"Parthenon" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of "what Goth, and Turk, and Time had spared," the world could still see enough to render possible a just impression of her old and chaste magnificence. It is painful to reflect within how comparatively short a period the chief injuries have been inflicted on such buildings as the Parthenon, and the temple of Jupiter Olympus, and to remember how recent is the greater part of the rubbish by which these edifices have been choked up, mutilated, and concealed. Probably until within a very few centuries, time had been, simply and alone, the "beautifier of the dead," ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... be pleasant and satisfying if we could trace step by step the progress of Greek sculpture from the rude archaic manner to that of the Periclean age, or from such art as is seen in the sculpture of AEgina to the perfections of the reliefs of the Parthenon. This we cannot do; but we know some of the causes that led to this progress, and can give accounts of a few sculptors who, while they did not equal the great Phidias, were at least the forerunners of such a type of ...
— A History of Art for Beginners and Students - Painting, Sculpture, Architecture • Clara Erskine Clement
... annalist or historian rather than the ordinary reader. They are the materials of history, not history itself. They bear the same relation to the works of Livy or Gibbon which the rude blocks in the quarry do to the temples of St Peter's or the Parthenon. Ordinary readers are not aware of this when they take up a volume of despatches; they expect to be as much fascinated by it as they are by the correspondence of Madame de Sevigne, Cowper, Gibbon, or Arnold. They will soon find their mistake: ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... hear the sound of such sweet and classical names as the Pentland and Malvern Hills, the Cliffs of Dover and the Trosachs, Richmond, Derwent, and Winandermere, which are to him now instead of the Acropolis and Parthenon, of Baiae, and Athens with its sea-walls, and ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... the attention paid to living forms. By the fifth century, in painting them as in other departments of Art, the supremacy of Attica had asserted itself, and there are many beautiful Attic vase-paintings of animals to place by the side of the magnificent horses' heads of the Parthenon (Fig. 6). In Attica, too, was early developed a characteristic and closely accurate type of representation of marine forms, and this attained a wider vogue in Southern Italy in the fourth century. From the latter period a number of dishes and vases ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... be an injury. And I doubt not that seven thousand years hence, if time could but spare it so long, pilgrims would still go in search of the beautiful from the remotest parts of the world, from parts now unknown, to worship before the Parthenon, and, may I not add, the Temple of the Sun ...
— Aurelian - or, Rome in the Third Century • William Ware
... if all our sires and we Are but foundations of a race to be,— Stones which one thrusts in earth, and builds thereon A white delight, a Parian Parthenon, And thither, long thereafter, youth and maid Seek with glad brows the alabaster shade, And in processions' pomp together bent Still interchange their sweet words innocent,— Not caring that those mighty columns rest Each on the ruin of a human breast,— That to the shrine ...
— Some Christian Convictions - A Practical Restatement in Terms of Present-Day Thinking • Henry Sloane Coffin
... has given a proper focus to the matter, and this collection of beautiful things made by people dead these two thousand years is now known to be absolutely priceless, almost as much so as the Elgin Marbles, taken from the Parthenon at Athens and which now repose in the British Museum, the chief attraction ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... men and women of all nations is to be held at Athens, in view of the ruins of the Parthenon, during ...
— 1931: A Glance at the Twentieth Century • Henry Hartshorne
... called classical, Greek, and so on, but is, in truth, a very modern reproduction of a classical type—a Venus by Mr. Gibson, rather than a Venus by Milo; a classic draped figure of a Wedgwood plaque more than an echo from the Parthenon.... The actress has evidently been well taught, and is both an apt and clever pupil; she speaks clearly, enunciates well, occasionally conceals the art she has so closely studied, and is at times both tender and graceful.... Her one great fault is insincerity, or, in other words, inability ...
— Mary Anderson • J. M. Farrar
... an exceedingly tiresome affair. It quite crushes a person to see so much at once, and I wandered from hall to hall with a weary and heavy heart, wishing (Heaven forgive me!) that the Elgin marbles and the frieze of the Parthenon were all burnt into lime, and that the granite Egyptian statues were hewn and ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.
... Propylaea was a temple to the Wingless Victory; on the northern, a Pinacotheca, or picture gallery. On the highest part of the platform of the Acropolis, not more than 300 feet from the entrance-buildings just described, stood and yet stands, though shattered and mutilated, The Parthenon, justly celebrated throughout the world, erected of white Pentelican marble, under the direction of Callicrates, Ictinus and Carpion and adorned with the finest sculptures ...
— Conversion of a High Priest into a Christian Worker • Meletios Golden
... state, so the Gothic Palace was, in its foundation, coeval with that of the aristocratic power. Considered as the principal representation of the Venetian school of architecture, the Ducal Palace is the Parthenon of ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 7 - Italy, Sicily, and Greece (Part One) • Various
... done at Bagistan, and projected at Athos? What town the soul to plant a colossus of brass in the sea, for the tallest ships to sail in and out between his legs? Is it architecture we have invented? Why, here too we are but children. Can we match for pure design the Parthenon, with its clusters of double and single Doric columns? (I do adore the Doric when the scale is large), and for grandeur and finish, the theatres of Greece and Rome, or the prodigious temples of Egypt, up to whose portals men walked awe-struck through avenues a mile long of sphinxes, each as big ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... elegance of Herodotus, recall, with their just conceptions of harmony, their noble and sustained flow of thought, and their freedom from the adventitious ornaments of an exaggerated rhetoric or a sentimental morality, the golden age of Greece. We seem to stand within the Parthenon, to gaze upon the Venus of Cnidus, to be jostled by the gay crowd at the Olympic games. It was indeed a golden age, when all that was beautiful in nature was reverently and assiduously nurtured, and all that was noble and natural in art was magnificently ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... poet, that the world will not willingly let die. A rush of stirring glorious memories swept over her mind as she gazed on the lofty summit of the Acropolis, covered with memorials of the ancient art, and associated with the great events of Athenian history. The Parthenon, or Temple of Pallas; the Temple of Theseus; that of Olympian Jove; the Tower of the Winds, or so-called Lantern of Demosthenes; and the Choragic Monument of Lysicrates,—all these she saw, and wondered at. But they have been so frequently ...
— The Story of Ida Pfeiffer - and Her Travels in Many Lands • Anonymous
... with a Gothic cathedral on one hand, and a Turkish mosque and all sorts of fantastic pagodas and conventicles about him. You may call Shakspeare and Milton pyramids, if you please; but I prefer the Temple of Theseus, or the Parthenon, to a mountain ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... of the goddess of Athens, and thereby to raise the religious ideals of the Athenians. In this last part of his attempt he was successful; the statue became the pride and glory of the city in its fitting shrine, the Parthenon; but the old image was still preserved in the temple of Athena Polias, and remained the official centre of worship. We are not told that Pericles meant to supersede it; but it is very probable that he intended to do so, and was only prevented by the religious conservatism ...
— Religion and Art in Ancient Greece • Ernest Arthur Gardner
... arrangement of which combined every style of architecture. It was at once Byzantine, Roman, Gothic, Renaissance, with semicircular doors, Pointed windows, Flamboyant rose-windows, fantastic bell-turrets,—in a word, a specimen of all sorts, half a Parthenon, half a Parisian Grand Cafe. Nor was this surprising, the theatre having been commenced under the burgomaster Ludwig Van Tricasse, in 1175, and only finished in 1837, under the burgomaster Natalis Van Tricasse. It had required seven hundred years to build it, and it ...
— A Winter Amid the Ice - and Other Thrilling Stories • Jules Verne
... had read enough to feel her sympathies awakened as she gazed from the lofty summit of the Acropolis on the plains of Attica and the waters of the AEgean, on Salamis and Marathon. She was not an artist, but she had a feeling for the beautiful; and she examined with intense delight the Parthenon, the Temple of Theseus, the Olympian, the Tower of the Winds, and the graceful choragic monument of Lysicrates. These, however, have been more fitly described by writers capable of doing them justice, and Madame Pfeiffer's brief and commonplace allusions may ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... describes Phidias as being inspired to make his Jupiter, as well as the prophets to write their burdens. He says the architect that made St. Peter's was guided by some divine instinct in his heart—he wrought in a sad sincerity. He says we cannot tell how such buildings as the Parthenon and St. Peter's were built, any more than how the bird builds its nest; they were formed by a natural architecture; they grew as the grass grows; they came out of thought's interior sphere, just as the pine ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... largest of the Greek temples. The area of the Parthenon at Athens was not one fourth of that of the temple of Ephesus."—Smith's Dictionary of Greek and Roman ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... and thence into the plain of Attica but the intervening heights and the trees kept the town concealed, till a turn of the path brought it full again before them; the Acropolis crowned with the ruins of the Parthenon—the Museum hill—and ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... architecturally suggestive, even in those western gardens—but to artists living among them and seeing only them! men's hands are not delicate in the early ages, and the fountain fairness of the palms is not very flowingly fashioned in the capitals; but in the flowery perfection of the Parthenon the palm triumphs. The forms of those columns came from Egypt, and that which was the suspicion of the earlier workers, was the success of more delicate designing. So is the palm inwound with our art, and poetry, and religion, and of all trees would the Howadji ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... the most imposing we ever remember to have witnessed. The great door of the church was hung with black curtains, with the initials of the deceased, "F. C.," emblazoned in silver. On our entry we found the vast area of the modern Parthenon entirely crowded. Nave, aisles, galleries, &c., were alive with human beings who had come to see the last of Frederick Chopin. Many, perhaps, had never heard of him before....In the space that separates the nave from the choir, a lofty ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... to saying that the crucial test of the frieze of the Parthenon is its adaptability to an apartment in Bloomsbury. So long as the illusion of the Acropolis gave credit to Pheidias' design, and the sunlight of Attica imposed its delicate intended shadows edging the reliefs, the countrymen of Pericles might ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... Pericles; and in it "the capable eye" may discover the pose of the Cnidian Venus of Praxiteles, of the Jupiter Olympius of Phidias, and the other lost wonders of ancient chisels, and, more directly, the tender severity of Doric capitals, and the secret grace of the shafts of the Parthenon. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 • Various
... throughout Greece, but was regarded with special veneration by the Athenians, she being the guardian deity of Athens. Her most celebrated temple was the Parthenon, which stood on the {47} Acropolis at Athens, and contained her world-renowned statue by Phidias, which ranks second only to that of Zeus by the same great artist. This colossal statue was 39 feet high, and was ...
— Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece and Rome • E.M. Berens
... have great hopes of the hotel, because it is the place of all others which it is to our interest to make look well. People go to the post office all the same, be it a barn or a parthenon, but they will go, other things being equal, to the best hotel. Here comes in the American principle of Competition, the keynote of all our enterprise. Competition is to do for us what the hope of earthly ...
— Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4 • Various
... reasonable means had been found. To learn from genius, we must try to recognize, both what is still imperfect, and what is grandly and unwontedly successful. There is no great work of art, not excepting even the Iliad or the Parthenon, which is not open, especially in point of ornament, to the scoff of the scoffer, or to the injustice of those who do not mind being unjust. But all art belongs to man; and man, even when he is greatest, is always limited ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... great rose windows of the thirteenth century as the most beautiful creation of their art, among the details of ornament; and this particular rose is the direct parent of that at Chartres, which is classic like the Parthenon, while both of them served as models or guides for that at Paris which dates from 1220, those in the north and south transepts at Rheims, about 1230, and so on, from parent to child, till the rose faded forever. ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... bestowed on Man do not suffice in themselves to make him form right notions of a Deity or a Hereafter; because it is plainly the design of Providence that Man must learn to correct and improve all his notions by his own study and observation. He must build a hut before he can build a Parthenon; he must believe with the savage or the heathen before he can believe with the philosopher or Christian. In a word, in all his capacities, Man has only given to him, not the immediate knowledge of the Perfect, but the means to strive towards the Perfect. And thus one of ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... and had carried an imagination already prepossessed and dazzled with Homeric visions. He told his story well and with detail, combining the recollections of the scholar with the impressions of an artist. The pediment of the Parthenon, the oleanders of the Ilissus, the stream "that runs in rain-time," the naked peak of Parnassus, the green slopes of Helicon, the blue gulf of Argus, the pine forest beside Alpheus, where the ancients worshipped ...
— The Ink-Stain, Complete • Rene Bazin
... the reasonable conclusion that this thickness should never be lost sight of, the carving ever and anon returning to the surface as a measure of music does to its key-note. This is exemplified in all the great works of antiquity, among which the Parthenon frieze may be quoted as evidence. On the other hand, all pictorial sculpture, such as carved landscapes with figures diminishing both in scale and projection, necessarily fail to uphold this sense of solidity, as there must ...
— Wood-Carving - Design and Workmanship • George Jack
... person. The history of every nation proves this, and no matter how rude, and even ugly, their efforts may seem to us, we are bound to recognize in them the same motives that actuated the builders of the Parthenon or of St. Peter's at Rome. This awakening and gratification of the aesthetic sense seems to be the first advance from a condition of mere animal existence, in which food, shelter, and comfort are the only considerations, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 598, June 18, 1887 • Various
... Chapel, where plastic art is so supreme, we are bound to ask the further question. What was the difference between Michael Angelo and a Greek? The Parthenon with its processions of youths and maidens, its gods and heroes, rejoicing in their strength, and robed with raiment that revealed their living form, made up a symphony of meaning as full as this of Michael Angelo, and far more radiant. ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... been made possible by new mechanical arts, now puts itself forward as the next great opportunity of the fine arts. One of the characteristic achievements of the immediate future shall be the twentieth-century Parthenon—a Parthenon not of the great and of the few and of the gods, but of the great many, where, through mighty corridors, day and night, democracy wanders and sleeps and chatters and is sad and lives and dies, streets rumbling below. The hotel—the crowd fireside—being more than ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... cost almost nothing. On the highest part of this ground you will build your house: an airy situation is invaluable in warm weather; and then a view is so desirable. In the choice of a style of architecture some difficulty arises. You may either have a clap-board Parthenon, with Corinthian columns in front and Doric columns in the rear, painted white, to flash back the rays of the sun, or which is perhaps more fashionable, a Gothic cottage, with steep roof, rustic pillars, fantastic barge-boards, ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, January 1844 - Volume 23, Number 1 • Various
... take my nap Upon the Parthenon high and free. My cornice nest is in the gap A cannon-ball made ...
— Enamels and Cameos and other Poems • Theophile Gautier
... utterances and writings possess that classic quality whose supreme expression is found in Greek literature. This is because Lincoln had an essentially Hellenic mind. First of all the architecture of his thought was that of the Greek masters, who, whether as Phidias they built the Parthenon to crown with harmonious beauty the Acropolis, or as Homer they recorded in swelling narrative from its dramatic beginning the strife of the Achaeans before Troy, or even as Euclid, they developed from postulates the relations ...
— The Poets' Lincoln - Tributes in Verse to the Martyred President • Various
... and no trace remains but embers. The stones of Jacob's altar may be standing yet. The Parthenon of Athens remains: where are the hovels of the people? 'He that doeth the will of God abideth for ever.' Permanent results ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... to the city from the Thiergarten, and is a sort of triumphal arch, erected in 1789. It is seventy feet in height, and two hundred in width, being modelled after the entrance in the gateway of the temple of the Parthenon at Athens. It affords five passage-ways through ...
— Foot-prints of Travel - or, Journeyings in Many Lands • Maturin M. Ballou
... of the apse of the Duomo of Pisa was a colossal image of Christ, in colored mosaic, bearing to the temple, as nearly as possible, the relation which the statue of Athena bore to the Parthenon; and in the same manner, concentrating the imagination of the Pisan on the attributes of the God in ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... rest are barbarians. He is a Greek Temple, with a Gothic Cathedral on one hand, and a Turkish Mosque and all sorts of fantastic pagodas and conventicles about him. You may call Shakspeare and Milton pyramids, if you please, but I prefer the Temple of Theseus or the Parthenon to a mountain ...
— Life of Lord Byron, With His Letters And Journals, Vol. 5 (of 6) • (Lord Byron) George Gordon Byron
... said in explanation of this principle? Surely not. 'If I were hungry I would not tell thee; for the world is mine and the fulness thereof,' is a grand word, but it does not give all the truth. When Paul stood on Mars Hill, and, within sight of the fair images of the Parthenon, shattered the intellectual basis of idolatry, by proclaiming a God 'not worshipped with men's hands as though He needed anything, seeing He giveth to all men all things,' that truth, mighty as it is, is not all. We requite God by taking rather than by giving, ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... service of the State, described in these eloquent words, reflects itself in the highest productions of Greek art and literature, and is the source of that 'political' spirit which every one can detect, alike in the poems of Homer and the sculpture of the Parthenon, as the inspiring cause of the noblest efforts of imitation. It prevailed most strongly through the period between the battle of Marathon and the battle of Chaeronea, and has left its monuments in such plays as the Persae ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... greatest works are those which express reality and life, not limited and temporary conditions, but life universal and for all time. Without commentary these carry their message, appealing to the wisest and the humblest. Gather into a single room a fragment of the Parthenon frieze, Michelangelo's "Day and Night," Botticelli's "Spring," the sprites and children of Donatello and Delia Robbia, Velasquez's "Pope Innocent," Rembrandt's "Cloth-weavers," Frans Hals' "Musician," Millet's ...
— The Gate of Appreciation - Studies in the Relation of Art to Life • Carleton Noyes
... last eighteen months or so I've been idling—running about to theatres and museums and so forth. I began at Athens and finished up with London. I remember one day sitting on the steps of the Parthenon declaiming the Antigone—and a moment with some meaning in it seemed ...
— The Great Hunger • Johan Bojer
... moral notions, but not right moral notions. It is true that questions of right and wrong occur in one state of society, that had no relevance in an earlier state, the conditions of the case not having arisen. But so it is in architecture; there are no arches in the Parthenon. The principle of the arch, however, held in the age of ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... neither of a multitude of deities, as some of his hearers held, nor of an impersonal blind power, as others believed, nor the result of chance, nor eternal, as others maintained. He boldly proclaims there, below the shadow of the Parthenon, that there is but one God,—the universal Lord, because the universal Creator. Many consequences from that fact, no doubt, crowded into Paul's mind; but he swiftly turns to its bearing on the pomp of temples which were the glory of Athens, and the multitude of sacrifices which he had beheld ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... scenery. After passing an island or two, the Frith, which forms the bay of Edinburgh, contracts into the river Forth. We swept by country seats, one of which was pointed out as the residence of the late Dugald Stewart, and another that of the Earl of Elgin, the plunderer of the Parthenon; and castles, towers, and churches, some of them in ruins ever since the time of John Knox, and hills half seen in the fog, until we came opposite to the Ochil mountains, whose grand rocky buttresses advanced from the haze almost to the ...
— Letters of a Traveller - Notes of Things Seen in Europe and America • William Cullen Bryant
... Colonel Denny, Doctor Birch, and Samuel Clemens who evaded the quarantine and made the perilous night trip to Athens and looked upon the Parthenon and the sleeping city by moonlight. It is all set down in the notes, and the account varies little from that given in the book; only he does not tell us that Captain Duncan and the quartermaster, Pratt, ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... veneration of the people, and that St. Patrick thought it his duty to destroy it? And the attitude of the people at the time of its destruction shows that it could not have borne for them the same sacred character as the statue of Minerva in the Parthenon did for the Greeks or that of Capitoline Jove for the Romans. Can we suppose that St. Paul or St. Peter would have dared to break either of these? And let us remark that the event we discuss occurred at the very beginning of St. Patrick's ministry, and before he had ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... April, 1816, because of the bad financial condition into which the government had fallen during the War of 1812. The building was designed by William Strickland, in his day the leading American architect, being modeled after the Parthenon of Athens. It was completed in 1824 and was put to ...
— The Colonial Architecture of Philadelphia • Frank Cousins
... Hexter's to Mother Spier's was a magnificent representation of the Parthenon: there were three pillars, and a great thing like this (a not over-successful sketch of a pediment), with the Eton and Royal arms in the middle, and "Gratulatur Etona Victoria et Alberto" It cost 150, and there were 5,000 lamps hung on it. Throughout the whole day we ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge
... all words—Such men and women can be; for such they have been; and such you may be yet, if you will use that science of which you too often only boast. Above all, I had been pondering over the awful and yet tender beauty of the maiden figures from the Parthenon and its kindred temples. And these, or such as these, I thought to myself, were the sisters of the men who fought at Marathon and Salamis; the mothers of many a man among the ten thousand whom Xenophon led back from Babylon to the Black Sea ...
— Sanitary and Social Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... In the dim forest crowded with old oaks, Answer. A race, that long has passed away, Built them;—a disciplined and populous race Heaped, with long toil, the earth, while yet the Greek Was hewing the Pentelicus to forms Of symmetry, and rearing on its rock The glittering Parthenon. These ample fields Nourished their harvests, here their herds were fed, When haply by their stalls the bison lowed, And bowed his maned shoulder to the yoke. All day this desert murmured with their toils, Till twilight blushed, and lovers walked, and wooed In a forgotten language, and ...
— Poems • William Cullen Bryant
... that not so much the private as the common wealth is by him indicated. I think the true soul—humble, rapt, conspiring with all, regards all souls as its lieutenants and proxies—itself in another place—and saith of the Parthenon, of the picture, of the poem,—It is also my work. I can never quarrel with your state of mind concerning original attempts in your own art. I admire it rather. And I am pained to think of the grievous resistance which your genius ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... religion of Pleasure, in which all Europe gave itself to luxury, ending in death. First, bals masques in every saloon, and then guillotines in every square. And all these three worships issue in vast temple building. Your Greek worshipped Wisdom, and built you the Parthenon—the Virgin's temple. The Mediaeval worshipped Consolation, and built you Virgin temples also—but to our Lady of Salvation. Then the Revivalist worshipped beauty, of a sort, and built you Versailles and the Vatican. Now, lastly, ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... comfortable. After a little the wind lulled, the fog dispersed again, and the iceberg seemed to contemplate our slow departure with complacent serenity. We regretted that the hour forbade a return. It would have been pleasant to play around that Parthenon of the sea in the twilight. The best that was left us was to look back and watch the effects of light, which were wonderfully fine, and had the charm of entire novelty. The last view was the very finest. All the east front was a most tender blue; the fissures on the southern face, from which we ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... the eye, of the visual memory, and of the judgment. As an example of the exercise of this sort of discipline we may cite Professor Waldstein's recognition of a marble fragment in the form of a head in the Louvre as belonging to a metope of the Parthenon. When, after Professor Waldstein's suggestion of the probable connection, a plaster cast of the head was taken to the British Museum and placed upon the headless figure of one of the metopes, the ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... columns lying on the ground, from which one would still recognise the massive character of Tuscan architecture. Further on, some remains of a gigantic aqueduct; here the high base of an Acropolis, with the floating outline of a Parthenon; there traces of a quay, as if an ancient port had formerly abutted on the borders of the ocean, and disappeared with its merchant vessels and its war-galleys. Farther on again, long lines of sunken walls and broad, deserted ...
— Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea • Jules Verne
... sexton and the parish beadle with his broad gold-laced hat, and cane of striking authority; and he loved the watchmen and their drowsy drawl of "past umph a' clock;" he loved the charity schools and admired beyond all the sculpture of Phidias, or the marble miracles of the Parthenon, the two full-length statues about three feet each in length and two feet six inches each in breadth, representing a charity boy and a charity girl, standing over the door of the parish school; he loved the city companies, their halls, their balls, though he ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, - Issue 493, June 11, 1831 • Various
... are at Athens, looking at the buttressed Acropolis and the ruined temples,—the Doric Parthenon, the Ionic Erechtheum, the Corinthian temple of Jupiter, and the beautiful Caryatides. But see those steps cut in the natural rock. Up those steps walked the Apostle Paul, and from that summit, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various
... have done nothing. Ictinus might have drawn the plans for the Parthenon, but without Pericles the noble building would have remained forever the stuff which dreams are made of. And they do say that without Aspasia Pericles would have been a mere dreamer of dreams, and Walter Savage Landor overheard enough of ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... The day for irrelevant statues, as for wall pictures, is over. As a matter of fact sculpture is always part of an architectural conception. And since churches are all museum stuff, since industry is our business, now, then let us make our places of industry our art—our factory-area our Parthenon, ECCO!' ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... more familiar than his contemporaries with Greek ideas. In a chapter on Idealism in his little book on Religion and Art in Ancient Greece, Professor Ernest Gardner writes: "The statue (of Athene) by Phidias within the Parthenon offered not merely that form in which she would choose to appear if she showed herself to mortal eyes, but actually showed her form as if she had revealed it to the sculptor. To look upon such an image helped the worshipper as much as—perhaps more than—any service ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler
... to question a step upon which the Greeks themselves are not in entire accord." A remarkable utterance. Politicians had gone to Siberia for less. Palmerston, too, had his way, and Otto, escorted by a warship, left his fatherland. On arriving in Athens, the joy-bells rang out and the columns of the Parthenon were flood-lit. But the choice was not to the popular taste; and it was not long before Otto was extinguished, as well as the lights. By the irony of fate, he returned to Munich on the very day that Ludwig had erected a Doric arch to commemorate the activities ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... lofty hotels moored like a sonorously named fleet of battle-ships along the upper reaches of the West Side: the Olympian, the Incandescent, the Ormolu; while others, perhaps the more exclusive, were held in the equally lofty but more romantically styled apartment-houses: the Parthenon, the Tintern Abbey ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... to the more ignoble variety of women labourers. A shop girl, perhaps, may plausibly fall in love with a moving-picture actor, and a half-idiotic old widow may succumb to a youth with shoulders like the Parthenon, but no woman of poise and self-respect, even supposing her to be transiently flustered by a lovely buck, would yield to that madness for an instant, or confess it to her dearest friend. Women know how little such purely superficial values are worth. The voice of their order, ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... a Scot, James Bruce, Earl of Elgin and Kincardine, directly descended from the patriot king Robert the Bruce. His father was the British ambassador who salvaged the 'Elgin marbles' from the Parthenon and sold them to the nation, thus drawing down upon himself the angry satire of Byron in 'The Curse of Minerva' and 'Childe Harold's Pilgrimage.' The new governor-general was young, poor, and able. Far more than his predecessors, he had enjoyed the advantages of a regular education. At Eton he had ...
— The Winning of Popular Government - A Chronicle of the Union of 1841 • Archibald Macmechan
... advance by grander divisions than its centuries, and adopted as epochs by the consent of all who come after. It stands with the Iliad and Shakespeare's plays, with the writings of Aristotle and Plato, with the Novum Organon and the Principia, with Justinian's Code, with the Parthenon and St. Peter's. It is the first Christian poem; and it opens European literature, as the Iliad did that of Greece and Rome. And, like the Iliad, it has never become out of date; it accompanies in undiminished freshness ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... enough to feel the spell of the Violet Crown. Illusions as to the eternal summer with which poets have blessed the Isles of Greece vanished as they found deep snow in the streets, icicles on the Acropolis, and snow-balling in the Parthenon. He had a reception only a shade less cordial than if he were Demosthenes come back. He dined with King Otho, and went to a Te Deum in honour of the Queen's birthday. Finlay, the learned man who had more of the true spirit of history ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... of Corinth, and all that was alive in Greek art had died many years earlier. That it had died before the death of Alexander let his tomb at Constantinople be my witness. Before they set the last stone of the Parthenon it was ailing: the big marbles in the British Museum are the last significant examples of Greek art; the frieze, of course, proves nothing, being mere artisan work. But the man who made what one may as well call ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... Archibald S. Henning, the first in importance, as he was to be cartoonist, and first to appear before the public, inasmuch as the wrapper was from his hand. He was the third son of John Henning, friend of Scott and Dr. Chalmers, on the strength of his famous miniature restoration of the Parthenon frieze, of which he engraved the figures on slate in intaglio; and he was well known besides not only for these copies of the Elgin marbles, but for his portrait-busts and medallions. Precision in all things was one ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... object in nature has some imperfection, which indicates that it has a relation to some other object, and is but a part of a greater whole. The intentional irregularity of the windows in the Doge's Palace at Venice enhances the effect of the marvellous facade. By comparing the Parthenon at Athens, with its curves and inclinations, with the Madeleine at Paris, we see how far short the copy comes of the original in beauty and expressiveness, because of the exact formality of its right angles. The ancient Egyptians ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... of these things were visible, you entered at once the great studio. Round the upper wall ran a cast of the Parthenon frieze, and beneath this the wall on one side was riddled and windowed, as it were, with innumerable framed pictures, small studies of foreign scenes; so that one looked out in turn upon Italy and the South, Egypt and the East, or upon an Irish ...
— Frederic Lord Leighton - An Illustrated Record of His Life and Work • Ernest Rhys
... progressive history, so the American Constitution is the most wonderful work ever struck off at a given time by the brain and purpose of man."[6] Let us now see who the men were who did this wonderful work,—this Iliad, or Parthenon, or Fifth Symphony, of statesmanship. We shall not find that they were all great geniuses. Such is never the case in such an assembly. There are not enough great geniuses to go around; and if there were, it is questionable if the result ...
— The Critical Period of American History • John Fiske
... proofs of the upward tendency of man from the rudest and simplest beginnings. Many columns of early Egyptian temples or tombs are but bundles of Nile reeds slightly conventionalized in stone; the temples of Greece, including not only the earliest forms, but the Parthenon itself, while in parts showing an evolution out of Egyptian and Assyrian architecture, exhibit frequent reminiscences and even imitations of earlier constructions in wood; the medieval cathedrals, while evolved out of Roman ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... massive and majestic shrine, the Parthenon of beer drinking, seductive to virtuosi, fascinating to the connoisseur, but a bit too strenuous, a trifle too cruel, perhaps, for the dilettante. The Muencheners love it as hillmen love the hills. There every one of them returns, soon or late. There he takes his children, ...
— Europe After 8:15 • H. L. Mencken, George Jean Nathan and Willard Huntington Wright
... maid, and he and Jennie would travel around a bit, seeing what Europe had to show. He wanted to visit Venice and Baden-Baden, and the great watering-places that had been recommended to him. Cairo and Luxor and the Parthenon had always appealed to his imagination. After he had had his outing he could come back and seriously gather up the ...
— Jennie Gerhardt - A Novel • Theodore Dreiser
... is accessible, but only a terrible picturesqueness, mixed with ghastly, with ludicrous, with base concomitants. Huge walls and roofs, dark on the sunset sky, but plastered with advertisement bills, monstrous-figured, seen farther than ever Parthenon shaft, or spire of Sainte Chapelle. Interminable lines of massy streets, wearisome with repetition of commonest design, and degraded by their gilded shops, wide-fuming, flaunting, glittering, with apparatus of eating or of dress. Splendor of palace-flank ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... said Margaret, with the kind readiness of woman, who would profess to "see" the Secret of Hegel, or the inmost heart of the Binomial Theorem, or the nature of the duties of cover-point, or the latest hypothesis about the frieze of the Parthenon, rather than be troubled with prolonged explanations, which the expositor, after all, might find ...
— The Mark Of Cain • Andrew Lang
... Serbia, Bulgaria, Turkey, Greece, Egypt and Morocco. I have sat on the Rock of Gibraltar, sailed on the Nile and the Suez Canal and crossed through the Dardanelles, over the Balkans, the steppes of Hungary and the Danube and Rhine. I have seen the sphinx by moonlight, the Parthenon and the Eiffel Tower and in two days more I shall have seen St. Paul's. What do you think I should like to see best now? YOU. I have been worrying of late as to whether or not I should not come home now and leave Paris for another time ...
— Adventures and Letters • Richard Harding Davis
... Yandell was the first woman to become a member of the National Sculpture Society. I quote from his article as follows: "The most imposing product of Miss Yandell's genius was the heroic figure of Athena, twenty-five feet in height, which stood in front of the reproduction of the Parthenon at the Nashville Exposition. This is the largest figure ever ...
— Women in the fine arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D. • Clara Erskine Clement
... Athena that crowned the Acropolis, whose ruins are the model of architectural perfection, was one—gave to the city an unrivaled beauty. Sculpture vied with architecture in this work of adornment. Phidias, who wrought the frieze of the Parthenon, counted among his wonderful creations the colossal sitting statue of Zeus at Olympia. It was the blossoming season of the Greek intellect, as regards literature and the fine arts. The drama reached its perfection in the masterly tragedies of Aeschylus, ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... the eye is offended at its want of size. It does not, as might be at first supposed, enhance the sublimity of surrounding scenery by its littleness, for it provokes no comparison; and there must be proportion between objects, or they cannot be compared. If the Parthenon, or the Pyramid of Cheops, or St. Peter's, were placed in the same situation, the mind would first form a just estimate of the magnificence of the building, and then be trebly impressed with the size of the masses which overwhelmed ...
— The Poetry of Architecture • John Ruskin
... of the temple presents, however, several questions, some of which seem still undecided. When was the temple built? Was it all built at one time? Was it restored after its destruction by the Persians? Did it continue in use after the erection of the Parthenon? Was it in existence in the days of Pausanias? Did Pausanias mention it in his description of the Acropolis? Conflicting answers to nearly all of these questions Page 2 have appeared since the discovery of the temple. Only the first question has received one and the same ...
— The American Journal of Archaeology, 1893-1 • Various
... concern that that of having the most beautiful city, the most beautiful processions, the most beautiful ideas, and the most beautiful men. In this respect, a statue like the "Meleager" or the "Theseus" of the Parthenon, or again a sight of the blue and lustrous Mediterranean, resembling a silken tunic out of which islands arise like marble bodies, together with a dozen choice phrases selected from the works of Plato and Aristophanes, teach us more than any ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... unless indulged in in great moderation. Now, what I like about this is the way in which ultra-colonialism is held in check, and modified in the direction of the Greek ideal. Those columns, supporting the broad portico, hark back to the Parthenon, don't they? I like that taste and flavor of ...
— Double Trouble - Or, Every Hero His Own Villain • Herbert Quick
... builder, and nowhere has he shown himself more significantly than in the buildings he has erected. When we stand before them—whether it be a mud hut, the house of a cliff-dweller stuck like the nest of a swallow on the side of a canon, a Pyramid, a Parthenon, or a Pantheon—we seem to read into his soul. The builder may have gone, perhaps ages before, but here he has left something of himself, his hopes, his fears, his ideas, his dreams. Even in the remote recesses ...
— The Builders - A Story and Study of Masonry • Joseph Fort Newton
... hero was conscienceless—a characteristic apparent in Greek civilization. What Greek patriot, whether Themistocles or Demosthenes, applied conscience to patriotism? They were as devoid of practical conscience as a Metope of the Parthenon was devoid of life. Patriotism was a transient sentiment. Demosthenes could become dumb in the presence of Philip's gold; and in a fit of pique over mistreatment at the hands of his brother-citizens, Themistocles became a traitor, and, expatriated, ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... parting." He adds, "We could not refrain from looking back, as we passed rapidly to the shore, and we continued to direct our eyes towards the spot, where we had caught the last glimpse of the Theseum and the ruins of the Parthenon through the vistas in the woods, for many minutes after the city and the Acropolis had been totally hidden ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. I. (of VI.) - With his Letters and Journals. • Thomas Moore
... word 'Hellenic' implies absolute truth of form, absolute truth of taste, grace and elegance. It means the selecting and simplifying of essentials into an ideal shape; and therefore it implies the absence of all superfluity, incongruousness, bombast, extravagance or purposelessness. The Parthenon and the statue of the grey-eyed goddess standing up in faultless symmetry against the clear blue sky of Attica; Plato's Apology of Socrates breathing serene and lucid thought in language lucid and serene—these are the types of art as understood by the Hellenic spirit. We nowadays prate ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... world in intellectual pursuits, in art, in poetry, in philosophy. A large and vital part of European culture is rooted directly in the language and thought of Athens. The most beautiful edifice in the world was the Peace Palace of the Parthenon, erected by Pericles, to celebrate the end of Greece's suicidal wars. This endured 2,187 years, to be wrecked at last (1687) in Turkish hands by the Christian bombs of the ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... elevation of woman to a civic status, but we are making precedents every day in our conduct of popular government. In Athens—where woman was both worshiped and degraded—the protectress of the city was a feminine ideal whose glorious image crowned the Parthenon with consummate beauty. In America, where woman is beloved and respected as nowhere else in the world—if she is only true to the ideals of private and public virtue—if she seeks power only as a means for the highest good of the ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... character, there is an effect more profound and artless, if it be less striking and less elaborate than in the Grecian heroine. To Antigone we give our admiration, to Cordelia our tears. Antigone stands before us in her austere and statue-like beauty, like one of the marbles of the Parthenon. If Cordelia reminds us of any thing on earth, it is of one of the Madonnas in the old Italian pictures, "with downcast eyes beneath th' almighty dove?" and as that heavenly form is connected with our human sympathies only by the expression of maternal tenderness ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... of his mirthful hours are carved. It was not in her infancy that Rome produced her Juvenal. Martial and Plautus caricatured the passions of humanity after Carthage had been destroyed and Julius Caesar had made of his tomb a city of palaces. Aristophanes wrote when Greece had her Parthenon and had boasted her Pericles. France had given birth to Richelieu when Moliere assumed the sack, and England had sustained the Reformation and conquered the land of the Cid when Butler, with his satires, shaking church and state, appeared ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I. February, 1862, No. II. - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... how the fish outbuilt her shell, Painting with morn each annual cell? Or how the sacred pine-tree adds To her old leaves new myriads? Such and so grew these holy piles, Whilst love and terror laid the tiles. Earth proudly wears the Parthenon, As the best gem upon her zone, And Morning opes with haste her lids To gaze upon the Pyramids; O'er England's abbeys bends the sky, As on its friends, with kindred eye; For out of Thought's interior sphere These wonders rose ...
— Selections From American Poetry • Various
... sands of Syria, men could still drink cider in the orchards of England. This is what makes Christendom at once so much more perplexing and so much more interesting than the Pagan empire; just as Amiens Cathedral is not better but more interesting than the Parthenon. If any one wants a modern proof of all this, let him consider the curious fact that, under Christianity, Europe (while remaining a unity) has broken up into individual nations. Patriotism is a perfect example of this deliberate balancing of one ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... even of a portion of their past, is not to be hoped, and we shall be well contented if we can have a collection of genuine fragments, that will indicate as clearly their life, as a horse's head from the Parthenon the ...
— Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 • S.M. Fuller
... liberality, justice, discretion. Byron liked new-papered rooms, and pull'd down old wainscot of cedar; Bright-color'd prints he preferr'd to the graver cartoons of a Raphael, Sailor and Turk (with a sack,) to Eginate and Parthenon marbles, Splendid the palace he rais'd—the gin-palace in Poesy's purlieus; Soft the divan on the sides, with spittoons for the qualmish and queesy. Wordsworth, well pleas'd with himself, cared little for modern or ancient. His was the moor and the tarn, the recess in the mountain, the ...
— The International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. 1, No. 7 - Of Literature, Art, and Science, August 12, 1850 • Various
... magnificent building, which really faces George Street, but was formerly considered to be in the square, is one of the palatial clubs evolved by the demands of modern luxury. The house which formerly stood here was used by the Parthenon Club from 1837-41, and was subsequently pulled down to make way for the present clubhouse, opened 1851, and built from designs by Parnell and Smith. The exterior is a combination of Sansovino's Palazzo ...
— The Strand District - The Fascination of London • Sir Walter Besant
... of the rock. There is no joy in this labour, and the savage, harsh yell of the machines drowns any song that of old might have lightened the toil. Blasted out of the mountains by slaves, some 13,000 of them, dragged by tortured and groaning animals, the marble that might have built a Parthenon is sold to the manufacturer to decorate the houses of the middle classes, the studios of the incompetent, the streets of our trumpery cities. Do you wonder why Carrara has never produced a sculptor? The answer is here in the quarries that, having dehumanised man, have themselves become ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... constitutional liberty? Who shall frame together the skilful architecture which unites national sovereignty with State rights, individual security, and public prosperity? No, if these columns fall, they will be raised not again. Like the Coliseum and the Parthenon, they will be destined to a mournful, a melancholy immortality. Bitterer tears, however, will flow over them, than were ever shed over the monuments of Roman or Grecian art; for they will be the remnants of a more glorious edifice than Greece ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster |
