"Chisel" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... confusion. And, of a sudden, in the midst of this tangle of straight clefts and sharp-pointed angles, we came on a little rounded niche where the wall was scooped out in a graceful curve from about our own height to the ground. It was all as smooth and softly rounded as if wrought by a mason's chisel, and as we stood looking at it with surprise, because it was so different from all the rest, a movement of the lantern showed us a greater wonder still. At our feet, in a smooth round basin, bubbled ...
— Carette of Sark • John Oxenham
... seems to have motion in it." "I must draw the curtain, my liege," said Paulina. "You are so transported, you will persuade yourself the statue lives." "O, sweet Paulina," said Leontes, "make me think so twenty years together! Still methinks there is an air comes from her. What fine chisel could ever yet cut breath? Let no man mock me, for I will kiss her." "Good, my lord, forbear!" said Paulina. "The ruddiness upon her lip is wet; you will stain your own with oily painting. Shall I draw the curtain?" "No, not these twenty ...
— Books for Children - The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 3 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... violence of voice and gesture. Such suppression, with a view to producing greater effect by leaving much to the excited imagination of the beholder, is not practiced only by the tactful histrionic artist—it pervades all art. To take a single brief example: the greatest sculptors, knowing that the chisel could produce form, not color, have shrunk from indicating the pupil of the eye in their statues, and left the eyeball smooth, because the imagination was more pleased with entire absence of the organ than with its imperfect representation. So ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 11, No. 24, March, 1873 • Various
... other rude implements and take not kindly to metal ones. Rude knives are still used for skinning deer, especially by the old Indians. The axe, of course, is employed for cutting trees and excavating canoes and mortars. It has really taken the place of the stone chisel, yet many old men prefer burning the roots of the tree until it can be made to fall by giving it a few hacks with the ...
— My Native Land • James Cox
... said Adrian, "but when last I saw him he was working at its hilt with a chisel, which seemed strange. He always wanted that sword. During the siege he offered a large reward to any soldier who could kill you and bring ...
— Lysbeth - A Tale Of The Dutch • H. Rider Haggard
... ran by in her imagination: among them a shaggy old poodle, whom she had seen that day in the street with a white patch on his eye and tufts of wool by his nose. Fedyushka ran after the poodle with a chisel in his hand, then all at once he too was covered with shaggy wool, and began merrily barking beside Kashtanka. Kashtanka and he goodnaturedly sniffed each other's noses and merrily ran down the ...
— The Cook's Wedding and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... or re-discoverer of the art of enamelling in Italy was Luca della Robbia, a Florentine sculptor. Vasari describes him as a man of indefatigable perseverance, working with his chisel all day and practising drawing during the greater part of the night. He pursued the latter art with so much assiduity, that when working late, to prevent his feet from freezing with the cold, he was accustomed to provide himself with a basket of shavings, in which he placed them ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... and that the less it is examined, probably the more it may be admired. Even the famous capital fares not much better. "In point of fine architectural features, monuments of art, and magnificent structures, (excepting only the great Mosques,) the chisel of the mason, the marble, the granite, Constantinople is more destitute than any other great capital. But then, you are told that these objects are not in the style and taste of the people. Be it so; ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... myself seized with a profound sadness, and I begin to write, but at the first lines I perceive that, without suspecting it, the historian's chisel has superseded the ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas
... the statue of Philip Lebon, the inventor of lighting by gas, occurred on the 26th of June, at Chaumont, under the auspices of the Technical Gas Society of France. The statue, which we illustrate herewith, is due to the practiced chisel of the young sculptor Antide Pechine, who has perfectly understood his work, and has represented the inventor at the moment at which he observes a flame start from a glass balloon in which he had heated some ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 611, September 17, 1887 • Various
... and in which the door had been sawn through, and the chest forced open, seemed to show that it was the work of practised hands. On examining closely the butler's pantry, he found a powerful screwdriver and a heavy chisel. These corresponded to marks in the lid, and had evidently been used for the purpose of forcing it open. They had the initials "R W." burnt in the handles. The inmates of the house all denied any knowledge of ...
— A Final Reckoning - A Tale of Bush Life in Australia • G. A. Henty
... blood from the arm comes from the vein, but here it is of no consequence. The doctors don't know that and don't understand it, how should they, the idle drones, the wretched Germans? It's the blacksmiths who go in for it. And aren't they skilful! They get a chisel, give it a tap with a hammer and it's done! ... Well, while I was thinking it over, it got quite dark, it was time for bed. I went to bed and Tresor, of course, was close by me. But whether it was from the fight, from the stuffiness, from the fleas or from my thoughts, I ...
— Knock, Knock, Knock and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... festivals to the very air of Olympus? What unprecedented scenes of splendour had I not devised for the celebration of the victory, the triumph—nay, even the entry into Rome! Whole chests are filled with the sketches, programmes, drawings, and verses. All who handle brush and chisel, compose and execute music, would have lent their aid, and—you may believe me-the result would have been something which future generations would have discussed, lauded, and ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... of the work. Unless, for instance, the scholar possesses as an unconscious habit the ability to hold the pen and form and join the various letters, he could never devote his attention to evolving the thoughts composing his essay. In like manner, without an habitual control of the chisel, the carver could not possibly give an absorbing attention to the delicate outlines of the particular model. It is only because the rider has habituated himself to the control of the handles, etc., that he can give his attention to the street traffic before him and ...
— Ontario Normal School Manuals: Science of Education • Ontario Ministry of Education
... to be transmitted, must be by the three means which have been established for that purpose; namely, the pen, the pencil, and the chisel. I therefore propose a building wherein these three may be employed to express the various incidents, and to mark that victory distinct from all others, by applying the several spoils and trophies taken; and to have the building of considerable ...
— The Life, Studies, And Works Of Benjamin West, Esq. • John Galt
... how to ask for them, but know'd what use to make of them, and therefore must have heard of Nails, which they call Whow, the name of a Tool among them made generally of bone, which they use as a Chisel in making Holes, etc. These people asking so readily for Nails proves that their connections must extend as far North as Cape Kidnapper, which is 45 Leagues, for that was the Southermost place on this side the coast we had any Traffick with ...
— Captain Cook's Journal During the First Voyage Round the World • James Cook
... better, boy! so much the better!" said the monk, heartily. "Only let the marble be fine and white, and it is as good as converting a heathen any time to baptize it to Christian uses. A few strokes of the chisel will soon demolish their naked nymphs and other such rubbish, and we can carve holy virgins, robed from head to foot in ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 48, October, 1861 • Various
... to saw and drive nails properly if it takes me the rest of my life!" he declared resolutely. "The very idea! Why, some of those little chaps in the sloyd room can chisel and plane like carpenters. I'll bet I can do it, too, if ...
— The Story of Porcelain • Sara Ware Bassett
... old Simon was doing with to-day. On two benches was a cart wheel, with its hickory spokes radiating like fingers from the locust hub, and on the floor were the mallet and the steel chisel with its tough oak handle. Stacked up in the corner were bundles of straight hickory, split from the butt of the great shell-bark log; round cuts of dry locust, and long timbers of white and red oak, and quarters of the tough sugars, seasoning, hard as iron. With these were ...
— Dwellers in the Hills • Melville Davisson Post
... harder than Porphyry or Agate, the Chisel of my love, drove by the Mallet of my fidelity, would have made some impression on thee. I, that have shaped as I pleased the most untoward of substances, hoped by the Compass of reason, the Plummet of discretion, the Saw of constancy, the soft File of kindness, and the Polish ...
— Town and Country, or, Life at Home and Abroad • John S. Adams
... prose or poetry, which had not, at one time or other, been inscribed on slate or marble. His sole task and office among the immortal pilgrims of the tomb—the duty for which Providence had sent the old man into the world, as it were with a chisel in his hand—was to label the dead bodies, lest their names should be forgotten at the resurrection. Yet he had not failed, within a narrow scope, to gather a few sprigs of earthly, and more than earthly, wisdom,—the harvest of many ...
— Chippings With A Chisel (From "Twice Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... turned their attention to the felled tree once more, studying the innumerable teeth marks, like so many tiny chisel cuts, on stump and butt. Then they noticed the great chips lying about the stump, some of them half ...
— The Young Wireless Operator—As a Fire Patrol - The Story of a Young Wireless Amateur Who Made Good as a Fire Patrol • Lewis E. Theiss
... destruction of his tomb by the Huguenots; but the artistic traveller will be more interested in these buildings as monuments of the architecture of the eleventh century, and to notice the marks of the chisel and the mason's hieroglyphics made in days so long gone by, that history itself becomes indistinct without these landmarks—marks and signs that neither armies of revolutionists nor eight centuries of time have ...
— Normandy Picturesque • Henry Blackburn
... reception rooms filled with exquisite statues and superb paintings, the works of the greatest sculptors and artists of the east and west, of the past and the present. Figures by Thorwaldsen, Powers and other modern celebrities of the block and chisel stood beside antique masterpieces framed by the genius of Phidias and his brother sculptors of old Greece and Rome, masterpieces that had been torn from the ruins of antiquity by the hand of the untiring and enterprising excavator. Among the paintings were fine specimens of the ...
— Edmond Dantes • Edmund Flagg
... Nettenmair's unfortunate death from the minds of the townsmen—and still other things these things. A stone was erected over his grave, and his honest death was vouched for by a sculptor and impressed with chisel-strokes upon forgetful posterity. One might think that the dark cloud that had hovered over the house with the green shutters would have burst in the storm that dashed the older son from the tower-roof of St. George's to the pavement below, and that life would now be bright there, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IX - Friedrich Hebbel and Otto Ludwig • Various
... chisel wrought, No pile above their graves, Say, could ye point out, save in thought, Their own, from tombs of slaves? A crumbling column, only shows ...
— Lays of Ancient Virginia, and Other Poems • James Avis Bartley
... lifted the great lid into its place, and then, with a hammer and a little chisel which he had brought with him from the tools which had been used for the building of the pier, he packed the crevices about the lid with oakum. With a mariner's skill he worked, and when his job was finished, it would have been difficult for a drop of water to have found its ...
— The Adventures of Captain Horn • Frank Richard Stockton
... the wretched band of prisoners, with the half-naked people, armed with guns and machetes, dancing drinking about them. As one barrel of rum was finished another was brought in, and the supply seemed endless. The days went by, and Mr. Ovens lost patience, and declared he would go and get a chisel and hammer and free the prisoners at all costs. "Na, na," replied Mary wisely, "we'll have a little ...
— Mary Slessor of Calabar: Pioneer Missionary • W. P. Livingstone
... period, inscriptions were engraved, carved or impressed with sharp instruments, and of patterns characteristic of a graving tool, chisel or other form which could be adapted to particular substances like stone, leaves, metal or ivory plates, wax or ...
— Forty Centuries of Ink • David N. Carvalho
... she does not mean either the house at Sciennes or the Kirkpatrick mansion near the Water of Leith. She is thinking of that once open space by the Greyfriars where, to the accompaniment of keen chisel-stroke and dull mallet-thud, once on a day she came to me, more dream-like than my dream, and said, "I have found ...
— The Dew of Their Youth • S. R. Crockett
... inundation to the country below by bursting through its walls. To obviate this danger, a tunnel for carrying off the water was pierced at a level much below the height to which it had risen. This gallery, cut entirely with the chisel through the rock for a distance of six thousand feet, or nearly a mile and one-seventh, is still in so good condition as to serve its original purpose. The fact that this work was contemporaneous with the siege of Veii, has given to ancient annalists ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... a chisel before, but he chipped and cut away the marble so marvellously that life seemed to spring out of the stone. There was a marble head of an old faun in the garden, and this Michelangelo set himself to copy. Such a wonderful copy did he make that Lorenzo was amazed. ...
— Knights of Art - Stories of the Italian Painters • Amy Steedman
... and his pleasures, next becomes the object of the passions and pleasures of man; an additional class of emotions produces an augmented treasure of expressions; and language, gesture, and the imitative arts become at once the representation and the medium, the pencil and the picture, the chisel and the statue, the chord and the harmony. The social sympathies, or those laws from which, as from its elements, society results, begin to develop themselves from the moment that two human beings coexist; the future is contained within the present, as the plant within the seed: and equality, ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... the counting whereof would leave one with aching eyes. Nor are you a modishly-fashioned vehicle of the road—a thing of clamps and iron. Rather, you are a vehicle but shapen and fitted with the axe or chisel of some handy peasant of Yaroslav. Nor are you driven by a coachman clothed in German livery, but by a man bearded and mittened. See him as he mounts, and flourishes his whip, and breaks into a long-drawn song! Away like the wind go the horses, and ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... pere," and Marie imitated in pantomime the use of the hammer and chisel. "Cut them all time winter, ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... 39 minutes South, Longitude 120 degrees 40 minutes East : This rock was broken off the face of the side of a bank of brook. It is rather soft, and would split; it is all in layers. I cut my initials in it with a chisel. : Purple ...
— Explorations in Australia • John Forrest
... directly upon the figure finally lifted to the pedestal prepared for her: an exquisite modern statue of Aphrodite of old, which had won a young Frenchman the Prix de Rome, and was compared by those authorities not inimical to the sculptor, to be worthy of the chisel of Praxiteles. Ivan had taken advantage of the quarrel among the committee who were considering it for purchase for the Luxembourg, and had bought it from its affronted creator for one hundred ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... have doubted whether there could be anything more beautiful. Architecture was consecrated to the gods, and so was art. You go to Delphi, said Plutarch, and see those wonderful works of the ancient artists and sculptors, as fresh still as if they had left the chisel yesterday, and they had stood there for hundreds of years, wonderful in their beauty. Think of some of the remains of the Greek art—of that Victory, for instance, which the Messenians set on the temple at Olympia in 421 B.C. She stood on a block of stone on the temple, but the block was painted ...
— The Jesus of History • T. R. Glover
... occasion; he is ready for a row when his blood is well up; and he will take to his book, if you will give him a schoolmaster. What is he, indeed, but the rough block of English character? Hew him out of the quarry of ignorance; dig him out of the slough of everlasting labor; chisel him, and polish him; and he will come out whatever you please. What is the stuff of which your armies have been chiefly made, but this English peasant? Who won your Cressys, your Agincourts, your Quebecs, your Indies, East and West, and your Waterloos, but the English peasant, trimmed ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... anthropomorphic speculation'. For it is inconceivable to us that nature should have placed such a form inside the block. Roused by our objection, the artist proceeds to verify his theory experimentally - 'with quite rudimentary apparatus, too: merely using a chisel to separate the form for our inspection, ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs
... garland of Gothic foliage composed of orange blossoms, is the Bride's Door. Carved on each side of the niche above the keystone is a "true-lover's-knot." A cynical observer (Rider's "New York City") comments: "Few visitors note the sly touch of irony which, by a few strokes of the chisel, has converted the lover's knot on the northerly side into an unmistakable ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice
... Arnim and his 400 Militia; whose conduct was perfect, under difficulties and alarms; but proved unsuccessful. The terrified Magistrates, finding their Keys gone, and the conflagrative Russians at their gates, got blacksmiths on the instant; smote down, by chisel and mallet, the locked Drawbridge, smote open the Gates: 'Enter, O gracious Sirs; and may Czarish Majesty have mercy on us!' So that Arnim had small start for marchers on foot; and was overtaken about half-way. Would not yield still, though the odds were overwhelming; drew himself ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... The chisel or gouge is the best tool to employ in this work. A sharp hawk-billed knife will be useful in cutting off the loose bark. Coal tar is the best material for covering wounds because it has both an antiseptic and a protective effect on the wood tissue. Paint, ...
— Studies of Trees • Jacob Joshua Levison
... here on business is requested to keep away!" said the magistrate, when, after much hammering and shaking, the door yielded to ax and chisel. "I request this, in the interest of the investigation. Orderly, ...
— The Most Interesting Stories of All Nations • Julian Hawthorne
... her lesson from sculpture, and before the end of the century both arts had become responsive to the demand of the time, and had entered upon that course of triumph which was not to end till, three centuries later, chisel and brush dropped from hands enfeebled in the general decline of national vigor, and incapable of resistance to the tyrannous and exclusive autocracy of ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... to the consummate surprise of the officers and crew, and the alarm of pedestrians as he passed along the street. "Mon Dieu!" said the mate, and taking the little fellow to the windlass-bits, succeeded in severing the handcuffs with a cold-chisel, and sent him down into the forecastle ...
— Manuel Pereira • F. C. Adams
... age, of experience and of idealism. His big, bright eyes and curving mouth betokened enthusiasm, fire, a kindly philosophy; while the lines upon his forehead and the grey streaks in his abundant hair seemed to speak of deeper things. Life had indeed graven with its chisel lines and marks ineffaceable. It was the face of one who had suffered deeply, who had passed through more than one saddening experience. In repose one would have said the man was serious, grave to a fault; but when he smiled, it was the face of youth—ardent, ...
— The Making of a Soul • Kathlyn Rhodes
... but found no trace of the curry-cook: they made guarded enquiries of the servants as to whether he had been seen, but nothing whatever could be learned about him. So when Peppino took a ponderous hammer and a stout chisel from his tool chest and led the way upstairs, they all knew that the decisive moment had come. Perhaps he might be meditating (for indeed it was likely that he had a good deal to meditate about), ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson
... already talking to a tall man clad in his mason's blouse, who looked about forty, but was I daresay older, who had his mallet and chisel in hand; there were at work in the shed and on the scaffold about half a dozen men and two women, blouse-clad like the carles, while a very pretty woman who was not in the work but was dressed in an elegant suit of blue linen came sauntering up to us with her knitting in her ...
— News from Nowhere - or An Epoch of Rest, being some chapters from A Utopian Romance • William Morris
... went down three hundred feet of limestone terraces, one below the other, as straight as if a carpenter had ruled them with his ruler and then cut them out with his chisel. There ...
— The Water-Babies - A Fairy Tale for a Land-Baby • Charles Kingsley
... hear the wash of the river below, I was startled and sometimes shivered as I walked under the shadow of tall monuments, carved figures, and by stately tombs of marble. And once I started back and broke into tears at the sight of the sculptured form of "Old Mortality" bending above a slab with chisel and mallet in hand—and I suppose is there still, grown older in his stony face because more stained ...
— Why I Preach the Second Coming • Isaac Massey Haldeman
... archaeological curiosity. The place is much lower, and worse lighted, than the contemporary crypt of St. Peter's-in-the-East, but not, perhaps, less interesting. The square-headed capitals have not been touched, like some of those in St. Peter's, by a later chisel. The place is dank and earthy, but otherwise much as Robert D'Oily left it. There is an odd-looking arrangement of planks on the floor. It is THE NEW DROP, which is found to work very well, and gives satisfaction ...
— Oxford • Andrew Lang
... vegetables, and even to stones and mineral substances. If an animal or a plant die, its soul immediately goes to Bolotoo; if a stone or any other substance is broken, immortality is equally its reward; nay, artificial bodies have equal good luck with men, and hogs, and yams. If an axe or a chisel is worn out or broken up, away flies its soul for the service of the gods. If a house is taken down, or any way destroyed, its immortal part will find a situation on the plains of Bolotoo; and, to confirm this doctrine, the Fiji people can show you a sort of natural well, or deep hole in the ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... one report: "I love them that love me." None of those forms of mental wealth called art or science or literature, enters the mind unasked or stays unurged. All the shelves are heavy with mental treasure, but only the eager mind may harvest it. Beauty sleeps in all the quarries, but only the eager chisel wakens it. Wealth is in every crack and crevice of the soil, but nature forbids the sluggard to mine it. Those forms of paradise called fame, position, influence, stand with gates open by day and ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... Remember the counsel given to the artist, who lay reclining upon his couch, and wondering what the fates would work out for him. Directing his attention to a block of unhewn marble, with a chisel lying by its side, the sculptor in the vision is represented ...
— Sanders' Union Fourth Reader • Charles W. Sanders
... features, usually placid and pale, had a rigid clearness about them that day we can never forget. They seemed, from their transparency and firmness, like some wondrous imagination of the artist's chisel, in which the marble, fancying itself human, had begun to breathe. The eye was calm and bright—the mouth, the feature round which danger loves to play, though easy, motionless, and with lips apart, had about it an air of immobility and quiet scorn, which ...
— The Felon's Track • Michael Doheny
... which they had become possessed, are worn out, they will have almost lost the knowledge of their own. In this last voyage of our commander, a stone hatchet was as rare a thing among the inhabitants as an iron one was eight years before; and a chisel of bone or stone was not to be seen. Spike nails had succeeded in their place; and of spike nails the natives were weak enough to imagine that they had gotten an inexhaustible store. Of all our commodities, axes, and hatchets remained the most unrivalled; and they must ever ...
— Narrative of the Voyages Round The World, • A. Kippis
... care by a friendly hand, and an unwilling admission is made of the opposition he had encountered. It is now illegible, and some of its lines appear to have been carefully erased—by some High Church chisel, probably. But the following copy was made when the epitaph was fresh ...
— East Anglia - Personal Recollections and Historical Associations • J. Ewing Ritchie
... carpenter nailed a thick oaken plank upon the floor, about seven feet long, putting at least a dozen nails into it, each longer than his middle finger. At one end of this piece of wood, there was a small projection, and not having a proper chisel with him by which he might remove it, the man returned to his shop to fetch one. While he was absent, some persons came to see the animals; and the hyaena was let down by the keeper into the part of the den in which the carpenter had been at work. ...
— Anecdotes of the Habits and Instinct of Animals • R. Lee
... the marble to his model in order to perfect his conception. We are all sculptors, working at various forms, moulding and chisel- 248:15 ing thought. What is the model before mortal mind? Is it imperfection, joy, sorrow, sin, suffering? Have you accepted the mortal model? Are you repro- 248:18 ducing it? Then you are haunted in your work by vicious sculptors and hideous forms. Do you not hear from ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... chisel disposed of the resistance of the door in a few minutes. But some article of furniture had been placed against it inside, as a barricade. By pushing at the door, we thrust this obstacle aside, and so got admission to the room. The landlord entered ...
— The Moonstone • Wilkie Collins
... his life, in deifying his necessary cravings in order that he might not despise them, going so far as to wrest from Chinese leaves, from Egyptian beans, from seeds of Mexico, their perfume, their treasure, their soul; going so far as to chisel the diamond, chase the silver, melt the gold ore, paint the clay and woo every art that may serve to decorate and to dignify the bowl from which he feeds!—how can this king, after having hidden under folds of muslin covered with diamonds, studded with ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... up at length with the aid of a chisel, but it was perfectly impossible to eat it, and we had to make a dinner off the vegetables and an apple tart. We tried a mouthful of the duck, but it ...
— Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... London Monument that, like a tall bully, lifts its head and lies, because of the inscription upon it that charged the Papists with causing the great fire. The malignant little hunchback, as malevolent as an ape for all his genius, could tell lies as great as any the chisel could grave, and unfortunately, infinitely more lasting. When he wrote: "Earless on high stands unabash'd Defoe," he knew he lied. Defoe did not lose his ears. He was pilloried simply, and for three days successively, stood in Cornhill, ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... month, clear of all expenses. Some of these apprentices are hoary-headed and wrinkle-browned men, with their children, and grand-children, apprentices also, around them, and who, after having used the plane and the chisel for half a century, with faithfulness for others, are now spending the few hours and the failing strength of old again in preparing to use the plane and the chisel for themselves. The work on which they ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... the field of poetry;—both Tasso and Milton, for example, having evinced so little tendency to such tastes[49], that, throughout the whole of their pages, there is not, I fear, one single allusion to any of those great masters of the pencil and chisel, whose works, nevertheless, both had seen. That Lord Byron, though despising the imposture and jargon with which the worship of the Arts is, like other worships, clogged and mystified, felt deeply, more especially ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. IV - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... chisel may suffice to scale The stone, and give my lines a right direction; And haply future study may avail, To bring the stubborn labour to perfection. Return we now to him, to whom the mail Of hawberk, shield, and helm, were small protection: I speak ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto
... dress a stone (which perhaps never quite fits the spot it was intended for, and has to be thrown aside!); or who carve away all their lives to produce a corbel of some reform in sexual relations, in the end to find it break under the chisel; who, out of many failures attain, perhaps, to no success, or but to one, and that so small and set so much in the shade that no eye will ever see it; for such as these, it is perhaps not so easy to labour ...
— Woman and Labour • Olive Schreiner
... through the wood show limbs naked from thigh to toe, smooth as moulded bronze, and proportioned as if cut by the chisel of Praxiteles. Their bodies above also nude; but here again differing from the red men of the prairies. No daub and disfigurement of chalk, charcoal, vermilion, or other garish pigment; but clear skins showing the lustrous hue of health, of bronze or brown ...
— Gaspar the Gaucho - A Story of the Gran Chaco • Mayne Reid
... you have not eaten for so long that too much bread will be poison to you now." And she at once dropped her hand, laid her bread upon the plate, and gazed into his eyes like a submissive child. And if any words could express—But neither chisel, nor brush, nor mighty speech is capable of expressing what is sometimes seen in glances of maidens, nor the tender feeling which takes possession of him who ...
— Taras Bulba and Other Tales • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... I could show you with a chisel in two minutes. . . . But you're right. Mahogany it is, and cuts like mahogany. . . . I keep a high-class warehouse of stuff lower down-town, and there I'll show you a log of it, seven-by-four. It's from Costa Rica. Would you care to prospect? . . . I don't mind sharing secrets with the old firm, ...
— Foe-Farrell • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... see the city. Everything was quiet and still, and he devoted himself to a more particular examination of the bars of the brig. They were two inches thick, but the case looked hopeful. Pursuing his investigations still farther, he found, under the steps, a saw, a hammer, a chisel, and some other tools, which Bitts, the carpenter, had placed there a few days before, and forgotten to remove. Clyde took up the saw; but just then, Peaks, with a book in his hand, seated himself at a table near the ...
— Up The Baltic - Young America in Norway, Sweden, and Denmark • Oliver Optic
... Fogg, with a brush of a chisel scraping the portraiture on his own box out of all semblance, and then doing the same with the picture on the reverse ...
— Ralph on the Overland Express - The Trials and Triumphs of a Young Engineer • Allen Chapman
... When he rises to speak in the House all eyes are riveted on him as though with a vice until he has finished speaking. Even when he has finished they sometimes have to be removed by the Serjeant-at-Arms with a chisel. His speeches have the moral fervour and intensity of one of the Minor Prophets—NAHUM or AMOS, in the opinion of some critics, though I personally incline to MALACHI or HABAKKUK. This personal magnetism which Mr. LLOYD GEORGE radiates in the House ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, November 10, 1920 • Various
... talking in whispers; the tall figure of the superintendent at the stove, busily stirring the kettle, and in the middle of the floor, the center of all eyes, the fourteen-year-old boy hurriedly working with chisel and hammer, seemingly only conscious of the task before him and the necessity of making the most of ...
— The Young Railroaders - Tales of Adventure and Ingenuity • Francis Lovell Coombs
... stands the first mate, a lighted lantern in his hand; Davis beside him, with auger, mallet, and chisel. They are by the hatchway, which they have opened, intending descent into the hold. With the lantern concealed under the skirt of his ample dreadnought, Harry Blew stands within the shadow of the mast, as if ...
— The Flag of Distress - A Story of the South Sea • Mayne Reid
... had my heritage!" he thought; and the chisel fell from his hands as he looked down the length of the barrack room with the blue glare of the African sky ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... see long, thin streaks. O Lawr, boys, Rodden must ha' been hard put, when he drapped the block into the hole. It's shet up tight. Hev ye got the chisel and mallet?" ...
— Two Knapsacks - A Novel of Canadian Summer Life • John Campbell
... to a valley nearly half a mile wide, paved with gravel and boulders, and as bald of vegetation as a desert. The rocks on the slope of the ridge and along the sides of this wide shallow ravine were cut as sharply and worn as smooth as if the stone cutter's chisel had shaped ...
— The Boy Scouts on the Yukon • Ralph Victor
... it, the nephew spilt the whole pail of plaster of Paris over the bed in which his uncle lay, and then fell in a drunken stupor into the mess. There they both stayed all night until they were hacked out with a chisel in the morning. ...
— The Reminiscences of an Irish Land Agent • S.M. Hussey
... Modern maritime quarantine demands that ships shall not carry vermin that are themselves plague-carriers. In the donkey-engine section of the for'ard house is a complete fumigating apparatus. The mutineers had merely to lay and fasten the pipes aft across the coal, to chisel a hole through the double-deck of steel and wood under the cabin, and to connect up and begin to pump. Buckwheat had fallen asleep and been awakened by the strangling sulphur fumes. We in the high place had been smoked out by our ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... until the chest stood free for half its depth—which is roughly three feet. It has handles at the ends, great hand-wrought loops of metal. I tugged my hardest, but the chest seemed fast in its place as the native rock. I laughed exultantly. The weight meant gold—gold! I had hammer and chisel with me, and with these I forced the massive ancient locks. There were three of them, one for each strip of brass which bound the chest. Then ...
— Spanish Doubloons • Camilla Kenyon
... area of a workman's studio you might cover with a napkin, or say, a small table-cloth. The carver takes the model and whacks it out in granite without any pointing or other help than his hand and eye and a pointed iron chisel and hammer, and he loses very little indeed of the character of the model, in fact, as little as some well ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch
... teach eternal God humility; The solemn beauty of the unfulfilled Moving towards fulfilment on a height Beyond all heights; the dreadful beauty of hope; The naked wrestler struggling from the rock Under the sculptor's chisel; the rough mass Of clay more glorious for the poor blind face And bosom that half emerge into the light, More glorious and august, even in defeat, Than that too cold dominion God foreswore To bear this passionate universal load, This Calvary ...
— Collected Poems - Volume One (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... Holborn—foreign gents and refugees. Such a cove my eagle eye detected in a man who entered the shop wearing a long black beard streaked with the snows of age, and who requested Poll to shave him clean. He was a sailor-man to look at; but his profile, David, might have been carved by a Grecian chisel out of an iceberg, and that steel grey eye of his might have struck a chill, even through a chink, into any heart less stout than beats behind the vest of Montague Tigg. The task of rasping so hirsute a customer seemed to sit heavy on the soul of Poll, and threatened ...
— Old Friends - Essays in Epistolary Parody • Andrew Lang
... truly beauty and more impressive and attractive than the beauty of sixteen. It is absurd to suppose that God has made women so that their glory passes away in half a dozen years. It is absurd to suppose that thought and feeling and passion and purpose, all holy instincts and impulses, can chisel away on a woman's face for thirty, forty, fifty years, and leave that face at the end worse than they found it. They found it a negative,—mere skin and bone, blood and muscle and fat. They can but leave their mark upon it, and the mark of good is good. Pity does not have the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., April, 1863, No. LXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics. • Various
... great wealth from his mine, but, on coming to the depth of three Spanish yards (varas), the abundance of water obliged him to abandon it, and no attempts have since been made to resume the working. When the silver is not found in solid masses, which requires to be cut with the chisel, it is generally finely sprinkled through the lode, and often serves to nail together the particles of stone through which it is disseminated."[81]—"The ores of the Pastiano mine, near the Carmen, were so rich that the lode was worked by bars, with a point at one end and a ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson
... brush, and the chisel have made us familiar with his plumed and hairy crests, but what of the deep fountains of his inner life? What did he think? How did he feel? What riotous impulses, or communion with the Great Mystery, carved his face of bronze? These no scientist, no discoverer, no leader of expeditions ...
— The Vanishing Race • Dr. Joseph Kossuth Dixon
... must watch whirlwinds, poised in space, and note their airy march. So I saw, clearly cut into the rock of the future, my own face, with all the lines and carvings wrought into it that the life of Bernard McKey would chisel out, and I only waited. I might have waited on forever, for Mr. McKey had not cast one pebbly word that must send up wavy ripples from deep spirit-waters; he only wandered, as any other might have done, upon the shore of my life, along its quiet, dewy sands, above its chalk-cliffs, and by the side ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 62, December, 1862 • Various
... turned the pinkest rivals pale Alike with sceptre, chisel, pen or palette, And could at any moment, gloved in ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... footsteps fell! And in my dreams I see thee now— The pearly teeth—the arching brow— The form that mocks the sculptor's art To add one curve that could impart More beauty and more witching grace, Or chisel out a sweeter face! Blest be the hour when first I met This charming girl ...
— The Old Hanging Fork and Other Poems • George W. Doneghy
... you where it is," cried Julia. "The shelf is too high for me to reach"; and, opening the door of the kitchen stair, she bade Gideon follow her. They found both the hammer and a chisel; but Gideon was surprised to see no sign of a servant. He also discovered that Miss Hazeltine had a very pretty little foot and ankle; and the discovery embarrassed him so much that he was glad to fall at ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... our natural love of immortality; but it is here that letters obtain the noblest triumphs; it is here that the swarthy daughters of Cadmus may hang their trophies on high; for when all the pride of the chisel and the pomp of heraldry yield to the silent touches of time, a single line, a half-worn-out inscription, remain faithful to their trust. Blest be the man that first introduced these strangers into our islands, and may they never ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... the night; sleep very bad: and among his sore bodily pains, ennui falls very heavy to a mind so restless. He can paint, he can whittle, chisel: at last they even mount him a table, in his bed, with joiner's tools, mallets, glue-pots, where he makes small carpentry,—the talk to go on the while;—often at night is the sound of his mallet audible in the Palace Esplanade; and Berlin townsfolk pause to listen, with many thoughts of a sympathetic ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. X. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—At Reinsberg—1736-1740 • Thomas Carlyle
... symphony of Auguste Rodin's. Love and life and bitterness and death rule the themes of his marbles. Like Beethoven and Wagner he breaks the academic laws of his art, but then he is Rodin, and where he achieves magnificently lesser men would miserably perish. His large tumultuous music is for his chisel alone to ring ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... 'made for duck or plover,' (the good man being absent on a coasting voyage to Virginia) and with it the powder-horn and shot-bag; but the lad thinking the duck and goose shot not quite the size to kill regulars, his mother took a chisel, cut up her pewter spoons, and hammered them into slugs, and put them into his bag, and he set off in great earnest, but thought he would call one moment and see the parson, who said, well done, my brave boy—God preserve you—and on he went in ...
— The Yankee Tea-party - Or, Boston in 1773 • Henry C. Watson
... since these strong-handed and brave-hearted men pushed their way into the profound wilderness of Upper Canada. Were they not heroes? See that man whose strong arm first uplifts the threatening axe. Fix his image in your mind, and tell me if he is not a subject worthy the genius and chisel of a Chantrey. Mark him as he swings his axe and buries it deep into a giant tree. Hark! how that first blow rings through the wood, and echoes along the shores of the bay. The wild duck starts and flaps her wings; the timid deer bounds away. Yet stroke follows stroke in measured force. The ...
— Life in Canada Fifty Years Ago • Canniff Haight
... air is filled with the perfume of roses and violets and tame songbirds make their nests in the oleander bushes? Wouldst like to recline on soft downy cushions, allowing thy golden hair to fall over thy shoulders the while I, mallet or chisel in hand, would make thy face immortal by carving it in marble? The praefect saith thine is a case for pity, then do I have pity upon thee, and give thee the choice of what thy life shall be. Squalor and misery as thy mother's slave, or joy, music, and ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... oak," said he, "and it has shrunk a little with age. If I had a chisel or a strong-bladed knife I could force the lock back without doing ...
— The Green Flag • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Venus is a paragon, but there is no collection of ancient sculpture which will compare with the extensive gallery of heads by Canova alone. When benignant Time shall have done his appointed work of covering with the pall of oblivion the worse nineteen twentieths of the productions of the modern chisel, the genuine successes of the Nineteenth Century will shine out clearer and brighter than they now do. So, I trust, with Painting, though I do not know what painter of our age to place on a perilous eminence with Canova as the champion or representative ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... The motion of the small foot shod in a Tartar boot embroidered with silver, and the firm pressure of the lean sinewy hand, showed that the prince still possessed the tenacious endurance and vigor of hardy old age. After a few more turns of the lathe he removed his foot from the pedal, wiped his chisel, dropped it into a leather pouch attached to the lathe, and, approaching the table, summoned his daughter. He never gave his children a blessing, so he simply held out his bristly cheek (as yet unshaven) and, regarding her tenderly and ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... by the magic illusion with which the rare genius has painted them as ornaments. They look as if relieved on the armour of the two cavaliers, insomuch that one would believe them to be truly the work of an actual chisel." He admires the smooth empasto; and among the painters who practised it, laudably mentions Vander Werff. But he blames others less known for carrying it out to an extreme finish. To our taste, the smooth empasto of Vander Werff is most displeasing; ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various
... cause: There was an Irish lady, to whose bust I ne'er saw justice done, and yet she was A frequent model; and if e'er she must Yield to stern Time and Nature's wrinkling laws, They will destroy a face which mortal thought Ne'er compass'd, nor less mortal chisel wrought. ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... the Vatican and beheld the forms of beauty, which the old sculptors had fashioned from blocks of marble, centuries ago. His breast swelled, he felt something so lofty, so holy, so elevated within him, yes, something so great and good, that he longed to create and chisel like forms from marble blocks. He desired to give expression to the feelings which agitated his heart; but how and in what shape? The soft clay allowed itself to be modeled into beautiful figures by his fingers, but on the following day, dissatisfied, ...
— The Ice-Maiden: and Other Tales. • Hans Christian Andersen
... are idols dumb, Which men have wrought from wood or clay, Carven with chisel, shaped with thumb, A morning's task, an evening's play. You bid me turn my face on high Where the blue heaven the sun enthrones, And serve a viewless deity, Nor make my bow to stocks ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... ship the Levers expeditiously on the proper square, both are to be marked with a cold chisel. ...
— Ordnance Instructions for the United States Navy. - 1866. Fourth edition. • Bureau of Ordnance, USN
... Pandu, after "the great war," Mahabharata, and that after their death every true believer was bidden to continue the work according to his own notions. Thus the temple was gradually built during three centuries. Every one who wished to redeem his sins would bring his chisel and set to work. Many were the members of royal families, and even kings, who personally took part in ...
— From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan • Helena Pretrovna Blavatsky |
