"Foreground" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... fleecy masses, giving to the dark vapours below a deeper blackness. Above all this, the sky was intensely blue, and the stars shone down with a sharp, diamond-like lustre. Beneath the bank of clouds, yet far enough in the foreground of this picture to partly emerge from obscurity, stood, on an eminence, a white marble building, with columns of porticos, like a Grecian temple. Projected against the dark background were its classic outlines, ...
— The Good Time Coming • T. S. Arthur
... mumbled Abbott, whose forehead was puckered with impatience. "Oh, those two? They are well set up. But what the deuce is the matter with this foreground?" taking the brushes from his teeth. "I've been hammering away at it for a week, and it does not ...
— The Place of Honeymoons • Harold MacGrath
... Bonington, whose technique is inspired by the same observations as their own. They find, finally, in Delacroix the frequent and very apparent application of their ideas. Notably in the famous Entry of the Crusaders into Constantinople, the fair woman kneeling in the foreground is painted in accordance with the principles of the division of tones: the nude back is furrowed with blue, green and yellow touches, the juxtaposition of which produces, at a certain distance, an ...
— The French Impressionists (1860-1900) • Camille Mauclair
... so? I often fancy one's general outlook would be nicer, if one had an indistinct human background and a clear foreground of unspoiled Nature. But that may ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... in the heart of a stately spacious garden that had almost made up its mind to be a park. The shallow stone basin of an old fountain, on whose wide ledge a leaden-moulded otter for ever preyed on a leaden salmon, filled a conspicuous place in the immediate foreground. Around its rim ran an inscription in Latin, warning mortal man that time flows as swiftly as water and exhorting him to make the most of his hours; after which piece of Jacobean moralising it set itself shamelessly ...
— The Unbearable Bassington • Saki
... a hat and feather, who was engaged in picking up wild-flowers from the warm heath. There was a gentleman from the office of the Board of Trade, who was sitting on the grass, nursing his knees and whistling. From time to time the chief figure in the foreground was an elderly gentleman, who evidently expected that he was going to be put into the picture, and who was occasionally dropping a cautious hint that he did not always wear this rough-and-ready sailor's costume. Mackenzie was also most anxious to point out to the artist the names of the hills ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Volume 11, No. 26, May, 1873 • Various
... although for entirely different purposes. For this one reason it was almost a matter of course that the Social Democrats offered their services for the war at the moment when they recognized that it had become of imperious necessity to set aside personal wishes and ideals and to put in the foreground only the duty of the defense of their country. The idea of our opponents, that they would find a support in the Socialists of our country, rested on a complete misunderstanding of ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... her fingers as she had knelt by his side, the glow which had crept into his heart as he had read to her fragments of his story and listened to her words of praise. The wall which he had built stood firm and fast. He lived in his new days. Life was all foreground, and hour by hour the splendid ...
— The Double Life Of Mr. Alfred Burton • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... In the foreground of Jean's was a pretty clump of fir-trees growing beside an old ruined stone wall, under which nestled a bunch of dry goldenrod. But the background! Did ever the maddest artist's brain conceive of such? Clear and distinct, where sky should ...
— Caps and Capers - A Story of Boarding-School Life • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... favored by God, and as above any other organization. Hence, we find many of the leaders far from humble in their bearings, whatever their profession may be, and entirely uninclined to cooperate with other organizations. This fact has been brought to the foreground of late years in England and America by a certain amount of antagonism between the Army and the Charity Organization Society, the Army claiming that it can do its work along its own lines and get along ...
— The Social Work of the Salvation Army • Edwin Gifford Lamb
... rather; as he sat and peacefully and joyously smoked, he studied every feature of them—each rock and swamp and barren slope, every hill and corrie and misty mountain-top; and he knew that while life remained to him he would never forget this memorable scene—with the slain stag in the foreground. No, nor how could he ever forget that wan glare of sunlight that had come along the plateau where the deer were quietly feeding?—he seemed to see again each individual blade of grass close to his face, as well as the noble quarry that had held him breathless. And then he took out ...
— Prince Fortunatus • William Black
... the observer. Goethe, on the other hand, ascribed to the human spirit the power of seeing the phenomenal world in all its three-dimensional multiplicity; that is, of seeing it in perspective and distinguishing between foreground and background.4 Things in the foreground he called ur-phenomena. Here the idea creatively determining the relevant field of facts comes to its purest expression. The sole task of the investigator of nature, he considered, ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs
... is NOT so and so, but is only allowed to pass as such), a delight in uncertainty and ambiguity, an exulting enjoyment of arbitrary, out-of-the-way narrowness and mystery, of the too-near, of the foreground, of the magnified, the diminished, the misshapen, the beautified—an enjoyment of the arbitrariness of all these manifestations of power. Finally, in this connection, there is the not unscrupulous readiness ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... on the gravel walks between flower-beds. Beyond, and thrown deeper into the perspective by the outer frame of the great archway, road and fields and forest fringes were revealed, lying tremulously in the hot sunshine. The foreground gained a human (though not lively) interest from the ample figure of our maitre d'hotel reposing in a rustic chair which had enjoyed the shade of an arbour about an hour earlier, when first occupied, ...
— The Guest of Quesnay • Booth Tarkington
... studded with islands varying in size from one to twenty acres. I would describe a point of view which enchanted me. I was on one side of the lake, where it is about half a mile in width: about half-way across, for the foreground of my picture, is a small island, about two acres, covered with trees, looking as if they grew out of the lake, with a central one of at least eighty feet high, and of the purest orange colour. The opposite shore is of a crescent shape, ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal, No. 421, New Series, Jan. 24, 1852 • Various
... family. Amongst this passing crowd, how few are there who reflect upon the design and end of their voyage; surfeited with pleasure, involved in life's busy concerns, the future, with its awful realities, is forgotten and time, not eternity, is placed in the foreground. ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... majesty and strength, in Trade, Commerce, and Enterprise. The man of 1801 can scarcely believe his eyes in 1862. The distant view is still there, from the top of Everton church tower, but how wonderfully is all the foreground changed. ...
— Recollections of Old Liverpool • A Nonagenarian
... "76 Fed." after the departure of Mr. Sorg he found his partner smoking the usual stogy and gazing pensively down upon the harbor. The immediate foreground was composed of rectangular roofs of divers colors, mostly reddish, ornamented with eccentrically shaped chimney pots, pent-houses, skylights and water tanks, in addition to various curious whistle-like protuberances from which white wraiths of steam whirled and ...
— Tutt and Mr. Tutt • Arthur Train
... Reverend, whose taste for giblets had proved rather expensive; and who was most desirous of appearing in print: a favor merry Stephen Godson, the lawyer, requested might also be extended to him." "Ay," said John Portman, "and if you want a character for your foreground rich in colour, my phiz is much at your service; and here's George Brookes, the radical, to form a good dark object in the distance." In this way the evening passed off very pleasantly. Our friend had made the object of our visit to the Bowling Alley known to some few of his intimates, circumstance ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... book,—type, margin, binding, and what we are now specially considering, illustration. How full of atmosphere are the landscapes, and how clear and perfectly kept their values! Look at the exquisite little wood scene on page 123, with the foreground in shadow, and a bar of sunshine lying across the middle distance. And here, in a totally different subject, a view of Stamboul, where the engraver has had to deal with land, water, and sky,—how ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 1, January 1886 - Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 1, January, 1886 • Various
... stood in the foreground, the boys imagined they heard a cry from within. Possibly it was a lure, and the Professor advised them not to be ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: The Tribesmen • Roger Finlay
... a towny foreground to it; and this it was, rather than the distant blue ranges, that held the gaze of Rose Pennycuick when she looked forth—the back-yard of the villa next to their own. It was a well-washed-and-swept enclosure, spacious ...
— Sisters • Ada Cambridge
... picture," he continued, dipping his brushes into a little case of paints he held on his thumb; "the mussel-bed a reddish violet, the sky red in the horizon, and the girl in the foreground, with that torrent of hair as the high light. I've been hunting for that hair all over Europe." And he began sketching ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... painter, of the eye being thus made to reveal the inner thought and a life beyond that passing at the moment. The first and most notable is in the "Charles the Second fleeing from the Battle of Worcester." The king and two nobles are in the immediate foreground, in flight, while far away the sun is going down in a red glare behind the smoke of battle, the lurid flames of the burning town, and the royal standard just fluttering down from the battlements ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... to put myself in any way in the foreground," Beric said. "I am still but a boy, and have no wish to raise my voice in the council of chiefs; but what I have learned of Roman history and Roman laws I would gladly explain to those who, like yourself, speak with the voice of authority, ...
— Beric the Briton - A Story of the Roman Invasion • G. A. Henty
... published, Mr. Walter Crane made an illustration for it showing R.L.S. under a tree in the foreground in his sleeping-bag, smoking, while Modestine contentedly crops grass by his side. Above him winds the path he is to take on his journey, encouraging Modestine with her burden to a livelier pace with his goad; receiving the blessing of the good monks at the Monastery ...
— The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson for Boys and Girls • Jacqueline M. Overton
... the selection of a few striking features, arranged with a light, unconscious grace, neither too much nor too little—equally remote from the barren generalizations of a former age, and the dull, servile fidelity with which so many inferior writers of our time fill in both background and foreground, having no more notion of the perspective of genius than Chinese paper-stainers have of that of the atmosphere, and producing in ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume I (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... interested in them than are Mr. Yeats and Lady Gregory, and therefore less acquainted with them. If one may judge from his writings the intimates of Mr. Martyn have been among his own landlord class, the priests, and the politicians. It is the landlords and middle-class people that occupy the foreground of his plays, Peg Inerny in "Maeve" (1899) being the only important character a peasant, unless Mrs. Font in "The Enchanted Sea" (1902) can be called a member of a class that she was born to, but from which ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... a hall and staircase in the middle, was extraordinarily unconvincing. The partition walls came to an end at quite a long distance from the front; and, with the general company spreading themselves at large over the whole width of the foreground, it was very difficult to entertain any illusion of that privacy which is of the essence of the cabinet particulier. I say nothing of the bedroom, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, September 29th, 1920 • Various
... himself to me "Wants interest, however, in the foreground. That's a picturesque tree yonder, is ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards
... Mr. Mangan went on, pushing his way once more into the foreground, "the butler whom I engaged in ...
— The Great Impersonation • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... An Empire commode in each space between the windows. In the centre of the two lateral walls, folding doors, the one at the left leading into another room, the one at the right into the vestibule. On the left, in the foreground, a sofa which is well preserved and gives evidence of former elegance, and similar chairs with stiff backs and light variegated covers, grouped around a large oval table. Opposite this in the foreground at the right, an old-fashioned fireplace, before which three ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various
... in the town of Schmalcald. Bodies of Crusading troops defiling past. Lewis and Elizabeth with their suite in the foreground. ...
— The Saint's Tragedy • Charles Kingsley
... day in the Shadengo Valley. A mist had settled down upon the old inn; lost to view was the landscape with its varied foliage. Only the immediate foreground was visible to a teamster who came down the road—the trees with dripping branches, and the inn from the eaves of which water fell to the ground with depressing monotony; the well with its pail for watering the horses and the log trough in whose limpid waters a number ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... long afternoons, of which the length was but the measure of her gratified eagerness, they took a boat on the river, the dear little river, as Isabel called it, where the opposite shore seemed still a part of the foreground of the landscape; or drove over the country in a phaeton—a low, capacious, thick-wheeled phaeton formerly much used by Mr. Touchett, but which he had now ceased to enjoy. Isabel enjoyed it largely and, handling the reins in ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 1 (of 2) • Henry James
... flapped back, with a croak, and dropped on the horse's skull again. Hearing that bodeful sound the doctor paused a moment, knocking the ashes out of his pipe, and looking round at the bird at its ugly work, set as foreground to that pure glory of the sunrise, and the vast noble landscape, misty valley, dewy grassland, far ranging ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... a right criticism is to place Winckelmann in an intellectual perspective, of which Goethe is the foreground. For, after all, he is infinitely less than Goethe; it is chiefly because at certain points he comes in contact with Goethe, that criticism entertains consideration of him. His relation to modern culture is a peculiar one. He is not of the modern ...
— The Renaissance - Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Pater
... do not imagine that I have any desire to underrate the merits of the scientific botanist. No, nothing of the sort. I am only desirous of bringing into the foreground a class of men whose services in my opinion the world has not yet sufficiently acknowledged—I mean ...
— The Plant Hunters - Adventures Among the Himalaya Mountains • Mayne Reid
... the shoreline, two thirds of the way around the key. At the eastern end was a strip of snowy beach backed by an irregular line of coconut palms, and with a very respectable dock in the foreground. From the pier a wooden path led upward through the scattering double row of palms to a corrugated iron hut, with smaller huts and outbuildings half seen through ...
— Black Caesar's Clan • Albert Payson Terhune
... through the howling, rum-crazed horde. At every lashing blow of his fist, every kick of his high-laced boot, men went down. Others reeled drunkenly from his path screaming aloud in their fright; while across the open space in the foreground four or five men could be seen dashing frantically for the protection of the timber. MacNair ripped the gun from the hand of a reeling Indian and, throwing it to his shoulder, fired. Of those who ran, one dropped, rose to his knees, and sank backward. ...
— The Gun-Brand • James B. Hendryx
... He will argue naturally enough and reasonably enough that he may as well die fighting as starve. This is a far more vital issue to him than the Belgian issue or Poland or Alsace-Lorraine. Our statesmen waste their breath and slight our intelligence when these foreground questions are thrust in front of the really fundamental matters. But as the mass of sensible people in every country concerned, in Germany just as much as in France or Great Britain, know perfectly well, unimpeded trade is good for every one except a few rich adventurers, ...
— In The Fourth Year - Anticipations of a World Peace (1918) • H.G. Wells
... one sweep of vision, Lucile took in Frona smiling with extended hand in the foreground, the dainty dressing-table, the simple finery, the thousand girlish evidences; and with the sweet wholesomeness of it pervading her nostrils, her own girlhood rose up and smote her. Then she turned a bleak eye and cold ear on ...
— A Daughter of the Snows • Jack London
... left to grapple with illiteracy, superstition and the needs of a benighted and down-trodden people, knotty questions in theology no longer vexed him, for he recognized that there was but one all-sufficient solvent for the dark problems which thrust themselves into the foreground, and that was the redemptive power of the Gospel of Christ. Men may be puzzled and perplexed concerning the theory of sunshine, but there are no questionings on the subject that can override the practical effect ...
— The American Missionary, Volume 42, No. 12, December, 1888 • Various
... is here signified in the two stars rising in the foreground; not only the soul-affinities of humanity, but the eternal father-mother forces manifested in the biune spirit of universal life and nature, the two great creative powers, Life and Light, whose harmony creates love, attraction and repulsion, and the straight lines of law and justice, which blend ...
— The Light of Egypt, Volume II • Henry O. Wagner/Belle M. Wagner/Thomas H. Burgoyne
... conquest, unparalleled in stellar annals. Phobar the astronomer discovered it. He was sweeping the heavens with one of the newly invented multi-powered Sussendorf comet-hunters when something caught his eye—a new star of great brilliance in the foreground of ...
— Raiders of the Universes • Donald Wandrei
... gray March heaven, with the combs of the roofs and the chimney-pots mezzotinted against it. He might have more profitably wasted his time even on the smoke-blackened yellow-brick house-walls, with their juts and angles, and their clambering pipes of unknown employ, in the middle distance; or, in the foreground, the skylights of cluttered outbuildings, and the copings of the walls of grimy backyards, where the sooty trees were making a fight with the spring, and putting forth a rash of buds like green points of electric light: the same sort of light that showed in the eyes of a black cat seasonably appearing ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... blue and green crayons for back and foreground. Vary by using the two opposites of any color chosen for the dish and omitting the two neighboring colors. See ...
— A Color Notation - A measured color system, based on the three qualities Hue, - Value and Chroma • Albert H. Munsell
... portion of the diggings; a workman is bringing up a barrow-load of soil from one of the deep store chambers which the Children of Israel built more than three thousand years ago. In the foreground lie the fragments of a fallen granite statue, the head and face of which are intact. The other illustration is taken from the temple end of the excavations. The sculptured group of Rameses the Great seated between divinities is one of a pair that adorned the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 401, September 8, 1883 • Various
... from that window. The artist shrank from the task. The far background was well enough, trees on the side of a hill; but the objects in the middle distance were a railway line and a ditch full of muddy water. In the foreground there were two incinerators, a dump of old tins, and a Salvation Army hut. I dare say the artist was right in shrinking from ...
— A Padre in France • George A. Birmingham
... picture. Not mine. I wrapped it up so he wouldn't know, but I came to see that darling child all the same, for I've got a surprise for her. But first I want you to see this picture. Here, wait until I untie this string. It's one of Sam's Hudson Rivery things. Palisades and a steamboat in the foreground, and an afternoon sky. Easy dodge, don't you see? Yellow sky and purple hill, and short streak for the steamboat and its wake, and a smear of white steam straggling behind. Sam does 'em as well as anybody. ...
— Felix O'Day • F. Hopkinson Smith
... the "Biographie Universelle," in fifty-two closely printed volumes, the most valuable body of biography that any modern literature can boast. Since 1830, historians and literary critics have occupied the foreground in French literature. The historians have divided themselves into two schools, the descriptive and the philosophical. With the one class history consists of a narration of facts in connection with a picture of manners, ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... to which the Renaissance was a return. But in an early engraving of Mocetto there is for once a Dionysus treated differently. The cold light of the background displays a barren hill, the bridge and towers of [42] an Italian town, and quiet water. In the foreground, at the root of a vine, Dionysus is sitting, in a posture of statuesque weariness; the leaves of the vine are grandly drawn, and wreathing heavily round the head of the god, suggest the notion of his incorporation ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... the little track of light cut into the darkness by the lantern, I followed the speaker, who turned into the first door on the right, and I found myself in an entry about four feet by six, with steep, rough, rickety stairs leading upward in the foreground, and their counterparts at the rear giving access to as successful a manufactory of disease and death as any city on earth can show. Coming to the first of these stairs, I was peremptorily halted by the foul stenches ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... foreground, strolling unconcernedly over the turf and pausing now and again to snuff the air or follow up an odd clue of scent that led him a foot or so before it died away ...
— Berry And Co. • Dornford Yates
... guide—an ancient and somewhat pompous individual—to a large and very pleasantly situated room in the north wing of the castle, from whence, through an opening between the trees, a glimpse of the sea was to be obtained; the foreground being occupied by a kitchen-garden. This room, it seemed, was to be our sleeping apartment. It was somewhat meagrely furnished, according to our English ideas, and there was only one bed in it—our guide informing us, ...
— The Rover's Secret - A Tale of the Pirate Cays and Lagoons of Cuba • Harry Collingwood
... say something of the kind, Jack; but you see, you, speaking of yourself, almost necessarily leave out much that I should have put in. For instance: I should have put in the foreground your being so much respected as Lay Precentor, or Lay Clerk, or whatever you call it, of this Cathedral; your enjoying the reputation of having done such wonders with the choir; your choosing your society, and holding such an independent position in this queer old place; ...
— The Mystery of Edwin Drood • Charles Dickens
... upper Balagne remain ignorant of one of its finest divisions,' adding, 'no description can exaggerate the beauty of this remarkable tract of mountain background and deep valley, which for richness of foreground, cheerful fertility and elegance of distance may compete with most Italian landscapes.' The district is densely peopled—at least twelve large villages are situated on the road itself between Belgodere and Lumio, a distance of 21 miles—and picturesque hamlets with lofty ...
— Itinerary through Corsica - by its Rail, Carriage & Forest Roads • Charles Bertram Black
... be had for miles in every direction. Toward the south stretched the rugged, ice-clad waste to the edge of the mighty barrier. Toward the east and west, and dimly toward the north I descried other Okarian cities, while in the immediate foreground, just beyond the walls of Kadabra, the grim guardian ...
— Warlord of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... emotional angle, upon a canvass of Gainsborough, who painted ladies like landscapes, as great and as unconscious with repose, and you will note how subtly the artist gives to a dress flowing in the foreground something of the divine quality of distance. Then you will understand another faded phrase and words spoken far away upon the sea; there will rise up quite fresh before you and be borne upon a bar of music, like words you have never heard before: ...
— A Short History of England • G. K. Chesterton
... to which he was riding was a wretched enough place. Nor could Nature, here in her most luxuriant mood, relieve it from its sordid aspect. A few of the huts were sheltered at the fringe of the dark woods, but most were set out upon the foreground of grass, which fronted ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum
... large particulars, then, were these: the foreground, the middle distance and the background made a synthetic whole, logically consistent, rational even—when you allow for the artist's make-up. That he will leave a full statement before the end, I venture to prophecy. His egregious vanity demands ...
— The Red Redmaynes • Eden Phillpotts
... sense of painful uneasiness grew momentarily. At first she imagined it was fear of what she must encounter upon her return home; then she felt sure it was her dread of meeting the people for whom she had risked so much. Finally Jerry-Jo loomed in the foreground of her thought and an entirely new terror ...
— The Place Beyond the Winds • Harriet T. Comstock
... by an eastern window, and the rare Pettybaw sunshine filters through the branches of a tree, shines upon the dusty window-panes, and throws a halo round David's head that he well deserves and little suspects. In my foreground sit Meg and Jean and Elspeth playing with thrums and wearing the fruit of David's loom in their gingham frocks. David himself sits on his wooden bench behind the maze of cords that form ...
— Penelope's Progress - Being Such Extracts from the Commonplace Book of Penelope Hamilton As Relate to Her Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... your painting,' said I, approaching to observe it more closely, and surveying it with a greater degree of admiration and delight than I cared to express. 'A few more touches in the foreground will finish it, I should think. But why have you called it Fernley Manor, Cumberland, instead of Wildfell Hall, —shire?' I asked, alluding to the name she had traced in small characters at ...
— The Tenant of Wildfell Hall • Anne Bronte
... Matanzas to Oratava the road is wretched but the scenery compensates for this. Upon arriving at the brow of the hill above Oratava, a beautiful prospect bursts upon the sight; directly in front rises the lordly Peak, whilst in the foreground are vineyards, cottages, and palm-trees; in the centre stands La Villa, the upper town of Oratava, encircled with gardens; on the right lies a rich slope running down to the sea which bounds the prospect on that side; and on the left rise rocky mountains, for the greater ...
— Journals Of Two Expeditions Of Discovery In North-West And Western Australia, Vol. 1 (of 2) • George Grey
... together. The attempt to reconcile them in this instance fails not only of effect, but of decorum. The IDEAL can have no place upon the stage, which is a picture without perspective; everything there is in the foreground. That which was merely an airy shape, a dream, a passing thought, immediately becomes an unmanageable reality. Where all is left to the imagination (as is the case in reading) every circumstance, near or remote, has an equal chance of being kept in mind, and ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt
... attracted by the three altars in the foreground, with the three coloured statues behind them, of Buddha, seated, as emblematic of Past, Present, and Future. On the occasion of Madame Pfeiffer's visit a service was being performed,—a funeral ceremony in honour of a mandarin's deceased wife, and at his ...
— The Story of Ida Pfeiffer - and Her Travels in Many Lands • Anonymous
... far distance, scarcely visible, appears to be a very high mountain, a long, long way off. To the south-west the same description of range. About thirty miles to the west is a high mount with open country, and patches of woodland in the foreground. At the north-west there appears to be an immense open plain with patches of wood. To the north is another plain becoming more wooded to the north-east. As this is the highest mountain that I have seen in Central ...
— Explorations in Australia, The Journals of John McDouall Stuart • John McDouall Stuart
... by the lake shore. It was a wild scene that lay before me—the aurora, with its waves of changing color flashing weirdly as they swept and lighted the sky, the dead trees everywhere like skeletons gray and gaunt, the blazing camp fire in the foreground, with the figures lying about it and the little white tent in the background. Somewhere hidden in the depths of that vast and silent wilderness to the westward ...
— The Long Labrador Trail • Dillon Wallace
... there to wait for the return of him and Jarvo; he took it for granted that Jarvo had grasped that Olivia must be taken back to her aunt and her friends at the palace; and afterward he knew only, for an indeterminate space, that the car was moving across some dim, heavenly foreground to some dim, ultimate destination in which he found himself believing ...
— Romance Island • Zona Gale
... or the one Law, manifesting itself in such various phenomena. Add to this her profound faith in truth, which made her a Realist of that order that thoughts to her were things. The world of her thoughts rose around her mind as a panorama,—the sun-in the sky, the flowers distinct in the foreground, the pale mountain sharply, though faintly, cutting the sky with its outline in the distance,—and all in pure light and ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... was one of the most beautiful and widest far or near, and we were treated like most new-comers. During the ascent our eyes were bandaged, and when the handkerchief was removed a marvellous picture appeared before our astonished gaze. In the foreground, toward the left, rose the wooded height crowned by the stately ruins of the Blankenburg. Beyond opened the beautiful leafy bed of the Saale, proudly dominated by the Leuchtenburg. Before us there was scarcely any barrier to the vision; for behind the nearer ranges of hills ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... Jacob has a beard and a blue cloak; his staff lies on the ground. The angel wears a red flowing robe, and his wings are many-coloured, and enriched with various threads and spirals of gold. The landscape is elaborate. In the foreground is a river with a bridge of planks, a gabled cottage, hospitably smoking from its chimneys, a red lily, and a tree. In the middle distance is a castle with tower and flag, and on the horizon are a windmill, a castle with ...
— English Embroidered Bookbindings • Cyril James Humphries Davenport
... vindicate this policy of humanity and forbearance. Men forget what is back of this struggle in Mexico. It is the age-long struggle of a people to come into their own, and while we look upon the incidents in the foreground, let us not forget the tragic reality in the background which towers above this whole sad picture. The gentlemen who criticize me speak as if America were afraid to fight Mexico. Poor Mexico, with its pitiful men, women, and children, fighting to gain a foothold in their own land! They speak of ...
— Woodrow Wilson as I Know Him • Joseph P. Tumulty
... this limelight stuff is playing right into your mitt. I didn't spill who I was to them news hounds, and I don't have to. I let you take all the foreground. I was the mechanic—see? So it's you that will have to put this over; and put ...
— The Thunder Bird • B. M. Bower
... arrested, he told the Marshal he regretted it, and that his sympathies were wholly with the slave. [Loud applause.] Fellow-citizens, remember that word. Hold your Mayor to it, and let it be seen that he has got a background and a foreground, which will authorize him to repeat that word in public, and act it out in Faneuil Hall. I say, so confident are the slave agents now, that they can carry off their slave in the daytime, that they do not put chains round the Court House; they have got no soldiers billeted in ...
— The Trial of Theodore Parker • Theodore Parker
... architecture into one splendid combination. "Thus the statue of Moses was meant to have been raised considerably above the eye of the spectator," writes Mr. Hillard, "and to have been a single object in a colossal structure of architecture and sculpture, which would have had a foreground and a background, and been crowned with a mass at once dome-like and pyramidal. Torn, as it is, from its proper place; divorced from its proportionate companionship; stuck against the wall of a church; and brought face to face with the observer,—what wonder that so many of those who ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting
... out of gear," as Ardan said, like those of a man blind from his birth and suddenly restored to sight. They could not adjust them so as to be able to realize the different plains of vision. All things seemed in a heap. Foreground and background were indistinguishably commingled. No painter could ever transfer a lunar ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne
... placed by Epicurus in the foreground of his ethical philosophy, as the only means of dispelling those fears of the gods that the current fables instilled into every one, and that did so much to destroy human comfort and security. He proclaimed ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain
... adorned with a long plume reaching nearly to the ground. The wall behind her is grey with a black wainscot. On the left, far back in the picture, on a low stool, some grey-green drapery strikes the highest note of colour in the picture. On the right, in the foreground, some tall daisies come into the picture, and two butterflies flutter over the girl's blonde head. This picture seems to exist principally in the seeing! I mean that the execution is so strangely simple that the thought, "If I could ...
— Modern Painting • George Moore
... bulk of the burden fell upon the Commons, they adopted a formula which placed the Commons in the foreground. The grant was made by the Commons, with the assent of the Lords spiritual and temporal. This formula appeared in 1395, and became the rule. In 1407, eight years after Henry IV. came to the throne, he assented ...
— The Rise of the Democracy • Joseph Clayton
... the hills and the trees in the distance, and in the foreground, the meadow land being dotted with clumps of wood, with the Indian tents clustered here and there to ...
— The Treaties of Canada with The Indians of Manitoba - and the North-West Territories • Alexander Morris
... quite overwhelmed by her magnificence. Before that I had known McGraw only by an ancient wood-cut of Mr. Pound's, which showed a long building, supremely bare, set among military trees; with a barouche in the foreground in which was a woman holding a parasol; with wooden-looking gentlemen in beaver hats pointing canes at the windows as though they were studying the beauties of imagined tracery. The military trees had grown, and through the gaps in the foliage ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... back of it, imperfectly shown, is the case surrounding the balance for weighing oxygen cylinders. On the wall, in the rear, is the recording apparatus for electric resistance thermometers in the water-circuit, a detail of which is shown in fig. 23. In the foreground in the center is seen the observer's table; at the right of this is shown the table for the absorption system, and at the left the chair calorimeter with the balance for weighing subjects above it. The mercury-vapor light, which is used to illuminate ...
— Respiration Calorimeters for Studying the Respiratory Exchange and Energy Transformations of Man • Francis Gano Benedict
... contemporaries who figure with great lustre and eclat in the world. Some of the quiet characters away from the centre of great affairs are as well worth our attention as those who in high-heeled cothurnus stalk across the foreground. ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 7: A Sketch • John Morley
... forgotten the two older children at that moment, though now and again the General's questioning glance traveled to that second mute picture; a larger growth, a gracious realization, as it were, of the hopes embodied in the baby forms rioting in the foreground. Their faces made up a kind of living poem, illustrating life's various phases. The luxurious background of the salon, the different attitudes, the strong contrasts of coloring in the faces, differing with the character of differing ages, ...
— A Woman of Thirty • Honore de Balzac
... conditions of his life, or matters concerning only him. If anybody announces that he has had a good time, he means without exception, absolutely without exception, that he has had an opportunity to push his "I'' very forcefully into the foreground. ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... the spirit and weakness of the flesh seldom overtaking them till an hour or so later. It chanced to be a beautiful day, for Helen and I were both happy and well, our volunteer helpers were daily growing more zealous and efficient, and there was no tragedy in the immediate foreground. ...
— The Story of Patsy • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... chocolate brown against the gray and green of the prairie, the wheat loam rolled away, back to the ridge, over it, and on again. It was such a breadth of sowing as had but once, when wheat was dear, been seen at Silverdale, but still across the foreground, advancing in echelon, came lines of dusty teams, and there was a meaning in the furrows they left behind them, for they were not plowing where the wheat had been. Each wave of lustrous clods that rolled from the gleaming shares was so much rent from the virgin prairie, and ...
— Winston of the Prairie • Harold Bindloss
... lace-fringed parasol, looked to right and to left and surveyed the way-side objects. After a while she pronounced them "affreux." Her brother remarked that it was apparently a country in which the foreground was inferior to the plans recules: and the Baroness rejoined that the landscape seemed to be all foreground. Felix had fixed with his new friends the hour at which he should bring his sister; it was four o'clock in the afternoon. The large, clean-faced house wore, to his eyes, as ...
— The Europeans • Henry James
... light snow, and melting imperceptibly downward into the warm yellow of the larches and the crimson of the bilberry. Wiesen was radiantly beautiful: those aerial ranges of the hills that separate Albula from Julier soared crystal-clear above their forests; and for a foreground, on the green fields starred with lilac crocuses, careered a group of children on their sledges. Then came the row of giant peaks—Pitz d'Aela, Tinzenhorn, and Michelhorn, above the deep ravine of Albula—all seen across wide undulating golden swards, close-shaven and awaiting ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... allurements as theatre-going and the ballet girl after whom he had for some time past been dangling. Gradually did the country estate and the simple life begin to recede into the distance: gradually did the town house and the life of gaiety begin to loom larger and larger in the foreground. Oh, life, life! ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... High Sheriff, is well entitled to the attention which the artist, in his explanation, suggests; but the spectator must not dwell too long on this sorrowful wreck of fallen nature. The group in the foreground of the right hand corner, is an episode which must not be omitted, for it corresponds with the fine portrait in the same situation in the "Election" picture. The reckless dissipation of the fine, young ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 336 Saturday, October 18, 1828 • Various
... meant to be prominent. All is equally elaborate. The chief wears the same gorgeous and degrading livery with his retinue, and obtains only his share of the indifferent stare which we bestow upon them in common. The poems have no strong lights and shades, no background, no foreground;—they are like the illuminated figures in an oriental manuscript,—plenty of rich tints and no perspective. Such are the faults of the most celebrated of these compositions. Of those which are universally acknowledged to be bad it is scarcely possible to ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Contibutions to Knight's Quarterly Magazine] • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... duties. For the fifteen years which succeeded his call to the bar he was in fact following two professions; he was at once a barrister and a very active journalist. This causes some difficulty to his biographer. My account of his literary career will have to occupy the foreground, partly because the literary story bears most directly and clearly the impress of his character, and partly because, as will be seen, it was more continuous. I must, however, warn my readers against a possible illusion of perspective. To Fitzjames ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... pencil sketches and good line engravings. We approached it this day from the shore in the direction in which the eminence it stands upon assumes the pyramidal form, and itself the tower-like outline. The acclivity is barren and stony,—a true desert foreground, like those of Thebes and Palmyra; and the huge square shadow of the tower stretched dark and cold athwart it. The sun shone out clearly. One half the immense bulk before us, with its delicate vertical lining, lay from top ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... cakes; and a great pot, that dispensed through the cave the savoury odour of unlucky poultry out short in the middle of their days, and of hapless hares destroyed without the game licence, depended over the other. An ass, the common property of the tribe, stood meditating in the foreground; two urchins, of about from ten to twelve years a-piece—wretchedly supplied in the article of clothing—for the one, provided with only a pair of tattered trousers, was naked from the waist upwards, and the other, furnished with only a dilapidated jacket, was naked from the waist ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... holding forth, apparently with equal effect, to Mr. Oakhurst and Mother Shipton, who was actually relaxing into amiability. "Is this yer a d—d picnic?" said Uncle Billy, with inward scorn, as he surveyed the sylvan group, the glancing fire-light, and the tethered animals in the foreground. Suddenly an idea mingled with the alcoholic fumes that disturbed his brain. It was apparently of a jocular nature, for he felt impelled to slap his leg again and cram ...
— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)
... metre, of which both the list and the text are imperfect. In all we meet with the same careless grace and simplicity both of thought and diction, but all do not show the same artistic skill. The judgment that led Catullus to place his lyric poems in the foreground was right. They are the best known, the best finished, and the most popular of all his compositions; the four to Lesbia, the one to Sirmio, and that on Acme and Septimus, are perhaps the most perfect lyrics in the Latin language; and others are ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... eager to do. There was a reasonable satisfaction in the doing, even of the disagreeable, dirty tasks necessary, in beating the risks he sometimes had to run. There was a secret triumph in overcoming difficulties as they arose. And he had an object, which, if it did not always lie in the foreground of his mind, he was nevertheless ...
— Poor Man's Rock • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... that I had almost completed the repose of Europe" (a favourite expression of his). By way of contrast to these grandiloquent phrases, the eye is attracted to the surroundings. The ground is thickly coated with snow; in the foreground, two famished wretches cut and devour raw flesh from a dead horse. On all sides lie dead and dying men and animals, while in the distance we behold the flying and demoralized troops chased by a cloud of Cossacks. The English caricaturists follow the emperor into the sanctity of his private life; ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... a sign of unfriendliness. Their chief interest seems to be centred in two large black mounds that are visible in the foreground of the camp; what they are I am unable to make out — there is not light enough for that — but I am probably not far wrong in guessing that they are seals. They are rather hard eating, anyhow, for I can hear them crunching under the dogs' teeth. Here ...
— The South Pole, Volumes 1 and 2 • Roald Amundsen
... on these sheaves," he continued, "and look again. Let us reject not a single one of the little facts that build up the reality of which I have spoken. Let us permit them to depart of their own accord into space. They cumber the foreground, and yet we cannot but be aware of the existence behind them of a great and very curious force that sustains the whole. Does it only sustain and not raise? These men whom we see before us are at least no longer the ferocious animals ...
— The Life of the Bee • Maurice Maeterlinck
... been blasted through solid rock. And then we reached the summit of this ridge, and like a flash the superb panorama of the Hudson burst upon us. At our feet lay the broad bosom of the Tappan Zee, its waters glistening in the sunlight, the spires of a village in the foreground, and the distance blue-girt with cliffs, hills, ...
— John Henry Smith - A Humorous Romance of Outdoor Life • Frederick Upham Adams
... had been recently erected; and nearer, Rainbarrow, on Egdon Heath, where another stood: farther to the left Bulbarrow, where there was yet another. Not far from this came Nettlecombe Tout; to the west, Dogberry Hill, and Black'on near to the foreground, the beacon thereon being built of furze faggots thatched with straw, and standing on the spot where the monument ...
— The Trumpet-Major • Thomas Hardy
... arrived. He left the mess of his fellow prisoners, and cooked and ate by himself. In figure he was the finest specimen of our race in the party, and as he lay by his solitary fire, he formed a striking foreground to the desert landscape. In his novitiate he was most willing to do anything his fellows required, and I felt often disposed to interfere when I overheard such words as "Doctor! go for a kettle of water, while I light a fire," etc. Worthington, in particular, ...
— Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, Vol 1 (of 2) • Thomas Mitchell
... "In the foreground, an old park. The trunks of the great trees, on the north side, are green with moss. The dampness of ...
— A Mummer's Tale • Anatole France
... quality—I have found it, on more than one attempt, difficult to take much interest in Les Natchez, not merely for the reasons already given, but chiefly owing to them. Rene's appearances (and he is generally in background or foreground) serve better than anything in any other book, perhaps, to explain and justify the old notion that accidia[29] of his kind is not only a fault in the individual, but a positive ill omen and nuisance[30] to others. ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... said I, "joking apart, they are very picturesque, ain't they, how well they look in a sketch, eh! nice feature in the foreground." ...
— Nature and Human Nature • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... etcher, pupil of Frans Hals, in his "Dutch Coffee House" (1650), shows the genesis of the coffee house of western Europe about the time it still partook of some of the tavern characteristics. Coffee is being served to a group in the foreground. It is believed to be the oldest existing picture of a coffee house. The illustration is after the etching by J. Beauvarlet in the ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... quiet roar, but no crackle. Banks of smoke went off horizontally at the back like passing clouds, and behind these burned hidden pyres, illuminating the semi-transparent sheet of smoke to a lustrous yellow uniformity. Individual straws in the foreground were consumed in a creeping movement of ruddy heat, as if they were knots of red worms, and above shone imaginary fiery faces, tongues hanging from lips, glaring eyes, and other impish forms, from which at intervals sparks flew in clusters ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... to the depot. A month had passed when one evening Torrance rode that way. The prairie, lying still and silent with a flush of saffron upon its western rim, was tinged with softest green, but broad across the foreground stretched the broken, chocolate-tinted clods of the ploughing, and the man's face grew grimmer as he glanced at them. He turned and watched the long lines of crawling cattle that stretched half-way across the vast sweep of green; and Larry and ...
— The Cattle-Baron's Daughter • Harold Bindloss
... rapid flight. Some there were to whom the painful reflection presented itself—"Shall I e'er behold those cherished shores again?" This, however, was but a transitory feeling, soon chased away by Hope, who delights to throw her sunny beams on the distance, while she leaves the foreground to the dark reality of life. All felt deeply, but there was none whose mental sufferings could be ...
— The King's Own • Captain Frederick Marryat
... more than the traditional abomination of desolation, for there was a touch of bloodthirsty and hungry life. Up away from the sea arose a stretch of dreary sand, and in the far distance were hills covered with snow and dotted with stunted pine, and bleak and forbidding, though not tenantless. In the foreground, close to the turbid waters which washed this frozen almost solitude, a great, gaunt wolf sat with his head uplifted to the lowering skies, and so well had the artist caught the creature's attitude, that looking upon it one could almost seem to hear the mournful ...
— The Wolf's Long Howl • Stanley Waterloo
... return to the Christian sources in the light of modern thought. Its starting point is a re-emphasis of the Christian belief in the divine immanence in the universe and in mankind. This doctrine is certainly not new, but it requires to be placed effectively in the foreground of Christian preaching. In the immediate past the doctrine of the divine transcendence—that is, the obvious truth that the infinite being of God must transcend the infinite universe—has been presented ...
— The New Theology • R. J. Campbell
... brain. Ten shillings and Jaffery's peremptory order to stick to his side and obey him slavishly took the place of intellectual workings. It was nearly midnight. We walked through the docks, a background of darkness, a foreground of confusing lights amid which shone vivid illuminated placards before the brightly lit steamers—"St. Malo"—"Cherbourg"—"Jersey"—"Havre." At the quiet gangway of the Havre boat we waited. The porter deposited our bags on the quay and stood patiently expectant ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... to faint," he announced, and did. When he returned to his love-story Johnnie's head was in Kitty's lap and a mounted policeman was in the foreground of the scene. His face was wet from the ...
— The Big-Town Round-Up • William MacLeod Raine
... the side of its connection with the surrounding organic world, and consequently what this nucleus is in itself as an experience recedes into the background, and descriptions and explanations in scientific or philosophical form step into the foreground. But a contradiction is imbedded in this very account. Some kind of experience of life, apart from, and higher in its nature than, the connection of the spiritual nucleus with its [p.41] physical history, persists in the life. The man of science ...
— An Interpretation of Rudolf Eucken's Philosophy • W. Tudor Jones
... who enacted the leading part was a remarkably clean-cut little person, with a golden sweep of eyelashes—I wished that Juliet could have had a more comfortable time of it. Instead of a yawning sepulchre, with Romeo and Juliet dying in the middle foreground, and that luckless young Paris stretched out on the left, spitted like a spring-chicken with Montague's rapier, and Friar Laurence, with a dark lantern, groping about under the melancholy yews—in place of all this costly piled-up woe, I would have liked a pretty, mediaeval chapel ...
— A Midnight Fantasy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... pictures of the society of the time, the Diary is unsurpassed for vivid Colouring and truthful delineation. As such alone it would possess a strong claim upon our attention, but how largely is our interest increased, when we find that the figures which fill the most prominent positions in the foreground of these pictures, are those of the most noble, most gifted, and Most distinguished men of the day! To mention ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 1 • Madame D'Arblay
... in the hands of several threshers, the other was in a noose around Gil Steele's neck. Mrs. Steele was being bound and gagged by other men. The action of the group came to an abrupt standstill as the vigilantes dismounted and crowded into the foreground. ...
— Injun and Whitey to the Rescue • William S. Hart
... a perfect picture, and although in places the drawing is defaced and the colour dimmed, yet these may be restored with no great difficulty, and with almost absolute certainty. The king stands out boldly in the foreground, and his tall figure towers over all else. He so completely transcends his surroundings, that at first sight one may well ask if he does not represent a god rather than a man; and, as a matter of fact, he is a god to his subjects. They call him "the good ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 2 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... Francais, en 1851-1852 (Paris, 1854). The engravings in that volume, although poorly printed on a cheap grade of book-paper, are noted for their accuracy, and are interesting as showing the methods etc. of the miners while Shirley was writing her Letters. The tail-race, in the foreground, is where James Wilson Marshall and Peter L. Wimmer first saw the nuggets, but Marshall was the first to pick up a specimen. Much has been written of Marshall; the Wimmers were of the ...
— The Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851-52 • Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe
... administration or finance. In short, the king and she had determined to take his declaration of the 23d of June[12] as the basis of the Constitution, with such modifications as subsequent circumstances might have suggested. Religion would be one of the matters placed in the foreground. ...
— The Life of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France • Charles Duke Yonge
... shines like a plate of silver or beautiful mirror. It is a gem worth crossing a continent to see, especially as there runs between the lake and the point of view a little valley dressed in bright, grassy green as a kind of foreground in the rear. There is thus a silvered lake, a lovely valley, with bright and warm green shades, and rich, dark-black forests in the rear. No one can gaze upon such a combination and contrast without being impressed, and without recognizing the sublime beauty and grandeur ...
— My Native Land • James Cox
... brown corduroys and his tan waistcoat, certainly suggested the partridge as he hopped nimbly about in the distant foreground, cocking his ears from time to time with all the aloofness of that wily bird. He was, strange to relate, some little distance from Bazelhurst territory, an actual if not a confident trespasser upon Shaw's domain. His horse, however, was tethered to a sapling on the safe side of the log, comfortably ...
— Master Tales of Mystery, Volume 3 • Collected and Arranged by Francis J. Reynolds
... possesses literary merit, he will probably not be far in the wrong. For perspective is essential in all presentation of thought, and there are usually as many things in the background, necessary and yet to be ignored, as there are in the foreground. ...
— How To Study and Teaching How To Study • F. M. McMurry
... place another plot to assassinate Peter, and once again Sophia's friends, the Imperial Guard, were in the foreground. Some of the soldiers, however, were faithful to the young Czar and warned him in time to fly for his life, and once again he and his mother took refuge in the monastery that had sheltered him when he ...
— A Treasury of Heroes and Heroines - A Record of High Endeavour and Strange Adventure from 500 B.C. to 1920 A.D. • Clayton Edwards
... against this stimulating background it was reassuringly plain that everything was agreeably settled at last, or very soon to be so settled. More and more, as April drew steadily nearer, Mr. Canning towered shiningly in the foreground of her thought. ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... trace in Irvine of this woodland poetry. He did not care for hunting, nor yet for buckskin suits. He had never observed scenery. The world, as it appeared to him, was almost obliterated by his own great grinning figure in the foreground: Caliban-Malvolio. And it seems to me as if, in the persons of these brothers-in-law, we had the two sides of rusticity fairly well represented: the hunter living really in nature; the clodhopper living merely out of society; the one bent up in every corporal agent to capacity in ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... evil that public men had acquired the habit of continually tampering with the existing legislative machinery instead of wisely using it for the benefit of the whole nation. The party system, as he always thought, had falsified the perspective of English politics, bringing into the foreground comparatively unimportant questions which were well suited to rally parties and win majorities; thrusting into the background others which were immeasurably more important, but which were less available for party purposes. What Carlyle called ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... lies spread like a map at his feet—grassy hill and sandy valley fading away into the distance. On the foreground the outpost men galloping their rough ponies into head-quarters, recalled by the flag flying above his head; the West-end house of refuge, with bread and matches, firewood and kettle, and directions to find ...
— Acadia - or, A Month with the Blue Noses • Frederic S. Cozzens
... houses on the left bank of the Seine, the "hotel" is built round a large courtyard, the Daudets' pretty appartement being situated on the side furthest from the street, and commanding a splendid view of Southern Paris, whilst in the immediate foreground is one of those peaceful, quiet gardens, owned by some of the old Paris religious foundations still left undisturbed by the march ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III., July 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... living stream, and the thousands and tens of thousands that cluster on this "earthly throne"—the magnificent architectural masses—the vivid light streaming in the distance; and the warlike turmoil of helmet heads, spears and floating banners that aid the shout of blood in the foreground: this must suffice. The First Interview between the Spaniards and Peruvians, after Briggs, by Greatbach, is a triumph of art; Wilkie's Dorty Bairn is excellent; the Fisherman's Children, after Collins, by C. Rolls, is exquisitely delicate; and the Gleaner, by Finden, after Holmes, has a ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 399, Supplementary Number • Various
... family letters to my father, it is Mrs. Wordsworth who comes into the foreground. The old age prophesied for her by her poet bridegroom in the early Grasmere days was about her for the nine years of her widowhood, "lovely as a Lapland night"; or rather like one of her own Rydal evenings when the sky is clear over the perfect little lake, and the reflections of ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... severely condemn. Our morality, as publicly professed, is in advance of our morals as privately exercised. When our neighbor steals or murders, we give him the jail or the chair; but when you and I are charged with such deeds and see the prison or the chair in our near foreground, we discover ourselves to be less convinced than we had imagined of the rectitude of our penal system. Of course, then, the faster we make laws to punish crime, and the more we punish criminals, the more criminals are ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... the hill, what I had never noticed before-a sign, not very legible from old age and dirt, "Free Reading-room." Having some literary predilections, I went in. A bar-room, with three or four loungers before the counter, occupied the foreground. In the rear were two round wooden tables. On one were half a dozen copies of notorious sensation sheets, one or two with infamous illustrations. A young lad of sixteen was gloating over the pages of one of them. The other table was ornamented with a backgammon board and a greasy ...
— Laicus - The experiences of a Layman in a Country Parish • Lyman Abbott
... from the right, and Satan, entering from the left, meet in the foreground. Satan is dressed in the dark ...
— Mr. Faust • Arthur Davison Ficke
... offspring. Miss Dearborn heard many admiring remarks passed upon her ability, and wondered whether they belonged to her or partly, at least, to Rebecca. The child had no more to do than several others, but she was somehow in the foreground. It transpired afterwards at various village entertainments that Rebecca couldn't be kept in the background; it positively refused to hold her. Her worst enemy could not have called her pushing. She was ready and willing and never shy; but she sought for ...
— Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... physical beauty were interrupted at intervals by inexplicable interludes of repentance, Bible-reading, psalm-singing, and visions. To delineate Cellini will be the business of a distant chapter. The form of the greatest of Italian preachers must occupy the foreground of the next. ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... Phipps and stained the skirts of Mrs. Milton, and dimmed the radiant emotions of the whole party. Dangle, with sticking-plaster and a black eye, felt the absurdity of the pose of the Wounded Knight, and abandoned it after the faintest efforts. Recriminations never, perhaps, held the foreground of the talk, but they played like summer lightning on the edge of the conversation. And deep in the hearts of all was a galling sense of the ridiculous. Jessie, they thought, was most to blame. Apparently, too, the worst, which would have ...
— The Wheels of Chance - A Bicycling Idyll • H. G. Wells
... whom I met in Germany put it in the foreground of the work to be done for re-establishing Germany in the comity of nations, that it should be proved that Germany was not responsible for the beginning of the war. It is still the theme of innumerable articles in the Press. The German ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... emptied into a huge cistern through the old conduit built by the ancient Romans to sink the level of the lake, I have watched by the hour together these strange pictorial groups, as they sang and thrashed the clothes they were engaged in washing; while over them, in the foreground, the great gray tower and granary, once a castle, lifted itself in strong light and shade against the peerless blue sky, while rolling hills beyond, covered with the pale green foliage of rounded olives, formed the characteristic background. Sometimes a contadino, mounted on the crupper ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various
... upon a green plate, or a day old evening paper. The view outside was flooded with light, and across the corner of it came the head of the acacia, and at the foot the top of the balcony-railing of hammered iron. In the foreground was the weltering silver of the river, never quiet and yet never tiresome. Beyond was the reedy bank, a broad stretch of meadow land, and then a dark line of trees ending in a group of poplars at the distant bend of the river, and, upstanding ...
— The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... think I would. And were that all, I certainly should. But then, there comes up the recollection of a picture of the city of Prague that hangs in a Bohemian friend's parlor, here in New York. I stood looking at it one day, and noticed in the foreground cannon that pointed in over the city. I spoke of it, unthinking, and said to my host that they should be trained, if against an enemy, the other way. The man's eye flashed fire. "Ha!" he cried, "here, yes!" When I think of that, I do not ...
— The Battle with the Slum • Jacob A. Riis |
