"Madonna" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... honest) to chivalry,—though devotion is sometimes a close second. You're manoeuvred into a position where you're made to think you 'must.' I've known chaps to marry on that basis.... It's weary waiting until Madame dies and Madonna ...
— Bertram Cope's Year • Henry Blake Fuller
... endowed with delicate features, a soft, Madonna like expression of countenance, elegance of movement and a quiet, yet gracious manner. Attentive to those around the board, she said but little. Occasionally, she listened in abstracted mood to the beating ...
— Adele Dubois - A Story of the Lovely Miramichi Valley in New Brunswick • Mrs. William T. Savage
... their historical paintings and half-length portraits than by introducing mountains and rocks of as fantastic and jagged a form as possible, although the latter often contrast strangely enough beside a mild, calmly serene Madonna face, or even beside the likeness of a prosaically respectable commonplace citizen of some free Imperial town. At that time, therefore, savagely broken-up, barren mountain scenery was considered the ideal type of natural scenic beauty, while, a few centuries later, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... given in charge of one of the nurses, a gentle, madonna-faced woman. She was quickly put to bed, and everything done for her that skill and experience could suggest. Hubert Varrick begged permission to sit by her couch and watch the progress of ...
— Kidnapped at the Altar - or, The Romance of that Saucy Jessie Bain • Laura Jean Libbey
... panoplies of arms, adorned walls on which were stretched tapestries of austere design. There I saw canvases of the highest value, the likes of which I had marveled at in private European collections and art exhibitions. The various schools of the old masters were represented by a Raphael Madonna, a Virgin by Leonardo da Vinci, a nymph by Correggio, a woman by Titian, an adoration of the Magi by Veronese, an assumption of the Virgin by Murillo, a Holbein portrait, a monk by Velazquez, a martyr by Ribera, a village fair by Rubens, two Flemish landscapes by Teniers, three little genre ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... his penitents as the instrument for hastening the reconciliation which would work God's triumph throughout the world. And her confessor's influence was certainly one of the decisive factors in shaping Benedetta's decision, for she was very pious, very devout, especially with regard to a certain Madonna whose image she went to adore every Sunday at the little church on the Piazza Farnese. One circumstance in particular struck her: Abbe Pisoni related that the flame of the lamp before the image in question whitened each time that he himself knelt there to beg the ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... turning and found I was among some at least quasi-private rooms. The doors being open I saw that there were flowers, books, a warm rug on the floor of one and a mirror on the wall of another. The third I ventured to step inside of, for a really beautiful Madonna and child confronted me at the door. The next moment I saw what I had not expected to see—a parrot in a cage suspended from the window! I made quite sure that it was not the parrot before I went up to it. It was asleep and appeared to be all over of a dull grey color, to match the Nuns, ...
— Crowded Out! and Other Sketches • Susie F. Harrison
... never more than the highest degree of an excellence which prevails widely round it, and forms the environment in which it grows. No single mind in single contact with the facts of nature could have created out of itself a Pallas, a Madonna, or a Lear: such vast conceptions are the growth of ages, the creations of a nation's spirit; and artist and poet, filled full with the power of that spirit, have but given them form, and nothing more than form. Nor would the form itself have been attainable by any isolated talent. No genius ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... in her plain white frock and sober conventional surroundings she seemed to show something of the quiet poise of a nurse or a nun. She seemed to exemplify the thought that the ideal woman is both wood-nymph and madonna. By contrast to the Nietzschian intriguer I had left that morning at Briar Hills, she was a paragon of all virtues. Nietzsche! The philosopher of the sty! ...
— Paradise Garden - The Satirical Narrative of a Great Experiment • George Gibbs
... coveted delight of studying the face, that had made summary shipwreck of his matrimonial fortune. No slightest detail escaped him; the burnished locks curled loosely around the forehead smooth as a sleeping baby's, the broad arch of the delicately-pencilled black brows, the Madonna droop of the lids whose heavy sable fringes deepened the bluish shadows beneath the eyes, the straight, flawless nose, the perfect chin with its deeply-incised dimple, the remarkably beautiful mouth, which despairing grief had ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... a little wayside shrine. Within its penthouse eave an oil-lamp flickered before the frescoed Madonna and Child; the shelf in front of the picture was heaped with flowers just beginning to fade. Manisty stayed the horse a moment; pointed first to the shrine, then to the bit ...
— Eleanor • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... fireplace was the mantel, with its rich hand-carving of the French coat of arms. On the walls of the room were family portraits, some of them brought from the provinces of old France. Doctor Hissong stood before one portrait, a face sweet in its Madonna-like innocence and purity. A tear-drop stole ...
— Shawn of Skarrow • James Tandy Ellis
... begins to make secret inquiries into reducing diet, and to cling desperately to the strongest corset-lacing as her only hope. It would require one to be better educated than most of our girls are, to be willing to look like the Sistine Madonna or ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
... Bob, if you were to lean the Sistine Madonna right up against the table in my room I wouldn't turn my head to look at it. And as for churches—I wouldn't accept Westminster Abbey as a gift. Tell 'em not to urge it on me, for I wouldn't take it even if I could get it through the customs free ...
— The Story of Glass • Sara Ware Bassett
... Cartier, begins the country of Canada. "Il settimo giorno di detto mese la vigilia della Madonna, dopo udita la messa ci partimmo dall' isola de' nocellari per andar all'insu di detta fiume, e arrivamo a quattordici isole distanti dall' isola de Nocellari intorno setto in otto leghe, e quivi ...
— The Conquest of Canada (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Warburton
... Historical and Critical Essay on the Life and Character of Petrarch; and A Dissertation on an Historical Hypothesis of the Abbe de Sade. 1810. [An Italian version, entitled Riflessioni intorno a Madonna ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... "O Madonna! hear me: it is for my mother's life. She will die—she will die. You know she cannot live if she is taken away from her house and from this holy place where she prays to you this many years. O Queen ...
— White Lies • Charles Reade
... whereon sat Mrs Gunning, majestic in another of faded purple satin, beneath which her dress remained conjectural. A noble square of Limerick point was flung over her head and hung veil-like by each ear; and, indeed, with the little cherub Lucy at her feet, she might have sat for an aging Madonna. ...
— The Ladies - A Shining Constellation of Wit and Beauty • E. Barrington
... last; he was never well; his mother gave many a tear and many a vigil to the sickly child she thought every week she must lose. To guard his days, she placed him, to gratify a Romish superstition, under the special protection of the Blessed Virgin, and in accordance with custom clad him in the Madonna's livery of blue. His costume of a blue smock, blue pantaloons, and a blue cap procured for him the name of Bleuet, or, as we should perhaps say, Blueling, if indeed we may coin for the occasion one of those familiar, affectionate diminutives, so common in the Italian, rarer in the French, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 74, December, 1863 • Various
... gloomy and terrible dreams produced by opiates. The most interesting parts of his Suspiria, showing De Quincey's marvelous insight into dreams, are those in which we are brought face to face with the strange feminine creations "Levana," "Madonna," "Our Lady of Sighs," and "Our Lady of Darkness." A series of nearly thirty articles which he collected in 1853, called Autobiographic Sketches, completes the revelation of the author's own life. Among his miscellaneous works may be mentioned, in order to show his wide range of subjects, Klosterheim, ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... the Lake of Mantua, in the year 1340, stood a small chapel containing a miraculous painting of the Madonna, called by the people of the locality 'Santa Maria delle Grazie.' The boatmen and fishermen of the Mincio, who had been, as they said, often saved from certain death by the Madonna—as famous in those days as the modern Lady of Rimini, celebrated for ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... coat and with long black hair, insisted upon charcoaling mustachios and imperial upon his host's countenance, in honor of his countryman who had distinguished himself as a patron of art. Later, a laughing girl whose blue-black hair was banded Madonna-wise around a head considerably otherwise, washed it off with a table napkin dipped in wine. She sat on his knee to perform the operation, scanned his clean face with satisfaction, and taking him by the ears as by handles, kissed him gaily. Then she went back to her own cher ami, who wasn't ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler
... going to drive to the nearest town, and that he had meant to give him a letter to post to Moscow; but the letter was not written. The letter was a very important one to a friend, asking him to bid for him for a picture of the Madonna which was to be offered for sale at an auction. As he reached the house he saw at the door four big, well-fed, well-groomed, thoroughbred horses harnessed to a carriage, the black lacquer of which glistened in the sun. The coachman was ...
— The Forged Coupon and Other Stories • Leo Tolstoy
... into the room. With her pale, ivory-tinted cheeks, her great limpid brown eyes, her soft dark hair parted madonna-like across her beautiful brow, her whole face was like some exquisite, composite picture of all the saints of history. Her ...
— The White Linen Nurse • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... chivalrous colonel by running quickly to Mrs. Tretherick, and hiding herself, as if for protection, in the folds of her gown. Nevertheless, the colonel was not vanquished. Falling back into an attitude of respectful admiration, he pointed out a marvellous resemblance to the "Madonna and Child." Mrs. Tretherick simpered, but did not dislodge Carry as before. There was an awkward pause for a moment; and then Mrs. Tretherick, motioning significantly to the child, said in a whisper, "Go now. Don't come here again, but meet me to-night ...
— Tales of the Argonauts • Bret Harte
... black hair, sits at the piano in her own parlor. On the Brussels carpet stands, among others, Her Majesty, Queen Miriam, in a lilac silk, with bare neck and arms save for the protection afforded by a bertha of applique lace trimmed with pink ribbon, with hair a la madonna, and fastened low on her neck. Is she not handsome as she stands fronting the folding doors, her hand in tall Mr. Trezevant's, just as she commences to dance, with the tip of her black bottine just ...
— A Confederate Girl's Diary • Sarah Morgan Dawson
... born in 1808, at an obscure hamlet in the district of Oderzo in the Friuli, of parents who were small freeholders. They removed with their son in his tenth year to Venice, and there he began his education for the Church in the Seminary of the Madonna della Salute. The tourist who desires to see the Titians and Tintorettos in the sacristy of this superb church, or to wonder at the cold splendors of the interior of the temple, is sometimes obliged to seek admittance through the seminary; and it has doubtless happened to more than one ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... in their original tongue in America, First performances of "Le Donne Curiose," "Il Segreto di Susanna," "I Giojelli della Madonna," "L'Amore Medico," Story and music of "Le Donne Curiose," Methods and apparatus of Mozart's day, Wolf-Ferrari's Teutonism, Goldoni paraphrased, Nicolai and Verdi, The German version of "Donne Curiose," Musical motivi in the opera, Rameau's "La Poule," ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... the Muses of Greece, the Marble Virgins of the Certosa at Pavia, the Day and Night of Michael Angelo, the little Angels which Bellini was the first to put at the foot of his Church pictures, and which Raphael painted so divinely in his Virgin with the Donor, and the Madonna who shivers at Dresden, the lovely Maidens by Orcagna in the Church of San-Michele, at Florence, the celestial choir round the tomb in Saint-Sebaldus, at Nuremberg, the Virgins of the Duomo, at Milan, the whole population of a hundred Gothic Cathedrals, ...
— Massimilla Doni • Honore de Balzac
... bulls or bears rather than at targets; the excitement is greater; the instinct is that of the soldiers of Spain and of France, who invariably preferred shooting at a valuable fresco like Sodoma's Christ, at Siena, or Lo Spagna's Madonna, at Spoleto, to practising against a mere worthless piece of wood. Such a man as Caesar Borgia is the nec plus ultra of a Renaissance villain; he takes, as all do not, absolute pleasure in evil as such. Yet Caesar Borgia is not a fiend nor ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... old mediaeval painting of a Madonna. That Madonna had a stiffness, a deadly pallor, a thinness of face incompatible with strict beauty. But on the thin lips there was a smile for which no word is lovely enough; and in the eyes was a pure and ...
— A Flat Iron for a Farthing - or Some Passages in the Life of an only Son • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... several valuable publications in the field of diplomacy, announced in his work, Aldo Manuzio, Lettres et Documents, 1494-1515, Venice, 1867, that he had been engaged for years on a biography of Madonna Lucretia Borgia, and had collected for the purpose a large mass of ...
— Lucretia Borgia - According to Original Documents and Correspondence of Her Day • Ferdinand Gregorovius
... artist a substantial salary and in 1460 the master went to reside at Mantua. He remained there under three successive marquises till his death in 1506. He enriched the little capital with splendid creations of his art, now unfortunately mostly destroyed. Mantegna's "Madonna della Vittoria," in the Louvre, was painted to celebrate the deeds of Francesco Gonzaga in ...
— Some Forerunners of Italian Opera • William James Henderson
... equal force may perhaps have been directed by the consciousness that he could not side with either view to the exclusion of the other. In any case his practical philosophy was touched with the spirit of Christianity. It was more than artistic enthusiasm which led him in profound admiration to the Madonna di San Sisto: ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; Religion, A Dialogue, Etc. • Arthur Schopenhauer
... and shade, thereby achieving a more exquisite combination and effect. In addition to the numerous decorative pages and marvellous initials, there are portraits of the Evangelists and full-page miniatures of the Temptation of Christ, His Seizure by the Jews, and the Madonna and Child surrounded by Angels with censers. Exceptionally beautiful are these angels and other angelic figures throughout the book, their wings shining with glowing colors amid woven patterns of graceful design. The portraits and miniatures and the numerous faces ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... immortal picture give you the results of a whole age of artistic culture, in a form within the compass of very humble means. There is now selling for five dollars at Williams and Everett's a photograph of Cheney's crayon drawing of the San Sisto Madonna and Child, which has the very spirit of the glorious original. Such a picture, hung against the wall of a child's room, would train its eye from infancy; and yet how many will freely spend five dollars in embroidery on its dress, that say they ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... must go back a little farther to the heroic age of the grisette and the tearful Manchon de Francine of Henri Murger. Thyrza, at any rate, is a most exquisite picture in half-tones of grey and purple of a little Madonna of the slums; she is in reality the belle fleur d'un fumier of which he speaks in the epigraph of the Nether World. The fumier in question is Lambeth Walk, of which we have a Saturday night scene, worthy of the author of L'Assommoir and Le Ventre de Paris ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... of Blent, quite good west-country people. She had broken away from them before she was twenty to marry Benham, whom she had idealized at a tennis party. He had talked of his work and she had seen it in a flash, the noblest work in the world, him at his daily divine toil and herself a Madonna surrounded by a troupe of Blessed Boys—all of good family, some of quite the best. For a time she had kept it up even more than he had, and then Nolan had distracted her with a realization of the heroism that goes to the ends of the earth. She became sick with desire for the forests of Brazil, and ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... had just come down to breakfast; Mrs. T. in her large dust-colored morning-dress and Madonna front (she looks rather scraggy of a morning, but I promise you her ringlets and figure will stun you of an evening); and having read the note, ...
— A Little Dinner at Timmins's • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Mrs. Burton are well, if airily, lodged in a flat composed of ten rooms, separated by a corridor, with a picture of our Saviour, a statuette of St. Joseph with a lamp, and the Madonna with another lamp burning before it. Thus far the belongings are all of the Cross; but no sooner are we landed in the little drawing-rooms than signs of the Crescent appear. Small, but artistically arranged, the rooms, opening in to one another, are ...
— The Romance of Isabel Lady Burton Volume II • Isabel Lady Burton & W. H. Wilkins
... every degree of earlier works. Under these circumstances it will easily be seen that the task of reconstructing a lost original from extant imitations is a very delicate and perilous one. Who could adequately appreciate the Sistine Madonna, if the inimitable touch of Raphael were known ...
— A History Of Greek Art • F. B. Tarbell
... larkspur flourished beside scarlet gladioli, feather-headed spirea, and hardy fuchsia. There were no straight lines, nor any order of planting. The Madonna lilies stood in groups, lifting up on thin, ragged stems their pure and spotless clusters, and overpowering with their heavy scent the fainter fragrance of the mignonette. Tall, green hollyhocks towered higher yet, holding the secret of their loveliness, until these should wither; when they too ...
— Peter's Mother • Mrs. Henry De La Pasture
... "One day, amid the rest, the youth surveyed The dame disordered and opprest with gloom; Having twice summoned, by her waiting-maid, The favoured dwarf, who yet delayed to come; A third time by the lady sent, she said: — 'Engaged at play, Madonna, is the groom, Nor, lest he lose a doit, his paltry stake, Will that discourteous churl his ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto
... with the utmost sincerity, expressed his fervent wish to meet Lorenzo's views in every respect, but he expressed, quite emphatically, his disinclination to undertake such an arduous duty. Not only did he plead the infirmities of age, but declared that his wife, Madonna Dianora, would never leave Florence. Her love of her own city and its people equalled that of her sister, the Domina Magnifica Lucrezia—their social, charitable and literary interests were ...
— The Tragedies of the Medici • Edgcumbe Staley
... began. So the third ship which was used in this voyage set sail. Luke notices its 'sign' as being that of the Twin Brethren, the patrons of sailors, whose images were, no doubt, displayed on the bow, just as to-day boats in that region often have a Madonna nailed on the mast. Strange conjunction—Castor and Pollux on the prow, and Paul ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... August, are so prevalent along the Gulf coast. Clara Sanders sat near a window, bending over a piece of needlework, while, with her hands clasped behind her, Beulah walked up and down the floor. Their countenances contrasted vividly; Clara's sweet, placid face, with drooped eyelids and Madonna-like serenity; the soft, auburn hair curled about her cheeks, and the delicate lips in peaceful rest. And Beulah!—how shall I adequately paint the gloom and restlessness written in her stormy countenance? To tell you that her brow was ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... night This particular brother knelt, I say, in his small chaste room, glaring upward at his Christ, who hung long-armed in a little recess between the side of three narrow bookshelves and a projection of the wall; and under the Christ a gilt and blue Madonna; the books on the three shelves few, leaning different ways. His right elbow rested on a square plain table, at which was a wooden chair; behind him, in a corner, the bed: a bed all enclosed in dark boards, a broad perpendicular ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... wonderful, wonderful picture of radiant womanhood Mrs. Van Blooren had made! Even in her trouble Nan was generous. The woman was beautiful in a way that poor Nan had only dreamed of. The Madonna-like features, calm, perfect. The dark hair, superb in the simplicity of its dressing. She remembered that at the first glance it had suggested to her the sheen of a cloudless summer night. And her gown, and her figure. The gown must have ...
— The Forfeit • Ridgwell Cullum
... and in my dreams the picture came towards me out of the frame and took me in her arms as Madonna takes her Holy Child, and looked at me with a gaze as if all the love on earth had met in those eyes. I threw my arms round her neck and waited for her to fondle and play with me like Mistress Stromer ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... Barker hesitated; the Madonna-like devotion of a moment ago was gone; it was only the woman of the world who laughingly looked up at him. Nevertheless he was touched. "Have you—ever—had a child, Mrs. Horncastle?" he asked gently and hesitatingly. ...
— The Three Partners • Bret Harte
... you and inspire you. I am going to send you one of our traveling art galleries, you may keep the pictures a whole week, long enough to learn the titles and the names of the painters. Just think what it will mean to lift your tired eyes to a beautiful, serene Madonna! And couldn't you have more color in your home? We find color so stimulating. Scarlet geraniums for instance. Wouldn't you ...
— A Romance of Billy-Goat Hill • Alice Hegan Rice
... the name of Anna Gaetano, of some celebrity for keeping a notable inn, over the door of which was inscribed in large letters, "Al buon vino non bisogna fruscia" (good wine needs no bush). But it was not the good wines alone of Madonna Anna that drew to her house some of the most distinguished men of Florence, and made it particularly the resort of the Cavaliere Oltramontani—her humor was as racy as her wine; and many of the men of wit and pleasure about town were ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects, and Curiosities of Art, (Vol. 2 of 3) • Shearjashub Spooner
... institution of the Mount of Pity failed before the lust of Lombardy, and the logic of Augsburg; and, to this day, the worship of the Immaculate Virginity of Money, mother of the Omnipotence of Money, is the Protestant form of Madonna worship. ...
— Val d'Arno • John Ruskin
... was daughter of all women, as her mother before her, and she was the mother of all women to come after her. She was Sar, the corn-goddess. She was Isthar who conquered death. She was Sheba and Cleopatra; she was Esther and Herodias. She was Mary the Madonna, and Mary the Magdalene, and Mary the sister of Martha, also she was Martha. And she was Brunnhilde and Guinevere, Iseult and Juliet, Heloise and Nicolette. Yes, and she was Eve, she was Lilith, she was Astarte. ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... proof of the above, Higgins cites Gorius's Tuscan Antiquities, where may be seen the figure of an old Goddess with her child in her arms, the inscription being in Etruscan characters. "No doubt the Romish Church would have claimed her for a Madonna, but most unluckily she has her name, Nurtia, in Etruscan letters, on her ...
— The God-Idea of the Ancients - or Sex in Religion • Eliza Burt Gamble
... of the Deity, as witness the Poems of Pentaur. This is true also of some of the Greek Poets who had a deep insight into divine things. It is not a little interesting to note also that artists of different nations paint the Madonna after the style of their own women. Very few of the pictures in the great art galleries are after the style of face which you see in the Orient. Hence there are Dutch Madonnas, and Italian and French and English types. There were no worshippers in the Joss-House at the hour when ...
— By the Golden Gate • Joseph Carey
... by my aunt's remonstrances, may have left it to me to bring them sometime or other over to Poland. That my father thought of this in later times is proved by the numerous bequests and codicils in his will. Among others there is one that touched me more deeply than I can tell: "The head of the Madonna by Sassoferrato I ...
— Without Dogma • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... Maggiore, Como: such a rest to our blistered feet! Those blisters were a drawback; but what episode in human life has none? We strayed through the lime-groves of the Isola Bella, where I exchanged the few words of Italian of which I was master with a fair and courteous madonna who crossed our path,—ascended, by clambering up within one of the folds of the Saint's short mantle, the gigantic bronze statue of the holy Borromeo, sat down inside the head, and looked out through the eyebrows on the lake under whose waters lies buried the wide-brimmed shovel-hat which once covered ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... color as a poem of Byron's; then came classic bas-reliefs, finely-cut agates, wonderful cameos! Works of art upon works of art, till the craftsman's skill palled on the mind, masterpiece after masterpiece till art itself became hateful at last and enthusiasm died. He came upon a Madonna by Raphael, but he was tired of Raphael; a figure by Correggio never received the glance it demanded of him. A priceless vase of antique porphyry carved round about with pictures of the most grotesquely wanton of Roman divinities, the pride ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... figures and the expression of his faces to the subject he had chosen. In a word, he humanized the altar-pieces and the cloister frescoes upon which he worked. In this way the painters rose above the ancient symbols and brought heaven down to earth. By drawing Madonna and her son like living human beings, by dramatizing the Christian history, they silently substituted the love of beauty and the interests of actual life for the principles of the Church. The saint or angel became an occasion for the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... notwithstanding, he cannot be said to have produced a tale without a miracle. His heroine, too, if we may judge by his descriptions of her, is 'all a wonder and a wild desire.' At the age of seventeen she 'was one of the Great Maker's masterpieces . . . a living likeness of the Dresden Madonna.' One rather shudders to think of what she may become at forty, but this is an impertinent prying into futurity. She hails from 'Maryland, my Maryland!' and has 'received a careful, if not a superior, education.' Need we add that she marries ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... the letter flushed her face with expectation. She took it with smiles. She covered it with kisses. When she opened it, a curl from Jack's head fell on to her lap. She pressed it to her heart, and then rose and laid it at the feet of her Madonna. "She must share my joy," she said with a pathetic childishness; "she will understand it." Then, with her arm around Isabel, and the girl's head on his shoulder, they read together ...
— Remember the Alamo • Amelia E. Barr
... as when, for no apparent reason, he changes his tactics, and with the same sweet confidence absolutely reverses his former statements. What can we do with him? There seems to be no appeal we can make. He swears by the Madonna! He raises his eyes to Heaven, and when he finally makes his near- true statement, he is filled with such confessional fervor that to reward him seems to be the only logical course left. He is certainly a child of nature, ...
— Library Work with Children • Alice I. Hazeltine
... Himalayas; and man slept not, but climbed. His groping toward this sunrise of soul is the epic of history. Dante knew not a gentleman, and could not dream him therefore. Mediaevalism learned to paint the Madonna's face, but not manhood's look. Character is the last test of genius. Man saw gray streaks of dawn, rimming far, ragged peaks, and still he climbed; and, on a morning, beheld the sunrise! And if you will note, 't is Don Quixote standing ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... faults, madonna, that drink and good counsel will amend: for give the dry fool drink, then is the fool not dry; bid the dishonest man mend himself: if he mend, he is no longer dishonest; if he cannot, let the botcher mend him. Anything that's mended is but patched; virtue that transgresses is but patched ...
— Twelfth Night; or, What You Will • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... been no substantial change since the Norman Conquest. The "feeling" of the scene is the same as it always was, the outlook of the people, their habit of mind, is the same. The one apparent difference is in religion, and that is not a difference of substance but of accident. We have forgotten the Madonna and the Saints, who were taken away from us by violence. We still go to church, but they are not there any more. They were expelled with a fork: one Cromwell but completed what another began. And now it is late in the day: they can never be brought back. "Vestigia nulla" is true of religion ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett
... dark earthen walls began to be gradually lit up. They reached a widening in the passage where, it seemed, there had once been a chapel; at least, there was a small table against the wall, like an altar, and above, the faded, almost entirely obliterated picture of a Catholic Madonna. A small silver lamp hanging before it barely illumined it. The Tatar stooped and picked up from the ground a copper candlestick which she had left there, a candlestick with a tall, slender stem, and snuffers, pin, and extinguisher ...
— Taras Bulba and Other Tales • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... sunshine streamed in at the western windows, touched the gold-fish globes with rosy glory, glittered on the brass bird-cages, flung a splendid halo round the meek head of the Madonna above my table, and poured a flood of grateful heat over my shoulders. The clatter of a tin pail outside the door, the uncertain turning of a knob by a hand too small to grasp it: "I forgitted my lunch bucket, 'n had to come back ...
— The Story of Patsy • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... celebrating mass Our Lady manifested to him her desire that the sanctuary should be specially consecrated to her, and that alone was enough. The church, then a desert, has never since been empty, and thousands of ex votos declare the graces which since that day the Madonna has ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans
... models for men. The reformer's?—a creed by posterity learnt A century after its author is burnt! The poet's?—a laurel that hides the bald brow It hath blighted! The painter's?—Ask Raphael now Which Madonna's authentic! The stateman's?—a name For parties to blacken, or boys to declaim! The soldier's?—three lines on the cold Abbey pavement! Were this all the life of the wise and the brave meant, All it ends in, thrice better, Neaera, it were Unregarded to sport with thine odorous hair, Untroubled ...
— Lucile • Owen Meredith
... sob, pressed her face into his chest, wishing she had helped it. Then, with Madonna love, she clasped his head upon her shoulder, covering her hands over his hair. Twice she kissed him softly in the nape of the neck, with fond, reassuring kisses. All the while, delicately, she fondled and soothed him, till he was ...
— The Trespasser • D.H. Lawrence
... haste is that of a master of his art, who, with conscious command of its resources, and in the frenzy of a grand inspiration, works out his conception to its minutest detail of essential form, leaving the work of surface finish for the occupation of cooler leisure. What the Sistine Madonna was to Raphael, it seems that 'Macbeth' was to Shakespeare—a magnificent impromptu; that kind of impromptu which results from the application of well-disciplined powers and rich stores of thought to a subject ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... there was standing not only Madame, but also a young girl whom she was holding by the hand. The golden hair, the fine-drawn, delicate contours, the face with its bewitching oval—a face which might have served as a model for the countenance of the Madonna, since it was of a type rarely to be met with in Russia, where nearly everything, from plains to human feet, is, rather, on the gigantic scale; these features, I say, were those of the identical maiden whom Chichikov had encountered on the road when he had ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... rose-and-cream chintz, and a Persian rug made up of blue and cream. The curtains at the windows are of plain blue linen bordered with a narrow blue and white fringe. The lighting-fixtures are of carved wood, pointed in polychrome. The most beautiful thing in the room is a Fifteenth Century painting, the Madonna of Bartolomeo Montagna, which has the place ...
— The House in Good Taste • Elsie de Wolfe
... see why this rascal should have the comfort of a light in there," he said. "As for Madonna Mary, she will not mind; she has a ...
— Helmet of Navarre • Bertha Runkle
... afforded momentary relief to the high-born girl, who was, indeed, a lovely picture, reclining on a cushion at the feet of Lady Douglas. A shade of sadness rested upon her face, giving her the expression of a Madonna—a study ...
— Lady Rosamond's Secret - A Romance of Fredericton • Rebecca Agatha Armour
... bit of mutton," her father said, "as ever a man would wish to stick a knife into." She had sat to the painter for all sorts of characters; and the curious who possess any of Gambouge's pictures will see her as Venus, Minerva, Madonna, and in numberless other characters: Portrait of a lady—Griskinissa; Sleeping Nymph—Griskinissa, without a rag of clothes, lying in a forest; Maternal Solicitude—Griskinissa again, with young Master Gambouge, who was by this time the offspring ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... to take this down," she said, as if apologising more to herself than Ted, "because I want to hang my large photo of the Sistine Madonna ...
— Audrey Craven • May Sinclair
... prosaic year of 1889 the Virgin was seen to descend into the streets of Johnstown, Pennsylvania, to save her image on the Catholic church in that place, when it was swept by a deluge in which hundreds of persons perished. It was the wrath of the Madonna that caused just such a flood in New Mexico long years ago. There is in the old Church of Our Lady of Guadalupe, in Santa Fe, a picture that commemorates the appearance of the Virgin to Juan Diego, an Indian in Guadalupe, old Mexico, ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... hears his comrade say, "I shall be taken to-day, give this to ——." Examples of this premonition abound. He enters a bombarded village, the only thing standing intact frequently is a figure of Christ crucified, or the Madonna looking down upon a mass of crumbling ruin. These facts are again and again verified by photographs. Often the talk of the camp as the men settle down by the fire is of the weird and the uncanny that has happened during the day; and there are pauses when the soldiers stare ...
— War and the Weird • Forbes Phillips
... next day was Sunday, and Eveley remained quietly on a couch, with Marie waiting upon her like a tender Madonna. Nolan came up, too, and insisted upon the full story ...
— Eve to the Rescue • Ethel Hueston
... save the old doctor, and later Kate's mother, become suddenly an old woman, broken by the terrible rumors which had penetrated her peaceful Bluegrass home. She was shocked beyond words to find her newly widowed daughter serene as some Madonna out of a painting, wrapped in a rose-colored dressing-gown that would ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... Carolina, was virtually mistress of the establishment. Mrs. Henry Lee Scott's social sway in Washington was almost unprecedented. She was as grand in appearance as she was in character, and during one of her visits to Rome she sat for a distinguished artist as a model for his pictures of the Madonna. General Scott seemed to derive much pleasure and satisfaction from the society of his former companions in arms, who were always welcomed to his hospitable board. Among those I especially recall were Colonels ...
— As I Remember - Recollections of American Society during the Nineteenth Century • Marian Gouverneur
... high-priced in order to be beautiful and good. We have seen things for which hundreds of guineas have been paid, that have not one-hundredth part of the meaning or beauty that is to be found in Linton's woodcut of Rafaelle's Madonna, which may be had for twopence. The head reminds one of the observation made by Hazlitt upon a picture, that it seems as if an unhandsome act would be impossible in its presence. It embodies the ideas of mother's love, womanly beauty, and earnest piety. As some one said of the picture: ...
— Thrift • Samuel Smiles
... Madonna lilies flourished like sculpture about the porch, and he admired their tall stems and leaves and carven blossoms, thinking how they would die without strife, without complaint. The briar filled the air with a sweet, apple-like smell; and far away the lake ...
— The Lake • George Moore
... they imperfectly reveal. We lingered briefly before many a Raphael and Titian; but I saw my friend was impatient, and I suffered him at last to lead me directly to the goal of our journey—the most tenderly fair of Raphael's virgins, the Madonna in the Chair. Of all the fine pictures of the world, it seemed to me this is the one with which criticism has least to do. None betrays less effort, less of the mechanism of success and of the irrepressible discord between conception ...
— The Madonna of the Future • Henry James
... find it in India; it has a god, unknown to southern Buddhism, and it has a goddess Kouan Yin, "the being who hears the cries of men," sometimes represented with a child on her knee, just like a Western Madonna. While still essentially monastic, it offers salvation and a way of life to all. To faith in Buddha the merciful one is also added a belief in the paradise in which he receives believers. Thus ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies
... immensely distinguished and superior. And she was over thirty and had never been engaged, despite the number and variety of her acquaintances, despite her challenging readiness to flirt, and her occasional coquetries. Ten years ago he had almost regarded her as a madonna on a throne, so high did she seem to be above him. His ideas had changed, but there could be no doubt that in an alliance between an Orgreave and a Clayhanger, it would be the Clayhanger who stood to gain the greater advantage. ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... the statue of Poggio which raises a problem familiar to students of fifteenth-century art, especially frequent in paintings of the Madonna, namely, the cryptic lettering to be found on the borders of garments. In the case of Poggio, the hem of the tunic just below the throat is incised with deep and clear cyphers which cannot be read as ...
— Donatello • David Lindsay, Earl of Crawford
... alterations made about one hundred and twenty years ago, the monument of a Knight Hospitaller was found, and within the last few years small pieces of carved stone have been dug up—amongst others, a Madonna's head with traces of blue and gold still upon it; a monk kneeling, and a knight and lady hand in hand. The Abbey is now the property ...
— Devon, Its Moorlands, Streams and Coasts • Rosalind Northcote
... petty officer as a punishment for some moral offence; the reviewer not being able to see in Drake, as a man, anything more than; a highly brave and successful buccaneer, whose pretences to religion might rank with the devotion of an Italian bandit to the Madonna. And so Hawkins, and even Raleigh, are regarded by superficial persons, who see only such outward circumstances of their history as correspond with their own impressions. The high nature of these men, and the high objects which they pursued, will only rise out and become ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... know that my picture is finished as well as another Quadro[18] the like of which I have never painted before. And as you are so pleased with yourself, let me tell you that there is no better Madonna picture in the land than mine; for all the painters praise it, as the nobles do you. They say that they have never seen a nobler, more charming painting, ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore
... question. Her eyes brightened a moment as she nodded in the affirmative; then they grew dim again, like windows seen from without when the light is withdrawn to an inner room. She seemed as unconscious as a pictured Madonna. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... of Michael Angelo was the beautiful Church of Santa Maria Novella, called by him affectionately "Mia Sposa." Here, day by day, he beheld the "Last Judgment" of Orcagna, the enthroned figures in the Spanish Chapel, and the solemn blue Madonna, now in the Capella Rucellai, with its little figures of prophets on the frame that are already almost Michael Angelesque. Here he transferred cartoons for Domenico and painted draperies and ornaments; here he ...
— Michael Angelo Buonarroti • Charles Holroyd
... ears, for instance, were so cultivated as to render it painful for them to listen even to the grandest music if indifferently performed; some who had "atmosphere" and "chiaro-oscuro" so fully developed that copies of even the "Madonna di San Sisto" were only daubs offensive to the eye; others who, having seen Macready in Macbeth, find the tragedy stale in others' hands. Now I don't believe this ensues where the love of the art itself is genuine; and I rejoice to say that having once listened to an oratorio ...
— Round the World • Andrew Carnegie
... solid wall.... The exhausted mother is binding her boy's hands with a portion of her petticoat.... As she kneels there, with the faint flicker of a light falling on her finely chiseled profile, she resembles Botticelli's magnificent Madonna in the Uffizi Gallery at Florence.... The picture is completed by the dark background and the solicitous attitude of the girls as they cluster around the sufferer.... With a little imagination one can delineate the jeweled crown which the ...
— Rescuing the Czar - Two authentic Diaries arranged and translated • James P. Smythe
... imaginative, provisional, and mistaken expressions of the underlying and indestructible sense of the nobility of human life. They were artistic, not scientific. A statue of Apollo, for instance, or a picture of the Madonna, were really representations of what men aimed at producing on earth, not of what actually had any existence in heaven. And if we look back at the greatest civilisations of antiquity, we shall find, it is said, that what gave them vigour and intensity were purely human ...
— Is Life Worth Living? • William Hurrell Mallock
... an old convent, and it is a little startling to see the church facade, with a statue of the Madonna over the central porch. At the steps a number of women stood waiting with pots and jars and handkerchiefs full of food for their relatives within; and when the doctor appeared several rushed up to ...
— The Land of The Blessed Virgin; Sketches and Impressions in Andalusia • William Somerset Maugham
... unconsciously took the rose from the little hand and stood looking as though in dire doubt what to do with it. The boy did not help him out. Already he had moved on to the next passenger,—this time a man of clerical bearing and suspiciously vivid nose,—and handed him a gleaming Madonna lily. ...
— The Return of Peter Grimm - Novelised From the Play • David Belasco
... was the first to break it. "But, whether here or there, beauty without money is the orange tree without shelter. If a lad could be got cheap, I would hire the land, and trust for the crop to the Madonna." ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... with canvases on which Beautrelet recognized the most famous signatures. There were Raphael's Madonna of the Agnus Dei, Andrea del Sarto's Portrait of Lucrezia Fede, Titian's Salome, Botticelli's Madonna and Angels and numbers of Tintorettos, ...
— The Hollow Needle • Maurice Leblanc
... "I don't know much about plumbing," Katie heard Ann saying. "I suppose perhaps it is bad. But do you care much about plumbing when looking at"—her pause before it might have been one of reverence—"The Madonna of the Chair?" ...
— The Visioning • Susan Glaspell
... be true. But it was not real. It was a dream- dwelling. I knew, for I turned suddenly and caught the grand piano cavorting in a spacious corner of the room. I did not say anything, for just then we were being received by a gracious woman, a beautiful Madonna, clad in flowing white and shod with sandals, who greeted us as though she had known ...
— The Cruise of the Snark • Jack London
... interest in the actual world seems never so far lost sight of, and earlier revived, in Sculpture. Even down to the spring-tide of Modern Art in the thirteenth century, the "pleasant days" when Guido of Siena was painting his Madonna, the improvement in Painting was rather a stirring within the cerements of conventional types, a flush on the cheek of the still rigid form,—while in the bas-reliefs of the Pisan sculptors we meet already a realism as much in excess ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... where the only spots of colour were the roses—masses of pink roses in gold bowls—a Madonna-like being was reclining in a green and white billow of a lace tea gown, on a white sofa. She held out both hands to Mrs. Ess Kay, and looked at me, apologising for not ...
— Lady Betty Across the Water • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... scrap- books and photographs. Jasper and a coadjutor or two undertook to photograph any one who wished it; and there too were displayed the Mouse-traps. Mrs. Henderson, sure to look beautiful, quite Madonna- like in her costume, would have the charge of the stall, with Gillian and two other girls, in Italian peasant-dresses, sent ...
— The Long Vacation • Charlotte M. Yonge
... craven heart. Before a sculptured Venus I would kneel, Crown her with flowers, worship her, and cry, 'O large and noble type of our ideal, At least my heart and prayer return to thee, Amidst a faithless world of proselytes. Madonna Mary, with her virgin lips, And eyes that look perpetual reproach, Insults and is a blasphemy on youth. Is she to claim the worship of a man Hot with the first rich flush of ripened life?' Realities, like phantoms, glided ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... He embraced the whole scene with his eyes. "Butterflies, bits of light and song and laughter, dancing, dancing down the last tail-reach of hell. Not only Lucile, but the rest of them. Look at May, there, with the brow of a Madonna and the tongue of a gutter-devil. And Myrtle—for all the world one of Gainsborough's old English beauties stepped down from the canvas to riot out the century in Dawson's dance-halls. And Laura, there, wouldn't she make a mother? Can't you see ...
— A Daughter of the Snows • Jack London
... his pictures were on sacred subjects; and finally, when driven from Florence to Luco by the plague, taking with him his wife and stepdaughter, he began a picture called the "Madonna del Sacco" ...
— Pictures Every Child Should Know • Dolores Bacon
... the [altarpiece called the] "Madonna of the Rose Garlands," painted for the chapel of S. Bartolommeo, the burial-place of the German colony. About the year 1600 it was bought for a high price by the Emperor Rudolf II, who is said to have had it carried [over the Alps] ...
— Memoirs of Journeys to Venice and the Low Countries - [This is our volunteer's translation of the title] • Albrecht Durer
... beauty of execution in this picture, it is unsurpassed. It is in this respect like the most beautiful things ever painted by Raphael,—like the Madonna del Cardellino, whose face has light within, "luce di dentro," as is the expressive Italian phrase,—and is also like another picture that I have seen, attributed to Raphael, in the collection of the late Baron ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... Wesley was a steady, well-meaning, rather slow fellow, comfortably off. He was not at all handsome. But Theodosia was a very pretty girl with the milky colouring of an auburn blonde and large china-blue eyes. She looked mild and Madonna-like and was known to be sweet-tempered. Wesley's older brother, Irving Brooke, had married a woman who kept him in hot water all the time, so Heatherton folks said, but they thought there was no fear of that with Wesley and Theodosia. ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1896 to 1901 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... by a Mexican drawn-work pattern beneath which glowed a bright red silk undergarment. Women's gowns on the flowing and Grecian order were not uncommon. These were usually coupled with the incongruity of parted hair brought low and madonna-wise over the ears. As the two entered, a very powerful blond man was just finishing the declamation of a French poem. He was addressing it directly at two women ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White
... conspicuous dimples, almost atoned for it. The brown hair was brushed and waved and its consequent state of new glossiness was a very distinct improvement on the former elf locks. In the sunshine it took tones of warm burnt sienna, like the hair of the Madonna in certain of Titian's great pictures. Lessons, alack! were uphill work. Rona was naturally bright, but some subjects she had never touched before, and in others she was hopelessly backward. The general feeling ...
— For the Sake of the School • Angela Brazil
... marks her small green bed With "Anna" and "Adieu". Madonna Mary, rest her head On your dear ...
— An Anthology of Australian Verse • Bertram Stevens
... did not then know that each day spent apart from you, Madonna Graciosa, would be a century ...
— The Jewel Merchants - A Comedy In One Act • James Branch Cabell
... know; but it is a very small and delicate copy (painted in oil on a gold ground) of some fine old Italian picture, Guido's or Raphael's, but I think Raphael's. Some say it is a Madonna; others call it a Magdalen, and say you may distinguish the tear upon the cheek, though no tear is there. But it seems to me more like Raphael's St. Cecilia, "with looks commercing with the skies," than anything ...
— Liber Amoris, or, The New Pygmalion • William Hazlitt
... (Maut), child (Khuns). Mr. Scott follows Ruskin in declaring that classic Greek art gives no real child-concept; nor does Gothic art up to the thirteenth century, when the influence of Christianity made itself felt, that influence which made art lavish its genius upon the Madonna and the Santo ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... and as the ground was covered with mud and I didn't care to wet my feet, I asked a young rascal who was selling post-cards what that place was. I didn't quite understand his explanation, which I am sure was very amusing. He confused Emperors with the Madonna and the saints. I gave the lad a lira and had some trouble in escaping from there, because he followed me around everywhere calling ...
— Caesar or Nothing • Pio Baroja Baroja
... Crawley is a fascinating woman; I never tire watching her. Very pretty, very smart with a pretty wit, she has the most delightfully gay, infectious laugh, which contrasts oddly with her curiously sad, unsmiling eyes, Mrs. Wilmot has a Madonna face. I don't mean one of those silly, fat-faced Madonnas one sees in the Louvre and elsewhere, but one's own idea of the Madonna; the kind of face, as someone puts it, ...
— Olivia in India • O. Douglas
... Association will shortly hold a Fancy Dress Exhibition of Really Beautiful War-workers. The subjects represented will range from CLEOPATRA to BOTTICELLI'S "Primavera," and from SALOME to the Sistine Madonna. Preliminary photographs are about to appear in the Society Press. The particular object of this great sacrifice in the cause of charity has not yet been determined upon, but will be announced in ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Dec. 5, 1917 • Various
... what it was; on which Bianconi, who was close behind the man carrying the glass, answered that it was "the Repeal of the Union!" The old woman's delight was unbounded! She knelt down on her knees in the middle of the road, as if it had been a picture of the Madonna, and thanked God for having preserved her in her old age to see the Repeal of ...
— Men of Invention and Industry • Samuel Smiles
... at this Greek dancing-girl, which is from a terra cotta, and therefore intensely of the school of Clay; look at her beside this Madonna of Filippo Lippi's: Greek motion against Gothic absolute quietness; Greek indifference—dancing careless—against Gothic passion, the mother's—what word can I use except frenzy of love; Greek fleshliness against ...
— Lectures on Landscape - Delivered at Oxford in Lent Term, 1871 • John Ruskin
... childlike conception of religion; and, as such, it was a sunny conception. Any one who will take the trouble to compare an idyl of Theokritos with a modern pastoral, or the poem of Kleanthes with a modern hymn, or the Aphrodite of Melos with a modern Madonna, will realize ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... betrayed in an unobtrusive manner a consciousness of being well dressed. His face, which was not without fine possibilities, had an air of well-bred neutrality; you could see that he assumed a defensive attitude against aesthetic impressions,—that even the Sistine Madonna or the Venus of Milo would not have surprised him into anything like enthusiasm or abject approval. It was evident, too, that he was a little bit ashamed of his Baedeker, which he consulted only ...
— Ilka on the Hill-Top and Other Stories • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... 'confess judgment' (as he recollected the phrase), and how he had been carried to another office where his life was assured for somebody not wholly unconnected with the sherry trade whom he remembered by the remarkable circumstance that he had a Straduarius violin to dispose of, and also a Madonna, formed the sum and substance of Mr Twemlow's narrative. Through which stalked the shadow of the awful Snigsworth, eyed afar off by money-lenders as Security in the Mist, and menacing Twemlow ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... a bright log fire, and on either side stood two deep leather arm-chairs. It was a room possessing the acme of cosiness and comfort. Over the fireplace was set a large circular painting of the Madonna and Child—evidently the work of some Italian master of the seventeenth century—while here and ...
— The Stretton Street Affair • William Le Queux
... reading-desk is a step of black and white marble, which extends to the altar, on which are two candlesticks of massive silver; and over them some beautiful carved oaken work covers a great painting, flanked on either side by old gilded pictures of the Saviour and the Madonna. Imagine this space all lighted from wall to wall by wax candles, and at the end by large lamps which shed a brighter and softer light, and imagine it filled, if you can, by five hundred men in snowy surplices, and you have a ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar
... nursing of the babe; the daughter from her original duty, in the pastoral age, of milking the cows. The lady was so-called from the social obligations entailed on the prosperous woman, of "loaf-giving," or dispensing charity to the less fortunate. As dame, madame, madonna, in the old days of aristocracy, she bore equal rank with the lord and master, and carried down to our better democratic age the co-partnership of civic and family rights ...
— Practical Suggestions for Mother and Housewife • Marion Mills Miller
... after the fashion of some French writers, seem, as it were, to have a certain perceptible taint; they breathe an unwholesome atmosphere. In one of his extravagant humours, he tells us that the most perfect picture of purity in existence is the Madonna of the Genoese painter, Piola, but that even that celestial Madonna would have looked like a Messalina by the side of the Duchesse de Manfrigneuse. If the duchess resembled either personage in character, ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... celebrated in the church, she is solicitous to attend: Monday, she is at the Ponte dell' Ammiraglio praying for the Souls of the Beheaded; Wednesday, you find her at San Giuseppe keeping the festival of the Madonna della Providenza; every Friday she goes to San Francesco di Paola, reciting by the way her accustomed beads; and if one Saturday pass when she ought to go to the Madonna dei Cappuccini, another does not; and there she prays with a devotion which none ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland |
