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More "Statuesque" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... wandering through the grounds in the late summer afternoon, her blue-lined parasol making an azure sky over her golden head, her white dress draping her slender figure in a strikingly statuesque way. She is the kind of girl to madden men and win admiration on the right hand and on the left, and he does like the women on whom the world sets a signet of approval. No sweet domestic drudge for him, and if Violet has a fault, it is this tendency. When ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... every one she knew was out of town; she herself was known to be upon the high seas bound for Europe; Matilda's gown and veil were a most unsuspicious disguise; and William, her paragon of a William, so rigidly upright on the seat before her—William's statuesque, unapproachable figure diffused about her a sense of absolute security. She relaxed, sank back into the upholstery of the carriage, and began fully to enjoy the rare ...
— No. 13 Washington Square • Leroy Scott
... before the animal could regain its feet the knife had found its heart. As Tarzan rose upon the body of his kill to scream forth his hideous victory cry into the face of the moon the wind carried to his nostrils something which froze him to statuesque immobility and silence. His savage eyes blazed into the direction from which the wind had borne down the warning to him and a moment later the grasses at one side of the clearing parted and Numa, the lion, strode majestically into view. His yellow-green eyes were fastened ...
— Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... hills. At sunrise and at sunset the most exquisite colors transformed the country into a veritable fairyland. The sun sank behind bands of purple and amethyst, and his last rays brought out in sharp silhouette the statuesque forms of women water-carriers and long lines of laden camels moving in ghostly silence along the river bank. Very beautiful also were the pictures made by the dahabiehs and other native boats, with their big lateen sails and with the motley gathering ...
— The Critic in the Orient • George Hamlin Fitch
... as bad. I hate that particular pose; it's coming up very much now; an imitation of the English, like everything else. A girl who tries to be statuesque at sea—that will act on ...
— The Patagonia • Henry James
... Mike was introduced to the man of hobbies. Mr Smith, senior, was a long, earnest-looking man who might have been Psmith in a grey wig but for his obvious energy. He was as wholly on the move as Psmith was wholly statuesque. Where Psmith stood like some dignified piece of sculpture, musing on deep questions with a glassy eye, his father would be trying to be in four places at once. When Psmith presented Mike to him, he shook ...
— Psmith in the City • P. G. Wodehouse
... handsome figure, scantily covered by a tunic of light-red cloth; in the right hand a whip; in the other, the arm raised and lightly extended, the four lines. The pose was exceedingly graceful and animated. The cheers and clapping of hands were received with statuesque indifference. Ben-Hur stood transfixed—his instinct and memory had served him faithfully—THE ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... to attitude and declamation. The actors raised on high boots above their natural height, their faces hidden in masks and their tones mechanically magnified, must have relied for their effects not upon facial play, or rapid and subtle variations of voice and gesture, but upon a certain statuesque beauty of pose, and a chanting intonation of that majestic iambic verse whose measure would have been obscured by a rapid and conversational delivery. The representation would thus become moving sculpture to the eye, and to the ear, as it were, a sleep of music between the intenser ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... and compose herself. She, however, was down again in a minute, with some drapery which she wound about her after the fashion Lady Hamilton was said to do, and represented, like her, the Muses, and various statues. With the curtain and one light she managed to give a very statuesque effect. Mr. Lewis was evidently very proud of her grace and talent, and she had a pretty, wilful, bird-like way with him, that was fascinating, and did not seem, as I thought it must really be, mechanical. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... a mood, or if his features were incapable of assuming the guise, it seems questionable whether he could really have been entitled to a marble immortality. In point of fact, however, the English face and form are seldom statuesque, however illustrious ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... a lamp and, as it were, cocked it and let it off at the features of Carlo Trent. And thus the two stood, statuesque and lit, surrounded by ...
— The Regent • E. Arnold Bennett
... the cold and guarded by two 'proud young porters' in severe cocked hats and formidable batons, into a broad hall,—threw off our furred boots and cloaks, ascended a carpeted marble staircase, in every angle of which stood a statuesque footman in gaudy coat and unblemished unmentionables, and reached a broad landing upon the top thronged as usual with servants. Thence we passed through an antechamber into a long, high, brilliantly lighted, saffron-papered ...
— Memoir of John Lothrop Motley, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... handsome, too: she was large and statuesque, with beautifully moulded throat and arms, and hair which rippled like that of my poor old plaster Juno at home,—in fact, she suggested to my mind some Greek goddess dressed up in silk and lace; I quite enjoyed looking at her, ...
— We Ten - Or, The Story of the Roses • Lyda Farrington Kraus
... tints, which rolled back in shining waves from her blue veined temples. While moulding the figure and features upon a scale almost heroic, nature had jealously guarded the symmetry of her work, and in addition to the perfect proportion of the statuesque outlines, had bestowed upon the firm white flesh a gleaming smoothness, suggestive of fine grained marble highly polished. Majesty of mien implies much, which the comparatively short period of eighteen years rarely confers, yet majestic most properly describes this girl, whose archetype Veleda ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... a very striking somebody. He wore only a pareu, as I, of scarlet muslin, with the William Morris design, but he had wound his about so that it was a mere ornamental triangle upon his tall, powerful, statuesque body. His chest and back had a growth of red-gold hair, which, with his bronzed skin, his red-gold beard, dark curls over a high forehead, handsome nose, and blue eyes, made him all of the same color scheme. He was without doubt as near to a Greek deity ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... obedience to a precept it substitutes following a Person, and instead of saying to men 'Be good' it says to them 'Be Christlike.' It brings the conception of duty out of the region of abstractions into the region of living realities. For the cold statuesque ideal of perfection it substitutes a living Man, with a heart to love, and a hand to help us. Thereby the whole aspect of striving after the right is changed; for the work is made easier, and companionship comes in to aid morality, when Jesus Christ says to us, 'Be like Me; and then you ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... toward the house when Jane appeared in the lane leading a horse. In riding-skirt and blouse she seemed to have lost some of her statuesque proportions, and looked more like a girl rider than the mistress of Withersteen. She was brightly smiling, and her greeting was ...
— Riders of the Purple Sage • Zane Grey
... was passing over it. On the bridge the man who had found the body made a merit of his discovery which he dramatized to a group of spectators without rousing them to a murmur or stirring them from their statuesque fixity. His own ...
— Familiar Spanish Travels • W. D. Howells
... Michelangelo's genius. After designing the architectural theatre which I have attempted to describe, and filling its main spaces with the vast religious drama he unrolled symbolically in a series of primeval scenes, statuesque figures, and countless minor groups contributing to one intellectual conception, he proceeded to charge the interspaces—all that is usually left for facile decorative details—with an army of passionately felt and wonderfully executed nudes, forms of youths ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... erected under the superintendence of Phidias. The pictures of Polygnotus had nothing of that elaborate grouping, aided by the powers of perspective, so much admired in modern art. His greatness lay in statuesque painting, which he brought nearly to perfection by ideal expression, accurate drawing, and improved coloring. He used but few colors, and softened the rigidity of his predecessors by making the mouth of beauty smile. He gave great expression to the face and figure, and his pictures ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume III • John Lord
... foreigner, the one colourist of the school, only a Florentine in this, that much of his work is, as it were, monumental, composing itself really—as with the Madonna delle Arpie or the great Madonna and Saints of the Pitti, for instance—into statuesque groups, into sculpture. So if we admit that Leonardo and Michelangelo were rather universal than Florentine, the most characteristic work of the school lies in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, in the work of Giotto, so full of great, simple ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... virtue of their unimportance, were Mrs. Stucky and her son Bud. They were followed and flanked by quite a number of their neighbors, who gazed on the festal scene with an impressive curiosity that can not be described. Pale-faced, wide-eyed, statuesque, their presence, interpreted by a vivid imagination, might have been regarded as an omen of impending misfortune. They stood on the outskirts of the wedding company, gazing on the scene apparently without an emotion of sympathy or interest. They were there, it seemed, to see what new caper ...
— Free Joe and Other Georgian Sketches • Joel Chandler Harris
... breathed life into the stone, But see yon graceful girl, with straitened zone And statuesque still bearing. You'd say in her the marble must invade The flesh, in so much loveliness arrayed, Such radiant ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98 February 15, 1890 • Various
... were at a close, Kincaid spoke from the saddle. Facing him stood his entire command, "in order in the line," their six shining pieces and dark caissons and their twice six six-horse teams stretching back in six statuesque rows; each of the three lieutenants—Bartleson, Villeneuve, Tracy—in the front line, midway between his two guns, the artificers just six yards out on the left, and guidon and buglers just six on the right. At the commander's back ...
— Kincaid's Battery • George W. Cable
... has not changed," said Mr. Amarinth. "That is so wonderful. He never develops at all. He alone understands the beauty of rigidity, the exquisite serenity of the statuesque nature. Men always fall into the absurdity of endeavouring to develop the mind, to push it violently forward in this direction or in that. The mind should be receptive, a harp waiting to catch the winds, a pool ready to be ruffled, not a bustling busybody, forever trotting about ...
— The Green Carnation • Robert Smythe Hichens
... with a full head of glossy, raven hair, and his eyes, like some mad animal's, flashing with light and resolution, yet with a certain strange calmness holds aloft in one hand a large knife—walks along not much back of the footlights—turns fully towards the audience, his face of statuesque beauty, lit by those basilisk eyes, flashing with desperation, perhaps insanity—launches out in a firm and steady voice the words, 'Sic semper tyrannis'—and then walks with neither slow nor very rapid pace diagonally across to the back of the ...
— Lincoln's Yarns and Stories • Alexander K. McClure
... platform of the hand-car. He looked like a bantam cock whose feathers were much ruffled. Zilda worked at the handles of the machine; she was very large and strong, all her attitudes were statuesque. The May day beamed on the flat spring landscape through which they were travelling; the beam found a perfect counterpart in the ...
— A Dozen Ways Of Love • Lily Dougall
... cause of the 'separate maintenance?' People are not particular here, and have no right to be; still, one would like to know. I fancy it can not be her fault; she is perfectly gentle in her manner, but rather cold—very beautiful too, in a placid, statuesque style." It is not worth transcribing the writer's farther speculations. If a silent, but ultra-fervent benediction can at all profit the person for whom it is intended, very few people have been so well paid for epistolary labor, ...
— Sword and Gown - A Novel • George A. Lawrence
... factotum, irreproachable from his snowy turban to his white-slippered feet, did not take the hint to retire, but stood motionless just inside the room, waiting with statuesque patience till his master should deign to bestow upon him the favour ...
— The Way of an Eagle • Ethel M. Dell
... than this withering glare of criticism. A sudden longing to escape, to be done with it all, came over him with sickening force. His nerves ached with the physical strain of holding himself upright on his horse, of preserving the statuesque erectness proper to the occasion. He felt like one of his own ancestral effigies, of which the wooden framework had rotted under the splendid robes. A congestion at the head of a narrow street ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... and a beauty of the rather thin but statuesque type, which attracts men up to five or six and twenty and then frequently bores, if it does not repel them. Moreover, she was clever and well read, and pretended to be intellectually and poetically inclined, as ladies not specially favoured ...
— Beatrice • H. Rider Haggard
... The question had turned Joe Lewis's word against him, when a tall Indian arose and spread his blanket open like a wing. He stood for a time silent, statuesque, and thoughtful. The men waited seriously to hear what ...
— The Log School-House on the Columbia • Hezekiah Butterworth
... for he had jumped to his feet and was now standing before her, a rigid, statuesque figure, with head bent and arms hanging inert by ...
— The Nest of the Sparrowhawk • Baroness Orczy
... too, were not tired, he laughed at the idea, tossing his burden or taking an extra climb as fresh as at the start. At night our cots were in the same room. As he stripped off his shirt and stood with head pillared upon a most stately neck, and massive, well-moulded chest and shoulders, he was statuesque indeed. ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... might fulfil their destiny, and fill out my story, by falling in love with the fluffy-haired English girl who was sitting between them, and pouting equally and simultaneously at both. There was also the stout German who talks about "de sturm und der vafes." And beside him was the statuesque English beauty, whose eyes are of the rich blackness of the tropic sky, whose voice has a large assortment of sudden notes of haughtiness, while the studied insolence of her manner first freezes her victims and then incontinently and inconsistently scorches them. ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100., Jan. 24, 1891. • Various
... Raphael do for you? A poet makes Goethe say to a sceptical and perplexed world, "Art still has truth, take refuge there." It would be a poor refuge for most of us; it was so even for the great Goethe; for with all his intellectual splendour, his character never rose above a grandiose and statuesque self-love; he behaved ill to his country, ill to women. Instead of being religion, Art seems, for its own perfection, to need religion—not a system of dogma, but a faith. This, probably, we all feel when we look at the paintings in the Church of Assisi or in the Arena ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... that Miss Lloyd might have put away one as a sentimental souvenir, but to my mind she did not seem the kind of a girl to do that. I knew my reasoning was absurd, for what man can predicate what a woman will do? but at the same time I could not seem to imagine the statuesque, imperial Miss Lloyd tenderly preserving a rose that her ...
— The Gold Bag • Carolyn Wells
... Grand Canal, we have no visible clue to guide us in our estimate of their artistic worth. Vasari's description, and Zanetti's engraving of a few fragments (done in 1760, when the frescoes were already in decay), go to prove that Giorgione at this period studied the antique, "commingling statuesque classicism and the flesh and ...
— Giorgione • Herbert Cook
... Eames and Mme. Scaichi to make the one "sensation" of the season—Gounod's "Faust," which had six regular performances, and two extra. Of the women singers the greatest popularity was won by Miss Eames, whose youthfulness, freshness of voice, and statuesque beauty, compelled general admiration. The smallness of her repertory, however, prevented her from helping the season to the triumphant close which it might have had if the company had been enlisted to carry out the policy adopted when the season was half over. Miss Eames's ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... faint pink, and eyes that varied from gray to blue and from gray to brown, according to the light in which you saw them. Her hands were thin and shapely, her nose straight, her face artistically narrow. She was not brilliant, not active, but rather peaceful and statuesque without knowing it. Cowperwood was carried away by her appearance. Her beauty measured up to his present sense of the artistic. She was lovely, he thought—gracious, dignified. If he could have his choice of a wife, this was the kind of a girl ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... fame of Miss Anderson's loveliness had reached our shores long before her own arrival. The Britishers were prepared to see a very handsome lady, and they have not been disappointed. Miss Anderson's beauty is of Grecian type, with a head of classic contour, finely chiseled features, and a tall statuesque figure, whose Hellenic expression a graceful costume of antique design sets off to the best advantage. You fancy that you have seen her before, and so perhaps you have upon the canvas of Angelica Kauffman. ...
— Mary Anderson • J. M. Farrar
... helped him to understand how it was that she had escaped the perils of her unprotected girlhood. Certainly it would have taken a good deal of courage, impudence or alcoholic excitement to make a man address to this statuesque and cold-faced creature ...
— The Wharf by the Docks - A Novel • Florence Warden
... might thus exemplify his art and his devotion. He certainly excelled any artist with whom we are acquainted in causing figures painted on a flat surface to appear to the spectator far below them to stand out with statuesque effect. In this Church of St. John, the Knights seemed to have vied with each other in adding to its ornaments and its treasures, so that the rich marbles, bas-reliefs, and mosaics are almost confusing in their abundance. The floor is closely ornamented with inlaid ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... the curtained doorway, the insteps of her bare feet gleaming like marble on the overshadowed matting of the floor. The fall of her lighted shoulders, the strong and fine modelling of her arms hanging down her sides, her immobility, too, had something statuesque, the charm of art tense with life. She was not very big—Heyst used to think of her, at first, as "that poor little girl,"—but revealed free from the shabby banality of a white platform dress, in the simple drapery of the sarong, there was that in her form and in the proportions ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... workman more baselessly accused of metrical carelessness than the poet who designedly varies his complicated verse-effects to suit every inner impulse belonging to his dramatic subject. A golden finish being in place in this statuesque, "Hyperion"-like monologue of Artemis, behold here it is, and none the less perfect because not merely the outcome of the desire to produce a polished piece of ...
— Men and Women • Robert Browning
... in spite of his weather-beaten face and hardened hands, he appeared what he was, a man of education and some refinement, and his resolute expression, erect carriage, and muscular frame, rendered lithe and almost statuesque by much swinging of the ax, gave him an indefinite air of distinction. Again she decided that Geoffrey Thurston was a well-favored man, but remembering Musker's stories, she set herself to watch for some trace of inherent barbarity. This was ...
— Thurston of Orchard Valley • Harold Bindloss
... last words shyly, partly afraid of bringing a frown on the lovely face opposite to her, which was quickly losing its vivid expression and sinking back into statuesque coldness. ...
— Cobwebs and Cables • Hesba Stretton
... centre of his brain, that an actor standing, his hand on his hip, could fill the place hitherto occupied in the mind by, let us say, the Hermes of Praxiteles. Yet this idea still obtained at Bayreuth, and Rosa Sucher walked about, her arms raised and posed above her head, in the conventional, statuesque attitude designed for the ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... of appreciation of others, for according to the favorable comment his comely appearance created, he seemed to be filled with indifference; while with me, as I warmed into high enthusiasm over certain well-defined representatives of the angelic sex, coolness, growing to statuesque frigidity, would develop in the object of my devotions, and the beauty whose charms had bedeviled me into insomnia and wild-eyed desperation became related to me thereafter as the angel surmounting the tombstone that marked the ...
— Cupid's Middleman • Edward B. Lent
... pieces—everywhere there seemed a suggestion of the game. Along the same path that Tara of Helium had been led Turan was conducted toward the throne room of O-Tar the jeddak, and when he entered the Hall of Chiefs his interest turned to wonder and admiration as he viewed the ranks of statuesque thoatmen decked in their gorgeous, martial panoply. Never, he thought, had he seen upon Barsoom more soldierly figures or thoats so perfectly trained to perfection of immobility as these. Not a muscle quivered, not a tail ...
— The Chessmen of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... at the altar stood Lady Dora Earle and Valentine. People said afterward they could not decide whom they admired most—Lady Helena's stately magnificence, Dora's sweet, simple elegance, or the Princess Borgezi's statuesque Grecian beauty. ...
— Dora Thorne • Charlotte M. Braeme
... and took up her old work, and Mr. Slotman practised temporarily a courtesy and a forbearance that were foreign to him. But Mr. Slotman had by no means given up his hopes and desires. Joan appealed to him as no woman ever had. He admired her statuesque beauty. He admired her air of breeding; he admired the very pride that she had attempted to ...
— The Imaginary Marriage • Henry St. John Cooper
... appearance: Maria was a delicate blonde, with a riant face, and an animated manner—we had said almost peculiarly Irish—rushing at conclusions, where her more thoughtful and careful sister paused to consider and calculate. The beauty of Jane was statuesque, her deportment serious yet cheerful, a seriousness quite as natural as her younger sister's gayety; they both labored diligently, but Anna Maria's labor was sport when compared to her elder sister's careful toil; Jane's mind was of a more lofty order, she was intense, and felt more ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... pure. Her form has rather the statuesque roundness of Psyche than the luxurious excess of Venus. Timid, yet not tremulous, graceful even to delicacy, coquettish in outline, her beauty is formed for smiles. She is a still-eyed Xenobi, but knows nothing of Passion with disheveled locks, divine frenzy, ...
— Trifles for the Christmas Holidays • H. S. Armstrong
... of development thus indicated she steadily advanced. Her affiliations were with grandeur, purity, and loveliness. An inherent and passionate tendency toward classic stateliness increased in her more and more. Characters of the statuesque order attracted her imagination—Ion, Galatea, Hermione—but she did not leave them soulless. In the interpretation of passion and the presentation of its results she revealed the striking truth that her perceptions could discern those consequences ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... his muddy Epoch. Sure enough, he was a proud lofty solemn Kaiser, infinitely the gentleman in air and humor; Spanish gravities, ceremonials, reticences;—and could, in a better scene, have distinguished himself by better than mere statuesque immovability of posture, dignified endurance of ennui, and Hapsburg tenacity in holding the grip. It was not till 1735, after tusslings and wrenchings beyond calculation, that he would consent to quit the Shadow ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume V. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... accustomed to find his admiration or attention always acceptable to the young ladies of his acquaintance, and the demeanour of Gladys was at once new and interesting to him. He determined to cultivate her acquaintance, and to awaken that fair, statuesque maiden into life. ...
— The Guinea Stamp - A Tale of Modern Glasgow • Annie S. Swan
... Colette, statuesque and sublime, caught the flash of radiance that illumined the face of her pastor, and her heart-strings responded ...
— Amarilly of Clothes-line Alley • Belle K. Maniates
... Duchess Mary Isabella was statuesque, classical; her features were noble. She received admiration as her right, but gave not largesse of smiles and wit in return. She was not as the Devonian divinity, "The woman in whose golden ...
— Some Old Time Beauties - After Portraits by the English Masters, with Embellishment and Comment • Thomson Willing
... towards a girl who, if they had not been so plaguily intent on honouring his fame, might have now been replacing the Mayoress at his side. True, the girl was merely a Jewess, and he disliked the breed. But Mabel Aaronsberg was unexpected. She had a statuesque purity of outline and complexion; seemed, indeed, worthy of being a creation of his own. How the tedious old manufacturer could have produced this marmoreal prodigy provided a problem for the sculptor, as he almost silently ate his way through ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... walked round me, looked at me from behind and before, and examined with grave interest the construction of my seat. In front of me sat an olive and lemon seller. Girls bargained with him as best they could in the press, others stood and looked on. I had an opportunity here of watching their innate statuesque grace. When they spoke, the right arm kept time with their speech. When silent, they generally placed one hand on the hip, bent, but not clenched. There were various types. The little blonde, blue-eyed girl with the mild Madonna smile, and absolutely straight nose, and ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... that Uncle George's eyelids were drooping slowly and William's sudden statuesque calm would have surprised many ...
— More William • Richmal Crompton
... mountains. The movement fixed her attention instantly. It was the instinct of one who lives in a country where the eyes and ears of a horse are often keener and more far-reaching than those of its human masters. The horse was gazing with statuesque fixedness across a waste of partially-melted snow. A stretch of ten miles lay flat and smooth as a billiard-table at the foot of the rise upon which the house was built. And far out across ...
— The Story of the Foss River Ranch • Ridgwell Cullum
... dropped his knife, and sat statuesque and expressionless. "Go on," he said hoarsely. "Tell me ...
— The House of Whispers • William Le Queux
... along the trail toward water, halted as a burst of laughter broke upon his startled ears. For a moment he stood statuesque but for his sensitively dilating nostrils; then he wheeled and fled noiselessly from the terrifying presence ...
— Jungle Tales of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... Moorsom emerged from the shadows side by side, a well-matched couple, animated yet statuesque in their calmness and in their pallor. She had let go his wrist. On catching sight of ...
— Within the Tides • Joseph Conrad
... upon the plank flooring. Her face was glowing with her four-mile walk in the hot sun, but she showed no signs of weariness. The position in which she stood was easy and graceful, but there was nothing statuesque or imposing about it; it was evident that at the very next instant she might shift into another equally as happy. Her eyes wandered from one object to another with the absence of concentration of one whose mind is not fixed upon any thing in particular. From the letter ...
— Bressant • Julian Hawthorne
... Madame Carthame, blissfully ignorant of the fact that she had neglected to remove her nightcap, stood up in her place, with her wrapper gathered about her in a statuesque fashion, and in a tragic tone uttered ...
— Short Story Classics (American) Vol. 2 • Various
... the fence, aimlessly lounging, there was a look on his face of a half-suppressed expectancy, which rendered the features less statuesque than was their wont—an expectancy that showed itself in the furtive lifting of his eyelids now and then, enabling him to survey the doorway without turning his head. Suddenly his face reassumed its habitual, ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... reached this period of life. Her form was ripening into a noble and statuesque symmetry; the light in her eyes shot forth from darkening depths; a faint bloom was creeping into her cheek; a soft smile was wreathing those lips, wrought by nature, into a somewhat haughty curve; ...
— Adele Dubois - A Story of the Lovely Miramichi Valley in New Brunswick • Mrs. William T. Savage
... by their favorite messenger! With what grace he opens the carriage door! with what majesty he mounts to his seat by the driver! I wonder if he has a sister. She would be worth a journey to see. I have met such women on their native soil, statuesque, slender, full-breasted, square-shouldered, with jars of water on their heads and clinking silver anklets. What a cursed thing is our American prejudice against color! No other people carries it to such an extent. In the Latin Quarter the West India blacks ...
— A Black Adonis • Linn Boyd Porter
... moment, he had leapt over the partition and darted into the room. There, stretched out across the floor, his head lying on the hearthrug, his hands lying inert and nerveless at his sides, lay an old man, grey-bearded, venerable—Daniel Multenius, no doubt. He lay very still, very statuesque—and Lauriston, bending over and placing a trembling hand on the high, white forehead, knew that ...
— The Orange-Yellow Diamond • J. S. Fletcher
... or read of other people having or imagining, that little raid I made with Gibberne on the Folkestone Leas, under the influence of the New Accelerator, was the strangest and maddest of all. We went out by his gate into the road, and there we made a minute examination of the statuesque passing traffic. The tops of the wheels and some of the legs of the horses of this char-a-banc, the end of the whip-lash and the lower jaw of the conductor—who was just beginning to yawn—were perceptibly in motion, but all the rest of the ...
— Twelve Stories and a Dream • H. G. Wells
... retreat for the night, he turned to retrace his way to the outer end of the entrance that he might block it with boulders against Numa's return, but even with the thought there came something to his sensitive ears that froze him into statuesque immobility with eyes glued upon the tunnel's mouth. A moment later the head of a huge lion framed in a great black mane appeared in the opening. The yellow-green eyes glared, round and unblinking, straight at the trespassing Tarmangani, a low growl rumbled from the deep chest, ...
— Tarzan the Untamed • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... prancing behind Lord George on his Roman-nosed charger; he, depend on it, would be for getting off his horse if he had the permission. He did not hesitate about trifles, as we know; but he was a very truth-telling and honorable soldier: and as for heroic rank and statuesque dignity, I would wager a dozen of '20 port against a bottle of pure and sound Bordeaux, at 18s. per dozen (bottles included), that he never would think of claiming any such absurd distinction. They have got a statue of Thomas Moore at Dublin, I hear. Is he on horseback? Some men should ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... had gone the set, statuesque features relaxed. A stricken look settled like a shadow over them. You would have said, "It will never depart: that ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, April, 1876. • Various
... unfortunate Minty's fuller and ampler curves had under her simple country stays known no more restraining cincture than knew the Venus of Milo. The alteration was a hideous failure, it was neither Minty's statuesque outline nor Louise Macy's graceful contour. Minty was no fool, and the revelation of this slow education of the figure and training of outline—whether fair or false in art—struck her quick intelligence with all its full and hopeless significance. A bitter light sprang to her eyes; ...
— A Phyllis of the Sierras • Bret Harte
... statues, heads pointed across the gully. They were more than a mile distant. When Gale looked without his glass they merged into the roughness of the lava. He was intensely interested. Did the sheep see the red scarf? It seemed incredible, but nothing else could account for that statuesque alertness. The sheep held this rigid position for perhaps fifteen minutes. Then the leading ram started to approach. The others followed. He took a few steps, then halted. Always he held his ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... the line behind him pushed him on. Cabinet Members; Senators and Representatives; prominent citizens, mostly Judge so-and-so, or Colonel this-or-that. It was all a blur, so much so that it was an instant before I recognized the gleaming golden hair and the statuesque figure. ...
— Lone Star Planet • Henry Beam Piper and John Joseph McGuire
... now was most remarkable; his complexion had assumed an ivory whiteness which lent his face a sort of statuesque beauty. He was cleanly shaven (somewhat of a novelty), and his hair was brushed back from his brow. But the dark ...
— The Yellow Claw • Sax Rohmer
... thought the journey too long. Louise came out and sat by me awhile as I lay in the hammock. She was all in white. A trifle taller and a bit more slender than her sister, I have sometimes thought her beauty was statelier, also, and more statuesque. The sight of her seemed to kindle in me the spirit of old chivalry. I would have fought and died for her with my best lance and plume. In all my life I had not seen a woman of sweeter graces of speech and manner, and, in truth, I have met some of ...
— D'Ri and I • Irving Bacheller
... the distance, flitting indistinctly against the gloomy border of the forest, and near the river two bronze figures, leaning on tall spears, stood in the sunlight under fantastic head-dresses of spotted skins, warlike and still in statuesque repose. And from right to left along the lighted shore moved a wild and gorgeous apparition of ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
... the deep blue of midnight, with the faint tints of dawn, with strange flowers and birds, with moths, and moons, and stars. Lengths of white silk clear as the notes of violins playing in a minor key; white poplin falling into folds statuesque as the bass of a fugue by Bach; yards of ruby velvet, rich as an air from Verdi played on the piano; tender green velvet, pastoral as hautboys heard beneath trees in a fair Arcadian vale; blue turquoise faille fanciful as the tinkling of a guitar twanged by a Watteau shepherd; gold brocade, ...
— Muslin • George Moore
... me quietly resolute, but one or two of his comrades looked half-ashamed and as though they wished themselves anywhere else, while the lads who rode with Carrington were manifestly uneasy. Still, the grim, erect figure sitting almost statuesque on the splendid horse dominated the picture. At length Carrington indicated me with a glance which, though I was ashamed of the fact afterward, made ...
— Lorimer of the Northwest • Harold Bindloss
... medal by the jury. The architectural beauty of these groups, in relation to the arched panels of the pylons forming their background, is worthy of study. It will be seen that the group, in spite of its statuesque quality, is actually part of the wall surface. The beauty of the ensemble is greatly enhanced by the ...
— The Sculpture and Mural Decorations of the Exposition • Stella G. S. Perry
... The statuesque calm of Pitt's personality charmed and overawed this impressionable Irishman from the time of their first interview in the summer of 1792. Always versatile and sometimes shifty, he seems instinctively to have felt in him the ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... acrolith, caryatid; xoanon. Associated Words: sculpture, statuary, sculptor, statuesque, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... pictures of peasants in the northern Italian pictures, with the same curious nobility, the same aristocratic, eternal look of motionlessness, something statuesque. His head was hard and fine, the bone finely constructed, though the skin of his face was loose and furrowed with work. His temples had that fine, hard clarity which is seen in Mantegna, an almost ...
— Twilight in Italy • D.H. Lawrence
... breakfast, and, to my shame be it acknowledged, a sort of farewell merry-go-round dance on the yellow sands with a dozen young persons all light-hearted as the morning, beautiful as the flowers that bound their hair, and in the extremity of statuesque attire. ...
— Gulliver of Mars • Edwin L. Arnold
... charming fair one, whose graces were of an irregular pattern—whose nose has a heavenward inclination—who pretends to no strictness of beauty, according to absurd rules laid down in drawing-books—why is she brought into such fatal juxtaposition with this other severe and classical-looking and statuesque lady! To be merely a foil? Much obliged, Mr. Sherwin! The offended belle expressing angry and ironic gratitude sweeps from the painter's studio, gathering her rustling skirts together that they may not be soiled by the least contact with the canvases and plaster casts, and other art-paraphernalia ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook
... figures of the upper part are designed with all the dignity and statuesque repose belonging to an earlier style, and they are painted on a ground of gold and tapestry, as was constantly the practice in earlier times: but united with the traditional type we already find a successful representation of life and nature in ...
— Six Centuries of Painting • Randall Davies
... upon his face; his features fixed themselves into such rigidity of grief that they became more expressive than if they had been distorted by passionate emotions; and over his brow collected cloud upon cloud, which deepened and darkened every instant till they overshadowed all; and his face in its statuesque fixedness resembled nothing so much as that which the artist gives to Napoleon at the crisis hour of Waterloo, when the Guard has recoiled from its last charge, and from that Imperial face in its fixed agony the soul itself ...
— Cord and Creese • James de Mille
... lying prone upon a couch beside him was swathed by a sheet which came almost to its eyes. But the shadows were leaving the bubble now. And Odin saw that it was Maya. Asleep. Statuesque. Like a carving upon ...
— Hunters Out of Space • Joseph Everidge Kelleam
... Janet shrugged her large statuesque shoulders when Alexina communicated her fears. What was war to her? England at least would have sense enough to keep out of it. Aileen came over after a convincing talk with her father looking ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton
... struck, Mark could be seen to grow suddenly less statuesque. His arms would drop to his side, and then as it rushed up towards where he stood, like some mighty sea-monster seeking to make him its prey, Mark's hands joined above his head, he bent forward slightly, and then with one tremendous leap seemed ...
— A Terrible Coward • George Manville Fenn
... party is condemned to the Cassandra role of uttering true prophecies which find no credence among those who wield the power of putting them to good account. M. Bratiano's appropriate attitude may be described as statuesque. Occasionally his Press organs commented upon the manifestations of the interventionists in words barbed with bitter sarcasm and utilitarian maxims. "Roumania's blood and money," the Independence Roumaine explained, "must be spent only in the furtherance ...
— England and Germany • Emile Joseph Dillon
... net, holding fast when the pull of the tide is too strong, and pausing irritably to pick out the fish. We stepped the great mast, shifted all the ballast to wind'ard. John came aft to steer, and seated himself on the counter, a strangely powerful, statuesque figure in his wet oilskins. "Have 'ee got the sheet in yer hand?" Tony called ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds
... a lady riding across the moor behind them. She was mounted on one of the Orme horses, was habited by Redfern, who had done justice to her superb and supple figure, and the sunlight which poured from between the clouds fully revealed the statuesque beauty ...
— At Love's Cost • Charles Garvice
... filed around the table, and glee and song once more prevailed, William began to soften in his statuesque attitude, and laughingly proposed that we "go a poaching" on the imprisoned animals and birds that Squire Lucy corraled for his special delectation, to the detriment of honest apprentices ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce
... had to consult Marcos, one of the Iragola brothers. Near a wood, in front of his house in the shade, they found him seated on a stump of a chestnut tree, always grave and statuesque, his eyes inspired and his gesture noble, in the act of making his little brother, still ...
— Ramuntcho • Pierre Loti
... at once, for now Driscoll understood the strategic outlay. Its key was Fra Diavolo, with a pistol at Ney's head, and quite statuesque the romantic Mexican looked. But out of the tail of his eye Fra Diavolo noted the American, at first with contemptuous amusement only. Then, as though such had been the situation from the start, he grew aware of an ugly black muzzle under his chin. For very safety ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... lines on one cheek, as if a duo-toothed comb had been drawn from cheek-bone to jaw, and, but for the good-humor that beamed from her small berry-like eyes and shone in her white teeth, would have been repulsive. She was short and stout. In her scant drapery and unrestrained freedom she was hardly statuesque, and her more unstudied attitudes were marred by a simian habit of softly scratching her left ankle with the toes of her right foot, in moments ...
— Mrs. Skaggs's Husbands and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... seemed disposed to intensify his misery. "Did you ever see a more statuesque creature—with those superb broad shoulders and that little head, and that thick braid brought round over the top? Doesn't her face, with that calm look in those starry eyes, and that peculiar fall ...
— Indian Summer • William D. Howells
... of that exquisite tint which in felicitous French phraseology is termed de couleur de fleur de pecher, and swept down from her slender figure in statuesque folds that ended in a long court train, particularly becoming in the pose she had selected. The Elizabethan ruff, with an edge of filmy lace, softened the effect of the bodice cut squares across the breast, and revealed the string of pearls—Leicester's last gift—that ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... at the door again with superhuman vigour. Behind me I heard Dona Rita laughing softly, statuesque, turned all dark in the fading glow. I called out to her quite openly, "Do keep your self-control." And she called back to me in a clear voice: "Oh, my dear, will you ever consent to speak to me after all this? But don't ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... room could be seen the tawny hues of naked flesh, limbs thrust into the darkness, projecting beyond the cots; upreared knees, arms hanging long and thin over the cot edges. For the most part they were statuesque, carven, dead. With the curious lockers standing all about like tombstones, there was a strange effect of a graveyard where bodies ...
— Men, Women, and Boats • Stephen Crane
... with the worries so much dampness had wrought for their powder and bow strings. Suddenly one of them raised his head, deerlike, to listen. As wild things they all responded, and the group of men was statuesque as it listened to the beat of horses' hoofs. As a flock of blackbirds leaves a bush—with one motion—the statuary dissolved into a kaleidoscopic twinkle of movement as the warriors grabbed and ran and gathered. They sought their ...
— The Way of an Indian • Frederic Remington
... of Heshbon, and a nobly modelled neck, short at the back and low between her shoulders in front. Unlike her sister she is uncorseted and dressed anyhow in a rich robe of black pile that shows off her white skin and statuesque contour. ...
— Heartbreak House • George Bernard Shaw
... squaw in a red sprigged muslin? Indeed, there is indescribable piquancy in this unconscious grouping of the pickers and their freedom from restraint. For each artistic bit—a laughing face in an aureole of amber clusters, a statuesque chin and throat, Indians in grotesquely picturesque raiment, and the yellow visages of the Chinese—the vines make an idyllic framing with a sinking summer sun in the background lending a shimmering transparency ...
— The California Birthday Book • Various
... moment to see whether Cleer would speak again; he wanted to hear that pleasant voice once more; but as she held her peace, he merely raised his hat, and accepting the dismissal, continued his walk round the cliffs alone. Yet, somehow, the rest of the way, the figure of that statuesque stranger haunted him. He looked back once or twice. The descendant of the Bassets of Tehidy had now resumed his high pedestal upon the airy tor, and was gazing away seaward, like the mystic Great Vision of his own Miltonic quotation, toward ...
— Michael's Crag • Grant Allen
... a younger daughter's license. She was a statuesque young woman with a pose, ripe lips, flashing white teeth, laughing eyes with an imp of mischief in them, and an exquisitely turned-up nose that was neither the Brentwood, which was severely classic, nor the Grimkie, which was ...
— The Grafters • Francis Lynde
... else, they would have been swamped thirty times over during the course of Lantenac's harangue. Again, after Lantenac has landed, we have scenes of almost inimitable workmanship that suggest the epithet "statuesque" by their clear and trenchant outline; but the tocsin scene will not do, and the tocsin unfortunately pervades the whole passage, ringing continually in our ears with a taunting accusation of falsehood. And then, when we come to the place where Lantenac meets the royalists, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... another totally wrong. There can be no new Washington discovered, because there never was but one. But the real man has been so overlaid with myths and traditions, and so distorted by misleading criticisms, that, as has already been suggested, he has been wellnigh lost. We have the religious or statuesque myth, we have the Weems myth, and the ludicrous myth of the writer of paragraphs. We have the stately hero of Sparks, and Everett, and Marshall, and Irving, with all his great deeds as general and president duly recorded and set down in polished and eloquent ...
— George Washington, Vol. I • Henry Cabot Lodge
... to him, and the saint who saw the daemons; and the metaphysical elements took form. "Piety itself is no aim, but only a means whereby, through purest inward peace, we may attain to highest culture." And his penetration of every secret of the fine arts will make Goethe still more statuesque. His affections help him, like women employed by Cicero to worm out the secret of conspirators. Enmities he has none. Enemy of him you may be,—if so you shall teach him aught which your good-will cannot,—were it only what experience will accrue from your ...
— Representative Men • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... so tumultuously that its beats became audible. He had singled out one maiden whose height and graceful proportions distinguished her from her companions,—Madeleine! Her face was turned from him; but surely that statuesque outline, that slender, flexible throat, that exquisitely-shaped head, about which he thought he traced the coronal braid that usually crowned her noble brows,—these could belong to Madeleine only! ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... these painfully decadent and painfully nascent Times, with their distresses, inarticulate gaspings and 'impossibilities;' meeting a tall Lifeguardsman in his snow-white trousers, or seeing those two statuesque Lifeguardsmen in their frowning bearskins, pipe-clayed buckskins, on their coal-black sleek-fiery quadrupeds, riding sentry at the Horse-Guards,—it strikes one with a kind of mournful interest, how, in such universal down-rushing and wrecked impotence of almost ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... in one of her carefully cultivated, statuesque poses, watched her cousin cross the street and disappear into a narrow and shabbily painted doorway there. Then she took his advice, and producing a red morocco wrist bag from under the counter, shut the necklace into it with a ...
— The Wishing Moon • Louise Elizabeth Dutton
... suddenly ceased keeping the world in a turmoil; and when he ceased, as they said after the death of Roland, there was a great quiet upon the earth. But in his best days (I mean, of course, his worst) Flambeau was a figure as statuesque and international as the Kaiser. Almost every morning the daily paper announced that he had escaped the consequences of one extraordinary crime by committing another. He was a Gascon of gigantic stature and bodily daring; and the wildest tales were told of his outbursts of athletic ...
— The Innocence of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... you thinking?" asked Adele of her companion, whose countenance she had been watching with a little amused attention, arrested by the absorbed expression which seemed to have seized and fixed every feature into a statuesque repose. ...
— The Awakening and Selected Short Stories • Kate Chopin
... Kralahome, like the idol of ebony before the demon had entered it! while around him these elfin worshippers, with flushed cheeks and flashing eyes, tossing arms and panting bosoms, whirl in their witching waltz. He is a man to be wondered at,—stony and grim, his huge hands resting on his knees in statuesque repose, as though he supported on his well-poised head the whole weight of the Maha Mongkut [Footnote: "The Mighty Crown."] itself, while at his feet these brown leaves ...
— The English Governess At The Siamese Court • Anna Harriette Leonowens
... few moments; and behind him came dear Violet Grafton, as I will still call her, smiling. Mordaunt's face glowed with pleasure, and the grasp of his strong hand was like a vice. He was unchanged, except that he wore a suit of plain gray cloth. His statuesque head, with the long black beard and mustache, the sparkling eyes, and cheeks tanned by exposure to the sun and wind, rose as proudly as on that morning in 1865, when he had charged and cut through the enemy ...
— Mohun, or, The Last Days of Lee • John Esten Cooke
... not a whit more warmed by Zenobia's passion than a salamander by the heat of its native furnace. He would have been absolutely statuesque, save for a look of slight perplexity, tinctured strongly with derision. It was a crisis in which his intellectual perceptions could not altogether help him out. He failed to comprehend, and cared but little for comprehending, why Zenobia should put herself into such a fume; but satisfied ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... forth across the room with nervous, rapid steps, her hands clasped back of her head and the wide sleeves of the robe slipped back, showing the perfect arms. She seemed a trifle taller than when in Paris that first springtime, and the open robe revealed a figure statuesque, perfect as a sculptor's ideal, yet without the statue's coldness; for the uncovered throat and bosom held delicious dimples where the robe fell apart and was swept ...
— The Bondwoman • Marah Ellis Ryan
... match," said Miss Holmes to Harut who was engaged in putting more tobacco into the bowl, the suspicion of a smile upon his grave and statuesque countenance. Harut received the match with a low bow and fired the stuff as before. Then he handed the bowl, from which once again the blue smoke curled upwards, to Miss Holmes, and gently and gracefully let the antimacassar ...
— The Ivory Child • H. Rider Haggard
... his eyes of black and gold never wavering; statuesque, his heroic body set solidly upon his sturdy legs, his regal head high, his lodestone feet secure upon the sloping rock, he was a handsome figure. He outweighed me about three pounds to one; so the longer I looked at him, the less desire I had to crowd. At length I mustered up courage to try ...
— A Mountain Boyhood • Joe Mills
... her well. There is something statuesque in her whole appearance. I could not help thinking what an admirable Camilla she would make in Cimarosa's Orazii. Her features are singularly regular. They had not much play, but the expression of her voice was such as if she felt the full ...
— Gryll Grange • Thomas Love Peacock
... these, the boy, John, grew up. When he was ten years old, Jacob Perkins, though in some fear, performed the sacred duty promised to his mother on that memorable morning, when he looked upon her pale, statuesque countenance for the last time. A flush covered the boy's face, as he received the locket, and understood from whence it came. He stood for some minutes, wholly abstracted, as if under the spell of ...
— The Allen House - or Twenty Years Ago and Now • T. S. Arthur
... snowy shoulders that, rising out of the glistening blue and white, were striped with a glistening red, but the snowy shoulders and fair hair of poor Olga Blomgren. Thus had she paid for her hour of magnificence. Thus had death cut her down because the maid's form was of the same statuesque beauty as her mistress's. Tenderly the doctor stooped to lift up the dead girl, stricken in her mistress's stead. There was a poniard in her throat, and it impaled a piece of paper upon ...
— The Strange Adventures of Mr. Middleton • Wardon Allan Curtis
... trusted here, and Vasari gives her a bad character, which Browning completes. Andrea painted her often, notably in the fresco of the "Nativity of the Virgin," to which we shall soon come at the Annunziata: a fine statuesque woman by no means unwilling to have the most popular artist ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... and hearts of the folk who live their lives in the wild, there are bred certain animal traits. The good trapper learns that, like rabbit or bob-cat, he must be able to freeze into statuesque immobility at the sudden appearance of danger. Nature, who does her best to protect her children, sees to it that the trapper's costume soon resembles nothing so much as a hoary tree-trunk. And the men who tramp the wild gradually assimilate the silent, furtive ...
— The Wilderness Trail • Frank Williams
... admiration of the strangers in return. He felt that in the case of Euphemia, who sometimes evinced a laudable curiosity in his pleasures, and a flattering ignorance of his reading, this might be pardonable; but what any one could find in the useless statuesque Clementina passed his comprehension. Could they not see at once that she was "just that kind of person" who would lie abed in the morning, pretending she was sick, in order to make Phemie do the housework, and make him, John Milton, clean her boots and fetch things for her? Was it not perfectly ...
— A First Family of Tasajara • Bret Harte
... of Holland. Beauty is a rare flower in Holland, as in all other countries; notwithstanding, in a walk of a hundred steps in the wood at the Hague I saw many more beautiful women than I had seen in all the pictures in the Dutch galleries. These ladies do not possess the statuesque beauty of the Romans, the splendid color of the English, nor the vivacity of the Andalusians; but there is about them a refinement, a delightful innocence and grace, a tranquil beauty, a pleasing countenance; ...
— Holland, v. 1 (of 2) • Edmondo de Amicis
... by her influence that he had taken no count of her general mould and build. He remembered now that she was not a large figure, that she was light and slight, of the type dubbed elegant. That was about all he had seen. There was nothing statuesque in her; all was nervous motion. She was mobile, living, yet a painter might not have called her handsome or beautiful. But the much that she was surprised him. She was quite a long way removed from the rusticity that was his. How could one of his cross-grained, unfortunate, almost accursed ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... Mocetto there is for once a Dionysus treated differently. The cold light of the background displays a barren hill, the bridge and towers of [42] an Italian town, and quiet water. In the foreground, at the root of a vine, Dionysus is sitting, in a posture of statuesque weariness; the leaves of the vine are grandly drawn, and wreathing heavily round the head of the god, suggest the notion of his incorporation into it. The right hand, holding a great vessel languidly ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... statuesque about her," said Pepton, who ardently admired her, "and yet there isn't. A statue could never equal her unless we knew there was a probability of movement in it. And the only statues which have that are the Jarley wax-works, which ...
— The Magic Egg and Other Stories • Frank Stockton
... of all was her simplicity—a simplicity that was not only in the calm regularity of her face, with its statuesque evenness of contour, its broad surface of cheek and forehead and the masses of her straight smooth hair, but was apparent as well in the long line of her carriage, from her foot to her waist and the single deep swell from her waist to her shoulder. Almost ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... the young girl's memory as she gazed at the cold, statuesque face of her lover's father. It seemed as if he held his tall, noble figure more haughtily erect than usual, and that his plain dark garments were of richer material and more faultless cut than ever; nay, she even fancied that, like the lion, which crouches ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... other people, had meant to economize this summer; but now she made a sudden start for Newport. Irene certainly was peerless in her half-mourning, with her statuesque figure. But there was not an eligible at Newport, so they turned their steps Saratoga-ward. And here they found an old admirer of Mrs. Minor's, Gordon Barringer, a widower for the second time, the owner of a silver-mine ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas
... sculptured bird, a bird cut out of beautifully variegated marble—blue-gray, buff, and chestnut, and placed against the tree to deceive the eye. The figure is so smooth and compact, the tints so soft and stone-like; and when he is still, he is so wonderfully still, and his attitude so statuesque! But he is never long still and when he resumes his lively, eccentric, up-and-down and sidewise motions, he is interesting in another way. He is like a small woodpecker who has broken loose from the woodpecker's somewhat ...
— Our Bird Comrades • Leander S. (Leander Sylvester) Keyser
... later Robbie had reached one of the chairs and dropped into it with a limpness strangely inharmonious with her statuesque proportions. "Bea, they ...
— Beatrice Leigh at College - A Story for Girls • Julia Augusta Schwartz
... legitimate possessor of that right is still at fault. If fascination is the bond by which the man can be held, why does she not make use of it herself? A face of statuesque beauty that knows not how to smile has often been the cause of ...
— Manasseh - A Romance of Transylvania • Maurus Jokai
... and followed the footman through several wide corridors filled with palms and flowers, which formed a kind of winter-garden, until we crossed a red-carpeted ante-room, where two statuesque sentries stood on guard, and the man conducting me rapped at the great polished mahogany doors ...
— The Czar's Spy - The Mystery of a Silent Love • William Le Queux
... shrug; and, for all their statuesque beauty, the movement of her shoulders was like the shrug of a little ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... Cornaro, the gallant queen of the island of Cypress, painted by Titian, and whose name she worthily bore. For years Alba had been so proud of the ray of seduction cast forth by the Countess, so proud of those statuesque arms, of the superb carriage, of the face which defied the passage of time, of the bloom of opulent life the glorious creature displayed. During that dinner she was almost ...
— Cosmopolis, Complete • Paul Bourget
... in hastily, for Katie was gone. The statuesque lady became informed with life; she started ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... had seen his gesture, and something in the thought that impelled it, as well as the almost statuesque pose of his thinly-clad figure, appealed to her. Courthorne as farmer, with the damp of clean effort on his forehead and the stain of the good soil that would faithfully repay it on his garments, had very little in common with the profligate and gambler. Vaguely she wondered ...
— Winston of the Prairie • Harold Bindloss
... perched General Jackson, at the national Capital. Nor is this "first in peace" by any means "the first" on horseback; the figure being theatric rather than dignified, and the extended arm more gymnastic than statuesque. ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... must glance back to that evening when John Scott, Marquis of Arondelle, first met Salome Levison. He had met many statuesque, pink and white beauties in his young life; and he had admired each and all with all a young man's ardor. But not one of them had touched his heart, as did the first full gaze of those large, soft gray eyes that were lifted to his and ...
— The Lost Lady of Lone • E.D.E.N. Southworth
... in these painfully decadent, and painfully nascent times, with their distresses, inarticulate gaspings, and 'impossibilities;' meeting a tall lifeguardsman in his snow-white trousers, or seeing those two statuesque lifeguardsmen, in their frowning bearskins, pipe-clayed buckskins, on their coal-black, sleek, fiery quadrupeds, riding sentry at the Horse-Guards—it strikes one with a kind of mournful interest, how, in such universal down-rushing and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... forbade that he should take Joan in to dinner, Ashe was glad that at least an apparently pleasant substitute had been provided. He had just been introduced to an appallingly statuesque lady of the name of Chester, Lady Ann Warblington's own maid, and his somewhat hazy recollections of Joan's lecture on below-stairs precedence had left him with the impression that this was his destined partner. He ...
— Something New • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... was a spectacle of physical degeneracy while Guy Little became a grotesque dwarf. The grandfather was much like the grandson, and—though she vowed to like him the less for it—was in his statuesque, leonine way quite the handsomest man ...
— Man to Man • Jackson Gregory
... was disconcerted he certainly did not show it. His was a face eminently calculated to conceal whatever thought or feeling might be passing through his mind. Of an even white complexion—verging on pastiness—he was handsome in a certain statuesque way. His features were always composed and dignified; his hair, thin and straight, was never out of order, but ever smooth and sleek upon his high, narrow brow. His eyes had that dulness which is characteristic of many Frenchmen, and may perhaps ...
— The Sowers • Henry Seton Merriman
... fakir on the little stone, and, carefully holding him by his protruding ribs, he lifted him and put him on the ground. The ascetic remained as statuesque as before. Then Gulab-Sing took the stone in his hands and showed it to us, asking us, however, not to touch it for fear of offending the crowd. The stone was round, flattish, with rather an uneven surface. When laid on the ground it ...
— From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan • Helena Pretrovna Blavatsky
... should be made quite wide, and may be protected by a flap, as in that excellent overall the modern Inverness cape; secondly, it should not be too tight, as otherwise all freedom of walking is impeded. If the young gentleman in the drawing buttons his overcoat he may succeed in being statuesque, though that I doubt very strongly, but he will never succeed in being swift; his super-totus is made for him on no principle whatsoever; a super-totus, or overall, should be capable of being worn long or ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... he said. "Only there's a statuesque old lady about two tables back of you who has been staring at you, with intervals for refreshment, for the last five minutes. You seem to ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse
... as the brave who had been in love with Glen Naspa. The moment Nas Ta Bega saw this visitor he made a singular motion with his hands—a motion that somehow to Shefford suggested despair—and then he waited, somber and statuesque, for the messenger to come to him. It was the Piute who did all the talking, and that was brief. Then the Navajo stood motionless, with his hands crossed over his breast. ...
— The Rainbow Trail • Zane Grey
... came nearer to it. He had the English taste for red and white, and for cold outlines: he secretly admired a statuesque demeanour with a statue's eyes. The national approbation of a reserved haughtiness in woman, a tempered disdain in her slightly lifted small upperlip and drooped eyelids, was shared by him; and Constance Asper, if not exactly aristocratic by birth, stood well for ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Cleer would speak again; he wanted to hear that pleasant voice once more; but as she held her peace, he merely raised his hat, and accepting the dismissal, continued his walk round the cliffs alone. Yet, somehow, the rest of the way, the figure of that statuesque stranger haunted him. He looked back once or twice. The descendant of the Bassets of Tehidy had now resumed his high pedestal upon the airy tor, and was gazing away seaward, like the mystic Great Vision of his own Miltonic quotation, toward the Spanish coast, wrapped ...
— Michael's Crag • Grant Allen
... band of the same colour encircled her shapely, though not noticeably slender, waist. Her bosom was rather full for so young a woman, so that, notwithstanding her perfect freshness and air of almost childlike simplicity, there was a certain statuesque quality in the effect of her white-clad figure seen thus in the shaded library, with its russet-red walls and furnishings ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... of warfare that morality always presents itself to Browning. It is not a mere equilibrium of qualities—the measured, self-contained, statuesque ethics of the Greeks, nor the asceticism and self-restraint of Puritanism, nor the peaceful evolution of Goethe's artistic morality: it is valour in the battle of life. His code contains no negative commandments, and no limitations; but he bids each ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... direction of development thus indicated she steadily advanced. Her affiliations were with grandeur, purity, and loveliness. An inherent and passionate tendency toward classic stateliness increased in her more and more. Characters of the statuesque order attracted her imagination—Ion, Galatea, Hermione—but she did not leave them soulless. In the interpretation of passion and the presentation of its results she revealed the striking truth that her perceptions could discern those consequences that ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... said Mr. Amarinth. "That is so wonderful. He never develops at all. He alone understands the beauty of rigidity, the exquisite serenity of the statuesque nature. Men always fall into the absurdity of endeavouring to develop the mind, to push it violently forward in this direction or in that. The mind should be receptive, a harp waiting to catch the winds, ...
— The Green Carnation • Robert Smythe Hichens
... passed the window, causing her to start. The figure was that of a man. She rose from the piano with a cry, and stood erect, motionless, statuesque. ...
— The House of Whispers • William Le Queux
... and statuesque, and his voice was deep and resonant ... but, though pleased with his stature and his vocal qualifications, Van Maarden decided on me to play the lead in his abnormal play.... I did not possess as fine a voice, but I knew ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... in the hottest zone but two of a Turkish bath, alternately inert in statuesque contemplation and rapidly manoeuvring a fountain-pen over the pages of ...
— The Chronicles of Clovis • Saki
... waited for a few minutes longer. If there is magic in the Stone, let it work, he thought; and so he sat and watched her until he saw that the fixed stare of her eyes and the rigidity of her now perfectly statuesque face convinced him that the magic of the Stone had, as Phadrig had told him, made him the possessor of it, absolute master of the man or woman who had gazed upon its ...
— The Mummy and Miss Nitocris - A Phantasy of the Fourth Dimension • George Griffith
... could be seen to grow suddenly less statuesque. His arms would drop to his side, and then as it rushed up towards where he stood, like some mighty sea-monster seeking to make him its prey, Mark's hands joined above his head, he bent forward slightly, and ...
— A Terrible Coward • George Manville Fenn
... restrained acting of the French stage. It is likely, too, that the very inexperience and lack of knowledge of artifice to which Mr. Yeats refers was an element in making the art of the company what it became. But it is not altogether impossible that certain traditions of the English stage—of the statuesque acting of the Kembles, for instance—had come down into the time of Mr. Fay's stage experience, to those days before he became stage manager of the performances of "The Daughters of Erin" in 1900, and that these traditions influenced his training ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... said Miss Holmes to Harut who was engaged in putting more tobacco into the bowl, the suspicion of a smile upon his grave and statuesque countenance. Harut received the match with a low bow and fired the stuff as before. Then he handed the bowl, from which once again the blue smoke curled upwards, to Miss Holmes, and gently and gracefully let the antimacassar fall over ...
— The Ivory Child • H. Rider Haggard
... there were nothing else, they would have been swamped thirty times over during the course of Lantenac's harangue. Again, after Lantenac has landed, we have scenes of almost inimitable workmanship that suggest the epithet "statuesque" by their clear and trenchant outline; but the tocsin scene will not do, and the tocsin unfortunately pervades the whole passage, ringing continually in our ears with a taunting accusation of falsehood. And then, when we come to the place where Lantenac ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... and eyes that varied from gray to blue and from gray to brown, according to the light in which you saw them. Her hands were thin and shapely, her nose straight, her face artistically narrow. She was not brilliant, not active, but rather peaceful and statuesque without knowing it. Cowperwood was carried away by her appearance. Her beauty measured up to his present sense of the artistic. She was lovely, he thought—gracious, dignified. If he could have his choice of a wife, this was the kind of a girl he ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... scantily covered by a tunic of light-red cloth; in the right hand a whip; in the other, the arm raised and lightly extended, the four lines. The pose was exceedingly graceful and animated. The cheers and clapping of hands were received with statuesque indifference. Ben-Hur stood transfixed—his instinct and memory had served ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... she stood in a shaft of moonlight falling between the sombre firs, and her face was marble-like; her whole pose was statuesque, all the girlish gentleness of the other days seemed to have fled from her, and her hour of tribulation had invested her with a dignity and force of will that sat well upon her stately figure. Harry beheld her with something like terror. This was not the woman he loved. His cause had never seemed ...
— The Gold-Stealers - A Story of Waddy • Edward Dyson
... del Sarto appears from the first as a foreigner, the one colourist of the school, only a Florentine in this, that much of his work is, as it were, monumental, composing itself really—as with the Madonna delle Arpie or the great Madonna and Saints of the Pitti, for instance—into statuesque groups, into sculpture. So if we admit that Leonardo and Michelangelo were rather universal than Florentine, the most characteristic work of the school lies in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, in the work of Giotto, so full of great, simple thoughts of ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... unflinchingly; his eyes of black and gold never wavering; statuesque, his heroic body set solidly upon his sturdy legs, his regal head high, his lodestone feet secure upon the sloping rock, he was a handsome figure. He outweighed me about three pounds to one; so the longer I looked at him, the less desire I had to crowd. At length I mustered ...
— A Mountain Boyhood • Joe Mills
... reached one of the chairs and dropped into it with a limpness strangely inharmonious with her statuesque proportions. "Bea, they belong to ...
— Beatrice Leigh at College - A Story for Girls • Julia Augusta Schwartz
... time regarding his wife's silent form. She was a woman some years older than himself, but had not by any means overpassed the maturity of good looks and vigour. Her passionate features, well-defined, firm, and statuesque in life, were doubly so now: her mouth and brow, beneath her purplish black hair, showed only too clearly that the turbulency of character which had made a bear-garden of his house had been no temporary phase of her existence. ...
— Wessex Tales • Thomas Hardy
... and painfully nascent Times, with their distresses, inarticulate gaspings and 'impossibilities;' meeting a tall Lifeguardsman in his snow-white trousers, or seeing those two statuesque Lifeguardsmen in their frowning bearskins, pipe-clayed buckskins, on their coal-black sleek-fiery quadrupeds, riding sentry at the Horse-Guards,—it strikes one with a kind of mournful interest, how, in such universal down-rushing and wrecked impotence of almost all old institutions, ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... phase it had reached when first I saw her? The classic form of her features, the noble poise of her head and neck, her stately height, her uncoloured yet pure complexion, caused some of the beholders at first to call her beauty statuesque, and others to call it majestic, some pronouncing it to be even imperious; but she was so intellectual, so keen, so autocratic, sometimes even so impassioned in speech, that nobody feeling her powers could go on feebly comparing her to a statue or a mere Queen or Empress. ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon
... generation. Unluckily he has long been out of office, and his party is condemned to the Cassandra role of uttering true prophecies which find no credence among those who wield the power of putting them to good account. M. Bratiano's appropriate attitude may be described as statuesque. Occasionally his Press organs commented upon the manifestations of the interventionists in words barbed with bitter sarcasm and utilitarian maxims. "Roumania's blood and money," the Independence Roumaine explained, "must be spent only in the furtherance of Roumania's ...
— England and Germany • Emile Joseph Dillon
... tea." Still, he carried the irreducible minimum of flesh on his bones, and his hollow cheeks and shrunken jaws threw his massive forehead into striking prominence. His line of features was absolutely faultless in its statuesque regularity, but his face was saved from the insipidity of too great perfection by the imperious—rather ruthless—lines of his mouth and the penetrating lustre of his deep-set eyes. His dress—a black cassock edged and buttoned with crimson, with ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... page and to honor his art,—and of the sculptor, and the poet, likewise, each of whom, ranging divine ground, remarks upon the objects there presented according to the law of his profession. As the picturesque, the statuesque, the poetical in the Bible are legitimate studies, so also ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... could regain its feet the knife had found its heart. As Tarzan rose upon the body of his kill to scream forth his hideous victory cry into the face of the moon the wind carried to his nostrils something which froze him to statuesque immobility and silence. His savage eyes blazed into the direction from which the wind had borne down the warning to him and a moment later the grasses at one side of the clearing parted and Numa, the lion, strode majestically into view. His yellow-green eyes were fastened upon ...
— Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... tragedy is absent in French. The quasi-supernatural religious awe that reigned over Greek tragedy, French tragedy does not affect. You miss also in French tragedy the severe simplicity, the self-restraint, the statuesque repose, belonging to the Greek model. Loftiness, grandeur, a loftiness somewhat strained, a grandeur tending to be tumid, an heroic tone sustained at sacrifice of ease and nature—such is the element in which French tragedy lives and flourishes. You must grant your French ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... was not Manuel who stood by the horses in the white track between the laurels. It was a figure as statuesque as his, but younger, and the pose was not that of a servant. It was the stand-at-ease of a soldier, or of an Indian wrapped in his blanket in the city square. This man was conscious of being looked at, but his training, of whatever ...
— A Touch Of Sun And Other Stories • Mary Hallock Foote
... boat; hand over hand, buoy by buoy, net by net, holding fast when the pull of the tide is too strong, and pausing irritably to pick out the fish. We stepped the great mast, shifted all the ballast to wind'ard. John came aft to steer, and seated himself on the counter, a strangely powerful, statuesque figure in his wet oilskins. "Have 'ee got the sheet in yer hand?" Tony ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds
... delicate bloom which any young beauty of the court might have envied. Her figure was graceful and queenly, her gestures and pose full of a natural dignity, and her voice, as he had already remarked, most sweet and melodious. Her face was handsome rather than beautiful, set in a statuesque classical mould, with broad white forehead, firm, delicately sensitive mouth, and a pair of large serene gray eyes, earnest and placid in repose, but capable of reflecting the whole play of her soul, from the merry gleam of humour to the quick flash ...
— The Refugees • Arthur Conan Doyle
... infantry were well out on the field, he followed in glittering column of pieces, his satin-coated horses dancing in sheer exuberance of spirits and his red-crested cannoneers sitting with folded arms, erect and statuesque, upon the ammunition-chests. Mrs. Cram, in her pretty basket phaeton, with Mrs. Lawrence, of the infantry, and several of the ladies of the garrison in ambulances or afoot, had taken station well to the front of the forming line. Then it became apparent that old Brax purposed to figure ...
— Waring's Peril • Charles King
... of the great new siege guns they are trying on the lower meadows. Sit down, dear, for a moment. Do be careful—you are getting"—she hesitated—"hysterical. There will be another presently. Do sit down, dear aunt. Don't be nervous." She was alarmed by her aunt's silent statuesque position. She could have applied no wiser remedy than her warning advice. No woman likes to be told she is nervous or hysterical and now it acted with the certainty of ...
— Westways • S. Weir Mitchell
... lift it to his back before she succeeded in accomplishing the Herculean task, and had it been any other horse upon the ranch than Brazos the thing could never have been done; but the kindly little pony stood in statuesque resignation while the heavy Mexican tree was banged and thumped against his legs and ribs, until a lucky swing carried it to ...
— The Mucker • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... Roman-nosed charger; he, depend on it, would be for getting off his horse if he had the permission. He did not hesitate about trifles, as we know; but he was a very truth-telling and honorable soldier: and as for heroic rank and statuesque dignity, I would wager a dozen of '20 port against a bottle of pure and sound Bordeaux, at 18s. per dozen (bottles included), that he never would think of claiming any such absurd distinction. They have got a statue of Thomas Moore at ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... there the holly stood green and statuesque in occasional clumps. And thus we fared on to Mashpee. The Mashpees, very mild and genial descendants of the "Chawums," if descendants they are, live quietly in little yellow houses that do not look prosperous, though the children are fat and the elders contented. Modern ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard
... exhibited in the department of Fine Arts and awarded a medal by the jury. The architectural beauty of these groups, in relation to the arched panels of the pylons forming their background, is worthy of study. It will be seen that the group, in spite of its statuesque quality, is actually part of the wall surface. The beauty of the ensemble is greatly enhanced ...
— The Sculpture and Mural Decorations of the Exposition • Stella G. S. Perry
... been given to topics so obscure as inquiries into the character of the Indian mind—if, indeed, it was thought the Indian had any mind at all. It was still supposed that the Indian was, at all times and in all places, "a stoic of the woods," always statuesque, always formal, always passionless, always on stilts, always speaking in metaphors, a cold embodiment of bravery, endurance, and savage heroism. Writers depicted him as a man who uttered nothing but high principles of natural right, who always harangued eloquently, and was ready, ...
— The Myth of Hiawatha, and Other Oral Legends, Mythologic and Allegoric, of the North American Indians • Henry R. Schoolcraft
... with the usual arrangement of treble doors, padded with leather to exclude the cold and guarded by two 'proud young porters' in severe cocked hats and formidable batons, into a broad hall,—threw off our furred boots and cloaks, ascended a carpeted marble staircase, in every angle of which stood a statuesque footman in gaudy coat and unblemished unmentionables, and reached a broad landing upon the top thronged as usual with servants. Thence we passed through an antechamber into a long, high, brilliantly lighted, saffron-papered ...
— Memoir of John Lothrop Motley, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... straw-hat, and was using it as a fan, keeping up a light tattoo with one foot upon the plank flooring. Her face was glowing with her four-mile walk in the hot sun, but she showed no signs of weariness. The position in which she stood was easy and graceful, but there was nothing statuesque or imposing about it; it was evident that at the very next instant she might shift into another equally as happy. Her eyes wandered from one object to another with the absence of concentration of one whose mind is not ...
— Bressant • Julian Hawthorne
... point one day a Lynx appeared statuesque on a stranded cake of ice, a hundred yards off, and gazed at the approaching boats. True to their religion, the half-breeds seized their rifles, the bullets whistled harmlessly about the "Peeshoo"—whereupon ...
— The Arctic Prairies • Ernest Thompson Seton
... cry of pain Helen's eyes shut tight and she groped for her napkin. And to make a good job of it the Fates dragged in at that moment Helen's guardian aunt, the tall and statuesque Mrs. ...
— Officer 666 • Barton W. Currie
... without prognathism, and fine almond-shaped eyes, with remarkably thick and silky lashes. The throat is thin, the bosom is high and well carried, or, as the admiring Arab says, "nejda;" the limbs are statuesque, and the hands and feet are Norman rather than Saxon. Many Europeans greatly admire these minois ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... about a stolid squaw in a red sprigged muslin? Indeed, there is indescribable piquancy in this unconscious grouping of the pickers and their freedom from restraint. For each artistic bit—a laughing face in an aureole of amber clusters, a statuesque chin and throat, Indians in grotesquely picturesque raiment, and the yellow visages of the Chinese—the vines make an idyllic framing with a sinking summer sun in the background lending a shimmering ...
— The California Birthday Book • Various
... depends on himself much, on the beholder much. Onlookers differ in opinion. Painters have their clientage. Poets are not omniscient; neither are we, a thing we are prone to forget. For myself, I confess not to see with those who deride the king, nor yet with those who think him statuesque, as if shaped, not out of flesh, but out of marble. He is not incredible, nor is he a shadow, stalking gaunt and battle-clad across the crags that fringe the Cornish sea. Not a few among us approximate perfection in character as blameless ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... could fill the place hitherto occupied in the mind by, let us say, the Hermes of Praxiteles. Yet this idea still obtained at Bayreuth, and Rosa Sucher walked about, her arms raised and posed above her head, in the conventional, statuesque attitude designed for the decoration ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... Julia, the heroine, a prey to guilty passion; the severe but kindly high priestess; Licinius, the adventurous lover, and his faithful friend Cinna; pious vestals, cruel priests, bold warriors, and haughty Romans, are represented with statuesque relief and finish. Both these works, 'La Vestale' (1802) and 'Cortez' (1809), ire among the finest that have been written for the stage; they are remarkable for naturalness and sublimeness, qualities lost sight of in the noisy instrumentation of ...
— Great Italian and French Composers • George T. Ferris
... lie, and he knew it; the thought of losing her, cold and statuesque as she was to him, made him miserable, filled his heart with a keen pain—a pain which had brought very near the inevitable revelation that he was bound to make to himself. Alexia raised her head and looked at him, but she did not speak. He ...
— A Bachelor's Dream • Mrs. Hungerford
... had had his solitary meal in the famous back parlour of the Phoenix, where the newspapers lay, and all comers were welcome. He was by no means a bad hero to look at, if such a thing were needed. His face was pale, melancholy, statuesque—and his large enthusiastic eyes, suggested a story and a secret—perhaps a horror. Most men, had they known all, would have wondered with good Doctor Walsingham, why, of all places in the world, he should have chosen the little town where he now ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... that moment caused the maid to fall into statuesque composure, and the painter to put his frowning head tremendously to one side as he stepped back in order to make quite sure that the last touch was really equal, if not superior, ...
— The Middy and the Moors - An Algerine Story • R.M. Ballantyne
... very picturesque assembly. Indians dress in an endless variety of fashions. Some in their native costumes looked as statuesque and beautiful as the ancient Greeks; others as ridiculous as a ...
— Oowikapun - How the Gospel Reached the Nelson River Indians • Egerton Ryerson Young
... Kelson answered, without enthusiasm. "Rather too cold and statuesque for my taste, although I have heard she has a bit of the devil in her. Quite a sportswoman, and as good after hounds as her brother. They say she had a thin time of it with her step-mother, and has come out wonderfully since the old lady died. Lord Painswick, ...
— The Hunt Ball Mystery • Magnay, William
... made out in the distance, flitting indistinctly against the gloomy border of the forest, and near the river two bronze figures, leaning on tall spears, stood in the sunlight under fantastic headdresses of spotted skins, warlike and still in statuesque repose. And from right to left along the lighted shore moved a wild and gorgeous apparition ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
... Miss Lloyd might have put away one as a sentimental souvenir, but to my mind she did not seem the kind of a girl to do that. I knew my reasoning was absurd, for what man can predicate what a woman will do? but at the same time I could not seem to imagine the statuesque, imperial Miss Lloyd tenderly preserving a rose that her lover had ...
— The Gold Bag • Carolyn Wells
... in a universal brotherhood, baffled and perverted although the effort has been in various ways, appears to have no parallel in ethical history. There is none in the Greek philosophers or the Roman Stoics, high as some of them may soar in their way. Aristotle's ideal man is perfect in its statuesque fashion, but it is not fraternal; it is not even philanthropic. Nor does the Christian character or the effort to create it depart with belief in dogma. Do not men who have totally renounced the dogma still cultivate a character ...
— No Refuge but in Truth • Goldwin Smith
... and his eyes like some mad animal's flashing with light and resolution, yet with a certain strange calmness, holds aloft in one hand a large knife—walks along not much back from the footlights—turns fully toward the audience his face of statuesque beauty, lit by those basilisk eyes, flashing with desperation, perhaps insanity—launches out in a firm and steady voice the words Sic semper tyrannis—and then walks with neither slow nor very rapid pace diagonally across to the back of the stage, and disappears. (Had not all this terrible ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... shoulders and the bewitching shape, who "no doubt understood,"—he dropped in often at the little bookstore, to begin with a "how-do?" and conclude with an "au revoir,"—the ineffable puppy! upon whose vicious vanity the cold, still, statuesque scorn of Miss Wimple was grandly lost. At last, at the Splurge house one evening, in the presence of Adelaide and Simon, he was betrayed by his egotism into boasting, by insinuation, of certain successes at the Circulating Library most damaging to Miss ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II., November, 1858., No. XIII. • Various
... back and took up her old work, and Mr. Slotman practised temporarily a courtesy and a forbearance that were foreign to him. But Mr. Slotman had by no means given up his hopes and desires. Joan appealed to him as no woman ever had. He admired her statuesque beauty. He admired her air of breeding; he admired the very pride that she had attempted ...
— The Imaginary Marriage • Henry St. John Cooper
... mighty pair - Slow, statuesque, intense - Amid the vague Immense: None can their chronicle declare, Nor ...
— Poems of the Past and the Present • Thomas Hardy
... that Madame Carthame, blissfully ignorant of the fact that she had neglected to remove her nightcap, stood up in her place, with her wrapper gathered about her in a statuesque fashion, and in a tragic ...
— Short Story Classics (American) Vol. 2 • Various
... maintaining the rights of a brother under circumstances of peril, of desertion, and consequently of perfect self-reliance. Iphigenia, again, though not dramatically coming before us in her own person, but according to the beautiful report of a spectator, presents us with a fine statuesque model of heroic fortitude, and of one whose young heart, even in the very agonies of her cruel immolation, refused to forget, by a single indecorous gesture, or so much as a moment's neglect of her own princely descent, and that she ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... term, than to attitude and declamation. The actors raised on high boots above their natural height, their faces hidden in masks and their tones mechanically magnified, must have relied for their effects not upon facial play, or rapid and subtle variations of voice and gesture, but upon a certain statuesque beauty of pose, and a chanting intonation of that majestic iambic verse whose measure would have been obscured by a rapid and conversational delivery. The representation would thus become moving sculpture to the eye, and to the ear, as it were, a sleep of music ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... some drapery which she wound about her after the fashion Lady Hamilton was said to do, and represented, like her, the Muses, and various statues. With the curtain and one light she managed to give a very statuesque effect. Mr. Lewis was evidently very proud of her grace and talent, and she had a pretty, wilful, bird-like way with him, that was fascinating, and did not seem, as I thought it must really be, mechanical. I felt, more than ever, how idle it must be to talk with ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... room. There, stretched out across the floor, his head lying on the hearthrug, his hands lying inert and nerveless at his sides, lay an old man, grey-bearded, venerable—Daniel Multenius, no doubt. He lay very still, very statuesque—and Lauriston, bending over and placing a trembling hand on the high, white forehead, ...
— The Orange-Yellow Diamond • J. S. Fletcher
... and of a few persons of the neighborhood. The object of these entertainments on a grand scale is, above all, to celebrate the visit of Monsieur de Malouet's only daughter, who comes every year to spend the autumn with her family. She is a person of statuesque beauty, who amuses herself with queenly dignity, and who communicates with ordinary mortals by means of contemptuous mono-syllables uttered in a deep bass voice. She married, some twelve years ago, an Englishman, a member of the diplomatic corps, Lord A——, a personage ...
— Led Astray and The Sphinx - Two Novellas In One Volume • Octave Feuillet
... which has the most important bearing upon Michelangelo's genius. After designing the architectural theatre which I have attempted to describe, and filling its main spaces with the vast religious drama he unrolled symbolically in a series of primeval scenes, statuesque figures, and countless minor groups contributing to one intellectual conception, he proceeded to charge the interspaces—all that is usually left for facile decorative details—with an army of passionately felt and wonderfully ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... their pocket, and the other on their heart! Be it so for the present; we shall see how long this statuesque attitude can be maintained; meantime, it chances strangely—as several other things have chanced while I was writing these notes to you—that they should have put in that sneer (two lines before) at my note on ...
— Time and Tide by Weare and Tyne - Twenty-five Letters to a Working Man of Sunderland on the Laws of Work • John Ruskin
... the kitchen was prolonged, and Mr Verloc felt disappointed. He had expected his wife to say something. But Mrs Verloc's lips, composed in their usual form, preserved a statuesque immobility like the rest of her face. And Mr Verloc was disappointed. Yet the occasion did not, he recognised, demand speech from her. She was a woman of very few words. For reasons involved in the very foundation of his psychology, Mr Verloc was inclined to put his ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad
... ceased keeping the world in a turmoil; and when he ceased, as they said after the death of Roland, there was a great quiet upon the earth. But in his best days (I mean, of course, his worst) Flambeau was a figure as statuesque and international as the Kaiser. Almost every morning the daily paper announced that he had escaped the consequences of one extraordinary crime by committing another. He was a Gascon of gigantic stature ...
— The Innocence of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... were unaccustomed to such a mood, or if his features were incapable of assuming the guise, it seems questionable whether he could really have been entitled to a marble immortality. In point of fact, however, the English face and form are seldom statuesque, however ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... other people having or imagining, that little raid I made with Gibberne on the Folkestone Leas, under the influence of the New Accelerator, was the strangest and maddest of all. We went out by his gate into the road, and there we made a minute examination of the statuesque passing traffic. The tops of the wheels and some of the legs of the horses of this char-a-banc, the end of the whip-lash and the lower jaw of the conductor—who was just beginning to yawn—were perceptibly in ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... not be seen, anyone looking at the balance of the head, the statuesque neck, would have surmised ...
— The Four Canadian Highwaymen • Joseph Edmund Collins
... embraced all departments of life as by an instinct. Every divinity was made a plain figure to the mind, every mystery was symbolized in some positive beautiful myth, and every conception of whatever object became statuesque and clear. This artistic character was possible to them from the comparatively limited range of pagan imagination; their thought rarely dwelt in those regions where reason loves to ask the aid of mysticism, and all remote ideas, like ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... a mistake! Is he blind? The mansion, which was a moment before ablaze, is now all dark! But the bride still stands under the lamp on the portico, statuesque as Zenobia or Medea. The statue grasps a paper. Like ...
— David Lockwin—The People's Idol • John McGovern
... helped and completed them she almost held them a positive hindrance to success—success of the only kind she esteemed. Far oftener than himself she had sat in judgement on young women for whom hair and eyebrows and a disposition for the statuesque would have worked the miracle of sanctifying their stupidity if the miracle were workable. But that particular miracle never was. The qualities she rated highest were not the gifts but the conquests, the effects the actor had worked hard for, had dug out of the mine by unwearied study. Sherringham ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... Aunt Helen remarked upon my paleness. It was an unusually silent meal for a Christmas gathering. My father, as I remembered later, seemed absorbed and dull. Aunt Agnes had shown me by a glance that the events of the previous day were not unknown to her. She sat glum and statuesque; but I did not attempt either to brave or to mollify her displeasure, for I knew that compared with the secret in my possession, the wretched affair with Paul Barr would seem to her a mere trifle. I wondered, however, what she would think of such ...
— A Romantic Young Lady • Robert Grant
... charming little toilettes with fresh flowers, a few trinkets, and all manner of dainty devices, which were both inexpensive and effective. It must be confessed that the artist sometimes got possession of the woman, and indulged in antique coiffures, statuesque attitudes, and classic draperies. But, dear heart, we all have our little weaknesses, and find it easy to pardon such in the young, who satisfy our eyes with their comeliness, and keep our hearts merry with ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott
... comrades leaving him to fret in monkish solitude while they were off to the wars again. Wind and tide served, and in a few minutes the Lively Polly rounded the point, and looking back, I saw the yellow haze of the afternoon sun sifted sleepily over all the place; the knots of white-clad people standing statuesque and motionless as they gazed; the flag of Mexico faintly waving in the air; and with a sigh of relief slumbrous veil seemed to fall over all the scene; and as our boat met the roll of the current outside the headland, the gray rocks of the point shut out the fading view, and we saw ...
— Stories by American Authors (Volume 4) • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... bring the coffee-pot away from the fire, and nearer Rand, with the apparent intention of examining its contents in a better light; in vain, while wiping a plate, did she, absorbed in the distant prospect, walk to the verge of the mountain, and become statuesque and forgetful. The sulky young gentleman took no outward ...
— The Twins of Table Mountain and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... grounds in the late summer afternoon, her blue-lined parasol making an azure sky over her golden head, her white dress draping her slender figure in a strikingly statuesque way. She is the kind of girl to madden men and win admiration on the right hand and on the left, and he does like the women on whom the world sets a signet of approval. No sweet domestic drudge for him, and if Violet has a fault, it is this tendency. When a man begins to discover ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... whom he had known and loved so long. That one was ever present in his mind, and had been for years—her image was never absent. Through the years he had feasted his soul in meditations upon her grand calm, her sublime self-poise, her statuesque beauty, her superiority to all human weakness, whether of love or of remorse. Even in those collisions into which she had come with him she had risen in his estimation. At Chetwynde she had shown some weakness, but in her attitude ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... de Justice at Rouen or the Hotel Cluny at Paris. Its frontispiece is marvellous, the rez-de-chaussee less gracious than the rest perhaps, but with the first story blooming forth as a gem of magnificent proportions and setting. Between the four windows of this first story are posed statuesque effigies of Charles VII, Jeanne d'Arc, Saint Remy and Louis IX. In the centre, in a niche, is an equestrian statue of Louis XII, who reigned when this monument was being built. A balustrade a jour finishes off this story, which, in turn, is overhung with a high, peaked ...
— Royal Palaces and Parks of France • Milburg Francisco Mansfield
... tragedy of Ysabel Herrera. Estenega stood enraptured, watching every motion of her body, every expression of her face. The blood blazed in her cheeks, her eyes were like green stars and sparkled wickedly. The cold curves of her statuesque mouth were warm and soft, her chin was saucily uplifted, her heavy waving hair fell over her shoulders to her knees, a glittering veil. Where had The Doomswoman, the proud daughter of ...
— The Doomswoman - An Historical Romance of Old California • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... Of the theories put forward, that which carries the most presumptive evidence must go to the credit of the old Spanish Pointer. Where else could they inherit that wonderful scenting power, that style in which they draw up to their game, their statuesque attitude when on point, and, above all, the staunchness and patience by which they hold their game spellbound until the shooter has time to walk leisurely up, even ...
— Dogs and All About Them • Robert Leighton
... scope. As the painter becomes aware of what at first he had ignored, he adds colour to outline, modelling to colour, and finally an observant rendering of tints and values. This process gives back to objects their texture and atmosphere, and the space in which they lie. From a representation which is statuesque in feeling and which renders figures by furnishing a visible inventory of their parts and attributes, the artist passes to considering his figures more and more as parts of a whole and as moving in an ambient ether. They tend accordingly to lose their ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... and a nobly modelled neck, short at the back and low between her shoulders in front. Unlike her sister she is uncorseted and dressed anyhow in a rich robe of black pile that shows off her white skin and statuesque contour. ...
— Heartbreak House • George Bernard Shaw
... plumes, while others carried flags and banners emblazoned with texts and symbols. Troops of horsemen in white woollen cloaks, sheikhs and Bedouins with flowing robes and huge turbans, religious chiefs of the great sects, imperturbable and statuesque, were in strange contrast to the shouting dervishes and camel-drivers ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... the door again with superhuman vigour. Behind me I heard Dona Rita laughing softly, statuesque, turned all dark in the fading glow. I called out to her quite openly, "Do keep your self-control." And she called back to me in a clear voice: "Oh, my dear, will you ever consent to speak to me after all this? But don't ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... a poem or a short piece that detaches itself, and assumes something like ejaculatory and statuesque proportion, as "O Captain, my Captain," "Pioneers," "Beat, Beat, Drums," and others in "Drum-Taps;" but all the great poems, like "Walt Whitman," "Song of the Open Road," "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry," "To Working Men," "Sleep-Chasings," etc., are out-flamings, out- rushings, of the ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... if the Gallery of the Kings ever served as a background for anything lovelier or more high-bred than that untitled slip of a girl from 'the States.' Her trailing gown of pearl-white satin fell in unbroken lustrous folds behind her. Her beautiful throat and shoulders rose in statuesque whiteness from the mist of chiffon that encircled them. Her dark hair showed a moonbeam parting that rested the eye, wearied by the contemplation of waves and frizzes fresh from the curling-tongs. Her mother's pearls hung in ropes from neck to waist, and the one spot of colour about her was ...
— Penelope's Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... surprised a secret vital to the safety of one's self and comrades—an enemy more formidable for his knowledge than all his army for its numbers? Carter Druse grew pale; he shook in every limb, turned faint, and saw the statuesque group before him as black figures, rising, falling, moving unsteadily in arcs of circles in a fiery sky. His hand fell away from his weapon, his head slowly dropped until his face rested on the leaves in which he lay. This courageous gentleman and hardy ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. II: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians • Ambrose Bierce
... attenuated French corset, and the unfortunate Minty's fuller and ampler curves had under her simple country stays known no more restraining cincture than knew the Venus of Milo. The alteration was a hideous failure, it was neither Minty's statuesque outline nor Louise Macy's graceful contour. Minty was no fool, and the revelation of this slow education of the figure and training of outline—whether fair or false in art—struck her quick intelligence with all its full and hopeless ...
— A Phyllis of the Sierras • Bret Harte
... she put forward the blossoms and the dignity of a woman. Never yet did my eye light upon creature that was born of woman, nor could it enter my heart to conceive one, possessing a figure more matchless in its proportions, more statuesque, and more deliberately and advisedly to be characterized by no adequate word but the word magnificent, (a word too often and lightly abused.) In reality, speaking of women, I have seen many beautiful figures, but hardly one except Agnes that could, without hyperbole, be styled truly and memorably ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... fair one, whose graces were of an irregular pattern—whose nose has a heavenward inclination—who pretends to no strictness of beauty, according to absurd rules laid down in drawing-books—why is she brought into such fatal juxtaposition with this other severe and classical-looking and statuesque lady! To be merely a foil? Much obliged, Mr. Sherwin! The offended belle expressing angry and ironic gratitude sweeps from the painter's studio, gathering her rustling skirts together that they may not be soiled by the least contact ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook
... question had turned Joe Lewis's word against him, when a tall Indian arose and spread his blanket open like a wing. He stood for a time silent, statuesque, and thoughtful. The men waited seriously to hear what he ...
— The Log School-House on the Columbia • Hezekiah Butterworth
... cards for the past two months, Fanny's idea of Jacob was more statuesque, noble, and eyeless than ever. To reinforce her vision she had taken to visiting the British Museum, where, keeping her eyes downcast until she was alongside of the battered Ulysses, she opened them and got ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... feet away, a strapping great lad in livery stood musing, motionless, statuesque, useless, like that purely decorative warrior whom one sees in the most tumultuous of Mantegna's paintings, lost in dreams, leaning upon his shield, while all around him are fighting and bloodshed and ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... drizzle. The warriors began drying their robes and their weapons—preoccupied with the worries so much dampness had wrought for their powder and bow strings. Suddenly one of them raised his head, deerlike, to listen. As wild things they all responded, and the group of men was statuesque as it listened to the beat of horses' hoofs. As a flock of blackbirds leaves a bush—with one motion—the statuary dissolved into a kaleidoscopic twinkle of movement as the warriors grabbed and ran and gathered. They sought their ...
— The Way of an Indian • Frederic Remington
... the Caterina Cornaro, the gallant queen of the island of Cypress, painted by Titian, and whose name she worthily bore. For years Alba had been so proud of the ray of seduction cast forth by the Countess, so proud of those statuesque arms, of the superb carriage, of the face which defied the passage of time, of the bloom of opulent life the glorious creature displayed. During that dinner she was almost ...
— Cosmopolis, Complete • Paul Bourget
... to his lack of appreciation of others, for according to the favorable comment his comely appearance created, he seemed to be filled with indifference; while with me, as I warmed into high enthusiasm over certain well-defined representatives of the angelic sex, coolness, growing to statuesque frigidity, would develop in the object of my devotions, and the beauty whose charms had bedeviled me into insomnia and wild-eyed desperation became related to me thereafter as the angel surmounting the tombstone that marked the resting place of ...
— Cupid's Middleman • Edward B. Lent
... fair sex of Holland. Beauty is a rare flower in Holland, as in all other countries; notwithstanding, in a walk of a hundred steps in the wood at the Hague I saw many more beautiful women than I had seen in all the pictures in the Dutch galleries. These ladies do not possess the statuesque beauty of the Romans, the splendid color of the English, nor the vivacity of the Andalusians; but there is about them a refinement, a delightful innocence and grace, a tranquil beauty, a pleasing countenance; they have, as a French writer has rightly said, the attraction of the valerian flower which ...
— Holland, v. 1 (of 2) • Edmondo de Amicis
... the coffin-lid. As we did so there came from the inside a stupefying and overpowering smell of chloroform. A body lay within, its head all wreathed in cotton-wool, which had been soaked in the narcotic. Holmes plucked it off and disclosed the statuesque face of a handsome and spiritual woman of middle age. In an instant he had passed his arm round the figure and raised her to ...
— The Disappearance of Lady Frances Carfax • Arthur Conan Doyle
... carried in a chair to the bars to receive her sorrowing lover. Her pale face retained its statuesque beauty of outline, but so ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... rose and followed the footman through several wide corridors filled with palms and flowers, which formed a kind of winter-garden, until we crossed a red-carpeted ante-room, where two statuesque sentries stood on guard, and the man conducting me rapped at the great polished mahogany doors of the ...
— The Czar's Spy - The Mystery of a Silent Love • William Le Queux
... With what grace he opens the carriage door! with what majesty he mounts to his seat by the driver! I wonder if he has a sister. She would be worth a journey to see. I have met such women on their native soil, statuesque, slender, full-breasted, square-shouldered, with jars of water on their heads and clinking silver anklets. What a cursed thing is our American prejudice against color! No other people carries it to such an extent. In the Latin Quarter ...
— A Black Adonis • Linn Boyd Porter
... name the man in the cab turned sharply and looked up. Gheta was leaning out, and his gaze fastened upon her with a sudden and extraordinary intensity. Lavinia saw that her sister, without dissembling her interest, sat forward, statuesque and lovely. It seemed to the former that the cab was an intolerable time passing; she wished to draw Gheta back, to cover her indiscretion from Anna Mantegazza's prying sight. She sighed with inexplicable relief when she saw that the man had driven ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... but for the good-humor that beamed from her small berry-like eyes and shone in her white teeth, would have been repulsive. She was short and stout. In her scant drapery and unrestrained freedom she was hardly statuesque, and her more unstudied attitudes were marred by a simian habit of softly scratching her left ankle with the toes of her right foot, in ...
— Mrs. Skaggs's Husbands and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... waist, and the contrast was as great as the resemblance. Broad, equally broad, and superbly muscled, the saloon-keeper was, if anything, heavier, but there was just a suspicion of bloat over all his frame. Jim was clean built, statuesque—a Jason rather than a Hermes. He was by six inches taller, but the other had just as long a reach. And, as the officious patrons of the "pub" strapped on the gloves and made the usual preparation of wet sponge and towel, ...
— The Preacher of Cedar Mountain - A Tale of the Open Country • Ernest Thompson Seton
... they had to consult Marcos, one of the Iragola brothers. Near a wood, in front of his house in the shade, they found him seated on a stump of a chestnut tree, always grave and statuesque, his eyes inspired and his gesture noble, in the act of making his little brother, still in swaddling clothes, ...
— Ramuntcho • Pierre Loti
... long, voluminous skirts of their double-breasted frock-coats. Flo gazed with frank animation in her eyes, but Forrest never saw her until after he had waved adieu to his German friends, standing in statuesque and superb precision at the salute beyond the foaming ...
— A Tame Surrender, A Story of The Chicago Strike • Charles King
... was no sound by the standards of human ears, yet to the highly attuned and delicate organs of the beast a message seemed to be borne to the savage brain. A wondrous transformation was wrought in the motionless mass of statuesque bone and muscle that had an instant before stood as though carved out ...
— The Beasts of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... that hundreds of wild horses together in one drove, captive and knowing it, were collected in this great trap. The intense vitality of them, the vivid coloring, the beautiful action of many and the statuesque immobility of the majority, were thrilling and all satisfying to ...
— Valley of Wild Horses • Zane Grey
... him could have scarcely been unpleasing to the most fastidious eye. The girl's face, drooping over her work, was very fair. The features were delicate and statuesque in their form; the large hazel eyes were very beautiful—all the more beautiful, perhaps, because of a soft melancholy that subdued their natural brightness; the smooth brown hair rippling upon the white forehead, which was low ...
— Henry Dunbar - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... if he resorted to cold cream, and before I knew what I was doing, I found myself staring at the statuesque brown ...
— The Motor Maid • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... much rather care for children than attend to the other duties of the little house she owns; but the white spreads on the beds and the spotless kitchen is no indication of this fact. She has a passion for the good old times when the Negroes had security with no responsibility. Her tall, statuesque appearance is in direct contrast to the present-day conception of ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves: The Ohio Narratives • Works Projects Administration
... springtime resembling a light pearl-colored mist, which had none of the qualities of a fog, but rather lent a weird transparency to the air. It gave the impression of sunlight faded or washed of its golden particles, or of a picture drawn on pearl. There was a statuesque stillness about the water, a near and yet a far look about the entire scene, which imparted a sense of unreality, almost ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various
... them held in her hand; and now the heart of Maurice throbbed so tumultuously that its beats became audible. He had singled out one maiden whose height and graceful proportions distinguished her from her companions,—Madeleine! Her face was turned from him; but surely that statuesque outline, that slender, flexible throat, that exquisitely-shaped head, about which he thought he traced the coronal braid that usually crowned her noble brows,—these could belong to Madeleine only! Could he fail to recognize ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... prerogative of Christian morality, that for obedience to a precept it substitutes following a Person, and instead of saying to men 'Be good' it says to them 'Be Christlike.' It brings the conception of duty out of the region of abstractions into the region of living realities. For the cold statuesque ideal of perfection it substitutes a living Man, with a heart to love, and a hand to help us. Thereby the whole aspect of striving after the right is changed; for the work is made easier, and companionship comes in to ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... distributed in largesses to the people and the army on the occasion of his inauguration. Meantime, as respected the present, the qualities of the young man were amply fitted to sustain a Roman popularity; for, in addition to his extreme and statuesque beauty of person, he was (in the report of one who did not wish to color his character advantageously) "memor families suce, comptus, decorus, oris venerandi, eloquentice, celsioris, versufacilis, in republic etiam non inutilis." Even as a military officer, he had a respectable [Footnote:— "nam ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... dead silence among the men as the soft white ball of smoke rose slowly and steadily, expanding the while and changing its shape till it became utterly diffused. The occupants of the schooner's deck were statuesque in their rigidity, the crew to a man gazing hard at the captain as they strained their hearing to catch his next command; the captain fixed his eyes from one side upon Uncle Paul, while Rodd stood upon the other with his lips apart, gazing questioningly in his uncle's ...
— The Ocean Cat's Paw - The Story of a Strange Cruise • George Manville Fenn
... town; she herself was known to be upon the high seas bound for Europe; Matilda's gown and veil were a most unsuspicious disguise; and William, her paragon of a William, so rigidly upright on the seat before her—William's statuesque, unapproachable figure diffused about her a sense of absolute security. She relaxed, sank back into the upholstery of the carriage, and began fully to ...
— No. 13 Washington Square • Leroy Scott
... the first readers it probably made no difference at all. Here again that process of "vivification," which has been so often dwelt on, makes an astonishing progress—the blood and colour of the novel, which distinguish it from the more statuesque narrative, are supplied, if indirectly yet sufficiently and, in comparison with previous examples, amply. Here you get, almost or quite for the first time in the English novel, those spurts and sparks of animation which only the living voice ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... her to become rigid, almost statuesque. Sudden terror often acts thus upon women of her highly nervous temperament. She allowed me to lead her downstairs and back to the dining room. On the way I met Short in the hall, and ordered him to go at ...
— The Seven Secrets • William Le Queux
... suits, and a considerable number of women, some wearing the neat dress of the army nurse, others much more elaborately attired—daughters of the neighborhood, probably, with a sprinkling of wives and sisters of the soldiery. Guards, leaning upon their muskets, stood in statuesque poses on either side of the main entrance, while the wide archway, draped with flags, opening into the ballroom, revealed an inspiring glimpse of swiftly revolving figures in gay uniforms and flashing skirts. Over all floated the low, ...
— My Lady of the North • Randall Parrish
... Architecture, is all light, graceful, airy, in its form; whereas the Gothic is in nature and design profound, solemn, majestic. The genius of the one runs to a simple expressiveness; of the other to a manifold suggestiveness. That is mainly statuesque, and hardly admits any effect of background and perspective; this is mainly picturesque, and requires an ample background and perspective for its characteristic effect. There the mind is drawn more to objects; here, more to relations. The former, therefore, naturally ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... delicate ethereal sound. And yet my mind turned irresistibly to thoughts of war, violence, and pillage. How often has this intermediate land been fought over by Montefeltro and Brancaleoni, by Borgia and Malatesta, by Medici and Della Rovere! Its contadini are robust men, almost statuesque in build, and beautiful of feature. No wonder that the Princes of Urbino, with such materials to draw from, sold their service and their troops to Florence, Rome, S. Mark, and Milan. The bearing of these peasants is still soldierly and proud. Yet they are not ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... moments, the fishers sat or stood in statuesque silence, eyes on the corks. Then Jacob Isaac showed ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. V, August, 1878, No 10. - Scribner's Illustrated • Various
... her as she took her key out of the lock and put it back in her purse. He was struck by the fact that with this new "personality" that had become a part of her, she was even more attractive than before. A glow had been added. The quiet, dignified, statuesque beauty of before had been mysteriously vitalized by a new ...
— Ten From Infinity • Paul W. Fairman
... that right is still at fault. If fascination is the bond by which the man can be held, why does she not make use of it herself? A face of statuesque beauty that knows not how to smile has often been ...
— Manasseh - A Romance of Transylvania • Maurus Jokai
... aside to admire the unconscious Judy, but striking a statuesque pose she caught the critical eye of Jane and was rewarded with a most ...
— Jane Allen: Junior • Edith Bancroft
... of the Revolution David abandoned painting; and on January 17, 1793, as a member of the Convention, voted for the execution of Louis XVI. It was during this period that were painted his pictures of Lepelletier and Marat, in which his cold, statuesque, and correct manner was revivified and warmed to life—paradoxically enough, to paint death. A friend of Robespierre, he was carried down at the overthrow of the "little lawyer from Arras," and imprisoned in the Luxembourg. His wife—who had left him at the outset ...
— McClure's Magazine, January, 1896, Vol. VI. No. 2 • Various
... Kaiser much sunk in the sediments of his muddy Epoch. Sure enough, he was a proud lofty solemn Kaiser, infinitely the gentleman in air and humor; Spanish gravities, ceremonials, reticences;—and could, in a better scene, have distinguished himself by better than mere statuesque immovability of posture, dignified endurance of ennui, and Hapsburg tenacity in holding the grip. It was not till 1735, after tusslings and wrenchings beyond calculation, that he would consent to quit the Shadow of the Crown of Spain; and let Europe ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume V. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... across the moor behind them. She was mounted on one of the Orme horses, was habited by Redfern, who had done justice to her superb and supple figure, and the sunlight which poured from between the clouds fully revealed the statuesque beauty of her face. ...
— At Love's Cost • Charles Garvice
... determination which helped him to understand how it was that she had escaped the perils of her unprotected girlhood. Certainly it would have taken a good deal of courage, impudence or alcoholic excitement to make a man address to this statuesque and cold-faced creature a ...
— The Wharf by the Docks - A Novel • Florence Warden
... as the Greek artist possessed, the statuesque effects of repose to the portrayal of action, Raphael showed himself capable of both. The Hellenic calm of Parnassus is not more impressive than the splendid charge of the avenging spirits upon Heliodorus; ...
— Raphael - A Collection Of Fifteen Pictures And A Portrait Of The - Painter With Introduction And Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll
... laughed so heartily that he joined in with her, though he did not know what had caused her amusement. He took pleasure in watching her when she laughed. Her statuesque beauty yielded then to a warm, pulsating life, which transformed her and made her seem to him more human, more attainable. For he had never shaken off the belief that she and a divine ...
— The Native Born - or, The Rajah's People • I. A. R. Wylie
... dull to Madame Sand, after having handled the hammer and chisel of the sculptor so boldly, in modeling the grand lines of that semi-colossal statue, in cutting those sinewy muscles, which even in their statuesque immobility, are full of bewildering and seductive charm. Should we continue long to gaze upon it, it excites the most painful emotion. In strong contrast to the miracle of Pygmalion, Lelia seems a living Galatea, rich in feeling, full of love, whom the deeply enamored artist has ...
— Life of Chopin • Franz Liszt
... greatest charm of all was her simplicity—a simplicity that was not only in the calm regularity of her face, with its statuesque evenness of contour, its broad surface of cheek and forehead and the masses of her straight smooth hair, but was apparent as well in the long line of her carriage, from her foot to her waist and the single deep swell from her waist to her shoulder. Almost unconsciously she dressed ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... anything but a dandy. His companion, addressed as Democrates, slighter, blonder, showed Simonides a handsome and truly Greek profile, set off by a neatly trimmed reddish beard. His purple-edged cloak fell in statuesque folds of the latest mode, his beryl signet-ring, scarlet fillet, and jewelled girdle bespoke wealth and taste. His face, too, might have seemed frank and affable, had not Simonides suddenly recalled an old proverb ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... lay together, pearl beside pearl, each rivalling the snowy lustre of the other. Had it not been for those starry eyes that looked out so full of mournful splendor, her face might have seemed too statuesque in its beauty; but from their dark depths all the enthusiasm of a nature that had concentrated its every emotion into one master-passion, lit up her face with flashes that came ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... of the old romances and the old comedy still hangs about them. They are chatty and confidential to a degree that appalls a stiff and formal Englishman of the upper middle class. The British servant is a chilly and statuesque image of propriety. The French is an intelligent and sympathizing friend. You can make of him what you like. But the Italian, and still more the Spaniard, is as gay as a child, and as incapable of intentional disrespect. The Castilian grandee does not regard his dignity as in danger from ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... Rose will be under her orders. I saw at a glance that my governess would be governed by me. In the six days we have been together, she has made very sure that I am the only person likely to take an interest in her; while, for my part, I have ascertained that, for all her statuesque features, she will prove accommodating. She seems to me a kindly soul, but cautious. I have not been able to extract a word of what passed between ...
— Letters of Two Brides • Honore de Balzac
... mostly town-bred, infatuated with the country-side, have raved of the statuesque repose of the rural maiden. A statute is no doubt a beautiful object, but you do not want to take it to a ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, March 19, 1919 • Various
... wont to fix them with a bold stare on the gentlemen of the divan, who colored and became like wax in her hands. She also had the reputation of possessing a wonderfully fine figure, and southerners appreciate a statuesque style of beauty. ...
— Nana, The Miller's Daughter, Captain Burle, Death of Olivier Becaille • Emile Zola
... his chest, his blond hair sweeping his shoulders, his blue eyes fixed upon a rocky rib of the mountain behind which the boy had disappeared, Big Pete still stood like a statue. But gradually the statuesque pose resolved itself into a more commonplace posture, and the muscles of the face relaxed until the familiar twinkle hovered around the corners of his eyes. "What did he say when ...
— The Black Wolf Pack • Dan Beard
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