"Perspective" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... to a university course. Moreover, she enjoyed, as with the Athels later, a free command of books; here began her acquaintance with the most modern literature, which was needful to set her thoughts in order, to throw into right perspective her previous miscellaneous reading, and to mark out her way in the future. Her instinctive craving for intellectual beauty acquired a reflective consistency; she reformed her ideals, found the loveliness of much that in her immaturity had seemed barren, put aside, with gentle ...
— A Life's Morning • George Gissing
... as himself without always conceding to the honest guide a high place in his esteem on account of these very virtues. That his daughter could find any serious objections to the match the old soldier did not apprehend; while, on the other hand, he saw many advantages to himself in dim perspective, connected with the decline of his days, and an evening of life passed among descendants who were equally dear to him through both parents. He had first made the proposition to his friend, who had listened to it kindly, but who, the Sergeant was ...
— The Pathfinder - The Inland Sea • James Fenimore Cooper
... lines drawn by sorrow there were other lines betokening laughter, those fine lines at the corners of the eyes which are born from mirth, and even though they take away from youth's first unlined smoothness, give value and perspective to the countenance. ...
— The Making of a Soul • Kathlyn Rhodes
... across the river led us to the tasteful tomb of Itimid-ud-Daulah. The entrance gate is fine, and the approach through spacious, well-kept grounds gives one a wide perspective. The facade is of marble with considerable inlaid work. Itimid-ud-Daulah was a Persian High Treasurer, and the grandfather of the Lady of the Taj. The tomb was built by Shah Jahangir, as was that of King Akbar at Sikandra, five miles distant ...
— Travels in the Far East • Ellen Mary Hayes Peck
... had been a poor reader; he had had no time for books. Now a book came into his hands. Feeling lonely, he dipped into it. It was Reade's "Martyrdom of Man." All night long he sat and read. All the civilizations of earth passed before him in perspective. It gave him a new interest in life. He wanted to go out and take this London by the throat. It was a mockery of what civilization should be. It was an insult to dead generations of men. Man had fought and suffered and died for—this! Humanity ...
— Colorado Jim • George Goodchild
... character is ever to be more than a name with us. To try and teach people how to live without giving them examples in which our rules are illustrated, is like teaching them to draw by the rules of perspective, and of light and shade, without designs to study them in; or to write verse by the laws of rhyme and metre without song or poem in which rhyme and metre are seen in their effects. It is a principle which we have forgotten, ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... at the time, but which stand out like mountain peaks raised "above oblivion's sea," when the times are all gathered in and the century begins to blend with the "infinite azure of the past." Not wars and conquests mark a century. The hosts grow small in the vanishing perspective, "the captains and the kings depart," but the thoughts of men, their attitude toward their environment, their struggles toward duty,—these are ...
— The Call of the Twentieth Century • David Starr Jordan
... still-life—of fishes, birds, fruits, and other objects—often admirable in their kind. Serving as frame or setting to many of the scenes there are architectural paintings—sometimes in complicated but highly skilful perspective, but often extremely unreal and confusing in conception—representing columns and pediments of buildings. It must here suffice to offer one or two characteristic examples out of the multitude of wall-paintings which have been found ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker
... him not the rounded merit of finite accomplishment, but the creative power by which he inaugurated a line of discovery endless in variety and extension. Let us attempt thus to see his work in true perspective between the past from which it grew, and the present which is its consequence. Darwin attacked the problem of Evolution by reference to facts of three classes: Variation; Heredity; Natural Selection. His work was not as the laity suppose, a sudden and unheralded revelation, but the first fruit ...
— Evolution in Modern Thought • Ernst Haeckel
... a long perspective of crowding memories. He never expected to see Sally again, but if the girl who stood by his chair was not Sally she was her twin. He sank into his seat, watching her out of the corner of his eye as she passed through the swing door with a flutter of her snowy apron. He replied feebly ...
— Blacksheep! Blacksheep! • Meredith Nicholson
... Mr. Ayrton. "I think that he's a bit of a fool to run his head into a hornet's nest because he has come to the conclusion that Abraham's code of morality was a trifle shaky, and that Samson was a shameless libertine. Great Heavens! has the man got no notion of the perspective of history?" ...
— Phyllis of Philistia • Frank Frankfort Moore
... a little farther. You have a capital view of Woodcote now; the house is in fine perspective. There is Michael's Bench, so called after my cousin, Captain Burnett; and this, Mollie'—pointing to a pretty little thicket of trees and shrubs reaching down to the water—'is Deep-water Chine. With your permission, we will ...
— Lover or Friend • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... went on, "that I named him Jonesy. I liked that name because it fitted him so badly. Jonesy is not conventional in his ideas, but his morals are sound. He has seen religions and civilizations and dynasties flourish and decay, and it has all given him a certain perspective on life. He has occasionally ...
— The Lighted Match • Charles Neville Buck
... and flowery branches, that overtopped the heads of the neighboring fruit trees, was bordered on the south by a low and ancient wall over which grew roses and honeysuckles. The long leafy avenue gave the impression of great depth, and its perspective melted into a bower of vines and jasmine bushes that in turn became a great verdant place, which came to an end at a storehouse of ancient construction, whose gray stones were hidden ...
— The Story of a Child • Pierre Loti
... nations, which gives evidence of the sympathy felt with all the simple phenomena of nature—spring with its flowers, the green fields, and the woods. But these pictures are all foreground, without perspective. Even the crusaders, who travelled so far and saw so much, are not recognizable as such in these poems. The epic poetry, which describes armor and costumes so fully, does not attempt more than a sketch of outward nature; ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... as Hell. The reply to such a sentence is impossible, without many words,—far more than Mr. Jowett's sentences commonly deserve.—Sometimes he strings together several heads of thought; of which enumeration the kindest thing which can be said is that it betrays an utter want of intellectual perspective. To unravel even a part of this tangled web so as to expose its argumentative worthlessness, soon fills a page.... But there is another kind of fallacy which the same gentleman wields with immense effect, and in the use of which he is a great master; which, because it ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... noticeable lack of dwarfed trees and pale pagodas and sprays of willowy bamboo; of clumsy boats adrift on tideless streams; of toy-like tea gardens hanging among artificial rocks, and of troops of flat-faced but complaisant people posing grotesquely in ridiculous perspective. ...
— In the Footprints of the Padres • Charles Warren Stoddard
... we note the care and conscientiousness of the writer; we have but a confused and blurred impression of the poet. Although a century has passed since his death, we do not yet see the events of Burns's life in proper perspective. Things trifling in themselves, and of little bearing on his character, have been preserved, and are still recorded with painful elaboration; while the sidelights from friends, companions, and acquaintances, male and female, are ...
— Robert Burns - Famous Scots Series • Gabriel Setoun
... companion for half-a-dozen years. Perhaps, good as she was, she grew rather to brandish this credit in the faces of the cloth-workers and their wives; to speak a little bigly of the galleries and the Academy, of chiaroscuro and perspective, of which the poor ignoramuses knew nothing: to be obstinate on her dignity, and stand out on her gentility far before that of the attorneys' and the doctors' wives;—and all this though she had been, as you may remember, ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... the rudiments of technique, more than the mere processes of mixing colors, more than shading and form, and perspective, and flat surfaces, and high lights, and foreshortening. She was the first person from the outside world with whom Peter had ever come into real contact, the first person not a Southerner with whom he had ever ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler
... crop up, allied to the coarsest calcaire grossier. The hill bristle with small split blocks, with peaks half overturned, with rough and denuded mounds. League beyond league, they stretch in low ignoble outline. Here and there a valley opens sharply into the desert, revealing an infinite perspective of summits and escarpments in echelon one behind another to the furthest plane of the horizon, like motionless caravans. The now confined river rushes on with a low, deep murmur, accompanied night and day by the croaking of frogs and the rhythmic ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 1 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... board the river-steamer, and his own hands carried it piecemeal to the bank. This was a red-brick bungalow with an ample veranda, standing back from the future street that was as yet little better than a country road. The veranda commanded a long perspective of pines, but no further bricks and mortar, and but very few weather board walls. The yard behind the house was shut in by as many outbuildings as clustered about the small homesteads which Fergus had already ...
— Stingaree • E. W. (Ernest William) Hornung
... Madge. They had turned suddenly in at the gates of Bushey Park, and before them was the twenty-mile-long perspective of the chestnut avenue, bounded by the white sunlit walls of the hospitable Greyhound. The girl's eyes sparkled with pleasure, and in her excitement, as some fresh bit of beauty was revealed, she rested a tiny gloved hand ...
— In Friendship's Guise • Wm. Murray Graydon
... here," Diana said, "as they always do. You can take my place as Bettina's chaperon, and Delia will take care of the house. I shan't be missed, and I can—get a perspective ...
— Glory of Youth • Temple Bailey
... character of the American forest, for the axe has felled its oldest and its grandest trees; but in the close wood which survives, live all the wild and pleasing peculiarities of nature: its complete irregularity, its vistas, in whose perspective the quiet cattle are peacefully browsing; its refreshing glades, where the grey rocks arise from amid the nodding fern; the silvery shafts of the old birch trees; the knotted trunks of the hoary oak, the grotesque but graceful branches which never shed their honours under the tyrant pruning-hook; ...
— The Purcell Papers - Volume I. (of III.) • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... roof dotted with windows, and so deep, expansive, and capacious that it alone seemed as though it might have lodged an army. In the centre rose the enormous square tower—massive—rock-like—launching itself aloft into Gothic spires and towers. All along the sides ran a perspective of statues and carvings. This astonishing work would take some minutes of brisk motion to walk down from end to end. It is really a wonder of the world, and, in the phrase applied to more ordinary things, 'seemed to take your breath away.' ...
— A Day's Tour • Percy Fitzgerald
... lagged behind their heads. With their reason they cannot but accept the ideas of natural science. The burden of proof is too much for them. But those ideas cannot satisfy the religious needs of their souls,—the perspective offered is too dreary. Is the human soul to rise on the wings of enthusiasm to the heights of beauty, truth, and goodness, only for each individual to be swept away in the end like a bubble blown by the material ...
— Christianity As A Mystical Fact - And The Mysteries of Antiquity • Rudolf Steiner
... cause and effect that he finds himself able to climb that ladder, because since the law works always in the same way, he can depend upon it and he can use it, just as he uses the laws of Nature in the physical worlds. His knowledge of this law brings to him a sense of perspective and shows him that if something comes to him, it comes because he has deserved it as a consequence of actions which he has committed, of words which he has spoken, of thought to which he has given harbour in previous days or ...
— A Textbook of Theosophy • C.W. Leadbeater
... surrounded by buildings above buildings, and roof above roof, has something striking and singular. A tall gilt crucifix of bronze, sculptured by some famous artist, adds to its splendour; and the tops of some tufted trees, seen above a line of magnificent hotels, have no bad effect in the perspective. ...
— Dreams, Waking Thoughts, and Incidents • William Beckford
... Michel the woodman sitting so at evening many a time. He had never had a soul to tell him of outline or perspective, of anatomy or of shadow, and yet he had given all the weary, worn-out age, all the sad, quiet patience, all the rugged, careworn pathos of his original, and given them so that the old lonely figure was a poem, sitting there, meditative and alone, on the dead tree, with ...
— A Dog of Flanders • Louisa de la Rame)
... will be readily seen how useful stick-laying may become in perspective drawing, in the study of planes and solids, in crystallography; how, while it insures an enjoyable familiarity with geometrical forms and secures ever-increasing manual skill and delicacy of touch, it develops at the same time the artistic sense of the children in a high ...
— Froebel's Gifts • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... in 1521, about the middle of July, and the remaining years of his life were spent in the prosecution of the art of the engraver, in painting, and in the effort to elucidate the sciences of perspective, geometry, and fortification, upon all of which he ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various
... the greatest delight in topography. "That is why," he used to say, "I delight in a flat country. The idea of space is what I want. I like to see miles at a glance. I like to see clouds league-long rolling up in great masses from the horizon—cloud perspective. I rejoice in seeing the fields, hedgerow after hedgerow, farm after farm, push into the blue distance. It makes me feel the unity and the diversity of life; a city bewilders and confuses me, but a great tract of placid country gives me a ...
— Memoirs of Arthur Hamilton, B. A. Of Trinity College, Cambridge • Arthur Christopher Benson
... Certosa of Pavia:—characterized by the imitative sculpture of large buildings on a small scale by way of pinnacles and niches; the substitution of candelabra for columns; and the covering of the surfaces with sculpture, often of classical subject, in high relief and daring perspective, and finished with delicacy which rather would demand preservation in a cabinet, and exhibition under a lens, than admit of exposure to the weather and removal from the eye, and which, therefore, architecturally considered, is worse than valueless, telling merely as unseemly roughness and rustication. ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... backwards, and whisked their tails about in all directions; the dogs barked, the mob screamed, the troops recovered, and nothing was to be seen on either side, as far as the eye could reach, but a long perspective of red coats and white trousers, ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... magnitude of the events has called forth such a multitude of individually heroic acts that no one can be placed before the rest; yet, when this greatest phase of history comes to be written down with historic perspective, one figure—that of King Albert of Belgium—will stand as that of a twentieth-century Bayard, a great knight without ...
— Raemaekers' Cartoons - With Accompanying Notes by Well-known English Writers • Louis Raemaekers
... church as can be found; but, for the reasons stated, it is not particularly interesting as a piece of architecture. Its wealth is in its frescos. In the quadrangle of the cloister is a series of pictures by Paolo Uccello, who, by the introduction of linear perspective, of which he is esteemed the inventor, made a new epoch in art. In the "chapel of the Spaniards" is a famous collection of frescos by Giotto's scholars. A large, thoughtful, and attractive composition is called the Wisdom of the Church. On the opposite side is a very ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... Sir W. Harcourt. He agrees, however, with Harcourt in condemning the game laws. His most characteristic utterance was when the admirer of Cobden had moved that 'to all human appearance we are warranted in tracing for our own country through the dim perspective of coming time an exalted and glorious destiny.' Fitzjames moved as an amendment 'that the House, while it acknowledges the many dangers to which the country is exposed, trusts that through the help of God ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... the mission of the poet is "to see life steadily and see it whole," a feat which is impossible if the worship of one figure out of the multitude is allowed to distort relative values, and to throw his view out of perspective. ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... architecture. On your right the Charles slipped smoothly through green and purple salt meadows, darkened here and there with the blossoming black grass as with a stranded cloud-shadow. Over these marshes, level as water but without its glare, and with softer and more soothing gradations of perspective, the eye was carried to a horizon of softly rounded hills. To your left upon the Old Road you saw some half dozen dignified old houses of the colonial time, all comfortably fronting southward." One of these, the largest and most stately, was the Craigie House, famous as the headquarters of ...
— Four Famous American Writers: Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, • Sherwin Cody
... ramifications it creates for the many, the attendant restraints for the individual—I confess interested me. You can imagine a personal reason or—an abstract one. From the lonely perspective of a tiny coral isle, a system, or systems,—codes of conduct, or morals, built up for the swarming millions, so to speak!—could not but possess fascination for one to whom those millions had become only as the far-away shadows of a dream. You will find a few of those books, minus ...
— Half A Chance • Frederic S. Isham
... with little figures, which have been for the most part ruined on the many occasions when that state has been harassed by wars. Nevertheless, there were preserved there some of his writings on geometry and perspective, in which sciences he was not inferior to any man of his own time, or perchance even to any man of any other time; as is demonstrated by all his works, which are full of perspectives, and particularly by a vase drawn in squares and sides, in such a manner that the base and the mouth ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 3 (of 10), Filarete and Simone to Mantegna • Giorgio Vasari
... give him two places in my team. One would be for the "Gold Bug," the other for the "Murder in the Rue Morgue." I do not see how either of those could be bettered. But I would not admit perfect excellence to any other of his stories. These two have a proportion and a perspective which are lacking in the others, the horror or weirdness of the idea intensified by the coolness of the narrator and of the principal actor, Dupin in the one case and Le Grand in the other. The same may be said of Bret Harte, also one of those great ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... However distant the perspective of happiness thus offered to his view, and although the avenue leading to it was beset with dangers and uncertainties, it promised to realize the ardent hopes which Luis Herrera had once ventured to indulge. Sanguine and confident, he would at once ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... part of the process of the development of the European Union and will enhance its contribution to solidarity within the Atlantic Alliance. WEU Member States agree to strengthen the role of WEU, in the longer term perspective of a common defence, compatible with that of the Atlantic Alliance. 2. WEU will be developed as the defence component of the European Union and as a means to strengthen the European pillar of the Atlantic ...
— The Treaty of the European Union, Maastricht Treaty, 7th February, 1992 • European Union
... fresh; religion is such a one, and religion, when nothing is left of it but the pleasant, familiar habit, may be defended, for were it not for our habits life would be unrecorded, it would be all on the flat, as we would say if we were talking about a picture without perspective. Our habits are our stories, and tell whence we have come and how we came to be what we are. This is quite a pretty reflection, but there is no time to think the matter out—here is the doctor! He lifts his skull-cap, and how beautiful is the gesture; his dignity ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... the gap of the San Luis Rey River and Valley. At all times of the year the color and light and shade in every part of the valley are most lovely, delighting the artist's eye with a whole gamut of aerial perspective; but it is in the spring that the hillsides and valley put on their most gorgeous robes, from the lightest tints of yellow and green, down through every hue and tone of red, blue and purple, soft and brilliant, pricked out here and there with spots of intense, flaming yellow ...
— Old Mission Stories of California • Charles Franklin Carter
... a style full of simplicity and feeling. In the modern languages she was perfectly skilled; and if her drawings wanted the enlivening touches of the master to give them effect, as an atonement they displayed a perfect knowledge of the rules of perspective and the study of ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... however, were then chosen. By the form I refer particularly to the use of the third person. I had always felt the most effective method of writing an autobiography, for the sake of a better perspective, was mentally to separate the writer from his subject by ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok (1863-1930)
... ones which are called real) a spark of Christ's own life, something of 'that spirit of life which was in Christ Jesus,' and by which, and by which alone, being transfused into us, we become 'free from the law of sin and death.' I beseech you, brethren, see that, in your perspective of Christian truth, the thought of a new life imparted to us has as prominent and as dominant a place as it obviously has in the teaching of the New Testament. It is not so dominant in the current notions of Christianity that prevail amongst average people, but ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... while it seemed that the trumpets sounded more cheerfully shrill, and the steeds, refreshed by rest and provender, chafed on the bit, and trod the ground more proudly. On they passed, troop after troop, banners waving, spears glancing, plumes dancing, in long perspective—a host composed of different nations, complexions, languages, arms, and appearances, but all fired, for the time, with the holy yet romantic purpose of rescuing the distressed daughter of Zion from her thraldom, and redeeming the sacred earth, which more than mortal had trodden, ...
— The Talisman • Sir Walter Scott
... who wanted to get to Paradise, had to go up a staircase which he had himself painted, but which no man could mount. That was to expiate his sins against perspective. All the plants and buildings, which the property-man had placed, with infinite pains, in countries to which they did not belong, the poor fellow was obliged to put in their right places before cockcrow, if he wanted to get into Paradise. Let Herr Fabs see how he would get in himself; ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... the most important occasions; and the effect is something similar to that of a Chinese painting, in which, though all the objects separately taken are accurately described, yet the whole is entirely wanting in a proper relief of perspective. What is observed by Milton of the conduct of life, may be applied to composition, "that there is a scale of higher and lower duties," and he who confuses it will infallibly fall short of that proportion which is necessary to excellence no less ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary
... placed Richmond in diminishing perspective, Robert rode with Zene and lived his campaign over again. This was partly necessary because little Carrie lay on the back carriage-seat. But it was entirely agreeable, for Zene wanted to know all ...
— Old Caravan Days • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... gable has a canopied niche, within which is a much-restored effigy of St. Peter. The sloping walls built on each side, as if purposely to conceal the buttresses of the nave and its aisles, give this portion of the church an awkward perspective, and tend to diminish the apparent height of the whole facade. The screen itself was the last important addition to be made to the fabric by Bishop Brantyngham (1370-94), and it is little more than a low stone scaffolding for holding the rows of figures of saints, ...
— Exeter • Sidney Heath
... fell again to pry. Thro' perspective more wistfully, When by mischance the fatal string, 465 That kept the tow'ring fowl on wing, Breaking, down fell the star. Well shot, Quoth WHACHUM, who right wisely thought H' had levell'd at a star, and hit it But SIDROPHEL, ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler
... where interchanged, and every where the question rises or is answered that determines the market value of the morning; that makes known the signal success of the great haul of Enoch Smith; the further fall of prices in the perspective; and the general promise of the season in the way of shad; and all agree that however large or small may be the supply, never, since the memory of man, have the shad been quite so good as they are this season; and that ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, April 1844 - Volume 23, Number 4 • Various
... contents of the book and the method to be pursued.[51] In the body of the commentaries, he hardly ever dwells on a subject at length, but contents himself with a brief explanation. In short, his horizon was limited and he lacked perspective. It is to be regretted that he did not know the philosophic works of Saadia, who would have opened up new worlds to him, and would have enlarged the circle of his ideas. If he had read only the Biblical commentaries of ...
— Rashi • Maurice Liber
... and Jacob, who dwelt in cheerful community one with another, praying before the same altar, and conversing during the hours of relaxation, but, in strict propriety, occupying separate cells in the rock. In 1735, however, Jacob died, when one Samuel Goerner, a modelist, and perspective maker, took his place. Some ingenious representations of Mount Calvary and the Holy Sepulchre, executed in wood by the hands of Brother Samuel, still remain, and are exhibited to the stranger with becoming pride. And last of all came ...
— Germany, Bohemia, and Hungary, Visited in 1837. Vol. II • G. R. Gleig
... of the special quality of the sense of sight, it is still not free from certain elements of feeling and will - that is, from elements with the character of dream or sleep. The first plays a part in our perception of colour; the second, in observing the forms and perspective ordering of objects ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs
... times she would interest herself in the children, and tell them of things in the world outside the forest. She praised Carl's pictures, and showed him how to work in his colors so as to more effectively bring out the perspective, and tried to educate his taste, as far as she could, by describing the pictures of the great masters. She often said afterwards that she could never have lived through those dark days but for the comfort she found ...
— Round-about Rambles in Lands of Fact and Fancy • Frank Richard Stockton
... strangely; they spoke of so tranquil a despair. Meanwhile the husband smilingly made his sack; and the unconscious babe struggled to reach a pot of raspberry jam, friendship's offering, which I had just brought up the den; and in a perspective of centuries I saw their case as ours, death coming in like a tide, and the day already numbered when there should be no more Beretani, and no more of any race whatever, and (what oddly touched me) no more literary works ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... went away. Somerset, feeling that he had now every reason for prowling about the castle, remained near the spot, endeavouring to evolve some plan of procedure for the project entertained by the beautiful owner of those weather-scathed walls. But for a long time the mental perspective of his new position so excited the emotional side of his nature that he could not concentrate it on feet and inches. As Paula's architect (supposing Havill not to be admitted as a competitor), he must of necessity ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... lately said by a liberal, have tried to dispense with great men, and have succeeded. There is a perspective to contemplate! Let us not, however, in France, try too often to dispense with them. The greatest of our moralists, he who knew us best, has said of man in general, what is true of the French nature in particular, that we have more force ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... she was content to pursue, on the spot, such further inquiries in behalf of the fugitive as she saw fit to make. It is possible the pleasures of freedom, in the shape of the contemplated divorce, were already floating before her active mind, with the soothing perspective of second nuptials, backed by the influence of such another picture as might be drawn from the recollections of her first love; the whole having a manifest tendency to pacify her awakened spirit, and to give a certain ...
— The Red Rover • James Fenimore Cooper
... that, thus instructed, the sunset and the pastoral landscape, the moss-grown arch and the craggy seaside, the twilight grove and the swaying cornfield, an old mill, a peasant, light and shade, form and feature, perspective and anatomy, a smile, a gesture, a cloud, a waterfall, weather-stains, leaves, deer,—every object in Nature, and every impress of the elements, speaks more distinctly to the eye and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 • Various
... sitting on camp-stools at the foot of one of the trees, sketching effects of light and shadow in the deep glades around them. On such occasions the baronet used to tie his horse to the lower branch of an old elm, and taking his stand behind Miss Dunbar, would amuse himself by giving her a lesson in perspective, with occasional hints to Miss Macmahon, who, as the young man remarked, drew so much better than her sister, that she ...
— Henry Dunbar - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... considerable, but the companies considered the money well spent. Not only were the men making helpful suggestions the very ones who would observe most wisely and profit most extensively from such educational trips, but they would bring back to their everyday tasks a new perspective, see them from a new angle, and frequently offer new suggestions which would more than save ...
— Increasing Efficiency In Business • Walter Dill Scott
... drew as a round, smoky spot; whistling as a spiral thread." In making letters, he always painted L yellow, M red, and A black. He draws a picture of a house with a soldier standing in front of it. The father rebukes him for bad perspective, and tells him that the soldier in his picture is taller than the house. But the boy replies, "If you drew the soldier smaller, you wouldn't be able to see ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... account of her sister Madge; unaffected by sounds of joy or grief, in his effort to produce a supple English, with Baden's Madonna for sole illumination of his darkness. To her, to the illimitable gold-mist of perspective and the innumerable images the thought of her painted for him, he owed the lift which withdrew him from contemplation of himself in a very disturbing stagnant pool of the wastes; wherein often will strenuous youth, grown faint, behold a face beneath a scroll inscribed Impostor. All whose ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Jeb growled. "He's an artilleryman. We've been in the dill together half a dozen times." Freddy was staring below, trying to understand the terrain from this perspective. While Joe was tripping the lever which let the tow rope drop away from the glider, the Telly reporter said, "Both of them used to fly lightplanes for sport. When you started this new glider angle, they must've seen the possibilities and took it up immediately. ...
— Frigid Fracas • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... His perspective must first be broken on the wheel of experience, that he might know human nature, and the relative worth of men. His unplastic nature would one day be his chief bulwark; as now, it was his chief stumbling block. For in his chosen life-work he must take ...
— The Promise - A Tale of the Great Northwest • James B. Hendryx
... making Scriptural quotations to his own advantage. It is not at all unlikely that amidst this scene of universal quietude he too was watching certain little snow-wrapt hamlets, scenes of straw-yard and deep thatched byre in which cattle munched their winter provender-watching them with the perspective scent of death and destruction in his nostrils; gloating over them with the knowledge of what was to be their fate before another snow time had come round. It could not be supposed that amidst such an era of tranquillity the army of England should have been allowed to remain in a very formidable ...
— The Great Lone Land - A Narrative of Travel and Adventure in the North-West of America • W. F. Butler
... date. Those in the Statistical Atlas of the United States showing the distribution of population from 1790 to 1890 embody a mass of history as well as of geography. A map of France or the Russian Empire has a long historical perspective; and on the other hand, without that map no change of ethnic or political boundary, no modification in routes of communication, no system of frontier defences or of colonization, no scheme of ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... wicked white against a leaden sky and what there is left of Breaker Island. In every other direction you will see the apparently endless walls of mangrove, unvarying in colour, unvarying in form, unvarying in height, save from perspective. Beneath and between you and them lie the rotting mud waters of Bonny River, and away up and down river, miles of rotting mud waters fringed with walls of rotting mud mangrove-swamp. The only break in them—one can hardly call it a relief to the scenery—are the gaunt black ribs of the old hulks, ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... false reports," yet if so this is not the fault of the rumor itself, but of the too credible listener. The prosperity of a rumor is in the ear that hears it. The sagacious listener will take the trouble to sift and winnow his rumors, set them in perspective with what he knows of the facts and from them he will then deduce exceedingly valuable considerations. Rumor is the living atmosphere of men's minds, the most fascinating and significant problem with ...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley
... notwithstanding the officious admonitions of the vergers that she had better move on, but approaching the iron grating that shut her out from the body of the church, looked wistfully down the long dim perspective of the beautiful southern aisle. And thus motionless she remained in contemplation, or it might be prayer, while the solemn peals of the organ and the sweet voices of the choir enjoyed that holy liberty for which she sighed, and seemed to wander at their will in every sacred ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... ridden over the hills to the west and south of Purdue University, and viewed the gorgeous panorama of the Wea plain, or who has glimpsed in the perspective the wooded hills of Warren and Vermilion from the bluffs on the eastern side of the river, it is not hard to understand why the red man loved the Wabash. An observer who saw it in the early part of the last century pens ...
— The Land of the Miamis • Elmore Barce
... you may often be called upon to conciliate or perhaps to control. That man will never be a perfect gentleman who lives only with gentlemen. To be a man of the world, we must view that world in every grade and in every perspective. In short, the most practical art of wisdom is that which extracts from things the very quality they least appear to possess; and the actor in the world, like the actor on the stage, should find 'a basket-hilted sword very convenient to carry milk in.' [See the witty inventory of a player's ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... that MR. SHADBOLT has not a knowledge of perspective, or, with a little reflection and trifling pains in linear demonstration on paper, he might have convinced himself of the accuracy of my method. It were well, then, to inform MR. SHADBOLT, that in perspective, planes parallel to the plane of delineation (in this case, the glass at ...
— Notes and Queries, No. 209, October 29 1853 • Various
... own experience, as he uttered his own convictions, most easily and effectively through alien lips. For a like reason he loved to survey the slow continuities of actual events from the standpoint of a given moment, under the conditions of perspective and illusion which it imposed. Both these conditions were less well satisfied by drama, which directly "imitates action," than by the dramatic speech or monologue, which imitates action as focussed in a particular mind. And Browning's dramatic genius ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... Anitchkoff Palace, facing on the Nevsky, upon the right shore; on the left, beyond the palace of Sergiei Alexandrovitch, the branch of the Alexander Nevsky Monastery, in old Russian style, with highly colored saints and heads of seraphim on the outer walls; and a perspective of light, stuccoed building,—dwellings, markets, churches,—until the eye halts with pleasure on the distant blue dome of the Troitzky cathedral, studded with golden stars. Indeed, it is difficult to discover a vista in St. Petersburg which does not charm us with a glimpse of one or more ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood
... at first I stuck my choice upon her, ere my heart Durst make too bold herald of my tongue: Where the impression of mine eye infixing, Contempt his scornful perspective did lend me, Which warp'd the line of every other favour; Scorned a fair colour, or express'd it stolen; Extended or contracted all proportions To a most hideous object: thence it came That she whom all men prais'd, and whom myself, Since I have lost, have lov'd, was ...
— All's Well That Ends Well • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... Doumer himself for re-organising the system of Tresoriers-Generaux, and making these officers regular members of the staff of the Finance Ministry with fixed salaries, my friend in the Aisne thinks it likely enough that one of these posts may fill the eventual perspective of ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... exercise of the pictorial art; for he contended that too strict an adherence to nature only trammelled him, and he preferred relying upon the thought conveyed in his illustrations, rather than upon the mechanical correctness of his outline or perspective." George Cruikshank showed, as we know, a tolerable contempt for nature when he undertook the delineation of a horse, a woman, or a tree; but it was one of the conditions of his genius that it should be left free and untrammelled to follow the dictates of its own inspiration, and ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... him an exceeding and eternal weight of glory will easily count all his cups and all his crosses, and all the crooks in his lot but as so many light afflictions and but for a moment. My Lord Understanding had his palace built with high perspective towers on it, and the site of it was near to Eye-gate, from the top of which his lordship every day looked not at the things which are temporal, but at the things which are eternal, and down from his palace towers he every day descended to ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte
... of perspective were known. None knew how to draw anything correctly. No color-harmonies had been thought of. These men must needs stammer when they tried to express themselves; but as much greater as thought is than the mere expression of it so much greater are many of their works, in the ...
— Barbara's Heritage - Young Americans Among the Old Italian Masters • Deristhe L. Hoyt
... few, and chosen rather by chance. He had never had the advantage of the common introduction to the world of ideas which is given, in a measure, to all boys who are systematically taught by teachers, and consequently, not knowing the relative value of what came before him, his perspective and proportion were incorrect. His mind, too, was essentially plain. He was perfect in his loyalty to duty; he was, as we have seen, very good in business matters, had a clear head, and could give shrewd ...
— Catharine Furze • Mark Rutherford
... impossible for any person to cultivate vocal expression to the best advantage without an intelligent and sympathetic teacher; he lacks the perspective upon himself which is necessary in order to correct his individual faults and draw out his most effective powers. Then, again, he needs that personal supervision and direction of his efforts which will allow his mind to be constantly occupied with thoughts and ...
— Expressive Voice Culture - Including the Emerson System • Jessie Eldridge Southwick
... and the frame of mind in China is not astonishing—especially in view of the censorship and the distraction of attention of the last few years. But that Japan and China should be so geographically near, and yet every fact that concerns them appear in precisely opposite perspective, is an experience of a life time. Japanese liberalism? Yes, it is heard of, but only in connection with one form which the longing for the miraculous deus ex machina takes. Perhaps a revolution in Japan may intervene ...
— China, Japan and the U.S.A. - Present-Day Conditions in the Far East and Their Bearing - on the Washington Conference • John Dewey
... with the legal and strategic questions involved in the "Green Book." These diplomatic briefs, White or Yellow or Orange or Green, seem more important at the moment than in perspective. They are all we observers have of definite reason to think upon. But nations do not go to war for the reasons assigned in them—nothing is clearer than that. Like the lengthy briefs in some famous law case, they are but the intellectual counters ...
— The World Decision • Robert Herrick
... The cabin epitomized the new world in which they must thenceforth live and move. The old cabin was gone forever. The horizon of life was totally new and unfamiliar. The unexpected had swept its wizardry over the face of things, changing the perspective, juggling values, and shuffling the real and the ...
— Love of Life - and Other Stories • Jack London
... Burke, for instance, was a writer who revered the prejudices of a modern society as deeply as Macaulay did; he believed society to be founded on prejudices and held compact by them. Yet what size there is in Burke, what fine perspective, what momentum, what edification! It may be pleaded that there is the literature of edification, and there is the literature of knowledge, and that the qualities proper to the one cannot lawfully be expected from the other, ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Volume I (of 3) - Essay 4: Macaulay • John Morley
... supported through the winter by his fellow-conductors, but faithfully nursed by them at night, each one taking turns after the long day's work. Such glimpses as this show us how queer is our usual charitable perspective, in which, as in a picture on a Chinese fan, we see the church steeple in the middle distance and the church visitor looming large in the foreground, while the poor little object of charity, quite helpless and alone save for us, huddles in a corner. The fact is that every life has a background, ...
— Friendly Visiting among the Poor - A Handbook for Charity Workers • Mary Ellen Richmond
... are recognised and appreciated only at a distance. Mrs Hunter lost the perspective of romance and adventure, and shed tears because there was sufficient mineral in the water to yellow her week's washing, and for various other causes which she had never foreseen and to which she refused to ...
— Sawtooth Ranch • B. M. Bower
... Modern Perspective. A Treatise upon the Principles and Practice of Plane and Cylindrical Perspective. 1 vol. 12mo. With Portfolio ...
— The Olden Time Series, Vol. 1: Curiosities of the Old Lottery • Henry M. Brooks
... waxcloths and unspeakable carpets. As he undresses by the light of a three-inch candle, he has his soul horrified by early Victorian prints, of Paul tumbling from his horse on the way to Damascus, of the gory relief of Lucknow, or of some towsy-headed clansman smiling out of perspective. He is by no means a tourist on pleasure bent. He must face gust and surge, for he cannot choose his time and weather. His duty is to cover as much ground as he can in a given week, fill his order-book ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... doubt whether their work will resist the criticism of the twentieth century, because there is at the core of it an exaggeration or disproportion which the future is likely to perceive more and more clearly in the receding perspective ...
— Inquiries and Opinions • Brander Matthews
... the river runs almost in a straight line to Vienne. On both shores rise round-crested wooded hills—the foothills of the parallel ranges of mountains by which the wide valley is shut in. Down this perspective, commandingly upon a height, is seen the city—misty and uncertain at first, but growing clearer and clearer, as the boat nears it, until the stone-work of man and the rock-work of nature become distinct ...
— The Christmas Kalends of Provence - And Some Other Provencal Festivals • Thomas A. Janvier
... the gravity and of the objects of life, the earnest desire to develop and improve, have grown and become real with us to a degree that has leavened our whole society from end to end? It is something beyond sects and beyond dogmas. It is rather an alteration of perspective, a shifting of our sense of proportion, a vivid realization that we are insignificant and evanescent creatures, existing on sufferance and at the mercy of the first chill wind from the unknown. But ...
— The Poison Belt • Arthur Conan Doyle
... upon the theory that others must be as faithless. Still, he had a cruel amusement in figuring the possible encounter between Margaret Vance, with her intellectual elegance, her eager sympathies and generous ideals, and those girls with their rude past, their false and distorted perspective, their sordid and hungry selfishness, and their faith in the omnipotence of their father's wealth wounded by their experience of its present social impotence. At the bottom of his heart he sympathized with them rather than with her; ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... named a swarthy beauty of twenty, with small figure, but a model of gracefulness, seemed indeed to challenge comparison with my two lovely relatives, and much as I longed to possess Mamma, this vision of Mary made a very lasting impression on my mind; beyond them stretching away in the dim perspective were quite a procession of attendant houris, all sizes, ages, and styles of complexion and beauty from very little ones to the fat, fair, and forty. Was this prophetic of my future career amongst the fair sex, viz, beginning at home with the ...
— Forbidden Fruit • Anonymous
... minutely wrought out, though not with all the artistic elaboration of later mediaeval work. The art of painting (almost always in miniature) was considerably advanced, the figures being well drawn, in rather stiff but not unlifelike attitudes, though perspective is very imperfectly understood, and hardly ever attempted. Later Anglo-Saxon architecture, such as that of Eadward's magnificent abbey church at Westminster (afterwards destroyed by Henry III. to make way for his ...
— Early Britain - Anglo-Saxon Britain • Grant Allen
... anything like complete materials for history. A credulous and uncritical record of gossip combined with a very scanty analysis of character and motive characterizes their works, which are rather a set of highly-coloured pictures without proportion or perspective, than those orderly annals from which history ...
— The Fall of the Moghul Empire of Hindustan • H. G. Keene
... vegetation. But the view that burst suddenly upon Eustace Le Neve's eye as he gained the summit of that precipitous serpentine bluff fairly took his breath away. It was a rich and varied one. To the north and west loomed headland after headland, walled in by steep crags, and stretching away in purple perspective toward Marazion, St. Michael's Mount, and the Penzance district. To the south and east huge masses of fallen rock lay tossed in wild confusion over Kynance Cove and the neighboring bays, with the bare boss of the Rill and the Rearing ...
— Michael's Crag • Grant Allen
... The wireless apparatus connected with it can talk with Paris and Calcutta. From the top you feel as if you were seeing "all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time." There are no other buildings to cut off the view or tamper with perspective. The Dead Sea was growing dark. The Moab Hills beyond it looked lonely and ...
— Jimgrim and Allah's Peace • Talbot Mundy
... secret! Let me peer into her veiled face and read. I have only to fix my thoughts to decipher—what? I know not. Something ... perhaps. But I cannot control my thoughts. I am absorbed in turn by the beauty of the Marble Arch and the perspective of the Bayswater Road, fading like an apparition amid ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... to make impossible actions possible, unheard of effects could be reached, all still remained in the outer framework of the stage. The photoplay showed a performance, however rapid or unusual, as it would go on in the outer world. An entirely new perspective was opened when the managers of the film play introduced the "close-up" and similar new methods. As every friend of the film knows, the close-up is a scheme by which a particular part of the picture, perhaps only the face of the hero or his hand or only a ...
— The Photoplay - A Psychological Study • Hugo Muensterberg
... sped. At fifteen Wilbur Cowan, suddenly alive to this quick way of time, was looking back to the days of his heedless youth. That long aisle of years seemed unending, but it narrowed in perspective until earlier experiences were but queerly dissolving shapes, wavering of outline, dimly discerned, piquant or sad in the mind, but elusive when he would try ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... by side along the narrow clearing which extended in endless perspective down the line of fence. After giving Rory a sketch of the vicissitudes and disasters which had imparted an element of variety to the thirteen preceding years of my life, I yielded myself to the lulling influence of his own history during the same ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... country road into a village thoroughfare. The dwellings were placed nearer or further from the sidewalk as their builders fancied, and the elms that met in a low arch above the street had an illusive symmetry in the perspective; they were really set at uneven intervals, and in a line that wavered capriciously in and out. The street itself lounged and curved along, widening and contracting like a river, and then suddenly lost itself over the brow of an upland which formed a natural boundary of the village. ...
— Annie Kilburn - A Novel • W. D. Howells
... you have not felt obliged to read so many stories, and I cannot advise you to do so. But it has made it possible for me to see in some sort of perspective, just where the American short story is going as well as what it has already achieved. It has made me see how American writers are weakening their substance by too frequent repetition, and it has helped me to fix the ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... thing which all these essays towards a scientific conduct of life reveal is a total want of perspective, for they proceed on the hypothesis—which no doubt their authors would defend—that this world and its concerns are everything, and that the intellectual and physical improvement of the human race by any measures, however harsh, is the "one thing ...
— Science and Morals and Other Essays • Bertram Coghill Alan Windle
... deny but that man's wit may make poesy, which should be [Greek text], which some learned have defined, figuring forth good things, to be [Greek text], which doth contrariwise infect the fancy with unworthy objects; as the painter, who should give to the eye either some excellent perspective, or some fine picture fit for building or fortification, or containing in it some notable example, as Abraham sacrificing his son Isaac, Judith killing Holofernes, David fighting with Goliath, may leave those, and please an ill-pleased eye with ...
— A Defence of Poesie and Poems • Philip Sidney
... the unscrupulous, but more patriotic financial impostures of Mendizabal, can be retrieved, and the national faith redeemed. The case is, to appearance, one past relief; but, with honest and incorruptible ministers of finance like Ramon Calatrava, hope still lingers in the long perspective. With an enlightened commercial policy on the one hand, with the retrenchment of a war expenditure on the other, the balance between receipts and expenditure may come to be struck, an excess of revenue perhaps ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various
... You look forward to a life of content and peace and honorable ambition—a life, with your wife at your side, which is to last forty or fifty years. You consider where you will be twenty years from now, at what point of your career you may become a judge or give up practise; your perspective is unlimited; you even think of the college to which you may send your son. It is a long, quiet future that you are looking forward to, and you choose my daughter as the companion for that future, ...
— The Exiles and Other Stories • Richard Harding Davis
... home, I had the honour of attending at Manchester, shortly before Christmas, and at Liverpool, only the night before last, for a purpose similar to that which brings you together this evening; and looking down a short perspective of similar engagements, I feel gratification at the thought that I shall very soon have nothing at all to say; in which case, I shall be content to stake my reputation, like the Spectator of Addison, and that other great periodical speaker, the Speaker ...
— Speeches: Literary and Social • Charles Dickens
... the hundred or more who knew the doctor personally. It was the only response the sullen crowd gave to his burst of epic feeling. They were not in sympathy with his optimism. The anguish of the present moment of bread-hunger and cold was too keen. Men with empty stomachs had no historic perspective. They felt instinctively that it was just as black for a man who starved to death in the ideal "City of the Soul" as it was for the wretch who starved in chains in ...
— The Root of Evil • Thomas Dixon |
