea gulls became dimly visible through the branches of the distant trees. The window itself was flung wide open, but the slowly moving air had little of ...
— The Great Prince Shan • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... those that shall come after us a blackened waste. The little one that lies in his cradle will be accursed for our sakes. Every child will be base-born, springing from ignoble blood. We inherited a fair fame, and bays from a glorious battle; but for him is no background, no stand-point. His country will be a burden on his shoulders, a blush upon his cheek, a chain about his feet. There is no career for the future, but a weary effort, a long, a painful, a heavy-hearted struggle to lift ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... the court, he soon put off the manners of a rustic and acquired the polished elegance of a courtier of the period. He spent much time in studying the drama of Parisian daily life, a brilliant, shifting series of gay scenes, with the revelation now and then of a cruel and sordid background. ...
— Heroes of Modern Europe • Alice Birkhead
... brought bright again; and, accordingly, give the sober pictures to the professors, to be put right by rules of art. Then, the professors repaint the old pictures in all the principal places, leaving perhaps only a bit of background to set off their own work. And thus the professors come to be generally figured, in my mind, as the monkeys who tear holes in the pictures, to grin through. Then the picture-dealers, who live by the pictures, ...
— A Joy For Ever - (And Its Price in the Market) • John Ruskin
... its lustre to the fire on the hearth of every Christian household. Yet, for all that, they are inexperienced in those same stronger and darker passions of which they prate, and know nothing of the import of those pictures of them painted, with background of gloom and foreground of fire, in the works of the truly great masters. The disturbed spirit of such delineations is far beyond the reaches of their souls; and they mistake their own senseless stupor for solemn awe—or their ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... stair-case stood a young officer. He was leaning nonchalantly against the carved balustrade; the scarlet and gold of his uniform shone against a green background of palms, distinguishing his broad shoulders from among the rest. The palms screened him ...
— The Black Cross • Olive M. Briggs
... attracted the greatest attention. The countless bas-reliefs, cut on soft stone slabs, were pages from the history of the monarch in peace and war, in council, in the chase, or in processional rites. Beside him and around him his officers came in for a share of the background glory. Occasionally the common people had representations of their lives and their pursuits, but the main subject of all the valley art was the king and his doings. Sculpture and painting were largely illustrations accompanying a history written ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Painting • John C. Van Dyke
... appreciate the glorious beauties of the landscape. The Rivanna River looked like a ribbon of silvery satin laid on green velvet, all in striking contrast with the red soil of the tilled fields. The Blue Ridge mountains, nearly fifty miles distant, were, in the clear air, a massive and misty blue background for the picturesque Ragged Mountains near ...
— Rodney, the Ranger - With Daniel Morgan on Trail and Battlefield • John V. Lane
... guests, Philippa soon recovered her usual gay spirits. The news that Alec had disclosed the night before, which sent her stunned and heart-sick to her retreat in the old apple-tree, had faded into the background in the excitement of the fire. She thought of it all the time she was dressing, but the keenness of her distress was not so overwhelming as it had been. It was like some old pain that had lost its worst sting in ...
— Flip's "Islands of Providence" • Annie Fellows Johnston
... been looking on at this little pantomime with great satisfaction for some time, when, to our unspeakable astonishment, we perceived that the whole of the characters, including a numerous corps de ballet of boots and shoes in the background, into which we had been hastily thrusting as many feet as we could press into the service, were arranging themselves in order for dancing; and some music striking up at the moment, to it they went without delay. It was perfectly delightful to witness the agility of the market-gardener. ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... great pace; lizards and goannas scampered out of the way in dozens, and, clambering trees, eyed us unblinkingly as we passed. Did we see a person or vehicle a tiny speck ahead of us—in a short time they were as far away in the background. ...
— My Brilliant Career • Miles Franklin
... more they passed into the river Geromerino, and made their way through a world of beautiful aquatic plants which covered the tranquil waters in every direction. The river banks are flat, and fringed with underwood and young trees; the background is formed by ranges ...
— The Story of Ida Pfeiffer - and Her Travels in Many Lands • Anonymous
... river had risen two feet during the night, and the stump of the tree to which I had moored my boat was submerged. The river was wide and the banks covered with heavy forests, with clearings here and there, which afforded attractive vistas of prairies in the background. I passed a bold, stratified crag, covered with a little growth of cedars. These adventurous trees, growing out of the crevices of the rock, formed a picturesque covering for its rough surface. A cavern, about thirty feet in width, penetrated a short distance into the ...
— Four Months in a Sneak-Box • Nathaniel H. Bishop
... sixteen when the wonder and beauty of the old Greek life began to dawn upon me. Suddenly I seemed to see the white figures throwing purple shadows on the sun-baked palaestra; 'bands of nude youths and maidens'—you remember Gautier's words—'moving across a background of deep blue as on the frieze of the Parthenon.' I began to read Greek eagerly for love of it all, and the more I read the more I ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... As Nieuwenhuis has pointed out [9, p. 451], the tatu of these tribes is distinctive, inasmuch as most of the designs are left in the natural colour of the skin against a background of tatu; that is to say in the phraseology of the photographer, whilst the tatu designs of Kayans, Kenyahs, etc., are POSITIVES, those of the Bakatans are NEGATIVES. The men were formerly most extensively tatued, and we figure the principal ...
— The Pagan Tribes of Borneo • Charles Hose and William McDougall
... no longer of any consequence to the community at large. In the mysterious purposes of that third volume which we seem to be living in Ireland, Francesca's beauty and mine, her hats and frocks as well as mine, are all reduced to the background; but Salemina's toilet had cost us some thought. When she first issued from the discreet and decorous fastnesses of Salem society, she had never donned any dinner dress that was not as high at the ...
— Penelope's Irish Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... of the newspapers seem to be of opinion that until the Republic has been officially recognised, it is not consistent with her dignity to take part in any European Conference. The diplomatists, who have been a little thrown in the background of late, by wars and generals, must be delighted to find their old friend, the "Eastern Question," cropping up. The settlement of the Schleswig-Holstein question was a heavy blow to them; but for many a year they ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... cheerfulness on days serene, her resignation on stormy ones,—all those variations of expression by which character is displayed depend, like the effects in the sky, on unexpected and fugitive circumstances, which have no connection with each other except the background against which they rest, though all are necessarily mingled with the events of this history,—truly a household epic, as great to the eyes of a wise man as a tragedy to the eyes of the crowd, an epic in which you will feel an interest, not only for ...
— The Lily of the Valley • Honore de Balzac
... period of valedictory may we be permitted a concluding reflection, projected in clear outline on the background of those thrilling days now forever over. That reflection, in silhouette, is this—the great crises of life—whether decisive of weal or of woe, are, to the soul of normal man, God impelling! In direct ratio as danger and death impended ...
— The Greater Love • George T. McCarthy
... Chinchero is a village near Cuzco, on the heights overlooking the lovely valley of Yucay, with magnificent mountains in the background. The remains of the Inca palace are still standing, not unlike those on the Colcampata ...
— History of the Incas • Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa
... not consent to be kept long in the background on such a day as this when the sun shone its brightest and the birds sang their hardest and the very wind seemed to be whispering of happier ...
— The Outdoor Girls at Bluff Point - Or a Wreck and a Rescue • Laura Lee Hope
... comet, and he observed it carefully before he aroused Nadia, who hurried into the control room. Looming large in the shortened range of the plate, their objective hurtled onward in its eternal course, its enormous velocity betrayed only by the rapidity with which it sped past the incredibly brilliant background of infinitely distant stars. Apparently it was a wild jumble of separate fragments; a conglomerate, heterogeneous aggregation of rough and jagged masses varying in size from grains of sand up to enormous chunks, which upon Earth would have weighed millions of ...
— Spacehounds of IPC • Edward Elmer Smith
... was rudely awakened by the fate which had dragged her into the depths of slavery. In the chambers of her imagery were pictures of noble deeds; of high, heroic men, knightly, tender, true, and brave. In Dr. Gresham she saw the ideal of her soul exemplified. But in her lonely condition, with all its background of terrible sorrow and deep abasement, she had never for a moment thought of giving or receiving love from one of that race who had been so lately associated in her mind with horror, aversion, and disgust. His kindness to her had been a new experience. His companionship ...
— Iola Leroy - Shadows Uplifted • Frances E.W. Harper
... reign of Charles I. is one full of involved details, yet the broader aspects of it, the great events which chiseled into shape the future of England stand out in bold relief in front of a background of interminable bickerings. There was constant quarreling between the factions within the English church, and between the Protestants and the Catholics, complicated by the discontent of the people and at times the nobles because of the autocratic, ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... gardener? You say nothing about that shadowy and sinister figure, the gardener. You are keeping him in the background, Murch. Out with him!" ...
— The Woman in Black • Edmund Clerihew Bentley
... breast as though asleep, his horse plodding after the others—along the slight trail they had made across the desert. So far as eye could reach nothing moved, nothing apparently existed. Fronting again to the north he looked upon the same grim barrenness, only that far off, against the lighter background of distant sky, there was visible a faint blur, a bluish haze, which he believed to be the distant sand dunes bordering the Arkansas. The intense dreariness of it all left a feeling of depression. His eyes turned and regarded the girl riding silently beside him. The same ...
— Keith of the Border • Randall Parrish
... The sudden change from the pleasant green gloom of the forest to the harsh glare of the brilliant sunshine was startling. As they crossed the open Dermot looked up at the giant rampart of the mountains and saw against the dark background of their steep slopes the grey wall of Fort and bungalows in the little outpost of Ranga Duar high ...
— The Elephant God • Gordon Casserly
... say, and he regrets it. He, regrets it, because Time, according to certain solemn philosophers, is the canvas background against which we embroider the follies of our existence, and truly it is little scientific not to be able to indicate at precisely which moment the canvas of this book begins. But the author does not know; all he can say is, that at that moment ...
— The Quest • Pio Baroja
... of that pale ghost, with great black hollow eyes, who sat in Crowland, with thin bare feet, and sackcloth on her tender limbs, watching, praying, longing, loving, uncomplaining. That ghost had been for many a month the background of all his thoughts and dreams. It was so clear before his mind's eye now, that, unawares to himself, he shouted "Torfrida!" as he struck, and struck the harder at the sound of ...
— Hereward, The Last of the English • Charles Kingsley
... because in their day instantaneous photography was unknown, and in addition there were certain crudities of construction that seriously interfered with the illumination of the pictures, rendering it necessary to make them practically as silhouettes on a very conspicuous background. Hence it will be obvious that these toys produced merely an ILLUSION ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... age when he ascended the throne on June 15, 1888, he may be said to have been at that time still but a raw youth, continually kept in the background, and treated more or less like a child, without any consequence or weight. It is, therefore, not remarkable that the first years of his reign should have been signalized by many errors of judgment; for it is not with impunity that one suddenly releases a person, locked ...
— The Secret Memoirs of the Courts of Europe: William II, Germany; Francis Joseph, Austria-Hungary, Volume I. (of 2) • Mme. La Marquise de Fontenoy
... eye sparkles, and has not the dulness usual to such. That Envy is here meant, you readily conjecture. Some diminutive females, frauds and deceits, attend her as companions, whose office is to encourage and instruct, and studiously to adorn their mistress. In the background, Repentance, sadly arrayed in a mournful, worn-out, and ragged garment, who, with averted head, with tears and shame, acknowledges and prepares to receive Truth, approaching from ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... it; the oddly assorted teams, mules, donkeys and Mongolian ponies, went unclipped and ungroomed; the drivers went unwashed. Loathsome beggars sat in the gilded doorways of the fur-shops, the incongruity of their rags against the background of barbaric splendour evidently appealing to none of the passers-by who hurried about their business in ...
— Sir Robert Hart - The Romance of a Great Career, 2nd Edition • Juliet Bredon
... is somewhat at the left of the centre of the canvas, and the picture would seem one-sided were it not for the details of the background at the right. Here the painter has represented a parapet supporting a marble pillar, at the base of which a large macaw perches. Beyond is seen a beautiful landscape. This spot of color brings the composition into perfect ...
— Sir Joshua Reynolds - A Collection of Fifteen Pictures and a Portrait of the - Painter with Introduction and Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll
... message, the spirit of that which they are professing to interpret. If that which we read is worth while, if it has anything vital in it, the effect will be stronger if the skill and personality of the speaker are kept in the background, and the audience is brought face to face with the spirit of that which has been embodied in the lines. As some readers go through their lines they seem to be saying, Listen to my voice, observe my ...
— The Speaker, No. 5: Volume II, Issue 1 - December, 1906. • Various
... objective, her political attitude toward attaining it, and her militant spirit were revived in suffrage history in 1913 when Alice Paul, also of Quaker background, entered the national field as leader of the new ...
— Jailed for Freedom • Doris Stevens
... caused by the rapid spread of the plague, the feldshers were unceremoniously relegated to the background. Their surgery was practically useless and their drugs proved powerless to stay the disease. The snakharkas, on the other hand, prospered greatly. Superstition flourished; prayers, sacrifices, ...
— Rabbi and Priest - A Story • Milton Goldsmith
... resigned way; and certainly when the good old nobleman did reach his final bob, his merry, jovial face looked particularly promising for the extra week. And now the Doctor advances to the table with the prize list in his hand. The prize boys are marshalled in the background, in the order in which their names appear, and Bramble tries hard to look as if nothing but his duty to his grandmother would have kept him from forming one ...
— The Fifth Form at Saint Dominic's - A School Story • Talbot Baines Reed
... faint as he was, rose on his elbow, watching. Charge after charge, wild and impetuous, break the slowly retreating battalions. In vain I heard Carter's stern oaths (may the angel of tears forgive him!), and Charlie Marsh's boyish calls. The men are facing us. The enemy, cheering, and in the background huge torches flaming with pitch, ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... bunted him with a head like a cannon-ball; he twisted little wiry legs under the hollows of 'Lisha's knees. The two came down together with a great thud. The teacher and the scholars came rushing to the door. Elmira wailed and sobbed in the background. The slight boy was holding great 'Lisha on the ground with a strength that ...
— Jerome, A Poor Man - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... saw how dangerous was our position, and how difficult escape would be should any fierce beast steal upon us unawares; we therefore hastened to make our way to the open seashore. Here the scene which presented itself was indeed delightful. A background of hills, the green, waving grass, the pleasant groups of trees stretching here and there to the water's edge, formed a lovely prospect. On the smooth sand we searched carefully for any trace of our hapless companions, but not a mark of a ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V3 • Charles H. Sylvester
... of ordered growth and measured progress. This excited a vivid hopefulness of interest, which insensibly but most effectually pressed the sterile propositions of dogmatic theology into a dim and squalid background. Nor was this all. The Preliminary Discourse and the host of articles marshalled behind it, showed that the triumphs of knowledge and true opinion had all been gained on two conditions. The first of these conditions was a firm disregard of authority; ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... and was completed in June or July. It was finished with little or no glazing. The Roman widow is a lady still youthful, in a grey fawn-tinted drapery, with a musical instrument in each hand; she is in the sepulchral chamber of her husband, whose stone urn appears in the background. I possess the antique urn which my brother procured, and which he used for the painting. For graceful simplicity, and for depth of earnest but not strained sentiment, he never, I think, exceeded ‘The Roman Widow.’ The two instruments seem to repeat the two mottoes on the urn, ‘Ave ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... important fact that the social order serves to sift out individuals of marked mnemonic powers and bring them into prominence, while those who are relatively deficient are relegated to the background. The educated class is necessarily composed of those who have good powers of memory. All others fail and are rejected. We see and admire those who succeed; of those who fail we know nothing and we even forget that there ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... than he seems in the light of later reflection. Probably we all have a period of admiring Carlyle almost exclusively. College essays, when the essayist cares for his work, are generally based on one or the other. Then they recede into the background. As for their thought, we cannot for ever remain disciples. We begin to see how much that looks like thought is really the expression of temperament, and how individual a thing temperament is, how each of us must construct his world for himself, or be content to wait for an answer and a synthesis ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... antithesis pictures in somber background that doomed spy hurried to his fate, and another swinging, strangling shape expiating through hangman's device the ...
— Oswald Langdon - or, Pierre and Paul Lanier. A Romance of 1894-1898 • Carson Jay Lee
... I am being happy!" he said to himself, and he turned this consciousness over in his mind as he would have turned a sweet in his mouth. Ever afterwards the memory of that moment's realisation was connected for him with a twisted line of hedge and a background of pale greenish sky. He stared at the distorted hedgerow that stood out so clearly, and to him this moment was so vividly the present that he did not see how it could ever leave off.... "This is now ..." he thought; "how ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... suburban streets of that city—I mean Verona—the eye never seeks to rest on that external scenery, however gorgeous; it does not look for the gaps between the houses, as you do here; it may for a few moments follow the broken line of the great Alpine battlements; but it is only where they form a background for other battlements, built by the hand of man. There is no necessity felt to dwell on the blue river or the burning hills. The heart and eye have enough to do in the streets of the city itself; they are contented ...
— Lectures on Architecture and Painting - Delivered at Edinburgh in November 1853 • John Ruskin
... Majesty. Especially in handling disturbances. I have complete confidence in him. He's also investigating the background of the affair. I'll give Your Majesty what he's learned, to date. It seems that the head of the physics department, a Professor Nelse Dandrik, had been conducting an experiment, assisted by a Professor Klenn Faress, to establish more accurately the velocity of subnucleonic particles, ...
— Ministry of Disturbance • Henry Beam Piper
... road that skirted the field, and against a pretty background of half-grown pines, motley forms and groups were moving to and fro, some seeking the "buyers" with full trays, others returning to their stations in the field with a new supply of empty baskets. Some of the pickers were drifting away to other fields, ...
— Success With Small Fruits • E. P. Roe
... which, I believe, Jack London is mainly responsible. In A Year of Their Lives the same "animal" method is transfered to the treatment of primitive human life, and the shadow of Knut Hamsun is plainly discernible in the background. Death, The Heirs, and The Belokonsky Estate are first class exercises in the manner of Bunin, and only A Thousand Years and The Crossways herald in, to a certain extent, Pilniak's own manner of ...
— Tales of the Wilderness • Boris Pilniak
... put into the sextette was entitled to consideration, even though it couldn't be banked on. There were three mediums and three big girls in the sextette. (Olga Larson was one of the mediums and so needn't fear replacement by Rose, who was a big girl.) Besides appearing in two numbers as a background to one of the principals, they had one all to themselves, a fact which constituted them a sort of super-chorus. Galbraith used to keep them for endless drills after the general ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... of Hildebrand; I lean out of the window, partly mooning and partly watching for him as if he were a sweetheart, for I crave a clean shirt—if you could only be here for a moment, and if you too could now see the dull silver of the Danube, the dark hills on a pale-red background, and the lights that shine up from below in Pesth, Vienna would go down a good way in your estimation as compared with "Buda-Pesth," as the Hungarians call it. You see that I too can go into raptures over nature. ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... murderous attack by the senior priest. His wounds were photographed; and the pictures were circulated with a view to exciting the mob. Gentry and populace held meetings for the purpose of screwing their courage up to the required pitch—governor and mandarins kept carefully in the background—and on the fifth day the mission buildings were destroyed and the priests killed. An English missionary, his wife and daughter, living not far away, were set upon and slain, not because they were not known to belong to another ...
— The Awakening of China • W.A.P. Martin
... from the bladder and the intestine. Stanley Hall,[64] to whom Havelock Ellis refers, is of opinion that "micturitional obscenities, which our returns show to be so common before adolescence, culminate at ten or twelve, and seem to retreat into the background as sex-phenomena appear." He distinguishes between two classes of cases: "fouling persons or things, secretly from adults, but openly with each other," and, less often, "ceremonial acts, connected with the act or the product, that almost suggest the skatological rites of savages." I can myself, ...
— The Sexual Life of the Child • Albert Moll
... Duchess of Aerschot, the dark-eyed Cornelia Annoni of Milan, the devout Dolores Gonzaga, with her large, calm, enthusiastic eyes, and again and again, crowding all the others into the background, the timid Johanna van der Gheynst, who under her delicate frame concealed a volcano of ardent passion. She had given him a daughter whose head was now adorned by a crown. In spite of the brief duration of their love ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... liberalization, privatization, and deregulation of the economy and introduced some tax reforms to that end. Unemployment fell steadily under the AZNAR administration but remains high at 8.7%. Growth averaging 3% annually during 2003-06 was satisfactory given the background of a faltering European economy. The Socialist president, RODRIGUEZ ZAPATERO, has made mixed progress in carrying out key structural reforms, which need to be accelerated and deepened to sustain Spain's ...
— The 2007 CIA World Factbook • United States
... always played a significant part in her life. They marked what she called her "blessings." Without doubt the rare bright spots in her life shone like blessings for the dark of their background. Years ago, when her Danny had had his accident and her world had seemed to turn upside down until it rested, full-weight, upon her poor shoulders, her "blessing" had been Miss Lewis at the settlement. Miss Lewis had given her work so that she could earn money to feed her family; Miss ...
— Red-Robin • Jane Abbott
... women in the church service there. I found myself time and again turning to look at their faces as I was speaking. There was a sweet light that transfigured their worn faces, and gave them a real beauty. It was the more striking against the background of the faces one sees in ...
— Quiet Talks on Following the Christ • S. D. Gordon
... growing understanding of all kinds of people with their varying experiences. We send our young people to Europe that they may lose their provincialism and be able to judge their fellows by a more universal test, as we send them to college that they may attain the cultural background and a larger outlook; all of these it is possible to acquire in other ways, as this member of the woman's club had discovered ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... seed for my squirrel's feed next winter. Then, too, I think sunflowers make a pretty nice background ...
— The Library of Work and Play: Gardening and Farming. • Ellen Eddy Shaw
... though Gray and the great Gray rose diamond and the three Charities had all become a bit of background for Nance Olden ...
— In the Bishop's Carriage • Miriam Michelson
... to notice that Balzac's thoughts now turned to those faithful friends of his youth, who had in late years passed rather into the background of his life. He wrote a long letter to Madame Delannoy, who had been a mother to him in the struggling days of his half-starved youth. He had paid off the debt he owed her, but he said he would never be able to thank her adequately for her tenderness ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... no other word spoken. Soon the dawn, moving across the great waste of waters, pierced the dark background behind the steamer's light. The long trail of white, curdling foam in her track gleamed like a silver cleft in a dark gulf. The dim shape of her sails stole slowly into sight, and they could see that she was carrying a great weight of canvas. Then ...
— A Monk of Cruta • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... sight, and the Irish question again became prominent. Ireland had now gained an able leader, Charles Stewart Parnell, founder of the Irish Land League, a trade union of Irish farmers, and its affairs could no longer be consigned to the background. ...
— A History of The Nations and Empires Involved and a Study - of the Events Culminating in The Great Conflict • Logan Marshall
... lashed itself to a livid fury against the sturdy Ffraddle turrets and mullions, whilst outside beyond the keep and raised drawbridge the beacons and camp fires stained the frost-laden air with vivid streaks of red and yellow—colours which formed the background of the Ffraddle coat of arms, thus presenting an omen to the startled inhabitants which history relates they were not slow ...
— Terribly Intimate Portraits • Noel Coward
... century. The exclusive application of the measure of mechanics to processes which are of chemical and organic nature and by which, it is true, the laws of mechanics are also manifested, but are pushed into the background by other higher laws, this application is the cause of the peculiar, but, considering the times, unavoidable, ...
— Feuerbach: The roots of the socialist philosophy • Frederick Engels
... obvious facts. It isn't a matter of what you think or what I think, or of speculation at all. I happen to know that Van Buren is going to propose to you. He'll probably do it at Henley or at Sandown, or in the Park. He's certain to want it to be on a typically English background; but you can take it from me, for a dead cert, ...
— The Limit • Ada Leverson
... the wheel over to Williams and took the latter's place at the periscope. Directly he was able to make out the coast line, and even at this distance he felt certain that he could make out a long row of buildings in the background. The submarine was, of course, still too far away for possible vessels, which would lie low on the water, to be within ...
— The Boy Allies with Uncle Sams Cruisers • Ensign Robert L. Drake
... motion, amid the eclipsed blue of the day; small boats with red and yellow flags fluttered quickly, trailing the sea with colour; a pleasure steamer coming from Cowes swung her soft stout way among the fleeting ships; high in the background were men-of-war, a long line, each one threading tiny triangles of flags through a ...
— The Trespasser • D.H. Lawrence
... and neck-band pinned tight at one side. Obviously, he had been digging, for a small pile of fresh dirt was heaped at his right. Now, however, he was motionless, the blue eyes beneath the long lashes observing the new-comer inquiringly. That was all, save that to the picture was added the background of the unbroken silence ...
— Ben Blair - The Story of a Plainsman • Will Lillibridge
... a daring move, and it had not been accomplished without courage. Lady Harriet in the background stiffened with displeasure, nearer to actual anger than she had ever before permitted herself to be with any one so contemptible as the surgeon's wife. Even Major Ralston himself, most phlegmatic of men, looked momentarily ...
— The Lamp in the Desert • Ethel M. Dell
... apartment, with a window open and looking into a garden. Lalage, in deep mourning, reading at a table on which lie some books and a hand mirror. In the background Jacinta (a servant maid) leans carelessly ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... the old way is to deny Wagner the astonishing sense of dramatic effect he had from the beginning; to play it as Seidl played it is to prove that the conductor appreciates the perfection of artistic sense that led, compelled, Wagner to set the miraculous vision of Lohengrin against a background made up of such stormy scenes. Had Seidl kept his vigour for the stormy scenes, and given us a finer tenderness in the prelude, the love-music, and Lohengrin's account of himself, his rendering would have been ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman
... in a bayonet charge and killed. In his own job he was worth a battalion but in a charge of no more value than any other man. The snipers and observers make effective use of camouflage, and have uniforms and rifle-covers to blend with their background—spotted for work among trees with foliage, a la Mr. Leopard—striped when in long grass or crops like Stripes of the jungle. We have suits resembling the bark of a tree, and some earth-colored for ploughed ground, also one made from sand-bags for ...
— "Over There" with the Australians • R. Hugh Knyvett
... pieces of chiaroscuro implied in the treatment of the pig. It is assumed that his curly tail would be light against the background—dark against his own rump. This little piece of heraldic quartering is absolutely necessary to solidify him. He would have been a white ghost of a pig, flat on the background, but for that alternative tail, and the bits of dark behind the ears. Secondly: Where the shade is necessary to suggest ...
— Ariadne Florentina - Six Lectures on Wood and Metal Engraving • John Ruskin
... and give him leisure. But as time goes on and the Lady wearies of much giving, Erasmus' tone grows sharper and more insistent; until at last he scolds and upbraids his patient correspondent for not extorting more, and even bids him put his own needs in the background until Erasmus' are satisfied. Batt's name deserves to be remembered as chief amongst faithful friends, for putting up with such scant gratitude after his inexhaustible devotion; and we must needs think more highly of Erasmus, if his friend could accept such treatment at his hand and not be ...
— The Age of Erasmus - Lectures Delivered in the Universities of Oxford and London • P. S. Allen
... Radisson and Groseillers suddenly wakened to find themselves famous. Groseillers seems to have kept in the background, but Radisson, the younger man, enjoyed the full blaze of glory, was seen in the King's box at the theater, and was presently paying furious court to Mistress Mary Kirke, daughter of Sir John Kirke, whose ancestors had captured Quebec. What with war and the plague, it was 1668 ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... search for old plants and old plant lore. We agree with Mrs. Foster that the most perfect herbaceous border is one that has an old wall behind it. Blue larkspurs and white lilies, roses, phloxes, and evening primroses never look so well as when they are seen against a background of wall, mellowed with age and clothed with its beautiful garment of wall-growing seedlings. . . . Mrs. Foster's book, too, is most useful in its lists of flowers that bloomed in the days of Chaucer and Shakespeare. She also devotes ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe
... the earliest chapels, and is dated by Fassola as from 1490 to 1500. There is no record of any contemporary fresco background. Bordiga says that these figures were originally in the chapel now occupied by the Salutation of Mary by Elizabeth, but that having been long objects of popular veneration they were preserved at the ...
— Ex Voto • Samuel Butler
... can hardly be understood, Deerfoot stood in the background and watched the antics of the warrior who had wrapped the bear-skin about his shoulders and body. He could not avoid a feeling of admiration for the cleverness with which the front was arranged, so as to resemble that of the beast, but he felt not the slightest fear that the trick would succeed. ...
— The Lost Trail - I • Edward S. Ellis
... of the country, and if elected they will have conferred a favor upon me for which I shall be unremitting in my labors to compensate. But if the good people in their wisdom shall see fit to keep me in the background, I have been too familiar with disappointments to ...
— A Short Life of Abraham Lincoln - Condensed from Nicolay & Hay's Abraham Lincoln: A History • John G. Nicolay
... think that you understand how it is that the burden, after all, is easier for me. A man may forget his troubles here, for all the while there is this eternal background ...
— A Lost Leader • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... learned that war had been declared. Ways and means were discussed, but our great tennis tournament on Monday, and a dance in the evening, left us with a mere background of warlike endeavour. It was vaguely determined that when my "viva" was over we should go and see people of ...
— Adventures of a Despatch Rider • W. H. L. Watson
... side, is Arlington, the seat of Mr. Custis, who is the grandson of General Washington's wife. It is a noble looking place, having a portico of stately white columns, which, as the mansion stands high, with a background of dark woods, forms a beautiful object in the landscape. At George Town is a nunnery, where many young ladies are educated, and at a little distance from it, a college of Jesuits for the education of young men, where, as their advertisements state, "the ...
— Domestic Manners of the Americans • Fanny Trollope
... The stage represents a small vale with the cave in the background. The cave is large and deep, opening in the direction of the spectator. Water has been coursing down the vale and has frozen to knolls of ice here and there. A part of the cave-mouth is hidden by icicles formed by the water trickling ...
— Poet Lore, Volume XXIV, Number IV, 1912 • Various
... round, and did not at first see our Italian. At last I discovered he had taken a back seat, through modesty perhaps, or to be out of observation—how was I to know? He sat in the shadow by a door, that, in fact, which leads into this room. He was thus in the background, rather out of the way, but I could see his eyes glittering in that far-off corner, and they were turned in our direction, always fixed upon the lady, you understand. She was next me, ...
— The Rome Express • Arthur Griffiths
... Leo XIII, now again motionless on his throne. With the papal cap on his head and the red cape edged with ermine about his shoulders, he retained in his long white cassock the rigid, sacerdotal attitude of an idol venerated by two hundred and fifty millions of Christians. Against the purple background of the hangings of the baldacchino, between the wing-like drapery on either side, enclosing, as it were, a brasier of glory, he assumed real majesty of aspect. He was no longer the feeble old man with the slow, jerky walk and the slender, scraggy neck of a poor ailing bird. The simious ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... herself a bachelor girl, but hadn't the touch of the Bohemian that phrase usually seems to imply. She was too plastic, too finished. He admired her social dexterity, her perfect harmony with the charming background she had so well arranged for herself. Yet, he thought, for such a young girl, only twenty-two, she was too complex, too civilised. Mrs Raymond, for instance, seemed much more downright and careless. ...
— Love's Shadow • Ada Leverson
... the whole horizon; and what a position has its architect secured! In the midst of hills on a bit of table-land, apparently made such by smoothing down the summit of one of them, with a greensward in front, and set off behind by a mountain background, stands this eternal monument of the noblest of arts amidst the finest dispositions of nature. There is another antiquity of the place also to be visited at Segeste—its theatre; but we are too immediately below it to know any thing about it at ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLV. July, 1844. Vol. LVI. • Various
... mentally ill, which had always, as long as I could remember, lain a silent pressure, a foreboding of unhappiness, in the background of my mind—although dissipated in the brighter summer-time of my companionship with Susanna—was therefore no sin, no burden of crime, no dark mysterious exception in me from every other natural order of things, but only a disease, actually ...
— The Visionary - Pictures From Nordland • Jonas Lie
... the reason for his uneasiness in the general's presence? No. MacMaine could accept the reason for that attitude; the general's background was different from that of an Earthman, and therefore he could not be judged by Terrestrial standards. Besides, MacMaine could acknowledge to himself that Tallis was superior to the norm—not only the norm of Keroth, ...
— The Highest Treason • Randall Garrett
... the Somali shore, and must confess I was much disappointed. All that was visible, besides the village mentioned, was a sandy tract of ground, the maritime plain, which extended in breadth from the sea-shore to some brown-looking hills in the background, from a few hundred yards to one or two miles distant; and hills and plains—for I could, by my close approximation to them, only see the brown folds of the hills near the base—were alike almost destitute of any vegetation; whilst not one animal or any ...
— What Led To The Discovery of the Source Of The Nile • John Hanning Speke
... wish you to observe how our great fellow townsman keeps his subject to the fore and himself in the background. ...
— The Light in the Clearing • Irving Bacheller
... had kept himself in the background. But now he had an idea inspired by confidence in his costume. Introducing himself to the gumashta, he asked him to give out that the party was in command of a Firangi in the service of the Nawab, and was conveying part of the Nawab's private equipage in advance to Baraset, a few miles north ...
— In Clive's Command - A Story of the Fight for India • Herbert Strang
... state, and, since all the windows were shuttered, every room lay moribund in a ghostly twilight. Only the clocks remained alive, probably thinking themselves immortal. The breakfast things were washed up and stored away. The last two servants had already gone. Behind Audrey, forming a hilly background, were trunks and boxes, a large bunch of flowers encased in paper, and a case of umbrellas and parasols; the whole strikingly new, and every single item except the flowers labelled "Paris via Charing ...
— The Lion's Share • E. Arnold Bennett
... entire business spread out like an immense funnel and could have been seen for miles out at sea. Occasionally, as some drug house or place stored with chemicals was reached, most fantastic effects were produced by the colored flames and smoke which rolled out against the darker background. ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum
... occupations of the mind it would seem that the heart with all its claims had to remain in the background. The smiling boy Cupid, with his gracious raillery and his smarting griefs, seemed to make no impression on that pale, grave, and taciturn artillery lieutenant, and not to dare shoot an arrow toward that bosom which had mailed itself ...
— The Empress Josephine • Louise Muhlbach
... tribesmen, who evidently recognized Sikaso from their greetings. The boys stood grouped in the background— Billy Barnes and Lathrop even viewing with some alarm the ...
— The Boy Aviators in Africa • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... in the distance against her background of chalk cliffs. People come on deck in strangely conventional clothes and with demure citified airs. Passengers of whose existence you were unaware suddenly make their appearance. Two friends meet near me for the first time. “Hallo, ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory
... distinct in the firelight and outlined against the black background of the night, she seemed some modern half-military ideal of Diana, with her two gaunt hounds beside her, the rest of the pack vaguely glimpsed at her heels outside, the perfect outline and chiselling of her features, her fine, strong, supple figure, the ...
— The Phantoms Of The Foot-Bridge - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... struggle itself was maintained largely by his efforts, by the military and political power of great nobles, Guises, Montmorencys and others. But when the struggle closes, both religion, its cause, and the great noble its supporter, sink somewhat into the background, while the king, the kingly power, fills the eye. And {14} the new divine right monarchy, triumphant over the feudal soldier and gladly accepted as the restorer of order by the middle class, sets to work to consolidate this ...
— The French Revolution - A Short History • R. M. Johnston
... been here ever can." She had risen, and they were walking down toward the shore. Her fatigue, or her mood, gave her an unusual gentleness of manner. As Stephen Archdale walked beside her he tried to imagine Katie as Elizabeth was now, with a background of suffering, with trial and daring, perhaps death before, and failed. He looked at Elizabeth, dimly seen under the starlight, now suddenly brought sharply into view by the flare of cannon, weary, glad of the General's thoughtfulness, ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 1, January 1886 - Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 1, January, 1886 • Various
... the wind being easterly, we left the bay. On passing Red Point, twenty or thirty natives came to the extreme point of the cliff, shouting and hallooing and making violent gestures; a large group of women and children appeared in the background, timidly concealing themselves behind the trees and bushes; another party was quietly seated round small fires on the rocks near the sea-beach, apparently engaged in cooking their fish; and at a little ...
— Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia - Performed between the years 1818 and 1822 • Phillip Parker King
... funnier? Whatever it was Jews have to bear witness to, these people had been bearing witness to so effectually that a daily visitor never heard a word of the evidence during four years. And this family is not an exception; it is a type. Abroad the English Jew keeps his Judaism in the background, at home in the back kitchen. When he travels, his Judaism is not packed up among his impedimenta. He never obtrudes his creed, and even his Jewish newspaper is sent to him in a wrapper labelled something else. How's that for witnesses? ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... absent for a minute or two, but had now returned, and stepped forward from a bay window, as if he had been out of sight only, not out of the apartment. "Not so, sir; I stood but in the background out of respect. Noble General, I hope all is well with the Estate, that your Excellency makes us so late a visit? Would not your ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott
... it was known to someone else. But that person took care to keep in the background. When once I had been suggested as the culprit a quantity of evidence was forthcoming to clinch the matter, so to speak. I was never particularly popular here, and people were quite ready to believe me capable of the deed." She smiled ...
— Afterwards • Kathlyn Rhodes
... the winter and its effects on other fruit plants in the vicinity of Geneva will serve as a background for the data on filberts. The first severe cold occurred on December 29 when the temperature dropped to -21 deg. F. This equalled the previous low record established in February, 1896. On February 9 the minimum temperature recorded was -31 deg. F. ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Twenty-Fifth Annual Meeting • Northern Nut Growers Association
... very important part of the hat and may be adjusted in any becoming way. It may form part of the covering of the hat, and is then arranged in becoming folds toward the back and allowed to fall to any desired length. It makes a becoming background for the face. Mourning millinery is not used as much as formerly, but those who desire to adhere to the custom will find ...
— Make Your Own Hats • Gene Allen Martin
... grey and silver cloudland, with a background of those frost-bitten and wind-tortured trees, the little Londoner told me a tale which, true or false, was as ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... my years, though my hair, still thick and full of vigour, is prematurely white—so often the case with men whose brains are continually on the stretch. The little home, far from grandiose, which forms the background to this most interesting personality is embowered in trees. Cats have made their mark on its lawns, and its owner's love of animals was sharply illustrated by the sheep-dog which lay on his feet clad in Turkish slippers. Get ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... glance sought first of all the farthest background of the place. What he saw was like and yet unlike what he had seen there. Then, it had been the figure of a young man, holding out his arms over a group of children; now, it was the figure of an old woman, worn with sickness—but with the same great ...
— The Song Of The Blood-Red Flower • Johannes Linnankoski
... approached academically. Yet most of the approach to the problems of labor is academic. Men in sanctuaries forever far removed from the endless hum and buzz and roar of machinery, with an intellectual background and individual ambitions forever far removed from the interests and desires of those who labor in factory and mill, theorize—and another volume is added ...
— Working With the Working Woman • Cornelia Stratton Parker
... in the world, indeed, another personality rarely or never absent from Alice Puttenham's consciousness. One face, one problem, more or less acutely realized, haunted her life continuously. But this afternoon they had, for the moment, receded into the background. Hester had been, surely, more reasonable, more affectionate lately. Philip Meryon had now left Sandford; a statement to that effect had appeared in the Post; and Hester had even shown some kindness to poor Stephen. She had at last declared her willingness ...
— The Case of Richard Meynell • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... run away with the idea that The Nursery (HEINEMANN) presents us with Mr. EDEN PHILLPOTTS' views on baby culture. The background of his story, the scenes of which are laid in and around Colchester a year or so ago, is composed of gardens and oyster-beds. On these he gives a lot of information, and, as he could not be pedantic even if he tried to be, I browsed pleasantly upon the ...
— Punch, 1917.07.04, Vol. 153, Issue No. 1 • Various
... a reel in place and it contains background information on a problem in Cultural Engineering all set out the way we are taught to do it in Class. The Problem concerns developments on a planet got settled by two groups during the Exodus and been isolated ...
— The Lost Kafoozalum • Pauline Ashwell
... mysteries, no philosophy ever did or ever can empty of their strangeness, or bring down to the level of the commonplace 'certainties' of daily life or of science, which are no more than shadows after all, that seem certainties because of the background of mystery on which they ...
— A Short History of Greek Philosophy • John Marshall
... vivid sketch of the Egypt of his day. Peace and plenty seemed to prevail in the country. This happy state of things was entirely due to the wise measures taken by Saladin, who, however, kept himself so studiously in the background, that not even his name is mentioned in the Itinerary. The deposition of the Fatimite Caliph on Friday, September 10, 1171, and his subsequent death, caused little stir. Saladin continued to govern Egypt as Nureddin's lieutenant. In due course he made himself master of Barca and Tripoli; then ...
— The Itinerary of Benjamin of Tudela • Benjamin of Tudela
... diamond-like lustre. Beneath the bank of clouds, yet far enough in the foreground of this picture to partly emerge from obscurity, stood, on an eminence, a white marble building, with columns of porticos, like a Grecian temple. Projected against the dark background were its classic outlines, looking more like a vision of the days of Pericles ...
— The Good Time Coming • T. S. Arthur
... heart of every merely positivistic, agnostic, or naturalistic scheme of philosophy. Let sanguine healthy-mindedness do its best with its strange power of living in the moment and ignoring and forgetting, still the evil background is really there to be thought of, and the skull will grin in at the banquet. In the practical life of the individual, we know how his whole gloom or glee about any present fact depends on the remoter schemes and hopes with which it stands related. Its significance and framing give it the chief ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... males, I noticed two Italian ladies treading delicately over the rough ballast of the railway-track. They had naturally brought with them in their flight the most valuable of their possessions, which were of a kind to be most conveniently carried on their persons. Against this gray background of mud and rubbish and a disbanded army their two figures glittered with a brilliance that would have been conspicuous in the rue de la Paix. Heavy sable furs and muffs almost bowed their shoulders; each finger ...
— World's War Events, Volume III • Various
... Bertie has never yet given me the chance to act the high-minded heroine." And then she fell to wondering why he had not said something really definite, he seemed near it so often. And yet he was his own master; no stern father loomed in the background—that Bluebell would have considered a possible obstacle,—for had she not seen such malign influence destroy more than one promising love affair among her companions. Of course there was no solution to such an inscrutable mystery, though ...
— Bluebell - A Novel • Mrs. George Croft Huddleston
... worthier man than any of her interested suitors may have a sincere respect and affection for her, but be kept in the background by the overzealous attention of his rivals. Still, if she has sufficient self-command to patiently and calmly investigate their general private character, she may find reason to decline their suit, and may discover that the more modest and retiring youth ...
— The Ladies Book of Useful Information - Compiled from many sources • Anonymous
... light be employed (e.g. white light) all these images are formed; and since they are ail ultimately intercepted by a plane (the retina of the eye, a focussing screen of a camera, &c.), they cause a confusion, named chromatic aberration; for instance, instead of a white margin on a dark background, there is perceived a coloured margin, or narrow spectrum. The absence of this error is termed achromatism, and an optical system so corrected is termed achromatic. A system is said to be "chromatically under-corrected'' when it shows the same kind of chromatic error as a thin positive lens, ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... had been listening to him with keen interest. Each showed it in his own way. To all of them the glamorous background was irresistibly appealing. But Jimmy Hale, the newspaper man, sensed something that did not appear on the ...
— Death Points a Finger • Will Levinrew
... has the modern revival of gardening, which has brought back the old herbaceous border, added to the charm of college gardens. It has been said with truth that the secret of a garden's beauty lies mainly in its background. How true this is! Flowers may blaze with colour in an open field—and who has not marvelled as he passes in the train the seed-ground of some great horticulturist?—but seen thus they have but little charm. In a college garden a border filled with delphiniums and ...
— Oxford • Frederick Douglas How
... must be said about it. But then he did not believe, if she had given him time to say the words he wished to say, that she would have come to such a decision; and as he called up her lovely face and figure, as it stood framed in the open doorway, with a background of the sunlit arbor and fields, the gorgeous distant foliage, with the blue sky and its white clouds and circling birds, he thought of the rapture and ecstasy which would have come to him, if she had listened to his words, ...
— The Late Mrs. Null • Frank Richard Stockton
... the name of "The Giant's Causeway," the upper ends of the columns forming a tolerably level surface, gently sloping seawards, and having very much the aspect of an artificial tesselated pavement on a huge scale. A portion of the Causeway, with the cliff in the background, is shown in the figure (Fig. 31). The columns are remarkable for their symmetry, being generally hexagonal, though occasionally they are pentagons, and each column is horizontally traversed by joints ...
— Volcanoes: Past and Present • Edward Hull
... which bounded his steps and invited him to repose. It was a circle, so formed artificially by slight trellises, to which clung parasite roses heavy with leaves and flowers. In the midst played a tiny fountain with a silvery murmuring sound; at the background, dominating the place, rose the crests of stately trees, on which the sunlight shimmered, but which rampired out all horizon beyond. Even as in life do the great dominant passions—love, ambition, desire of ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... men in the long fight with fortune are the cheerful men, or those, certainly, who find the fair background of faith and hope. Columbus, but for this, had never ...
— Christopher Columbus and His Monument Columbia • Various
... followed by a peal on the bell; and Mr. Cottrell emerged from the dining-room just in time to see Jim open the hall door to Laura Chipchase, attired in hat and habit, with Miss Sylla mounted and holding her cousin's horse in the background. ...
— Belles and Ringers • Hawley Smart
... set upon the state carriage, greatly damaging it; and when George later on proceeded in his private carriage to Buckingham House, he again ploughed his way through a din of curses. Pitt kept discreetly in the background, or he ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... down). He had so grown into our lives. I can't think of him as having gone out of them. He, with his sufferings and his loneliness, was like a cloudy background to our sunlit happiness. Well, perhaps it is best so. For him, anyway. (Standing still.) And perhaps for us too, Nora. We two are thrown quite upon each other now. (Puts his arms round her.) My darling ...
— A Doll's House • Henrik Ibsen
... satisfactory. We would fain have had a picture of that circle of which Dickens was one of the most prominent figures; but though his own personality is revealed in the fullest light, the group in the background is left indistinct, most of its members being barely visible, and none of them ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 11, - No. 22, January, 1873 • Various
... his attacks is that the ideal with which he would illuminate his background is shifty, uncertain, ill-realised; being undetermined, the function that is allotted to the human ideal is actually left to chance, to accidental impulse rather than to conscious will—to human frailty rather than to human strength. Hence it is that he declares the rights of sex where its claims ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... had gone Marguerite went to the sick girl's room with a cup of gruel. Amada lay back on the pillow, her face gray with pallor against the background of her shining black hair. She kissed and ...
— With Hoops of Steel • Florence Finch Kelly
... used in wigwagging. A white flag with a red square in the center is used against a dark background; a red flag with a white square in the center is used against the sky or against a mixed background. But of course in emergency anything must be tried, and for a short distance the Scout can use his hat ...
— Pluck on the Long Trail - Boy Scouts in the Rockies • Edwin L. Sabin
... glistened in the glorious day. The very earth and heavens welcomed the Island Queen. Amidst all the loveliness on which she looked, the fairest spot was that which was washed by the waters of Killany Bay, where the soft sweet vale of Shanganah, with its silver strand, its green bosom, and noble background, stretched away between Bray Head and Kingstown. They were scenes amidst which one of queenly taste might love to linger, and were well calculated to impress her majesty and family with the beauty of the fair but sorrowful land upon which she was about ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... red men and women have the flavor of actuality, with all the wonder and strangeness that children demand. The background of the Western plains when Injun babies lived in tepees made of buffalo skins is a new one for children's stories; the adventures of the little Indians with animals and their simple life of every day make the collection a unique one for young ...
— Europa's Fairy Book • Joseph Jacobs
... men—men?—men? In describing color what can one say of men? Well, it's not their fault that they can't wear pretty clothes. They make a nice grey background for the women and a very desirable audience and that's the best I ...
— Vignettes of San Francisco • Almira Bailey
... the dawn-time of Christianity. It has its love story and its chapters of excitement worked in with such historic background as to give a running commentary on those fateful and ...
— The Boy from Hollow Hut - A Story of the Kentucky Mountains • Isla May Mullins
... the two rooms. On the library side of this door Mr. Stilton laid down a platform, slightly raised and covered with green baize cloth, and behind the platform a frame-work was raised and hung with green baize to serve as a proper background for the pictures. A flower stand was brought in from the greenhouse and placed at one side, out of sight from the drawing-room; for the purpose, as Preston informed Daisy, of holding the lights. All these details were under his management, and ...
— Melbourne House, Volume 2 • Susan Warner
... produced his favourite dirty Charles the First pipe, the diminutive bowl of which he filled continually with what smokers call "dottles." He was then apparently perfectly happy, as indeed he always looked when puffing away at his antique clay. Years afterwards, when sketching a background for a Punch drawing in the East End, I noticed some labourers returning from working at excavations, laughing over something they had found in the ground; it was a splendid specimen of the Charles clay pipe, longer than any I have seen. I bought ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... of martial music flying on invisible wings, in thousand forms, throughout every corridor. As this second summons for the masterpiece to be set in motion died away in turn, two bands of men detached themselves from the distant throng massed in the farthest background, and came slowly forward with bowed heads and deferential tread. At the same instant a hundred brilliant officers of the household stepped out of the corridors behind the King with drawn swords, and other hundreds crowded behind them ...
— The Arena - Volume 18, No. 92, July, 1897 • Various
... the sheep being all collected in a crowd within these two enclosures; and in one angle a catching-pen was formed, in which three or four sheep were continuously kept ready for the shearers to seize without loss of time. In the background, mellowed by tawny shade, were the three women, Maryann Money, and Temperance and Soberness Miller, gathering up the fleeces and twisting ropes of wool with a wimble for tying them round. They were indifferently well assisted by the old maltster, who, when the malting season from October to April ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... light, his fame would have gone down to posterity as one of the greatest of Nature's interpreters. But it was reserved for him to accomplish other discoveries, which have pushed even his analysis of the sunbeam into the background; it is he who has expounded the system of the universe by the discovery of ...
— Great Astronomers • R. S. Ball
... had been designed as a setting for Natalie, although every color-scheme, almost every chair, had been bought with a view to forming a background for her, it was too big, too massive. It dwarfed her. Out-of-doors, Audrey lost that feeling. In the formal garden Natalie was charmingly framed. It was like her, beautifully exact, carefully planned, already with ...
— Dangerous Days • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... far as the projected peace at large takes effect, international interests will necessarily fall somewhat into the background, as being no longer a matter of precarious equilibration, with heavy penalties in the balance; and diplomacy will consequently become even more of a make-believe than today—something after the fashion ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... for this would I turn against Pompeii at the last moment, as it were, though my second visit had not aesthetically enriched me beyond my first. I keep the vision of it under that gray January sky, with Vesuvius smokeless in the background, and the plan of the dead city, opener to the eye than ever it could have been in life, inscribed upon the broadly opened area of the gentle slopes within its gates. Whether one had not better known it dead than alive, one might not wish perhaps to say; but the place itself is curiously ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... more than a man, or only man because he was mortal. Then he thought that to kill Monsoreau would be the best way to end the combat, and sought him with his eyes among his assailants, but he stood in the background, loading the pistols for his men. However, Bussy rushed forward, and found himself face to face with him. He, who held a loaded pistol, fired, and the ball, striking Bussy's sword, broke it off six ...
— Chicot the Jester - [An abridged translation of "La dame de Monsoreau"] • Alexandre Dumas
... was the change. Nanny's home was as a clock that had been run out, and is set going again. Already the old woman was unpacking her box, to increase the distance between herself and the poorhouse. But Gavin only saw her in the background, for the Egyptian, singing at her work, had become the heart of the house. She had flung her shawl over Nanny's shoulders, and was at the fireplace breaking peats with the leg of a stool. She turned merrily to the minister to ask him to chop up his staff for firewood, and he would ...
— The Little Minister • J.M. Barrie
... "comic cuts" as the most conscientious of painters could be in his canvas; and drawing invariably from the model—even if that model were simply an old shoe—he would often journey into the country for a background of, say, a turnip-field, or in search of any ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... "you are being straight with me. I don't know exactly what you are driving at, uncle, but I gather that it is something rather unpleasant, and that somewhere in the background there is hovering an accusation against me. From the fact that you have mentioned Mr. Rex Holland or the gang which went by that name, I suppose that you are suggesting that I am an ...
— The Man Who Knew • Edgar Wallace
... material world about us, any narrative will probably have occasion to include some description. It may be necessary merely as an aid to our understanding of some of the details upon which the plot turns, it may help us to realize the personalities of the characters, and it is often useful in creating background and atmosphere, giving us some of the feelings of those with whom the story deals as they look upon the beauty, or the gray dullness, of the changing panorama of their lives. Stevenson's description of the "old sea-dog" in "Treasure ...
— The Writing of the Short Story • Lewis Worthington Smith
... ways in which the pieces move find a parallel in the topography of the theatre of war, in that the various battle-fields are more or less easy of access. But it is quite unjustifiable to assign to the Knights the functions of scouts, and to say that Rooks should stay in the background, as heavy artillery, and so on. Such pronouncements would not have the slightest practical value. What we take from the science of warfare is merely the definition. In each game the strategy of chess should set us the tasks which must be accomplished (in order to mate the opponent's ...
— Chess Strategy • Edward Lasker
... gathering seeds and chanting their monotonous trills. While I first found these sparrows near Peabody, they were also fairly common, a few days later, in northeastern Kansas, about a mile back from the Missouri River, where their low alto strains formed a kind of gray background for the high-pitched trills of the Harris sparrows and the loud pipings of the cardinals. Quaint as our little contralto's solos are, they have a distinct fascination for me, and now that I no longer live in the Sunflower state, ...
— Our Bird Comrades • Leander S. (Leander Sylvester) Keyser
... Mrs. Wade at her ease. Mrs. Wade lit the lamp; apologizing for the darkness of the firelit room. The deep pink shade flooded the room with rosy light. There was a tea-table set in the background. Lady O'Gara had a passing wonder as to whether the table had been set daily in ...
— Love of Brothers • Katharine Tynan
... any regrets or sadnesses in the background of memory, the painfullest of all times are these anniversaries. One is forced round face to face with the past and the unalterable, to gaze on it, perchance, through blinding tears. The days return—unchanged: but, oh, to what ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe
... imaginations of men, through the waste and gloom of future ages, after it shall have gone quite to decay and ruin: the brilliant, though scarcely distinct gleam of a statelier dome than ever was seen, shining on the background of the night of Time. This simile looked prettier in my fancy than I have made it ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Dampier turned his broad back and looked out of the window. There was a moment's silence. They could hear the tinkling of bells, the whistling of the sea, the voices of the men calling to each other in the port, the sunshine streamed in; Elly was standing in it, and seemed gilt with a golden background. She ought to have held a palm in her hand, poor little martyr!" There is sweet wisdom in this book, wisdom that is eternal, being simple; near may not come the ugliness of positivism, nor the horror of pessimism, nor the profound greyness of Hegelism, ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... a fondness for the little inlet, with its background of tall firs, where she had first met little Lottie Drugg, and she often walked down there. So she became pretty well acquainted with "Mr. Selectman" Cross Moore. But as yet she did not get as far out on the Middletown Lower Road as the house where the Hammett ...
— Janice Day at Poketown • Helen Beecher Long
... wanted, purely and simply, a man of genius,—talent she cared little for; just as a lawyer is of no account to a girl who aims for an ambassador. Her only desire for wealth was to cast it at the feet of her idol. Indeed, the golden background of these visions was far less rich than the treasury of her own heart, filled with womanly delicacy; for its dominant desire was to make some Tasso, some Milton, a Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a ...
— Modeste Mignon • Honore de Balzac
... not yet invaded by modern industrialism and still innocent of socialism; next the youth's struggles in Copenhagen against employers and authorities; and last the man's final victory in laying the foundation of a garden-city for the benefit of his fellow-workers. The background everywhere is the rapid growth of the labor movement; but social problems are never obtruded, except, again, in the last part, and the purely human interest is always kept well before the reader's eye through variety of ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... new navy, the counterpart, on a more modest scale, of the German fleet, and to reorganize the effective army, here again taking Germany for his model. Among certain cliques, he was accused of not keeping enough in the background, of showing little tact or consideration in the manner of thrusting aside the phantom Emperor, who was gently gliding into the winter of the years at Schoenbrunn amid the veneration of his subjects of ...
— World's War Events, Vol. I • Various
... only on a place to nest. They wage war against robins and wrens, pick quarrels with swallows, and seem to deliberate for days over the policy of taking forcible possession of one of the mud-houses of the latter. But as the season advances they drift more into the background. Schemes of conquest which they at first seemed bent upon are abandoned, and the settle down very quietly in their old quarters in ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... willingly, vexed at being no longer able to gather any fruit from it for the advantage of the State or himself, wholly abandoned as he was to his Paris pleasures and to his minister. The conviction of my complete inutility more and more kept me in the background, without the slightest suspicion that different conduct could be dangerous to me, or that, weak and abandoned to Dubois as was the Regent, the former could ever exile me, like the Duc de Roailles, and Cariillac, or disgust me into exiling myself. I followed, then, my accustomed life. That is to ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... the rustic seat that was standing on a white fur mat in front of a scene representing the Jungfrau, but he headed me off it. If I liked the Jungfrau as a background I could have it, but not with the seat; that was for engaged couples only. He recommended a pair of skis, or a bobsleigh; he could put a fine fall of snow into the negative. But as I had arrayed myself in a black coat, with one of those white ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 146., January 21, 1914 • Various
... undefined bright background, on which fancy sketched all that was fairest and most desirable, without one warning from the voice of reason: now, clearly outlined and distinctly colored, it takes such precise shape that I can almost guess what it is to be, can see my path traced ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: Italian • Various
... arrow-straight into the south to a junction with the trunk line, which swung westward twenty odd miles below. And even the very atmosphere of that lower portion of the town was different. The men still swarmed in on the drives, brilliant dots of color against the neutral background of the dusty wide streets. Their capacity for abandonment to pleasure, their prodigality, was as great as ever, but the old-time picturesque simplicity of it all seemed lacking—the simplicity which had once mitigated much that would have been otherwise only ...
— Then I'll Come Back to You • Larry Evans
... services in the House of Representatives and in the Senate is of little importance to us save in three respects. It throws some light on his political opinions at that period; it gives us a glimpse of him as he appeared against the background of the most elegant society then existing in America, for Congress was sitting in Philadelphia, which had sixty-five thousand inhabitants; and it led to one or two friendships which had an important bearing on his ...
— Andrew Jackson • William Garrott Brown
... day of Pentecost. Larger than any of these is a damaged 'Crucifixion' in the Jesus Chapel under the chapter-house. The painting is full, perhaps too full, of movement and of figures. Besides the scenes usually portrayed in a picture of the Crucifixion, others are shown in the background, Judas hanging himself on one side, and Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus on the other, coming out from Jerusalem with their spices. Lastly, in the sacristy there are twelve small paintings of the Apostles and other saints of ...
— Portuguese Architecture • Walter Crum Watson
... accompany the voice. For the lyre in its primitive state was never a solo instrument; the tone was weak and its powers of expression were exceedingly limited. On the other hand, it furnished an excellent background for the voice and, which was still more to the point, the singer could accompany himself. The drum had too vague a pitch, and the flute or pipe necessitated another performer, besides having too much similarity of tone to the ...
— Critical & Historical Essays - Lectures delivered at Columbia University • Edward MacDowell
... and harebells massed together—yellow marigolds and glorious scarlet poppies, of which Jess with her taste of the savage was passionately fond. She had arranged some of these against a pale blue background of bunches of forget-me- nots, with an effect strangely striking in that ...
— The Lilac Sunbonnet • S.R. Crockett
... general scurry for the cyclone cellars. They all know me, and those who don't are watching for me. On the contrary, if you are going to start there I had better execute a flank movement in Queens or Jersey to divert attention. Really, I mean it. I had better keep in the background. But I'll tell you what I would like ...
— The Ear in the Wall • Arthur B. Reeve
... by the dancing, the music, and the clank of spurs, they threw themselves heart and soul into making the acquaintance of their new partners, and quite forgot their old civilian friends. Their fathers and husbands, forced temporarily into the background, crowded round the meagre refreshment table in the entrance hall. All these government cashiers, secretaries, clerks, and superintendents—stale, sickly-looking, clumsy figures—were perfectly well aware ...
— The Lady with the Dog and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... the clock, he produced a disk of white paper, an inch and a half in diameter, gummed on one side. Raising the mask slightly, he moistened the disk, and applied it to the clock's case, almost at the bottom of the reservoir. Against the green background the mark showed very distinctly. For a moment or two he regarded it critically, then went to the door and turned the key. He stepped briskly up the room, halting at the heavy brown curtains drawn ...
— Till the Clock Stops • John Joy Bell
... more than a history; the other a tale that is more than a tale. Dickens, no doubt, owed much of his inspiration to Carlyle's tremendous prose epic. But the genius that depicted a moving and tragic story upon the red background of the Terror was Dickens's own, and the "Tale of Two Cities" was final proof that its author could handle a great theme in a manner that was worthy of its greatness. The work was one of the novelist's later writings—it ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol III • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... Cooleen Bawn, "but my love for you. If you were not surrounded by danger as you are, if the whoop of vengeance were not on your trail, if death and a gibbet were not in the background, I could part with you; but now that danger, vengeance, and death, are hovering about you, I shall and must partake of them with you. And listen, Reilly; after all it is the best plan. Papa, if I accompany you—supposing that we are ...
— Willy Reilly - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... to lift. Yet it was incredible that Esther, this charming sinister figure always in the background or else blocking everybody's natural movements, should ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... men's dances. They also act as assistants to the chief actors in the Totem Dances, three particularly expert and richly dressed women dancers ranging themselves behind the mask dancer as a pleasing background of streaming furs and glistening feathers. The only time they are forbidden to enter the kasgi is when the shaman is performing certain secret rites. They also have secret meetings of their own when all men are banished.[3] I happened to stumble on to one of these one time when they ...
— The Dance Festivals of the Alaskan Eskimo • Ernest William Hawkes
... sober as he looked on with narrowed eyes. Against a background of velvet black, gold spangled, the slim space-traveler showed. The sun's rays caught her, and she was a tiny silver fish in ...
— The Great Dome on Mercury • Arthur Leo Zagat
... called him, fastened upon me with a fatal glance of good-will and approbation. He had somehow heard of my being a very learned person, who could both read and write with extraordinary facility; and moreover that I was a rather reserved youth, who kept his modest, unassuming merits in the background. But though, from the keen sense of my situation as a man-of-war's-man all this about my keeping myself in the back ground was true enough, yet I had no idea of hiding my diffident merits under ground. I became alarmed at the old Yeoman's goggling glances, ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... attracted our attention. Beyond these rose a range of mountains, running north and south through the island, and broken into the most fantastic shapes. As we sailed along the shore, having the mountains still as the background, here and there appeared the most lovely little caves and bays, fringed with luxuriant cane-fields, and enlivened by the neatly laid-out mansions of the planters; while numerous fishing and passage boats, ...
— Charley Laurel - A Story of Adventure by Sea and Land • W. H. G. Kingston
... ornamented with carving, except the Alhambra. And from here we pass out upon the broad terrace of masonry, with a splendid flanking octagon tower, its base hidden in trees, a rich facade for a background, and below the town the river, and beyond the plain and floods of golden sunlight. What shall we do? Sit and dream in the Rent Tower under the lindens that grow in its top? The day passes while one is deciding how to spend it, and the sun over ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... led him below. His voice was heard booming in the cabin until at length it ended in a roar of laughter, and Captain Brisket, appearing at the companion, beckoned them below, with a whispered injunction to Mr. Chalk to keep as much in the background ...
— Dialstone Lane, Complete • W.W. Jacobs
... or young woman should seek to know as many agreeable, companionable persons of the opposite sex as possible without the strain of attempting to establish a reputation for popularity. These acquaintances, as much as possible, should have a background essentially similar to one's own, and they should be sought as friends rather than as lovers. It is obvious that one's affection must turn to some one whom one knows, and before the awakening of strong feeling there should be as wide an experience—the man with women, ...
— The Good Housekeeping Marriage Book • Various
... his sight. The bishop, so radiantly glorious but an instant before, suddenly vanished away, the tapers paled upon their golden candlesticks like stars in the dawn, and a vast darkness seemed to fill the whole church. The charming creature appeared in bright relief against the background of that darkness, like some angelic revelation. She seemed herself radiant, and radiating light rather than ...
— Clarimonde • Theophile Gautier
... lesson of nature for a moment. In the springtime the farmer plants the kernels of corn shelled from ears like this. [Draw the ear of corn, making first a solid yellow background for the ear and then putting in the fine lines with brown or black.] He has every reason to believe that when the harvest time comes he will reap a crop of many hundredfold, because each kernel is expected to send up a little green shoot, like this, and each stalk is capable ...
— Crayon and Character: Truth Made Clear Through Eye and Ear - Or, Ten-Minute Talks with Colored Chalks • B.J. Griswold
... lengths and breadths of Pompeii. But not for this would I turn against Pompeii at the last moment, as it were, though my second visit had not aesthetically enriched me beyond my first. I keep the vision of it under that gray January sky, with Vesuvius smokeless in the background, and the plan of the dead city, opener to the eye than ever it could have been in life, inscribed upon the broadly opened area of the gentle slopes within its gates. Whether one had not better known it dead than ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... back to his room and finished fastening his tie. His own affairs had sunk a little into the background lately, but the announcement of this unusual visitor brought them back into his mind with a rush. Notwithstanding his iron nerves, his fingers shook as he drew on his dinner-jacket and walked out to the passageway to answer the bell which rang a few seconds ...
— Havoc • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... of the automobile had been a signal, the front door swung quietly open and a Chinese butler in white linen appeared against a background of soft coloring ...
— IT and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... his story, something of the romance of the Middle Ages. The wars and jealousies of the clans, the adventures of a chief among hostile tribesmen, the raids and forays, the loves and hatreds of rival families, form a good background for a romantic legend; and such a legend occurs in the story of Black Colin of Loch Awe, a warrior of the great Campbell clan in the fourteenth century. The tale is common in one form or another to all European lands where the call of the Crusades was heard, and the romantic Crusading element ...
— Hero-Myths & Legends of the British Race • Maud Isabel Ebbutt
... had known Mr. Bradshaw for a long time as a customer at a shop knows the staff in the background, mere office secretions, who only ooze out at intervals. For Bradshaw was not strictly a counter-jumper, although Miss Wilson more than once spoke of him so, adding, when it was pointed out to her that theoretically ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... equal horizontal bands of white (top), blue, and red superimposed with the Slovak cross in a shield centered on the hoist side; the cross is white centered on a background of ...
— The 1998 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... the road rises sharply for a few yards, and then a whole stretch of undulating woodland is before one: to the right bosky green, but on the left a rough dark heath with a shaggy wilderness of pine for background, heightened here and there with a sudden surprise of gentle silver birch. How freshly the wind met one at the top of the road: a southwest wind soft and blithe enough to have blown ...
— Prose Fancies • Richard Le Gallienne
... chair near this window looking out. I remember the effect of her splendor against the snow sifting down in a steady stream behind her. The pink velvet—the soft green of the curtains on either side—her brilliants—and the snow for a background! Yes, the murderer came in that way. Her figure would be plain to any one outside, and if she moved and the diamond shone—Don't you see what a probable theory it is? There must be ways by which a desperate man might reach that ...
— The Woman in the Alcove • Anna Katharine Green
... the brass can be made by tacking it on a board, laying out the design and piercing the background with some sharp-pointed tool. This leaves the design raised with a ...
— Mission Furniture - How to Make It, Part 3 • H. H. Windsor
... of the supposed temple are seen on the hill in the background of the picture. A number of writers speak of this hill in such terms as to imply that it was altogether artificial, like the ...
— The Prehistoric World - Vanished Races • E. A. Allen
... and the showy and witty Theresa Cabarrus, and even the flutter of La Fayette, the most tinsel of heroes, and the sullen sententiousness of Robespierre, then known only as a provincial deputy, furnished a background which increased the prominence ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... Warwick Hall. The hollyhocks from Ann Hathaway's cottage had not yet begun to flaunt their rosettes of color, but the rhododendrons from Killarney were in gorgeous bloom. As Lloyd focussed the camera in such a way as to make them a background for a picture of the sun-dial, Betty heard Kitty ask: "You'll let us know early in the morning what your present is, ...
— The Little Colonel: Maid of Honor • Annie Fellows Johnston
... and subtlety, I should even say craftiness, with which the problem of "the real and the apparent world" is dealt with at present throughout Europe, furnishes food for thought and attention; and he who hears only a "Will to Truth" in the background, and nothing else, cannot certainly boast of the sharpest ears. In rare and isolated cases, it may really have happened that such a Will to Truth—a certain extravagant and adventurous pluck, a metaphysician's ambition of the forlorn hope—has participated therein: that which in the end always ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... Queen of Sheba said of the glory and grandeur of King Solomon, that "the half had not been told." I was struck dumb with admiration as we threaded our way through a narrow channel between irregular reefs lying off the harbor of Port Royal. The spacious harbor itself was a noble sight, but the background was even more picturesque—the light, two-storied houses with their piazzas painted green and white, the varying hues of the gardens, filled with palms and cocoanut trees, and the lofty minarets of the Blue Mountains, ...
— Humphrey Bold - A Story of the Times of Benbow • Herbert Strang
... representatives in the colony of the psalm-singing fanatics of England would have to go now. Silk and lace and curling wigs would be once more in fashion, the hated close-cropped wretches in black coats and round hats would fade into the background, and the good old cavaliers, like the king, would ...
— The Real America in Romance, Volume 6; A Century Too Soon (A Story - of Bacon's Rebellion) • John R. Musick
... sun-shade. At one end of the balcony is a young man blowing a conch-shaped horn, whilst in front of it a richly decorated gondola, bearing the Venetian flag and having two gondoliers, is rocking on the sea. In the background stretches the sea itself studded with hundreds and hundreds of sails, whilst the towers and palaces of magnificent Venice are seen rising out of its waves. To the left is Saint Mark's, to the right, more in the front, San Giorgio Maggiore. The following words were cut in the ...
— Weird Tales, Vol. II. • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... twenty-seven, who might so easily have made one or other of the trifling or selfish excuses we are all so ready to make, was only a prophecy of those many "nameless unremembered acts" of simple kindness which filled the background of Matthew Arnold's middle and later life, and were not revealed, many of them, even to his own people, till after his death—kindness to a pupil-teacher, an unsuccessful writer, a hard-worked schoolmaster or schoolmistress, a budding poet, ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the "Banshee" figured. On one of her trips, when she was creeping down the land about twelve miles above Fort Fisher, a cruiser appeared moving along about two hundred yards from shore. An effort was made to pass her inside, hoping to be hidden by the dark background of the land. But there were eyes open on the cruiser, and there came the ominous hail, "Stop that steamer or I ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 2 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... historical and geographical background has been sketched, the teacher may safely trust the children to get the most out of the story. Fifth grade pupils can read it without preparation. Pupils in the fourth grade should first read it in ...
— The Belgian Twins • Lucy Fitch Perkins
... moon was rising behind us; I looked at it over my left shoulder. Brigitte was watching the lines of the wooded hills as they began to design themselves against the background of sky. As the light flooded the copse and threw its halo over sleeping nature, Brigitte's song became more gentle and more melancholy. Then she bent over, and, throwing her arms around ...
— The Confession of a Child of The Century • Alfred de Musset
... nice or useful that somebody else has and which we have not. But our education and our cultural standards, including fear of punishment, have so repressed this desire, have put it so deeply in the background, that normal human beings hardly feel it ...
— Woman - Her Sex and Love Life • William J. Robinson
... latter part of the Psalter is joyous. A deep sense of gratitude to Jehovah for deliverance pervades them. The Jews felt that Jehovah had indeed delivered them "as a bird from the snare of the fowler" (Psalm 124). In the near background were the dark days of persecution. Hostile foes still encircled Israel, but trust in Jehovah's power and willingness to deliver ...
— The Makers and Teachers of Judaism • Charles Foster Kent
... smoke, an inspiring glimpse of distant sea with yet more distant hills beyond. But Mr. Walkingshaw had no time for looking gratis out of his window to see unprofitable views. The gray street had been the background to nearly fifty years of dignified labor on behalf of the most ...
— The Prodigal Father • J. Storer Clouston
... herself occasionally called on to endure something worse. She was introduced here and there by her uncle, and forced to be spoken to, and to curtsey, and speak again. This was a hard duty, and she was never summoned to it without looking at William, as he walked about at his ease in the background of the scene, and longing ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... light as colourless, just as we speak of water as tasteless, but both of those expressions relate rather to our own feelings than to anything really characteristic of water or of sunlight. We regard the sunlight as colourless because it forms, as it were, the background on which all other colours are depicted. The fact is, that white is so far from being colourless that it contains every known hue blended together in certain proportions. The sun's light is really extremely composite; Nature herself tells us ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... reverently, "If I should survive my wife," &c., to pass it on to the barber, who recited the same formula to the same ritual. In the middle of the sandheap was a pit, which appeared to be somebody's grave; and somewhere in the background, on the far side of the pit, stood Mrs Bosenna and Tabb's girl together, the one watching with a queer smile, while the other kept repeating, "He's going to hell. He couldn't change his habits, and it's high time the Quay ...
— Hocken and Hunken • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... men looked at the screen before them, just as the backward sway of the crowd had ceased and horror was finding a gasping voice upon the lips of the women; for there, walking as naturally as life, out of the background of the picture, came David Lewis with his dark sleeves rolled up, his peaked army hat on the back of his head, a bucket in his hand, and as he stopped and grinned at the crowd—between the lightning-flashes of the kinetoscope—they could see him wave his free hand. He stood there while a laugh ...
— In Our Town • William Allen White
... of a certainty, that you project only the smallest possible fragment of yourself. You yield your universality to the bond of common brotherhood; but your individualism—what it is that makes you you—withdraws itself naturally, involuntarily, inevitably, into the background,—the dim distance which their eyes cannot penetrate. But, from the fraction which you do project, they construct another you, call it by your name, and pass it around for the real, the actual you. You bristle with jest and laughter and wild whims, to keep them at a distance; ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... Bear, his voice tiny. He was in high spirits again. Jerry wished that all his fret and worry about the charge account and getting change could disappear as easily as Andy's sorrow. During the P. T. A. meeting Jerry had pushed his worries to the background of his thoughts. Now he found them right up front again. The next time his mother sent him to the store, where was he to go to get change now that George the ...
— Jerry's Charge Account • Hazel Hutchins Wilson
... fire-light against a patch of darkness caused probably by some bush about twenty yards away, and by picturing in his own mind the face of Barbara, that strong, pleasant English face, as it might appear on such a background. Suddenly there, on the identical spot he did see a face, though one of a very different character. It was round and small and hideous, resembling in its general outline that of a bloated child. At this distance he could not distinguish the features, except the ...
— The Yellow God - An Idol of Africa • H. Rider Haggard
... because many of the religious lessons which it conveys can never be superseded even by Christianity itself: in part because the study of it provides the general knowledge of Judaism, and of Jewish institutions and modes of thought, which is necessary for the proper understanding of the religious background of the Gospels, and of much else in the New Testament as well: in part also because the two revelations—the Jewish and the Christian—hang together, interlocking with one another as anticipation and fulfilment, in a ...
— Religious Reality • A.E.J. Rawlinson
... channel widens, there are smaller islands, so disposed as to make it impossible to say what is island and what continent. These are gems in a setting that perfectly reflects the grass and pines fringing the sea's glossy surface, as well as the background ...
— Metlakahtla and the North Pacific Mission • Eugene Stock
... whom are firing over the parapet at the yelling fiends who have just emerged from their forest-ambush. A glimpse of the interior of the block-house shows us women engaged in casting bullets and loading fire-arms which they are handing to the men. In the background a brave girl is returning swiftly to the garrison, with buckets of water which she has drawn from the spring, a few rods away from the house. A crouching savage has leveled his gun at her, and she evidently knows the danger she is in, but moves steadily forward without spilling ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... light on the hand of the conspirator. No. 52. is "The Martyrdom of King Charles I." No. 53. "The Restoration of Monarchy and King Charles II." A number of cavaliers on horseback, with their conical hats and long tresses, occupy the foreground of this picture; the army appears in the background. This is the last, though the ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 210, November 5, 1853 • Various
... you would come back," she said, as the big, powerful form of Colonel Jeff towered upon the threshold, tall and dark against the background of the darkness. ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 29, May 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... States. Now the Rail-splitter had come! The tocsin of war sounded. The Union was rent. War with its flames of fire and streams of blood devastated the Republic. But the bow of promise was set on the dark background of the receding storm. American slavery was swept into oblivion, and the end of the third quarter of the century saw such a condition established in both the New World and the Old, as made the restoration of human bondage ...
— Notable Events of the Nineteenth Century - Great Deeds of Men and Nations and the Progress of the World • Various
... Fourment Rubens and Her Son and Daughter" was really painted to honor the boy. It has always been the custom in Europe to pay special attention to the boys in the home and keep the girls very much in the background. It is very easy to see how pert the little Albert Rubens is, and how subdued and meek is his sister. The boy has the "Lord of Creation" air that would not be good for him in America. We love the picture, for Rubens, the father, shows us plainly the old idea ...
— The Children's Book of Celebrated Pictures • Lorinda Munson Bryant
... the utmost verge of the danger line, lying in a clump of bushes where the warriors were passing, not twenty feet away. Suddenly he started a little, as a new figure came into the light, thrown into distinct relief by the blazing background of the fires. ...
— The Border Watch - A Story of the Great Chief's Last Stand • Joseph A. Altsheler
... compiled by Tardieu, the Council of Ten held seventy-two sessions, the "Five" held thirty-nine, and the "Four" held one hundred and forty-five. As one of the American experts puts it: "The 'Ten' fell into the background, the 'Five' never emerged from obscurity, the 'Four' ruled the Conference in the culminating period when ...
— From Isolation to Leadership, Revised - A Review of American Foreign Policy • John Holladay Latane
... many as were needed to fill Kellermann's line, and left to his colleague the part for which he was fitted. For his conduct that day Kellermann was named a marshal of the Empire and duke of Valmy; but the whole world was aware that the event was due to the brain of the man in the background. When the French had lost 300 men without wavering, the Prussians ceased firing, and broke off the engagement. Their loss was only 184. Yet this third-rate and mediocre action is counted, with Waterloo and Gettysburg, among the decisive battles of history; ...
— Lectures on the French Revolution • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... never coming?" was again the call; and Lady Archfield muttering, "Was there ever such an impatient poppet?" released Anne, who was instantly pounced upon by young Mrs. Archfield. Linking her arm into that of her visitor, and thrusting Lucy into the background, the little heiress proceeded to her own wainscotted bedroom, bare according to modern views, but very luxurious according to those of the seventeenth century, and with the toilette apparatus, scanty indeed, but of ...
— A Reputed Changeling • Charlotte M. Yonge
... appearance but of vital artistic importance, is the author's power of description, of picturing both the appearance of his characters and the scenes which make his background and help to give the tone of his work. Perhaps four subjects of description may be distinguished: 1. External Nature. Here such questions as the following are of varying importance, according to the ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... resultant of the two forces, the change from a straight line being so gradual, however, that for some minutes they scarcely perceived it. The coronal streamers about the sun, such as are visible on earth during a total eclipse, shone with a halo against the ultra-Cimmerian background, bursting forth to a height of twenty or thirty thousand miles above the surface in vast cyclonic storms, producing so rapid a motion that a column of incandescent gas may move ten thousand miles in less than ten minutes. Whether these great streaks were in part electrical phenomena similar to the ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds • J. J. Astor
... eleventh book of the Antiquities, we definitely pass away from the region of sacred history and miracles, and find ourselves in the more spacious but more misty area of the Hellenistic kingdom, in which Jewish affairs are only a detail set in a larger background. Though Josephus himself does not explicitly mark the break, the character of his work materially changes. He has come to the end of the period when the Bible was his chief guide; he has now to depend for the main thread on Hellenistic sources, filling in the details when he can from some Jewish ...
— Josephus • Norman Bentwich
... when the wonder and beauty of the old Greek life began to dawn upon me. Suddenly I seemed to see the white figures throwing purple shadows on the sun-baked palaestra; 'bands of nude youths and maidens'—you remember Gautier's words—'moving across a background of deep blue as on the frieze of the Parthenon.' I began to read Greek eagerly for love of it all, and the more I read the more I ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... Houghton also met frequently in London, and they corresponded regularly for many years. [185] "Richard and I," says Mrs. Burton, writing to Lord Houghton 12th August 1874, "would have remained very much in the background if you had not taken us by the hand and pulled us into notice." A friendship also sprang up between Burton and Mr. Swinburne, and the Burtons were often the guests of Mrs. Burton's uncle, Lord Gerard, who resided at Garswood, near St. ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... columns stood up again, the mutilated marble statues found new noses and arms, and in the background of all this growing magnificence the young duke perceived-at first dimly, as if obscured by mists, then more distinctly-the outline of a palace with loggia, balconies, columned halls, and statues in bronze and marble around the cornice of ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... Acrogens,—ferns and their allies. There occurs, however, just beyond the first group of club mosses,—a remarkable exception in a solitary pine,—the advance guard of one of the ancient forests of the country, which may be seen far in the background, clothing with its shaggy covering of deep green the lower hill-slopes. And as we found in the Thallogens of that littoral zone over which we have just passed, representatives of the marine flora of the Silurian System, from the first appearance of organisms in ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... to take my hand from him, but she said, "I think I have met Mr. Strange," and now I saw in the background, sitting on a camp-stool near a long, lank young man stretched in a hammock, a very handsome girl, who hastily ran through a book, and then dropped it at the third mention of my name. I suspected that the book was the Social Register, and that the girl's search for me ...
— Through the Eye of the Needle - A Romance • W. D. Howells
... memories of her are, and yet (when we piece them together) how they erect a comfortable background for all we are and dream. She built the earth about us and arched us over with sky. She created our world, taught us to dwell therein. The passion of her love compelled the rude laws of life to stand back while we were soft and helpless. She defied gravity that we might ...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley
... Verity's simple, yet devious, mind played not ungratefully. For it seemed to her to harmonize with the true inwardness of her mission, offering a sympathetic background to the news of her niece's indisposition and the signals of distress flown by her little protegee, Theresa Bilson. The note addressed to her by the latter was couched in mysterious and ambiguous phrases, the purport of which she failed to grasp. Theresa's ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... regiments of little scholars creeping in and forming square, each in its appointed place, under the vast roof; and teachers presently coming to them. A stream of light from the jewelled windows beams slanting down upon each little squad of children, and the tall background of the church retires into a grayer gloom. Pattering little feet of laggards arriving echo through the great nave. They trot in and join their regiments, gathered under the slanting sunbeams. What are they learning? Is it truth? Those two gray ladies with their ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... with success. The process of modeling which Miss Sears has originated is as follows: A vase or other piece which has been formed in the wet clay and dried is taken before it has been in the kiln, and with knives or other tools the design is cut or chiseled so as to leave the background as thin and transparent as possible when finished. As the dry Belleek, besides being thin, is extremely brittle, and crumbles easily, the carving is an exceedingly difficult operation. It is necessarily a very slow process, since at any ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 1082, September 26, 1896 • Various
... his eye. In another portion, he found three hundred and thirty-one thousand stars in a single cluster.[313] He found the whole structure of that vast luminous cloud which spans the sky, "to consist entirely of stars, scattered by millions, like glittering dust, on the background of ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... down together. Herr Freudenberg gave reckless orders for more wine. The chef d'orchestre was at his elbow, Albert hovered in the background. Kendricks leaned over and whispered ...
— The Mischief Maker • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... is becoming less uncommon for American men to retire from business and devote themselves to other pursuits; and their number will undoubtedly increase as time goes on, and we learn the lessons of life with a richer background. But one cannot help feeling regretful that the custom is ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok
... that it is here. We cannot observe the genesis of the bad conscience any more than we can observe the genesis of consciousness in general. We see that consciousness does stand in relief against the background of natural life; but though we believe that, as it exists in us, it has emerged from that background, we cannot see it emerge; it is an ultimate fact, and is assumed in all that we can ever regard as its physical antecedents and presuppositions. In the same way, the moral consciousness ...
— The Atonement and the Modern Mind • James Denney
... prove their death warrants on active service. The enemy are hidden in the edge of a large and straggly wood that only two days before was the scene of a roaring bush fire. Occasionally a man can be seen moving against the background of the charred trunks, but they, too, are making the best of what cover there is. Smith, leaving us to clear the wood, withdraws his men and reports to the colonel, and then moves around to a flank, hoping to cut off the party ...
— From the St. Lawrence to the Yser with the 1st Canadian brigade • Frederic C. Curry
... educated in a Catholic family in England; so that here was another relation—the first female one—to whom he had been introduced. She was a quiet, shy, undemonstrative young woman, with a fine bloom and other charms which she kept as much in the background as possible, with maiden reserve. (There is a Catholic ...
— The Ancestral Footstep (fragment) - Outlines of an English Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Beneath the bank of clouds, yet far enough in the foreground of this picture to partly emerge from obscurity, stood, on an eminence, a white marble building, with columns of porticos, like a Grecian temple. Projected against the dark background were its classic outlines, looking more like a vision of the days of Pericles than ...
— The Good Time Coming • T. S. Arthur
... river presenting more the appearance of a genuine mountain stream. Its banks are here and there heavily fringed with timber, rich grass grows luxuriantly in the flat bottoms, and the dark bluffs which bound them form a beautiful background, interspersed ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman
... fine a summer's day as ever you want to see, and the green leaves of the forest made a pleasing background for the gay picture of the yeomen setting forth. Says the old ballad—it was a seemly sight to see how Robin Hood himself had dressed, and all his yeomanry. He clothed his men in Lincoln green, and himself in scarlet red, with hats of black and feathers white to bravely deck each head. ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... think, as the ghost I expected to see. On the wall opposite the mirror, just a pace or two behind where I had been standing, hung a portrait. And such a portrait!—Bronzino never painted a grander one. Against a background of harsh, dark blue, there stands out the figure of the Duchess (for it is Medea, the real Medea, a thousand times more real, individual, and powerful than in the other portraits), seated stiffly in a high-backed chair, sustained, as it were, ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... thoroughly and make no blunders in your grammar, but it takes that and something more to make a great poet. Look at your saint, Porbus! At a first glance she is admirable; look at her again, and you see at once that she is glued to the background, and that you could not walk round her. She is a silhouette that turns but one side of her face to all beholders, a figure cut out of canvas, an image with no power to move nor change her position. I feel as if there were no air between that arm ...
— The Unknown Masterpiece - 1845 • Honore De Balzac
... matter of primary importance — Lord K.'s relations with Sir J. French — The despatch of Sir H. Smith-Dorrien to command the Second Corps — Sir J. French not well treated at the time of the Antwerp affair — The relegation of the General Staff at the War Office to the background in the early days — Question whether this was entirely due to its having suffered in efficiency by the withdrawals which took place on mobilization — The General Staff only eliminated in respect ...
— Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918 • Charles Edward Callwell
... black stillness, he began to have fancies. He imagined himself enormously tall—a great Viking of the Northland, hastening over icy fiords to his love. And that reminded him that he had a love—though, indeed, that thought was always present with him as a background for other thoughts. To be sure, he had not told her that she was his love, for he had seen her only a few times, and the auspicious occasion had not yet presented itself. She lived at Echo Bay also, and was to be the maid of honor to his friend's bride—which was ...
— The Shape of Fear • Elia W. Peattie
... to be given to the scene that was going up in the background, borrowed from the Pan-Elocutionists. It was magnificent, and represented ...
— St. Nicholas, Vol. 5, No. 2, December, 1877 • Various
... down the ravine to the south, a half-mile distant a dark figure passed over a bright patch of sand. It was quickly lost in the dark background beyond. But not before Alex had recognized the unmistakable figure and walk of the Italian, Big Tony. His suspicions at once awakened, Alex was but a moment in deciding to follow the foreigner, and returning to the eastern bank, he scrambled down to the gully bottom, and hastily ...
— The Young Railroaders - Tales of Adventure and Ingenuity • Francis Lovell Coombs
... her now, of course: remembered her as one of the shadowy sidling presences in the background of that awful house in Chelsea, one of the dumb appendages of the shrieking unescapable Mrs. Murrett, into whose talons he had fallen in the course of his head-long pursuit of Lady Ulrica Crispin. Oh, ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton
... witty verses written on the fly-leaf in a flourishing hand. It was worth while to amuse Theodora, she was so pretty and unassuming in her delight at his carelessly-amiable efforts for her entertainment. She was only a mere child after all at sixteen, with Downport in the background; so he felt quite honestly at ease in being attentive to her girlish requirements. Better that he should amuse her than that she should be left to the mercy of men who would perhaps have the execrable taste to spoil her pretty childish ...
— Theo - A Sprightly Love Story • Mrs. Frances Hodgson Burnett
... scene and background it forms!" my friend, however, had meanwhile gone on. "What legends, what histories it knows! My heart really breaks with all I seem to guess. There's Tennyson's Talking Oak! What summer days one could spend here! How I could lounge the rest ...
— A Passionate Pilgrim • Henry James
... photographic realism, with a pair of policemen as its protagonists. All five plays "of the supernatural" follow a single plan. In the foreground, as it were, we see a sordid drama played out on the human plane, and in the background (or in the empyrean above, as you choose) we see the operation of the god-like imbecilities which sway and flay us all. The technical trick is well managed. It would be easy for such four-dimensional pieces to fall into burlesque, but in at least two cases, ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... gleaming white against the background of dark foliage, were silently and dexterously manoeuvred by small, yellow, naked men, with long hair piled up on their heads in feminine fashion. Gradually, as we advanced farther up the green channel, the perfumes became more penetrating, ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... has been here ever can." She had risen, and they were walking down toward the shore. Her fatigue, or her mood, gave her an unusual gentleness of manner. As Stephen Archdale walked beside her he tried to imagine Katie as Elizabeth was now, with a background of suffering, with trial and daring, perhaps death before, and failed. He looked at Elizabeth, dimly seen under the starlight, now suddenly brought sharply into view by the flare of cannon, weary, glad ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 1, January 1886 - Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 1, January, 1886 • Various
... admiration, but in the evening, when she and another nurse retired for the night, she removed the picture from the envelope and immovably looked with admiration at the faces; her own, his and the aunt's, their dresses, the stairs of the balcony, the bushes in the background, her eyes feasting especially on herself, her young, beautiful face with the hair hanging over her forehead. She was so absorbed that she failed to notice that the ...
— The Awakening - The Resurrection • Leo Nikoleyevich Tolstoy
... a park of more than ten acres the grounds of a subsidiary residence of the daimyo. The magnificent trees, with lakes, rivulets and hills fashioned with infinite art,[175] and the background of natural hill and woodland, made in all a possession which exhibited the delectable possibilities of Japanese gardening. An occasional electric light amid the trees gave an effect in the evening ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... chicken-pox, nor any other of the tormenting demons of childhood; and I was assured each time that it was a great piece of good luck that this malady was now past forever. But alas! another again threatened in the background, and advanced. All these things increased my propensity to reflection; and as I had already practised myself in fortitude, in order to remove the torture of impatience, the virtues which I had heard praised ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... tell all but the names. I'd best be prudent, for I'm afraid you may get a little fierce you do sometimes when people vex me," began Rose, rather liking the prospect of a confidential chat with Uncle, for he had kept himself a good deal in the background lately. ...
— Rose in Bloom - A Sequel to "Eight Cousins" • Louisa May Alcott
... and a camera speedily proves how really free is the atmosphere of all visionary obstruction. A photograph of a horse, a bullock, or of any such object out on the hills, will secure a reproduction of a background quite extraordinary in the extent and ...
— Adventures in Many Lands • Various
... them; but as time went on, these memory-pictures grew more faint. The fast-succeeding events and the new experiences of her married life crowded swiftly and thickly upon her, until she began to look upon the past more as a dream than as a reality. Vane's figure receded rapidly into the background of her life, and, as it did so, it seemed in some way to become spiritualised, lifted above and beyond the world-sphere in which it was ...
— The Missionary • George Griffith
... surroundings were photographed on my memory. The rain-swept sky (we were at the end of the wet weather), the sodden, dingy pines, the muddy road, and the black powder-riven cliffs formed a gloomy background against which the black and white liveries of the jhampanies, the yellow-paneled 'rickshaw and Mrs. Wessington's down-bowed golden head stood out clearly. She was holding her handkerchief in her left hand and was leaning back exhausted against ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling
... for yourselves," cried O'Neil, jumping suddenly to his feet, and pointing towards the wood, where a solitary figure was seen dimly against the dark background. ...
— The Golden Dream - Adventures in the Far West • R.M. Ballantyne
... remark from a stranger disconcerted her; and even the old friends of her father who tried to draw her out could seldom extract more than a Yes or a No. Her figure was small, her face not distinguished by beauty. She was therefore suffered to withdraw quietly to the background, and, unobserved herself, to observe all that passed. Her nearest relations were aware that she had good sense, but seem not to have suspected, that under her demure and bashful deportment were concealed a fertile ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... toward St. Andrew's Church and Tanfield Hall, where he insisted on taking me to get the "proper historical background," he told me about the great Disruption movement. He was extremely eloquent,—so eloquent that the image of Willie Beresford tottered continually on its throne, and I found not the slightest difficulty in ...
— Penelope's Progress - Being Such Extracts from the Commonplace Book of Penelope Hamilton As Relate to Her Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... glow that shimmered about the town. At one end rose the great block of the Hulton factory, which lost something of its utilitarian ugliness at night. Its harsh, rectangular outline faded into the background of forest, and the rows of glimmering windows gave it a curious transparent look. It seemed to overflow with radiance and filled the air with ...
— Carmen's Messenger • Harold Bindloss
... life of the spirit, which he lived so intensely, and so vividly transfused in the figures of his Saints, must necessarily have abstracted his mind from his surroundings, to which he therefore gave little attention. In this he was faithful to the Giottesque principle of not enriching the background, except by just what was necessary to render the subject intelligible, and this ...
— Fra Angelico • J. B. Supino
... gold had died at the top of the peak, Number Four had caught a glimpse of a tiny blaze afar over to the east, and instantly passed the word. Only half an hour it was observed, and then, away toward the south-east, an answering gleam burned for a moment against the black background of the Sierras. Then both went out ...
— Tonio, Son of the Sierras - A Story of the Apache War • Charles King
... regained most of the ground to the north of that point. And so the fight surged to and fro throughout the night. All around the scene of the conflict the sky was lit up by the flashes of the guns and the light of blazing villages and farms, while against this background of smoke and flame, looking out in the murky light over the crumbling ruins of the old town, rose the battered wreck of the cathedral town and the spires of ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... real quiet comfort, there was not a club in London equal to it; but his hearers were not aware that in past days he had been blackballed at the T—— and the G——. These were accidents which Lopez had a gift of keeping in the background. His present companion, Everett Wharton, had, as well as himself, been an original member;—and Wharton had been one of those who had hoped to find in the club a stepping-stone to high political life, and who now talked often with idle energy of the ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... public-house, set there upon the edge of the bay. Here and there over the unruffled surface of the waters to the left of them, a light pricked out, glowing against the gloom. Black against the mouth of the harbour, as though etched upon a smoky background, a steamer swayed uneasily with the swell of the water at her keel, her nose touching the pier-head, a chain of lights outlining her cumbersome hulk. Men's voices made the night noisy, and numerous feet scuttled to and fro over the cobbles of the dockyard to where a handful of fishing ...
— The Riddle of the Frozen Flame • Mary E. Hanshew
... the view from any thing witnessed in England. It had never been seen before by European eyes; but scenes so lovely must have been gazed upon by angels in their flight. The only want felt is that of mountains in the background. The falls are bounded on three sides by ridges 300 or 400 feet in height, which are covered with forest, with the red soil appearing among the trees. When about half a mile from the falls, I left the canoe ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... novelist complains that our society wants that sharp contrast of character and costume which comes of caste, so in the narrative of our historians we miss what may be called background and perspective, as if the events and the actors in them failed of that cumulative interest which only a long historical entail can give. Relatively, the crusade of Sir William Pepperell was of more consequence than that of St. Louis, and yet forgive us, injured shade of the second American baronet, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... better that you should speak to her any way, than that she should not be spoken to at all.—Oh! that look of love!' continued he, between his teeth, as he bolted himself into his own private room. 'And that cursed lie; which showed some terrible shame in the background, to be kept from the light in which I thought she lived perpetually! Oh, Margaret, Margaret! Mother, how you have tortured me! Oh! Margaret, could you not have loved me? I am but uncouth and hard, but I would never have led you into any ...
— North and South • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... to her former condition, although she did not yet for a long time reach a position that was at all enviable, except as compared with the dark days of her bondage. But she was now where she could take advantage of the general uplifting of the race, and though kept in the background by man as much as was possible, she was constantly growing and learning, preparing herself for a future of which she would then dare not even ...
— Daybreak: A Romance of an Old World • James Cowan
... mouthpieces for Milton's declamations, without any personal or human interest. Regarded as a drama, therefore, Paradise Lost could never have been a success; but as poetry, with its sublime imagery, its harmonious verse, its titanic background of heaven, hell, and the illimitable void that lies between, it is ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... belt of forest growth which extended to a hill range, dark with impervious jungle, and cleared here and there for the cultivator's village. Behind it, rose another sub-range, wooded with a lower bush and already blue with air, whilst in the background towered range upon range, here rising abruptly into points and peaks, there ramp-shaped or wall- formed, with sheer descents, and all of light azure hue adorned with glories ...
— Vikram and the Vampire • Sir Richard F. Burton
... their ears, while now and then the note of a cannon boomed above it, and a solid shot, curving over their heads, whizzed into the thickets. But they paid little attention to the main battle; it was merely a chorus, a background, as it were, for their own corner of the struggle, which ...
— The Free Rangers - A Story of the Early Days Along the Mississippi • Joseph A. Altsheler
... fresh air which blew in upon his breast through a shirt of the very finest cambric. As the governor entered, the young man turned his head with a look full of indifference; and on recognizing Baisemeaux, he arose and saluted him courteously. But when his eyes fell upon Aramis, who remained in the background, the latter trembled, turned pale, and his hat, which he held in his hand, fell upon the ground, as if all his muscles had become relaxed at once. Baisemeaux, habituated to the presence of his prisoner, ...
— Ten Years Later - Chapters 1-104 • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... three paces away from me, was the dim outline of the young girl's form vaguely discernible in the gloom—a white mass, almost motionless, against a background of inky blackness. With a quick intaking of my breath I sprang forward, the shawl outspread in my hand, and with a quick dexterous gesture I threw it over her head, and the next second had her, faintly struggling, in my arms. She was as ...
— Castles in the Air • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... in two minutes the head of the house, a fine old specimen of the patriarchal Boer, and his son, a poor slip of a man, were standing before him, hat in hand, while women-folk of all ages and fulness of costume peeped from every convenient crevice in the background. The general attitude of the household was that of humility, in contrast to the usual reception which the column had experienced in the majority of Karoo farms. And presently the cause for the deference became apparent. The gaping children in the main entrance were ...
— On the Heels of De Wet • The Intelligence Officer
... The walls were covered with a garish paper selected by one who had an eye but not a taste for colour: bright pink flowers that looked more or less like chunks of a shattered water melon spilt promiscuously over a background of pearl grey. There was every indication that it had been hung recently. Indeed there was a distinct aroma of fresh flour paste. The bedstead, bureau and washstand were likewise offensively modern. Everything was as clean as a pin, however, and the bed looked comfortable. He ...
— Green Fancy • George Barr McCutcheon
... free art in China more than a thousand years ago, and her school of landscape is the loftiest yet known to the world. Nor was man ever dissociated from nature. As early as the 4th century Ku K'ai-chih says that in painting a certain noble character he must give him a fit background of great peaks and deep ravines. Chinese painting, in sum, finely complements rather than poorly supplements that of Europe; where the latter is strong, it is weak; but in certain chosen provinces it long ago found consummate expression ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... decreasing. It was under these conditions of family communism that the rights of the husband and father were restricted on every side. Not only does he not stand out as a principal person from the background of the familial clan; he has not even any recognised social existence in the family group. This restriction of the husband and father was clearly dependent on the form of marriage. We have seen that the individual relationships between the sexes ...
— The Position of Woman in Primitive Society - A Study of the Matriarchy • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... do. It was enough for him that a machine was to be made and he wanted to share in its ownership at once. As the two men walked back from the freight warehouse, his mind took hold of Hugh's remark about getting money. Again he was afraid. "There's some one in the background," he thought. "Now I must make a proposal he can't refuse. I mustn't leave until I've ...
— Poor White • Sherwood Anderson
... which they had now reached Sibylla and Ned commanded a bird's-eye view of the entire harbour, with South Island—as it soon came to be called—for a background, with the southern horizon showing just clear of its highest portion. Ned was now able to form a very much more correct idea of the entire locality than had before been possible; and as he stood critically examining the ...
— The Missing Merchantman • Harry Collingwood
... conjunction with what we already know, or suspect, will put us sleuth hounds on the hot trail of the big millionaire they feel certain has been the main backing of the whole ugly bunch while keeping in the background himself all the while. They're depending on you and me, Perk, to produce the evidence that's going to convict him of conspiracy against the Government, which may send him to Atlanta for a ...
— Eagles of the Sky - With Jack Ralston Along the Air Lanes • Ambrose Newcomb
... complete, but the Western Barbarian had lived long enough in England to know that, except in the pages of a holiday supplement, this was rarely the accompaniment of a Christmas landscape, and he cheerfully accepted, on the 24th of December, the background of a low, brooding sky, on which the delicate tracery of leafless sprays and blacker chevaux de frise of pine was faintly etched, as a consistent setting to the turrets and peacefully stacked chimneys of Stukeley Castle. Yet, even in this disastrous eclipse of color and distance, the harmonious ...
— Colonel Starbottle's Client and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... a minute, on the fiery background of the African sky, there was a dreadful firework display of scattered brains, smoking blood, and tawny hair. When all fell, Tartarin perceived two colossal Negroes furiously running towards him, brandishing cudgels. They were his two ...
— Tartarin of Tarascon • Alphonse Daudet
... sitting beside some mountain beck, in the hush of the noontide heat, when all was silent and solitary about her except the gauzy wings of insects moving above the grasses, a certain face would start up against the background of her thoughts—a pair of dark, wistful eyes would appeal to her out of the silence. That mute farewell, so suggestive, so full of pain—even the strong warm grasp with which her hand had been held—recurred to her ...
— Lover or Friend • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... again, with his haunting suspicion of a man in the background with whom he would yet have to deal. He knew that here he had no rights, but in other directions he ...
— A Husband by Proxy • Jack Steele
... a peculiar child with a peculiar background," I went on. "Her mother was from the old country, one of the Slav races. There's the inheritance of a lot of peculiar notions. Maybe she had passed them on to her daughter. She kept Jennie locked up in their room. The kid never got out with other children. ...
— Sense from Thought Divide • Mark Irvin Clifton
... and one which had formerly been suppressed by King and Pope. Moreover, if the Charter of Larmenius is to be believed, the newly elected Grand Master of the Temple was the Duc de Bourbon, who had already incurred the Cardinal's displeasure. Obviously, therefore, Templar influence was kept in the background. This is not to imply bad faith on the part of Ramsay, who doubtless held the Order of Templars to be wholly praiseworthy; but he could not expect the King or Cardinal to share his view, and therefore held it more prudent to refer to the progenitors of Freemasonry under ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster
... the darkening faces and downcast look of his audience, that the prudence he was preaching had already commenced to press the courage of the poor people into the background, and raising his voice still higher ...
— The Merchant of Berlin - An Historical Novel • L. Muhlbach
... quite the whole of the idea, but it will serve) drove her into the shelter of a formal marriage with a devoted don, I leave you to gather. I don't think the author quite succeeds in making Mary's defection inevitable, nor do I see the significance of the apparently quite irrelevant background of Indian philosophy and intrigue. But here's a well-written book, with sound positive qualities ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, August 4th, 1920 • Various
... shows. Its use here may be a trace of a touching desire to make sure that readers, who only knew him as Matthew, should understand who this publican was. It is like the little likenesses of themselves, in some corner of a background, that early painters used to slip into a picture of Madonna and angels. There was no vanity in the wish, for he says nothing about his sacrifices, leaving it to Luke to tell that 'he left all,' but he does crave that his brethren, who read, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
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