"AEsthetical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Opinions upon Authors, Books, and other subjects," is the title of a new volume by the late Edgar A. Poe, which Mr. Redfield will publish during the Fall. It will embrace besides several of the author's most elaborate aesthetical essays, those caustic personalities and criticisms from his pen which, during several years, attracted so much attention in our literary world. Among his subjects are Bryant, Cooper, Pauldings, Hawthorne, Willis, Longfellow, Verplanck, Bush, Anthon, Hoffman, Cornelius Mathews, ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. 1, No. 5, July 29, 1850 • Various
... kind of mediator between reason and sense, between inclination and duty, having as its mission the work of reconciling the conflicting elements in the human heart. A strong trace of this view will be found in Schiller, especially in all that he says about the play-instinct in his "Aesthetical Letters." ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... American readers, and has at once rendered its author's name and character famous and familiar in our country. It abounds in gems and apt allusions, which display without an effort the deep practical views and the aesthetical culture ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... early life and experiences in Ireland, and I especially recall many things she told me concerning the members of the Wilde family, with whom she had been quite intimately associated. I learned from her that Oscar Wilde inherited his aesthetic tastes largely from his mother. She was a woman of unusual type and habitually dressed in white—at a time, too, before white garments had become so generally prevalent. I was also told that Oscar Wilde's father was an oculist of some prominence, and that he built a mansion ...
— As I Remember - Recollections of American Society during the Nineteenth Century • Marian Gouverneur
... As the aesthetic qualities of our people become more highly developed, the business of raising flowers must become of increasing importance, and will readily reward any one who goes into it conscientiously. Flower growing is peculiarly ...
— Three Acres and Liberty • Bolton Hall
... the detached pieces, they have mostly been called forth by special occasions, and reflect particular external objects, as well as distinct grades of inward culture; while it is equally clear, that temporary moral and aesthetic maxims and convictions prevail in them. As a whole, however, these productions remain without connection; nay, it is often difficult to believe that they emanate from one ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... with dark Creole eyes, and bright ribbons in her hair, came in to remove the supper dishes. She wore a bright-colored green gown, cut low. As she reached over the table near him he winced at the strong smell of musk, which beauties of her race imagine adds so greatly to their aesthetic status-quo. She came nearer to him than was necessary, and there was an attempted familiarity in the movement that caused him to curve slightly the corner of his thin, nervous lip, showing beneath his mustache. She kept a half glance on him always. He smoked ...
— The Bishop of Cottontown - A Story of the Southern Cotton Mills • John Trotwood Moore
... great art-master, I of course accepted as from a highly cultured aesthetic source; but fear that, from want of true poetic light and art culture, I did not quite appreciate or realize it in the interior, though to me the exterior outline and architecture were always soft and beautiful. Unfortunately, one is greatly pestered outside by a voracious band of touts, miscalled ...
— Fair Italy, the Riviera and Monte Carlo • W. Cope Devereux
... thorough. The choice of this intellectual and kindly natured man, who set no value on the external forms of life, was, I might say, "naturally" a very elegant woman, a native of Berlin, the widow of the Kriegsrath Hofmeister. She speedily opened Froebel's eyes to the aesthetic and artistic element in the lives of the boys entrusted to his care—the element to which Langethal, from the time of his entrance into the institution, had directed ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... idea that one generation lays the foundation for succeeding generations. The rough affairs of life very largely fall to the earlier generation, while the next one has the privilege of dealing with the higher and more aesthetic things of life. This is true of all generations, of all peoples; and, unless the foundation is deeply laid, it is impossible for the succeeding one to have a career in any way approaching success. As regards ...
— The Future of the American Negro • Booker T. Washington
... found some warm friends, in whose houses he could come and go at pleasure. He enjoyed keenly the privilege of daily association with high-minded and refined women; their eager activity of intellect stimulated him, their exquisite ethereal grace and their delicately chiseled beauty satisfied his aesthetic cravings, and the responsive vivacity of their nature prepared him ever new surprises. He felt a strange fascination in the presence of these women, and the conviction grew upon him that their type of womanhood was superior to any he had hitherto ...
— Short Story Classics (American) Vol. 2 • Various
... meaning, had been passed in the haste of journalistic production. But I have nowhere tried to adjust earlier to later points of view. I am aware that these points of view are often difficult to reconcile; that, for instance, 'aesthetic' in the essay on Tchehov has a much narrower meaning than it bears in 'The Function of Criticism'; that the essay on 'The Religion of Rousseau' is criticism of a kind which I deprecate as insufficient in the essay, 'The Cry in the Wilderness,' because ...
— Aspects of Literature • J. Middleton Murry
... had been the brief response, when she had suggested varying the colours in order to cultivate the aesthetic instinct in ...
— A Princess in Calico • Edith Ferguson Black
... and severity. He was patient, kind, and loving. He had humor, and a pleasant smile generally lighted up his benignant countenance. He was often playfully indignant. I remember that at one time an aesthetic character named Russell addressed gatherings of society people advising them what they should throw out of their over-furnished rooms. In conversation with Mr. Worcester I asked him how he felt about it. He replied, "I know what I should ...
— A Backward Glance at Eighty • Charles A. Murdock
... story, or else 'The Buried God,' and she thinks me an idealizing ignoramus upon whom she can impose. Her sepulchral name is at least not Italian; probably she is a sharp countrywoman of mine, turning, by means of the present aesthetic craze, an honest penny ...
— Stories by American Authors (Volume 4) • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... type of Action Story where the mood of the figures is that of bronze, with the aesthetic resources of that metal: its elasticity; its emphasis on the tendon, ligament, and bone, rather than on the muscle; and an attribute that we will call the panther-like quality. Hermon A. MacNeil has a memorable piece of work in the yard of the architect Shaw, ...
— The Art Of The Moving Picture • Vachel Lindsay
... worked as hard and as successfully and have spent as sparingly. The special contribution to America which these Germans made lay in other qualities. Their artists and musicians and actors planted the first seeds of aesthetic appreciation in the raw West where the repertoire had previously been limited to Money Musk, The Arkansas Traveler, and Old Dog Tray. The liberal tendencies of German thought mellowed the austere Puritanism of the prevalent theology. The respect ...
— Our Foreigners - A Chronicle of Americans in the Making • Samuel P. Orth
... diligent study, he discovered and formulated the essential laws of all art; and, thanks to him, aesthetic science in our day has the same precision as mathematical science. He had numerous pupils, many of whom have become distinguished in various public careers—in the pulpit, at the bar, on the ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... you everywhere at the Botanic Gardens, and finding you were too wise to come, came here, grieving your absence, and had an aesthetic "Bier." [(Dr. William Francis, one of the editors of the "Philosophical Magazine," and a member of the publishing ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... edits certain Shakespeare Plays for Macmillan: very well, I fancy, so far as Notes go; simply explaining what needs explanation for young Readers, and eschewing all aesthetic (now, don't say you don't know what 'aesthetic' means, etc.) aesthetic (detestable word) observation. With this the Swinburnes, Furnivalls, Athenaeums, etc., find fault: and a pretty hand they make of it when they try that tack. It is safest surely to give people all the Data you can for forming a Judgment, and then leave them to form ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald to Fanny Kemble (1871-1883) • Edward FitzGerald
... enough. She trips through the trees, her bracelets jingling, and tumbles the pods on to the heap. Once one has seen a great heap of cacao pods it glows in one's memory: anything more rich, more daring in the way of colour one's eye is unlikely to light on. The artist, seeking only an aesthetic effect would be content with this for the consummation and would wish ...
— Cocoa and Chocolate - Their History from Plantation to Consumer • Arthur W. Knapp
... most commonplace way and with the most unseductive seducer possible. Her progress and her end are, to borrow a later phrase and title metaphorically, merely a tale of the meanest streets; untouched and unconfirmed by the very slightest art; as destitute of any aesthetic attraction, or any evidence of artistic power, as the log-books of a common lodging-house and a hospital ward could be. In Cherie there is nothing exactly improper; it is merely an elaborate study of a spoilt—at least petted—and unhealthy ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... something akin to reverence crept over Honor as she crossed the threshold. Her impressionable Celtic temperament could not fail to be influenced by outward surroundings: she had a great love of the beautiful, and this room satisfied her aesthetic tastes. ...
— The New Girl at St. Chad's - A Story of School Life • Angela Brazil
... enough, as they rolled it out. In tact, considerateness, and right appreciation, as well as in taste and aesthetic sensibilities—we failed at every point, we breeched and bearded prentice-jobs of Nature; and I began to feel like collapsing on the carpet from sheer spiritual anaemia. But when one of them, with a swing of her skirt, ...
— Dream Days • Kenneth Grahame
... straw and leaves are their chief ingredients, they seem to have an eye for beauty, and the old hen has been seen surrounded with a brilliant wreath of scarlet anemones." Thus Bishop Stanley, whose account of the bird is full of interesting particulars. This aesthetic water-hen, with her husband, lived at Cheadle, in Staffordshire, in the rectory moat, for several seasons, "always however leaving it in the spring," (for Scotland, supposably?): being constantly fed, the pair became quite tame, built their nest in a thorn-bush covered with ivy which had ...
— Love's Meinie - Three Lectures on Greek and English Birds • John Ruskin
... the man's account, and, as soon as he had gone, paraded at leisure, and con amore, and after the manner of an artist of aesthetic taste, before the mirror. Somehow he seemed to look better than ever in the suit, for his cheeks had now taken on a still more interesting air, and his chin an added seductiveness, while his white collar lent tone to his neck, the blue satin tie heightened ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... flowers, books, a piano; even the paper on the walls and the hangings at the window were of most delicate and careful choice. No rich drawing-room could show more taste in its arrangements, or have a more soothing effect on a mind to which the sense of aesthetic fitness is its ...
— Agatha's Husband - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik (AKA: Dinah Maria Mulock)
... the greatest value from this study, classes should be required to keep a notebook which should follow some uniform plan. I suggest the following as such outline: (1) historical and geographical; (2) home life; (3) physical, religious, and aesthetic education; (4) elementary and higher education; (5) summary of lessons taught; (6) educators: (a) life, (b) writings, (c) pedagogical teachings. Of course each teacher will modify this outline to ...
— History of Education • Levi Seeley
... the inner room and crosses to the porch. He rings the electric bell outside, then enters through the swing doors R.C. BETTY enters R. and moves up at back of settee R. to DEVENISH by the swing doors. He is carrying a large bunch of violets and adopts a very aesthetic attitude. ...
— Belinda • A. A. Milne
... facts on which I am about to dwell are in nowise antagonistic to the theories which Mr. Darwin's unwearied and unerring investigations are every day rendering more probable. The aesthetic relations of species are independent of their origin. Nevertheless, it has always seemed to me in what little work I have done upon organic forms, as if the species mocked us by their deliberate ...
— The Queen of the Air • John Ruskin
... that Terry had so complained of when we first came—that they weren't "feminine," they lacked "charm," now became a great comfort. Their vigorous beauty was an aesthetic pleasure, not an irritant. Their dress and ornaments had not a ...
— Herland • Charlotte Perkins Stetson Gilman
... the stage, and, delivering an excellent philosophical dissertation on the merits of the "situation," shows that by the purest principles of art the sacrifice is necessary, but at the same time offers to the audience the privilege of changing the denouement. Such, however, is the nice aesthetic sense of a Chinese auditory, and so universal the desire of bloodshed in the heathen breast, that invariably at each representation of this remarkable tragedy the cause of humanity gives way to ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... the fundamental difference between heathen and Christian morality; between intellectual Greek philosophy and practical modern science; between the aesthetic ideal and the ideal ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... friendship with a Japanese colorist on the staff. Also, he was fortunate in meeting and knowing Mr. Cavalier, the artist of animal life, and from him the boy learned a great deal of the picturesque and aesthetic elements of the life which he painted and modeled with such surpassing skill. Scores of other workers, writers, and scientists of all kinds had rooms in the wonderfully interesting ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Fisheries • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... preserve flies of obvious error in the amber[3] of the truth. Last and chief, while literature, gagged with linsey-woolsey, can only deal with a fraction of the life of man, talk goes fancy free[4] and may call a spade a spade.[5] It cannot, even if it would, become merely aesthetic or merely classical like literature. A jest intervenes, the solemn humbug is dissolved in laughter, and speech runs forth out of the contemporary groove into the open fields of nature, cheery and cheering, like schoolboys out of school. And it is in talk alone that ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... are, as a matter of strict chronology, somewhat earlier. But the chief tendencies may be divided into seven periods. They are (1) The decay of Victorianism and the growth of a purely decorative art, (2) The rise and decline of the AEsthetic Philosophy, (3) The muscular influence of Henley, (4) The Celtic revival in Ireland, (5) Rudyard Kipling and the ascendency of mechanism in art, (6) John Masefield and the return of the rhymed narrative, (7) The war and the appearance of "The Georgians." It may be interesting to trace these developments ...
— Modern British Poetry • Various
... what great cosmic facts lie behind these vague and looming intuitions? The physical merges by insensible degrees into the aesthetic, the moral, the spiritual. On the one hand, the chill, the blankness, the negation, sometimes the horror, of the darkness. And on the other hand the purity and beauty, the colour and effulgence of the light—above all, its ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... the English-speaking world outside of Europe. By the end of the twentieth century such nations as France and Germany can only claim such a relative position in the political world as Holland and Switzerland now occupy. Their greatness in thought and scholarship, in industrial and aesthetic art, will doubtless continue unabated. But their political weights will severally have come to be insignificant; and as we now look back, with historic curiosity, to the days when Holland was navally and commercially ...
— American Political Ideas Viewed From The Standpoint Of Universal History • John Fiske
... what is one of the most important of all the sides of literary study. I mean its effect as helping to preserve the dignity and the purity of the English language. That noble instrument has never been exposed to such dangers as those which beset it to-day. Domestic slang, scientific slang, pseudo-aesthetic affectations, hideous importations from American newspapers, all bear down with horrible force upon the glorious fabric which the genius of our race has reared. I will say nothing of my own on this pressing theme, but will read to you a passage of weight and authority from ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... Frenchmen bathe. Drama, action, suspense, all are here. From the first stealthy testing of the water with an apprehensive toe to the final seal-like plunge, there is never a dull moment. And apart from the excitement of the thing, judging it from a purely aesthetic standpoint, his must be a dull soul who can fail to be uplifted by the spectacle of a series of very stout men with whiskers, seen in tight bathing suits against a background of brightest blue. Yet the young man with red hair, recently in the employment of Mr. Scrymgeour, eyed this free circus ...
— The Adventures of Sally • P. G. Wodehouse
... purity and conscience that women have,—take them in the mass. They give over to habits and pleasures like great boys. People talk about the extravagance of women. But men are equally so, only their extravagance takes a different turn. A woman's is aesthetic; a man's is gross. She buys fine clothes and furniture. He panders to his bodily appetites. Which is worse? Women love men, and wish to be loved by them, and are miserable if they are not. So the wife lets her husband do twenty things which he ought not to do, which ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... The nakedness of man, and the absence of a tail (rudimentariness of the tail vertebrae) are next discussed. Darwin is inclined to attribute the nakedness of man, not to the action of natural selection on ancestors who originally inhabited a tropical land, but to sexual selection, which, for aesthetic reasons, brought about the loss of the hairy covering in man, or primarily in woman. An interesting discussion of the loss of the tail, which, however, man shares with the anthropoid apes, some other monkeys and lemurs, forms the conclusion of the almost ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... theory. This is at least felt to be the economically legitimate end of acquisition, which alone it is incumbent on the theory to take account of. Such consumption may of course be conceived to serve the consumer's physical wants—his physical comfort—or his so-called higher wants—spiritual, aesthetic, intellectual, or what not; the latter class of wants being served indirectly by an expenditure of goods, after the fashion familiar to ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... largest and loftiest inspirations, and religion is indebted to poetry for its subtlest and most luminous interpretations." No doubt a man may be truly, deeply religious who has little or no development on the aesthetic side, to whom poetry makes no special appeal. But it is certain that he whose soul is deaf to the "concord of sweet sounds" misses a mighty aid in the spiritual life. For a hymn is a wing by which the spirit soars above earthly cares and trials into a purer air and a clearer sunshine. ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... Edgeworth's very subdued criticisms and descriptions of feeling on this occasion. 'It is extremely agreeable to me,' she writes, 'to see paintings with those who have excellent taste and no affectation.' And this remark might perhaps be thought even more to the point now than in the pre-aesthetic age in which it was innocently made. The travellers are finally landed in Paris in a magnificent hotel in a fine square, 'formerly Place Louis-Quinze, afterwards Place de la Revolution, now Place de la Concorde.' And Place de la Concorde it remains, wars and revolutions notwithstanding, whether lighted ...
— A Book of Sibyls - Miss Barbauld, Miss Edgeworth, Mrs Opie, Miss Austen • Anne Thackeray (Mrs. Richmond Ritchie)
... seemed to me even more tedious than usual. The long train journey in the morning, the walk through Farringdon Meat Market, which aesthetic butchers made hideous with mosaics of the intestines of animals, as if the horror of suety pavements and bloody sawdust did not suffice, the weariness of inventing lies that no one believed to account for my lateness and neglected homework, ...
— The Ghost Ship • Richard Middleton
... when it means a short prose narrative, which presents artistically a bit of real life; the primary object of which is to amuse, though it may also depict a character, plead a cause, or point a moral; this amusement is neither of that aesthetic order which we derive from poetry, nor of that cheap sort which we gain from a broad burlesque: it is the simple yet intellectual pleasure derived from listening ...
— Short Story Writing - A Practical Treatise on the Art of The Short Story • Charles Raymond Barrett
... Your taste used to be rather aesthetic. Even your own wife is one of the smartest ...
— The Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith • Arthur Wing Pinero
... composed by a first-class artist in the maturity of his powers; and for that very reason we must regret that it is steeped in bitterness; while Thackeray's rooted hostility to mothers-in-law misguides him into the aesthetic error of admitting a virago to scold frantically almost over the colonel's death-bed. The unvarying meanness and selfishness of Mrs. Mackenzie, and of Sir Barnes Newcome, fatigue the reader; for whereas ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... been consumed in these creations, which have the rudeness of mediaevalism without its emotional sincerity, and which—amid the loveliness of tropic nature, the grace of palms, the many-colored fire of liana blossoms—jar on the aesthetic sense with an almost brutal violence. Yet there is a veiled poetry in these silent populations of plaster and wood and stone. They represent something older than the Middle Ages, older than Christianity,— something strangely distorted and transformed, it is ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... strong supporter of the aesthetic dress movement," he said, doubtless alluding to the graceful freedom of ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... almost—almost, but never quite—driven from Mozart's thought by the anguish that tormented him as he wrote. While speaking of Bach's "Matthew" Passion, I have said it "was an appeal, of a force and poignancy paralleled only in the Ninth symphony, to the emotional side of man's nature ... the aesthetic qualities are subordinated to the utterance of an overwhelming emotion." Had I said "deliberately subordinated" I should have indicated the main difference as well as the main likeness between Bach's masterwork and Mozart's. The aesthetic qualities are subordinated to ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman
... in every play in which she was concerned, so she was as ready as though she had been the understudy. Miss Herbert was not a remarkable actress, but her appearance was wonderful indeed. She was very tall, with pale gold hair and the spiritual, ethereal look which the aesthetic movement loved. When mother wanted to flatter me very highly, she said that I looked like Miss Herbert! Rossetti founded many of his pictures on her, and she and Mrs. "Janie" Morris were his favorite types. When any one was the object of Rossetti's devotion, there was no extravagant length to ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry
... that the goal of action is in its final analysis aesthetic and not moral—a quality of feeling instead of conformity to rule. Words like justice, harmony, power, democracy are simply empirical suggestions which may produce the good life. If the practice of them does not produce it then we are under no obligation to follow ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... "a born sceptic; an ultra-modern." She had a certain veneration for the more distant past, but none for her father's period. "Victorianism" was to her a term of abuse. She had long since condemned alike the ethic and the aesthetic of the nineteenth century as represented by her father's opinions; so, that, even now, when his familiar comment coincided so queerly with her own thought, she instinctively disbelieved him. Yet, as always, she was gentle in her answer. She condescended from the heights of her youth ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Edward J. O'Brien and John Cournos, editors
... in the highest kind of imagination and intellect to achieve the greatest things. He seldom or never stood aloof from his own time, as Wordsworth did through his philosophic imagination, as Keats did through his aesthetic imagination, as Browning did through his dramatic imagination. He wore a poetical cloak, and avoided the vulgar crowd physically; he had none of Browning's taste for tea-parties. But Browning had not the tea-party imagination; ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... year's residence in Concord I had driven up with some friends to an aesthetic tea at Mr. Emerson's. It was in the winter, and a great wood-fire blazed upon the hospitable hearth. There were various men and women of note assembled, and I, who listened attentively to all the fine things that were said, was for some time scarcely aware of a man who sat upon ...
— Literary and Social Essays • George William Curtis
... fungus upon a fruit tree. Whatever there was in Mr. Bellingham's rooms was good; much of it was unique, and the whole was harmonious. Rare editions were bound by famous binders, and if the twopenny-halfpenny productions of some little would-be modern poet, resplendent with vellum and aesthetic greenliness of paper, occasionally found their way to the table, they never travelled as far as the shelves. Mr. Bellingham had fools enough about him to absorb his ...
— Doctor Claudius, A True Story • F. Marion Crawford
... ice-cream for dessert last night. Only vegetable dyes are used in colouring the food. The college is very much opposed, both from aesthetic and hygienic motives, to the use ...
— Daddy-Long-Legs • Jean Webster
... stockings, and my toes came out through the ends of my boots, and in order to keep the thing safe I knotted it up in the tail of my shirt, which waggled out of the seat of my breeches. It was given to me by a beautiful lady, who, I remember, smelled like all the perfumes of Araby. She awakened my aesthetic sense by the divine and intoxicating odour that emanated from her. Since then I have never met woman so—so like a scented garden of all the innocences. To me she was a goddess. I overheard her prophesy things about me. My life began from that moment. I kept the cornelian heart all my life, ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... can prepare it so it won't poison you, you can make an eatable paste. If you like oily cabbage, the top of any palmetto will furnish it. But, my poor friend, there's little here to tempt one's appetite or satisfy one's aesthetic hunger for flowers. Our Northern meadows are far more gorgeous from June to October; and our wild fruits are far more delicious than what one finds growing ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers
... he turned, not by chance but with definite purpose, and without hesitation poured a whiskey glass level full. There was no attendant siphon or water convenient and he drank the liquor raw and returned the glass to its place. It was not the quasi-aesthetic tippling of comradery but the deliberate drinking of one with a cause, real or fancied, therefor and for its effect; and as he drank he shivered involuntarily with the instinctive aversion to raw liquor of one to whom the action has not ...
— The Dominant Dollar • Will Lillibridge
... indifference of those times; but Leo X, son of Lorenzo the Magnificent, heir of the traditions in companionship and the humanities which had made Florence illustrious,—Leo, cultivated, brilliant, clean in his personal life, had assembled around him men reasonably good. His aesthetic inclinations were running him deeply in debt, and to fill the bankrupt treasury, His Holiness commissioned Tetzel to sell indulgences—a practice repugnant to moral instinct, to the dignity of the Church, and the honor of our God, and yet a practice continued by Romanism in our own day and under ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... the brief murmur of a hidden voice, and the curtains of the fit-up stage swung apart and disclosed the roseate environs of Castle Bunthorne, ornamented by those famous maidens who were dying for love of its aesthetic owner. The audience made no attempt to grasp the situation of the characters until it had satisfactorily settled the private identity of each. That done, it applied itself to the sympathetic comprehension of the feelings ...
— Leonora • Arnold Bennett
... The American, 1877, he has shown the actual misery which may result from the clashing of opposed social systems. In such clever sketches as Daisy Miller, 1879, the Pension Beaurepas, and A Bundle of Letters, he has exhibited types of the American girl, the American business man, the aesthetic feebling from Boston, and the Europeanized or would-be denationalized American campaigners in the Old World, and has set forth the ludicrous incongruities, perplexities, and misunderstandings which result from contradictory standards of conventional morality and behavior. In The Europeans, ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... superb, and adds beauty and distinction to every subtle line of the architecture. He pays attention, also, to the minor details of decorative effect, and takes pains with the ornaments and embroideries; while his use of gold, and embossing with gesso, add much to the aesthetic charm of his work, and proves that he could, when necessary, subordinate his love of realism to ...
— Luca Signorelli • Maud Cruttwell
... nature, has man no other relation to his external environment than the utilitarian? The moral influence has been just suggested; the exploitation of this rich vein has for some time past engaged the attention of evolutionary moralists. Our more immediate concern is with the aesthetic influences. And in nature there is beauty as well as utility. Nor is the beauty a by-product of utility; it exists on its own account, and asserts itself in its own right. As Emerson puts it—"it is its own excuse for being." As another writer puts it—"in ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... German-silver-spoon, 'used by dabblers in aesthetic tea,' we have the annexed palpable hit at the small-beer imitators of CARLYLE, and copyists after the external garb of the German school, who have occasionally shown themselves up in the pages of 'The Dial,' a work which formerly 'indicated rather the ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, January 1844 - Volume 23, Number 1 • Various
... a scientific basis for the historical study of Art, criticism has tended gradually but naturally to fall into two divisions, as distinct from each other as the functions they respectively perform are distinct. The one, which we may call aesthetic criticism, deals with the artist and his works solely for the purpose of interpretation and appreciation, judging them according to some artistic standard, which, as often as not, derives its only sanction from the prejudices of the critic ...
— John Lyly • John Dover Wilson
... devoid of aesthetic taste, considered all save religious poetry sinful in the extreme; so it was not until the middle of the seventeenth century that Fame could trumpet abroad the advent of "the Tenth Muse," or "the Morning Star of American ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... given to aesthetic crockery, or Francesco de Rimini, I think you would rather have liked him; a sort of fellow who would lend you his dogs, or his gun, or his horse, or his ballet-dancer, or his credit—humph!—at a moment's notice. ...
— Amaryllis at the Fair • Richard Jefferies
... collecting and collectors appeal to his sporting instinct. His knowledge about his collection will be precise and definite, whether it be postage stamps or pictures. He will know all about it, except its aesthetic value. That he cannot know, for he cannot see it. He has the flair of the dealer, not the perception of the amateur. And he does not know or believe that there is any ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... probably for similar aesthetic considerations that he soon altered the barbaric Rotterdammensis to Roterdamus, later Roterodamus, which he perhaps accentuated as a proparoxytone. Desiderius was an addition selected by himself, which he first used in 1496; it is possible that the study of his favourite author ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga
... that the turn-out was stylish, and he learned to consult certain eccentricities of Frank's in the satisfaction of his pride. One of these was a high reluctance to be passed on the road. Frank was as lazy a horse—but lazy in a self-respectful, aesthetic way—as ever was; yet if he heard a vehicle at no matter how great distance behind him (and he always heard it before his driver), he brightened with resolution and defiance, and struck out with speed that made ...
— Buying a Horse • William Dean Howells
... examination of Sexual Selection a way of speaking of beauty, which seems to us to be highly unphilosophical, because it assumes a certain theory of beauty, which the most competent modern thinkers are too far from accepting, to allow its assumption to be quite judicious...Why should we only find the aesthetic quality in birds wonderful, when it happens to coincide with our own? In other words, why attribute to them conscious aesthetic qualities at all? There is no more positive reason for attributing aesthetic consciousness ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... less appalling to one's aesthetic sense was the clerk himself. Squatting behind his wretched desk, Elias Droom peered across the litter of papers and books with snaky but polite eyes, almost as inviting as the spider who, with wily but insidious decorum, draws the guileless ...
— Jane Cable • George Barr McCutcheon
... manner, all that we call faculties, capacities, and the like, are, in a far deeper sense than the conventional use of the word 'gift' implies, bestowments from Him. The Old Testament goes to the root of the matter when, speaking of the artistic and aesthetic skill of the workers in the fine arts in the Tabernacle, it says, 'the Spirit of the Lord' taught Bezaleel; and when, even in regard to the brute strength of Samson—surely the strangest hero of faith that ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... for making the rural home beautiful and attractive are unequaled in the city for any except the very rich. It is not necessary that the farmhouse shall be crowded for space; its outlook and surroundings can be arranged to give it an aesthetic quality wholly impossible in the ordinary city home. That this is true is proved by many inexpensive farmhouses that are a delight to the eye. On the other hand, it must be admitted that a large proportion of farmhouses are lacking in both architectural ...
— New Ideals in Rural Schools • George Herbert Betts
... every dramatist must claim. If the poet will but take observations from real persons, however widely scattered, discretion may be exercised in the conjunction of those persons, and in the sequence of incidents by which they are affected. An aesthetic invention may be as natural as a mechanical one, although the materials for each are collected from a wide surface, and placed in new relations. Thus much we say as expressing dissent from objections which have been hastily made ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various
... benefit of foreign travel, the aesthetic value of railroads is to unite the advantages of town and country life, neither of which we can spare. A man should live in or near a large town, because, let his own genius be what it may, it will repel quite as much of agreeable and valuable talent as it draws, and, in a city, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... they came out of some Vandyck portrait. In my mind was the strong impression that all this was natural, spontaneous—that it had about it nothing of the picturesqueness which swell studios have taught to rich and aesthetic houses. Mr. ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... variety or pattern-equivalent in play of light and shadow upon different planes, lines, or concavities and convexities. The common plaster cornice placed to unite walls and ceiling, in our ordinary houses, is a concession (on the part even of the jerriest of builders) to the aesthetic sense. We get the decorated frieze in architecture in obedience to the same demand, though originally a necessary feature of lintel construction, as we have seen, from the days of the festal garland ...
— Line and Form (1900) • Walter Crane
... Castle, after which it was allowed to fall into decay. The instructions to the "shyriffe" were no doubt necessary; for although L60 would probably go a great way in the time of Bishop Gundulph, the modern aesthetic builder would do very little indeed for that sum, towards the erection of such an impregnable fortress as Rochester Castle, the walls of which vary from eight to thirteen feet in thickness, whatever his progenitor ...
— A Week's Tramp in Dickens-Land • William R. Hughes
... despise. Indeed, considering the character of some of my own books, such an attempt would be gross inconsistency. But, while I appreciate its importance in a philological view, I am inclined to set little store on its aesthetic value, especially in poetry. Three parts of the emendations made upon poets are mere alterations, some of which, had they been suggested to the author by his Maecenas or Africanus, he would probably have adopted. Moreover, those who are most exact in laying down rules of verbal ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... modulate a plaintive ditty on her ciniloi and sing whilst she beats on her bamboo sticks an accompaniment that tortures well-tuned ears. For the rest, if her beauty soon fades, her ugliness does not create the least feeling of disgust amongst the Sakais of the masculine gender, who have aesthetic ...
— My Friends the Savages - Notes and Observations of a Perak settler (Malay Peninsula) • Giovanni Battista Cerruti
... did not control all this; the resources of her transcendent art were strained to keep up with the march of womanhood—that was all. If we may believe du Maurier's art, the note of beauty never entirely disappeared from fashion until the aesthetic women of the eighties seemed to take in hand their own clothes. The aesthetic ladies failed, as the movement to which they attached themselves did, for beauty is something attendant upon life, arriving when it likes, going away very often when everyone ...
— George Du Maurier, the Satirist of the Victorians • T. Martin Wood
... barns is responsible for the same kind of animal pollution, and while it is difficult to prove by statistics that such pollution is always dangerous to health, it is sufficiently repulsive from an aesthetic standpoint to be done away with whenever possible. Such pollution applies only to surface water, such as brooks or lakes, and the best method of detecting and evaluating this pollution is to make a careful inspection of ...
— Rural Hygiene • Henry N. Ogden
... should meet to-morrow, or any other day! I have no relics of CECILIA. I had some,—an old glove, a lash of a riding-switch, and other trifles. I kept them in the secret drawer of a bureau, and in my absence that bureau was traded away for a new aesthetic article, relics and all, of course. Perhaps some minor poet bought the piece of furniture, and found the things, and wrote a poem on them. That is what makes me uncomfortable. If CECILIA sees the poem in one of the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, June 11, 1892 • Various
... he was, could successfully do a number of things that Peter, being what he was, must inevitably come to grief over. But still he indomitably tried. He even profaned the roads and outraged all aesthetic fitness in the endeavour, clacking into the country upon a hired motor-bicycle and making his head ache badly and getting very cold, and being from time to time thrown off and jumped upon and going ...
— The Lee Shore • Rose Macaulay
... mode of installation formed a striking feature in the case of many of the systems of public schools exhibited at St. Louis. The highest results were achieved where the plan of the exhibit had been carefully worked out with full regard to aesthetic effect and educational significance. In the formation of these plans women had very largely participated, and in one instance, namely, that of the Minnesota educational exhibit, the entire installation was planned and carried to a successful completion by a woman. This exhibit was ranked in the ...
— Final Report of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission • Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission
... respect to give and take of the values of life. Hence, the education such a society gives is partial and distorted. If we take, on the other hand, the kind of family life which illustrates the standard, we find that there are material, intellectual, aesthetic interests in which all participate and that the progress of one member has worth for the experience of other members—it is readily communicable—and that the family is not an isolated whole, but enters intimately into relationships with business groups, with schools, with all the agencies ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... blast, Coil her stained ensign round its haughty mast, Or tear the fold that wears so foul a scar, And drive a bolt through every blackened star! Once more,—once only,—- we must stop so soon: What have we here? A GERMAN-SILVER SPOON; A cheap utensil, which we often see Used by the dabblers in aesthetic tea, Of slender fabric, somewhat light and thin, Made of mixed metal, chiefly lead and tin; The bowl is shallow, and the handle small, Marked in large letters with the name JEAN PAUL. Small as it is, its powers are passing strange, For all who use it show a wondrous change; And ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... that the Sunday staff of the Eclipse must have a kind of aesthetic delight in pictures of this kind, but Coleman's face betrayed no emotion as he looked at this specimen. He lit a fresh cigar, tilted his chair and surveyed it with a cold and stony stare. " Yes, that's all right," he said slowly. There seemed to be no affectionate relation between ...
— Active Service • Stephen Crane
... a succession of shared aesthetic appreciation threads all that time. Our honeymoon was no exultant coming together, no mutual shout of "YOU!" We were almost shy with one another, and felt the relief of even a picture to help us out. It was entirely in my conception of things that ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... an aesthetic point of view, however, the war has done a great deal of enduring mischief, by causing the devastation of great tracts of woodland scenery, in which this part of Virginia would appear to be very rich. Around all the encampments, and everywhere along the road, ...
— Sketches and Studies • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... that, from an aesthetic point of view, the Englishman, devoid of high lights and shadows, coated with drab, and super-humanly steady on his feet, is not too attractive. But for the wearing, tearing, slow, and dreadful business of this war, the Englishman—fighting of his own free ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... as in itself it really is," has been justly said to be the aim of all true criticism whatever; and in aesthetic criticism the first step towards seeing one's object as it really is, is to know one's own impression as it really is, to discriminate it, to realise it distinctly. The objects with which aesthetic criticism ...
— The Renaissance - Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Pater
... brings back to our memory the fall of Constantinople and Granada, the discovery of the new world, the figures of Bayazid, Ferdinand, and Christopher Columbus, we have a subject for meditation, as well as aesthetic enjoyment. Innocent VIII., Giovanni Battista Cibo, of Genoa, is represented on his sarcophagus sleeping the sleep of the just, while above it he appears again in the full power of life, seated on the pontifical ...
— Pagan and Christian Rome • Rodolfo Lanciani
... automobile, and when he ran over a man blamed metaphysics. He would not have us get over-excited about physical disturbance but have it accepted as a part of any progress in culture, moral, spiritual or aesthetic. If a poet retires to the mountain-side, to avoid the vulgar unculture of men, and their physical disturbance, so that he may better catch a nobler theme for his symphony, Emerson tells him that "man's culture can spare nothing, wants all material, converts all impediments into instruments, ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... Slopham lived in a neat and aesthetic apartment in a fashionable apartment-house, and it might have been supposed that she was hardly prepared to set up an asylum for fugitive Kickapoos. But that intrepid woman never faltered. Her answer went whirling by wire before she had paused to think of the ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... through these pages, and the unaffected desire of the writer to awaken a kindly interest in the poor souls who have so twined themselves about her own best feelings, may be said to consecrate the work. In its character of aesthetic material for another age, it appeals to our nationality; while, as the effort of a reflecting and Christian mind to call public attention to the needs of an unhappy race, we may ask for it the approbation of all who acknowledge the duty to ...
— Dahcotah - Life and Legends of the Sioux Around Fort Snelling • Mary Eastman
... declare to ye now, that's a grand paper. If ye papered a room with that and put a hen in it she'd lay four eggs!" But not even the consideration of its value as an aesthetic stimulant can compass the ...
— All on the Irish Shore - Irish Sketches • E. Somerville and Martin Ross
... that other classes of "men" made up to him, after the men of distinction, those whom the dons considered the best men, had withdrawn and left him to pursue his own way. The men who loafed considered him their natural prey; the aesthetic men who wrote bad verses opened their arms, and were ready to welcome him as their own. And perhaps among these classes he might have found disinterested friendship, for nobody any longer sought Warrender on account of what ...
— A Country Gentleman and his Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... have rung with lunatic screams after months and years of hollow-eyed watching for the ship that never came? It might have been different, of course, had Malmsworth been able to appreciate the aesthetic values of life, as Mr. Wordsley did. But doubtless these lovely miles and miles of crystalline oceans had been but a desert ...
— The Marooner • Charles A. Stearns
... tenderness. And where else in the United States, can we look for a spontaneous gush of melody? Plymouth Rock and its surroundings have not hitherto seemed favorable to the growth and manifestation of musical genius; for the old Puritan element, in its savage intent to annihilate the aesthetic part of man's nature, under the deadening dominion of its own Blue Laws, and to crush out whatever of noble inspiration had been vouchsafed to man by his Creator, rarely sought relief ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... except those that came from the school. While the other girls were clamoring for mail, Harriet stood in the background silent and unexpectant. Miss Sallie picked out her clothes, and Miss Sallie's standards were utilitarian rather than aesthetic. Harriet, with no exception, was the worst dressed girl in the school. Even her school uniform, which was an exact twin of sixty-three other uniforms, hung upon her with the grace of a meal-bag. ...
— Just Patty • Jean Webster
... villages—those lively little clearing-houses for immense farming districts. To the adventurer from New York they seem always new and crude. To our travellers from a newer, cruder region they were actually aesthetic in their suggestions of an old and ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson
... shooting up towns and camps and railway trains like a pack of aerial cowboys; when, on your way home, you have deliberately disobeyed orders and loafed a long way behind the other members of your group in order to watch the pretty sunset, and, as a punishment for this aesthetic indulgence, have been overtaken by darkness and compelled to land in strange country, only to have your machine immediately surrounded by German soldiers; then, having taken the desperate resolve that they shall not have possession of your ...
— High Adventure - A Narrative of Air Fighting in France • James Norman Hall
... than the technique. The scope of this investigation has carried into questions of geography, demography, politics, economics, social systems, and leadership. Unfortunately, the frontier had not yet provided the leisure essential to artistic and aesthetic pursuits. Consequently, these areas were given a limited treatment. Furthermore, the mythology and folklore of this valley offered little of record. However, the breadth of this analysis has furnished ...
— The Fair Play Settlers of the West Branch Valley, 1769-1784 - A Study of Frontier Ethnography • George D. Wolf
... fervent, and had been proved by the steadiness with which they confronted torture and death, but they knew no measure in the ridicule which they heaped upon the men by whom they were daily murdered in droves. The rhetoric comedies were not admirable in an aesthetic point of view, but they were wrathful and sincere. Therefore they cost many thousand lives, but they sowed the seed of resistance to religious tyranny, to spring up one day in a hundredfold harvest. ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... is for enjoyment; the qualification of physical, mental and aesthetic needs. To enjoy requires the possession of the Roman prime essential; a sound mind in a sound body. So closely are physical and mental health related, so complex the reactions of a disordered nervous system on bodily health, or the effect on the mind of physical weakness, that the wisest doctors ...
— The Art of Stage Dancing - The Story of a Beautiful and Profitable Profession • Ned Wayburn
... intellectual and refined age, in point of literary and artistic taste, that the world has ever seen. A few centuries before, Greece had reached the summit of science and art. No country, in ancient or modern times, has surpassed the acumen of her philosophical writers and the aesthetic perfection of her poets and artists. Rome made use of her to embellish her cities, and inherited her taste for science ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... before its door; its front had been cut up into several gables, and shingled to the ground with shingles artificially antiquated, so that it looked much grayer than it naturally ought. Within it was equipped for electric lighting; and there was a low-browed aesthetic parlor, where, when Gaites arrived and passed to a belated dinner in the dining-room, an orchestra, consisting of a lady pianist and a lady violinist, was giving the closing piece of the afternoon concert. The dining-room was painted a self-righteous olive-green; ...
— A Pair of Patient Lovers • William Dean Howells
... the mental, moral, and aesthetic ideals of hundreds of thousands of readers is much greater than he often realizes. When he considers the extent to which most men and women are unconsciously guided in their ideas and aspirations by what they ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... Florence. She sat upon the fence, her gaze unfavourably though wistfully fixed upon a sign of no special aesthetic ...
— Gentle Julia • Booth Tarkington
... polished, for Swift to be cynical (in an optimistic sense), for Chesterton to be paradoxical. Ruggedness is a form of beauty, but it is a beauty that is quite different from the commonly accepted grounds. A mountain is rugged and it is beautiful, a woman is beautiful; but the two features of the aesthetic are quite different. It is the same with poetry. There is (and Browning proved it) a 'beautifulness' in the rugged; it is a sense of ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... Paris roused into activity an aspect of my religious nature that had hitherto been latent. I discovered the sensuous enjoyment that lay in introducing colour and fragrance and pomp into religious services, so that the gratification of the aesthetic emotions became dignified with the garb of piety. The picture-galleries of the Louvre, crowded with Madonnas and saints, the Roman Catholic churches with their incense-laden air and exquisite music, brought a new joy into my life, a more vivid colour ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... the fragments of the ruined cabinet, but was rewarded by no hollow ring. It was a most undutifully matter-of-fact and prosaic piece of furniture in its interior, however much it may have pleased the aesthetic sense outwardly. He gave it up after a time, and finished dressing. "Nothing in that but firewood," he announced to Jones, who had been watching his researches with some surprise. "Pile it up in a corner and leave it there until I have made my ...
— What Dreams May Come • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... he followed Bluhm up a dirty flight of stairs into the assemblage of Superior Women. The office was by nature a chamber with gaudy wall-paper of bouquets and wreaths. Viewed as an office, it was well enough, but in the aesthetic, light of a Holy Ground of Ideas it needed sweeping. The paper, too, hung in flaps from the damp walls: dusty files of newspapers, an empty bird-cage, old boots, a case of medical books, a pair of dilapidated trousers filled up one side of the room. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 28. July, 1873. • Various
... entirety. He was It with a capital letter. No wonder that under the circumstances Fairbridge had charms that allured, that people chose it for suburban residences, that the small, ornate, new houses with their perky little towers and aesthetic diamond-paned windows, multiplied. ...
— The Butterfly House • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... matter in fusion solidifies too quickly and in the wrong shape: it has to be put to the fire again. This is the part violence plays in human evolution; but that salutary violence must not make us forget what our aesthetic citizenship had acquired in the way of perdurable peace and harmony. But our suffering comes precisely from the fact that we ...
— Letters of a Soldier - 1914-1915 • Anonymous
... of education now. Are we more educated than were the ancient Greeks? Do we know anything about education, physical, intellectual, aesthetic (religious education in our sense of the word of course they had none), of which they have not taught us at least the rudiments? Are there not some branches of education which they perfected once and for ever, leaving us northern barbarians to follow or not to follow their example? To produce health, ...
— Daily Thoughts - selected from the writings of Charles Kingsley by his wife • Charles Kingsley
... Vogdes," with a laugh and shrug, "Berrytown has given its best of aesthetic instincts here: five square stories painted white, with green shutters; pebble walks; six straight evergreens to testify of the Beautiful. Inside—here we are! Parlor: yellow-pine floors, spotless; green paper blinds in the windows, that hang stirless the year round. This is ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - April, 1873, Vol. XI, No. 25. • Various
... would say, "if I went away from a gallery without a crick in my back and a blinding headache that I had no realization of my aesthetic privileges. Now-a-days I am willing to confess that I find too much of everything. Besides, all these pictures have been so overpraised! Let us find some pleasure that ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, November, 1878 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... a little piece of the millennium. "Everything is so very pretty and charming," says the visitor. Yes, so it is. But all this color, beauty, grace, symmetry, daintiness, delicacy, and refinement, though it seems to address and develop the aesthetic side of the child's nature, has in reality a very profound ethical significance. We have all seen the preternatural virtue of the child who wears her best dress, hat, and shoes on the same august occasion. Children are tidier and more careful in a dainty, well-kept room. They ...
— Children's Rights and Others • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... not an innate impulse which produced them, but a sham ambition, implanted from without, and artificially stimulated by the false and fleeting mood of the time. They must really hamper the growth of aesthetic knowledge among people who were ...
— The Coast of Bohemia • William Dean Howells
... high favor for his culinary excellence, as are the women for beauty and hospitality. To gratify the healthy appetite of the human animal this bird was doubtless sent by a kind Providence, none the less mindful of the creature comforts and necessities of mankind than of the purely aesthetic senses. ...
— Birds, Illustrated by Color Photography [July 1897] - A Monthly Serial designed to Promote Knowledge of Bird-Life • Various
... are they? No doubt Madame de Pompadour, the Geisha of Japanese art, and finally, bestial and degraded, La Fille Elisa—types that symbolize the most salient aspects of that genius—historic, aesthetic, and fictional—which will keep green the precious memory of Edmond and Jules ...
— Rene Mauperin • Edmond de Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt
... superficial glance, but must take time and a little pains to discover the intellectual. Comparing him with an American, I really thought that our national paleness and lean habit of flesh gave us greatly the advantage in an aesthetic point of view. It seemed to me, moreover, that the English tailor had not done so much as he might and ought for these heavy figures, but had gone on wilfully exaggerating their uncouthness by the roominess of their garments: ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... conceptions equally fit to satisfy the logical demand, that one which awakens the active {76} impulses, or satisfies other aesthetic demands better than the other, will be accounted the more rational conception, and ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... curious or intricate rather than beautiful. There is, nevertheless, beauty of a kind in Chinese bowls of jade, and there is dignity in some of the pieces of rock-crystal, but the bulk of the carving done in wood, horn and ivory does not deserve a moment's serious thought from the aesthetic point of view. The few fine specimens may be referred to the earlier part of the Ming dynasty when Chinese art in general was sincere and simple. After the middle of the 15th century there set in the taste for profuse ornament which ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... government; and it reinforced his purposes so powerfully that he appointed the author, in spite of his legitimism, to several diplomatic posts. "Le Genie du Christianisme" is indeed a plea for Christianity on aesthetic grounds—an attempt, as has been sneeringly said, to recommend Christianity by making it look pretty. Chateaubriand was not a close reasoner; his knowledge was superficial and inaccurate; his character was weakened by vanity ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... irritating way of speaking of a book. He talked of incidents, and effects, and suggestions, as if the whole thing had just been a sensational-aesthetic attribute to himself. Not a grain of human feeling in the man, said Miss Frost, flushing pink with exasperation. She herself ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... persists in the adult in these scientific times has been so much acted on and changed by dry light that it is scarcely recognizable in what is somewhat loosely or vaguely called a "feeling for nature": it has become intertwined with the aesthetic feeling and may be traced in a good deal of our poetic literature, particularly from the time of the first appearance of Lyrical Ballads, which put an end to the eighteenth-century poetic convention ...
— Far Away and Long Ago • W. H. Hudson
... at her, but with a changed eye. Hitherto he had found, in her presence and her talk, the aesthetic amusement which a reflective man is apt to seek in desultory intercourse with pretty women. His attitude had been one of admiring spectatorship, and he would have been almost sorry to detect in her any emotional weakness which should interfere with the fulfilment of her ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... distant peaks that merged into the mists on the horizon. It was a beautiful view, and on this hazy September afternoon, with the hidden sun sending long shafts of light from behind radiant masses of cloud, it formed a prospect that should have afforded keen aesthetic satisfaction to anybody who cared to look at it. Usually the girls appreciated its changeful glories, but to-day—this first day of a new term—they were too much taken up with their own grievances to think about scenery. In fact, they sat huddled together in the wheelbarrow with their ...
— A harum-scarum schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... elements of star lit splendor, the moon, in full radiance, casting a silvery luminous path on the sparkling waves. It was a phenomena worthy of the tallest submarine risks to witness. The full moon and the very repleteness of things aesthetic gave opportunity for those who were able to portray an attitude of indifference, to tell gravely how the radiance of the night fully exposed the convoy to the U-boats that were lurking in ...
— The Delta of the Triple Elevens - The History of Battery D, 311th Field Artillery US Army, - American Expeditionary Forces • William Elmer Bachman
... The aesthetic side of our subject we have purposely avoided, as it would lead us further than this purely technical guide-book pretends to go. But we propose shortly to bring out a second part devoted to design, composition, colour, and the common-sense ...
— Handbook of Embroidery • L. Higgin
... number of delicate and superior persons would refuse to see the force in that kitchen garden comparison, because it is not connected with any of the ordinary maritime sentiments as stated in books and songs. The aesthetic amateur would say that he knew what large and philosophical thoughts he ought to have by the boundless deep. He would say that he was not a greengrocer who would think first of greens. To which I should reply, like Hamlet, apropos of a parallel profession, "I would you were so honest ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... the aesthetic tool in the carpenter's kit. It is the most difficult tool to handle and the most satisfactory when thoroughly mastered. How to care for and handle it will be referred to in a subsequent chapter. We are now concerned with its uses only. Each complete kit ...
— Carpentry for Boys • J. S. Zerbe
... Belasco's play was not so much begotten, conceived, or born of admiration for Mr. Long's book as it was of despair wrought by the failure of another play written by Mr. Belasco. This play was a farce entitled "Naughty Anthony," created by Mr. Belasco in a moment of aesthetic aberration for production at the Herald Square Theatre, in New York, in the spring of 1900. Mr. Belasco doesn't think so now, but at the time he had a notion that the public would find something humorous and attractive in the ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... work of man's hand are the beliefs held by various peoples in past ages more clearly defined than in our cathedrals and churches, which noble buildings in every civilized country indicate principles as well as facts, influences as well as results; and while presenting the finest materials for aesthetic study, are no less useful as indicating the psychological peculiarities of those builders of old to whose condition ...
— Our Homeland Churches and How to Study Them • Sidney Heath
... have seen a civilization which in many respects rivals all that modern nations have to show. In art, in literature, in philosophy, in laws, in the mechanism of government, in the cultivated face of Nature, in military strength, in aesthetic culture, the Greeks and Romans were our equals. And this high civilization was reached by the native and unaided strength of man; by the power of will, by courage, by perseverance, by genius, by fortunate circumstances. We are filled with admiration by all these trophies of genius, and cannot ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume III • John Lord
... in ease and quiet in the country town in which he was born. Our sympathetic critics, even when, like Dr. Furnivall, they know absolutely all the archaeological facts as to theatrical life in Shakspere's time, do not seem to bring those facts into vital touch with their aesthetic estimate of his product; they remain under the spell of Coleridge and Gervinus.[141] Emerson, it is true, protested at the close of his essay that he "could not marry this fact," of Shakspere's being a jovial actor and manager, "to his verse;" ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson
... the Hotel-Dieu, the great Paris hospital; this, too, was projected on a greater scale than anything of the kind ever before known, and also required millions. But in the erection of these two buildings the emperor's determination was distinctly made known, that with the highest provision for aesthetic enjoyment there should be a similar provision, moving on parallel lines, for the relief of human suffering. This plan was carried out to the letter: the Palace of the Opera and the Hotel-Dieu went on with equal steps, and the former was not allowed to be finished before the latter. ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... least respects everyone's liberty and applauds all originality; but it helps no one, troubles itself for no one, bears no one's burden; in a word, it lacks charity, the great Christian virtue. To his mind perfection lies in personal nobility, and not in love. His keynote is aesthetic and not moral. He ignores sanctity, and has never so much as reflected on the terrible problem of evil. He believes in the opportunity of the individual, but neither in liberty nor in responsibility. He is a stranger to the social and political aspirations of the multitude; he has no ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... order, of power (except in the narrow sense of power over our fellows) and of action in general are all omitted. We may conjecture what reply Bentham would have made to this criticism. The omission of the love of beauty and aesthetic pleasures may surprise us when we remember that Bentham loved music, if he cared nothing for poetry. But he apparently regarded these as 'complex pleasures,'[392] and therefore not admissible into his table, if it be understood as an analysis into ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen |
