"Obelisk" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... hour and a half. Here the full face of the Pic du Midi d'Ossau is squarely commanded. The view is said to challenge that of the Matterhorn from the Riffel. The plateau itself is nearly five thousand feet above the sea, and across the ravine before it, this isolated granite obelisk, with its mitre of snow, lifts itself upward more than five thousand feet higher,—a precipitous cone, "notched like a pair of gaping jaws, ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix
... marble caryatids, was flagged in yellow marble, and frescoed freely with faded eighteenth-century scenes—cardinals walking in stiff gardens, a pope alighting from his coach, surrounded by peasants on their knees, and behind him fountains and obelisk and the towering facade of St. Peter's. At the moment, thanks to a last glow of light coming in through a west window at the farther end, it was a place beautiful though forlorn. But the rooms into which she looked on either side were wreck and desolation ...
— The Marriage of William Ashe • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... visibly from the white man's lips. "Sofala," Captain Whalley repeated; and suddenly his heart failed him. He paused. The shores, the islets, the high ground, the low points, were dark: the horizon had grown somber; and across the eastern sweep of the shore the white obelisk, marking the landing-place of the telegraph-cable, stood like a pale ghost on the beach before the dark spread of uneven roofs, intermingled with palms, of the native town. Captain Whalley ...
— End of the Tether • Joseph Conrad
... deterioration. Their linen is not clean, and is wretchedly got up; their black turns rusty, like old mourning; they wear very indifferent fur; and take to the shabbiest cotton velvet, instead of silk velvet. I am on terms of recognition with several small streets of cats, about the Obelisk in Saint George's Fields, and also in the vicinity of Clerkenwell Green, and also in the back settlements of Drury Lane. In appearance, they are very like the women among whom they live. They seem to turn out of their unwholesome beds into the street, without any preparation. They leave their ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... pretty towers. The bats came out, as if they knew how precious is their black at evening against the ethereal lemon color, the orange and the red. The little obelisk beyond the last sphinx on the left began to change, as in Egypt all things change at sunset—pylon and dusty bush, colossus and baked earth hovel, sycamore, and tamarisk, statue and trotting donkey. It looked like a mysterious ...
— The Spell of Egypt • Robert Hichens
... equally, as in existing fish, on each side the central vertebral column, but chiefly on the lower side—the column sending out its diminished vertebrae to the extreme termination of the fin. All the forms testify of a remote antiquity. The figures on a Chinese vase or an Egyptian obelisk are scarce more unlike what now exists in nature than are the fossils of the ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... been carried to Rome were again borne off to decorate this new Capitol. The Emperor Constantine there erected a column a hundred feet high, and placed his statue on it; Theodosius also erected a column and an obelisk; but Justinian excelled all these, and about 543 A.D. set up a monument with a colossal equestrian statue of himself in bronze upon it. The column which supported this statue was of brick masonry covered with plates of bronze. From the accounts we have of ...
— A History of Art for Beginners and Students - Painting, Sculpture, Architecture • Clara Erskine Clement
... temple, assisted by his ministers or great officers in pouring out the libations to the spirits of the departed. The libation-cup was fitted with a handle of jade, that used by the king having a complete kwei, the obelisk-like symbol of rank, while the cups used by a minister had for a handle only ...
— The Shih King • James Legge
... in the family burial ground, situated on a wooded hill up behind the homestead, and at the head of his last resting place was afterwards erected a plain obelisk of white marble, with his name and the date of his birth and death and ...
— Hidden Hand • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... Mason, sleeping with his forehead on the type-writer keys—he'll be lettered like the obelisk when he wakes up—and crept into the next room to see just what Tausig keeps in that ...
— In the Bishop's Carriage • Miriam Michelson
... cabin-box reared itself on end like a dwarfish obelisk; a fat hold-all adorned each mud-guard, where it lay like an underdone suet pudding; the two huge dressing-bags had been pushed under the corner seats of the tonneau, which fortunately was of generous dimensions, while the third and smallest one (no doubt Miss Destrey's) was so placed that it could ...
— My Friend the Chauffeur • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... Shakespeare, like Byron, like Walter Scott, like Talleyrand, but that did not hinder his getting along in the world. But how fanatic and bloodthirsty he was! History affirms that at Delhi he massacred a hundred thousand captives, and at Bagdad he erected an obelisk of ...
— The Adventures of a Special Correspondent • Jules Verne
... cannot much commend the without-doors. This scene consists of a beautiful lake entirely shut in with wood: the head falls into a fine cascade, and that into a serpentine river, over which is a little Gothic seat like a round temple, lifted up by a shaggy mount. On an eminence in the park is an obelisk erected to the honour and at the expense of "optimus" and 1, munificentissimus" the late Prince of Wales, "in loci amoenitatem et memoriam advent'us ejus." There are several paltry Chinese buildings and bridges, which have the merit or demerit of being the progenitors of ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... intelligent. She was also intensely bored with her home where, as if packed in a tight box, her individuality—of which she was very conscious—had no play. She strode like a grenadier, was strong and upright like an obelisk, had a beautiful face, a candid brow, pure eyes, and not a thought of her own in her head. He surrendered quickly to all those charms, and she appeared to him so unquestionably of the right sort that he did not hesitate for a moment to declare ...
— Tales of Unrest • Joseph Conrad
... climbing up every possible elevation, and a bright-faced girl who had conquered a high place on the base of the obelisk was chattering down at a group of her friends who ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... Vatican. The spot of the apostles' execution was indicated "by immemorial tradition" as between the two goals (inter duas metas) of Nero's Circus, which spot Signor Lanciani tells us is exactly the site of the obelisk now standing in the piazza of St. Peter. A little chapel, called the Chapel of the Crucifixion, stood there in the early ages, before any great basilica ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 8 - The Later Renaissance: From Gutenberg To The Reformation • Editor-in-Chief: Rossiter Johnson
... obelisk in Central Park, New York, is one of the most noted monoliths in the world. It was quarried, carved and erected about the time of Abraham, to commemorate the deeds of an ancient Pharaoh. Five hundred years later the conquering Sesostris, the bad Pharaoh of the Bible, ...
— Reading Made Easy for Foreigners - Third Reader • John L. Huelshof
... field from our height and try to realize what mighty fortunes were here at stake, we note that the mementoes of that day are few. A Corinthian column and an obelisk are seen at the roadside as memorials of the bravery of two officers. This Lion's Mound, two hundred feet high and made from earth piled up by cart loads, commemorates the place where a prince was wounded. Colossal in size, the lion was cast from French cannon captured in ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 4 (of 10) • Various
... Peter the Hermit.—At Huy, on the Meuse, is shown the tomb where Peter the Hermit was buried: it is in the shape of an obelisk, and has an inscription on each of the four sides. Of this inscription, which is curious, and which I copied when I was there, I have lost the greater part: can one of your correspondents supply it for me, or tell where the lines are originally to be found, as I fancy ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 78, April 26, 1851 • Various
... ice had been forced quite over the barrier by the irresistible pressure behind, and even while he gazed a great wedge of ice, nearly five feet thick and several yards in length, was being reared up like a glittering obelisk, and forced slowly but surely ...
— The Red Man's Revenge - A Tale of The Red River Flood • R.M. Ballantyne
... velvet and Chinese silk—gathered in the court. They were kneeling with their backs towards him and the doorway, so that not one of them had noticed his approach. They were facing a small rough-hewn obelisk of stone which stood at the head of a low mound of earth at the far end of the court. Six of them were grouped in a sort of semi-circle, and the seventh, a man clad from head to foot in green robes, knelt a little in advance and alone. But from none of the seven nobles did the voice ...
— The Broken Road • A. E. W. Mason
... from Boston for China, and watched, as he tells us, "while light and eyesight lasted, till the summit of that monument faded, at last, from view." Many a departing, many a returning, sailor and traveler, has given his "last, long, lingering look" to that towering obelisk, but none with deeper feeling ...
— Bay State Monthly, Vol. I, No. 3, March, 1884 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... well describe it," said the sculptor; "but you enter on a large open space, in the centre of which stands an obelisk, which is ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... he was doing neither, and the needle proved refractory in his cold fingers, he was swearing to himself. For there was no fire in the room. The materials for a fire were there, and a white tile stove, as cozy as an obelisk in a cemetery, stood in the corner. But fires are expensive, and hardly necessary when one sleeps with all one's windows open—one window, to be exact, the room being very small—and spends most of the day in a warm and comfortable shambles ...
— The Street of Seven Stars • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... subscription, a proper National Monument on the Field of Mollwitz, and so closing his old career. Subscriptions did not take, in that April, 1841, nor in the following months or twelve-months: the zealous Doctor, therefore, indignantly drew his own purse; got a big Obelisk of Granite hewn ready, with suitable Inscription on it; carted his big Obelisk from the quarries of Strehlen; assembled the Country round it, on Mollwitz Field; and passionately discoursed and pleaded, That at least the Country should bring block-and-tackle, with proper ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... mysterious. Ages come and go, empires rise and fall, philosophies flourish and fail, and man seeks him out many inventions, but they stand silent under the bright Egyptian night, as fascinating as they are baffling. An obelisk is simply a pyramid, albeit the base has become a shaft, holding aloft the oldest emblems of solar faith—a Triangle mounted on a Square. When and why this figure became holy no one knows, save as we may conjecture that it was one of those sacred stones which gained its sanctity ...
— The Builders - A Story and Study of Masonry • Joseph Fort Newton
... An obelisk of gray Canadian granite now stands on this historic ground. Madame de la Peltrie did not remain more than two years in Ville-Marie, but returned to the convent at Quebec which she had left in a moment of caprice. ...
— Canada • J. G. Bourinot
... to see the famous obelisk presented by Mehemet Ali to the British Government, who have not shown a particular alacrity to accept this ponderous present. The huge shaft lies on the ground, prostrate, and desecrated by all sorts of abominations. Children were sprawling ...
— Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo • William Makepeace Thackeray
... qualities. Such a concourse of people of all ranks and nations had never been seen at any public ceremony on the Bosphorus as that which, on July 24, accompanied the remains of Hobart Pasha to their last resting place in the English cemetery at Scutari, not far from the spot where a tall granite obelisk records the brave deeds and glorious death of those heroes who perished in ...
— Sketches From My Life - By The Late Admiral Hobart Pasha • Hobart Pasha
... here that the stone which Doctor Franklin erected, as above, became so dilapidated that in 1827, the citizens of Boston replaced it by a granite obelisk. The bodies repose in the old Granary ...
— From Boyhood to Manhood • William M. Thayer
... Madame Gorka's instinct had at least served her in leading her upon a route on which she met no one. Now the sense of reality returned. She recognized the objects around her, and that framework, so familiar to her piety of fervent Catholicism, the enormous square, the obelisk of Sixte-Quint in the centre, the fountains, the circular portico crowned with bishops and martyrs, the palace of the Vatican at the corner, and yonder the facade of the large papal cathedral, with the Saviour and the apostles erect upon the ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... stanch hounds. During the periodical cuttings of the copse, which the necessities of the family of St. Ronan's brought round more frequently than Ponty would have recommended, some oaks had been spared in the neighbourhood of this massive obelisk, old enough perhaps to have heard the whoop and halloo which followed the fall of the stag, and to have witnessed the raising of the rude monument by which that great event was commemorated. These trees, with their broad spreading boughs, made a twilight even of noon-day; and, ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... by no means able to rival, the skill with which Addison imitated Virgil. His lines on the Barometer and the Bowling Green were applauded by hundreds, to whom the Dissertation on the Epistles of Phalaris was as unintelligible as the hieroglyphics on an obelisk. ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... count continued to descend the Corso. As they approached the Piazza del Popolo, the crowd became more dense, and above the heads of the multitude two objects were visible: the obelisk, surmounted by a cross, which marks the centre of the square, and in front of the obelisk, at the point where the three streets, del Babuino, del Corso, and di Ripetta, meet, the two uprights of the scaffold, between which glittered the curved knife of the mandaia. ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... Market-place of a large mining village in the Midlands. A man addressing a small gang of colliers from the foot of a stumpy memorial obelisk. Church bells heard. Churchgoers passing along the ...
— Touch and Go • D. H. Lawrence
... his feet, set him by his obelisk to face me. I loaded his piece for him, put it into his hands, then stepped back, facing him always, till I was fifteen yards away. "Drop your glove when you are ready," I ...
— The Fool Errant • Maurice Hewlett
... at the mole, the remains were met by the governor of the island, accompanied by the generals and the military staff. The coffin was then conveyed between files of soldiery which lined the streets to the obelisk, in the place of arms, where it was received in a hearse prepared for the purpose. Here the remains were formally delivered to the governor and captain-general of the island, the key given up to him, the ...
— The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (Vol. II) • Washington Irving
... from a square, triangular, or other base, gradually diminishing in size till it ends in a point at the top. Like the obelisk, pyramids were sometimes erected to preserve the memory of singular events, or to transmit to future ages the glory and magnificence of princes; but oftener as funeral monuments and receptacles for the ...
— A Catechism of Familiar Things; Their History, and the Events Which Led to Their Discovery • Benziger Brothers
... the Aiguille, a Roman obelisk seventy-six feet high. There is a square base, pierced by arches in each face, and the obelisk, or pyramid rather, stands on this. It is not very beautiful, but it is worth examining. It is thought that the monument to Marius ...
— In Troubadour-Land - A Ramble in Provence and Languedoc • S. Baring-Gould
... he was succeeded by his son Shalmaneser III (860-825 B.C.), whose military activities extended over his whole reign. No fewer than thirty-two expeditions were recorded on his famous black obelisk. ...
— Myths of Babylonia and Assyria • Donald A. Mackenzie
... over the plains, while from Sanim to Beltane they lived in the "Betas," or houses of hospitality, or feasted high with Finn McCumal, son of Cumal, grandson of Trenmore O'Baskin, whose palace stood upon the summit of the hill of Allen, a hill now crowned with a meaningless modern obelisk, covering the site of the old historic rath, a familiar object to thousands who have looked up at it from the Curragh of Kildare, certainly with no thought in their minds of Finn McCumal or his ...
— The Story Of Ireland • Emily Lawless
... brought them into the suburbs of the city, They stand on a grassy brow of a hill at the foot of a granite obelisk which points its great finger upwards, as if the human family had agreed, by a visible symbol of age-long endurance, to offer some high sacrifice of thanksgiving or supplication. The solemn height of the monument, its deep simplicity, and the ...
— The New Adam and Eve (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... there was plenty to do and see before Mark was allowed to dine: Lassie, the colley, had to be unfastened for a run about the 'grounds,' of which a mechanical mouse might have made the tour in five minutes; there was a stone obelisk to be inspected that Uncle Solomon had bought a bargain at a sale and set up at a corner of the lawn inscribed with the names of his favourites living and dead—a remarkably scratch team, by the way; then he read out sonorous versions of the Latin names of most ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey
... centre of the "Place" is the monolith obelisk, 49 ft. high, hewn by the Romans from the quarries of Esterel. It stood originally in the Circus at the S.W. corner of the town; but of it no ...
— The South of France—East Half • Charles Bertram Black
... said good-bye to the farmer and strode on through Harrington and Norton, and a little beyond this Robert took those that cared about it to see the obelisk on the site of the Battle of Evesham, at which Simon de Montfort was killed in 1265. And so they came through the orchards of plum-trees, on which the fruit was now forming, ...
— The Slowcoach • E. V. Lucas
... head and two bottles of the blood of St. Januarius are preserved here; the people assert that this blood liquefies every year. The frescoes on the ceiling are splendidly painted; and on the square before the church is to be seen an obelisk surmounted by a statue of ...
— A Visit to the Holy Land • Ida Pfeiffer
... eyes of Maieddine than the foolish faith of Christians, who, at least, were not backsliders. He would not even point out to Victoria the strange minaret of the Abadite mosque at Berryan, which tapered like a brown obelisk against the shimmering sky, for to him its ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... of alignements and cromlechs. Several of these attain to a great size. That to Locmariaquer (Morbihan), now unfortunately fallen and broken, measured over 60 feet in height, being thus not much shorter than the Egyptian obelisk which stands in the Place ...
— Rough Stone Monuments and Their Builders • T. Eric Peet
... had seen St. Peter's; so set off in a hackney coach, drove by the Piazza della Colonna and the Castle of St. Angelo (which burst upon me unexpectedly as I turned on the bridge), and got out as soon as St. Peter's was in sight. My first feeling was disappointment, but as I advanced towards the obelisk, with the fountains on each side, and found myself in that ocean of space with all the grand objects around, delight and admiration succeeded. As I walked along the piazza and then entered the church, I felt that sort of breathless bewilderment which was ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... upright for purposes of sex worship is universally found. An upright conical stone is frequently mentioned. Many of the stone idols or pillars, the worship of which was forbidden by the Bible, come under this group. Likewise, the obelisk, found not only in Egypt, but in modified forms in many other countries as well, embodies the same phallic principle. The usual explanation of the obelisk is that it represented the rays of the sun striking the earth: when we speak of sun worship later, ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... blasphemies of this or that conquering king, all to the same tune—'I came, I saw, I conquered; I slew so many thousands of the people—I took so many thousands into captivity—I built this temple to the gods—I raised this obelisk or that pyramid'—and all by hand labour, with the miserable, belaboured slaves dying by their thousands upon thousands under their taskmasters' lashes, to be cast afterwards into the Nile, or left to the jackals and vultures. ...
— In the Mahdi's Grasp • George Manville Fenn
... understanding, very small would the matters have been which, even with their best efforts applied in conjunction, they could have attempted or accomplished. Now (to pause while upon this example and look in it as in a glass) let us suppose that some vast obelisk were (for the decoration of a triumph or some such magnificence) to be removed from its place, and that men should set to work upon it with their naked hands; would not any sober spectator think them ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... designed by Major Young of the 97th Regiment. To the top of the surbase is fourteen feet from the ground; on this rests a sarcophagus, seven feet three inches high, from which rises an obelisk forty-two feet eight inches in height, and the apex is two feet one inch. The dimensions of the obelisk at the base are six feet by four feet eight inches. A prize medal was adjudged to J.C. Fisher, LL.D. for the following inscription on ...
— The Backwoods of Canada • Catharine Parr Traill
... well describe it," replied the sculptor. "A great open place, and in the midst of it an obelisk, which is ...
— What the Moon Saw: and Other Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... two monuments besides this granite obelisk: One, the house I built on the hill, With its spires, bay windows, and roof of slate. The other, the lake-front in Chicago, Where the railroad keeps a switching yard, With whistling engines and crunching wheels And smoke and soot thrown over the ...
— Spoon River Anthology • Edgar Lee Masters
... deep hollows, a wrinkled, callous skin, a beard that had a trick of twitching its long white bristles, a menacing pointed chin, a toothless mouth, eyes bright as the eyes of his dogs in the yard, and a nose like an obelisk—there he stood in his gallery smiling at the beauty called into being by genius. A Jew surrounded by his millions will always be one of the finest spectacles which humanity can give. Robert Medal, our great actor, ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... pleasantly through the city gate toward the summer theatre and Fredericksberg. The evening sun shone upon the column of Liberty; the beautiful obelisk, around which stand Wiedewelt's statues, one of ...
— O. T. - A Danish Romance • Hans Christian Andersen
... resurrection. If it had the faintest conception of humor it would wake up long enough to laugh, and if it hadn't it would come to life for the express purpose of hitting Jay Jay Lawrence, A.M., M.D., across the sterno cleidomastoidens with a well-seasoned obelisk. It is impossible to reproduce the flavor of this intellectual hippocampus' politico-economic emulsions, they being evidently compounded with thaumaturgis incantations while he is surrounded with jars of jalap, pile remedies, aphrodisiacs and patent liver pills. They should be labelled ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... predilection which made his company in a riding party a somewhat exciting pleasure. The day in 1868 when he won three steeplechases at Melbourne is still remembered; and at Mount Gambier, in South Australia, a granite obelisk marks where once he leaped his horse over a fence surmounting the headland of a lake, and then across a chasm 'more than forty feet wide.' A single false step would have cast horse and rider into the lake two hundred feet below. Of the same wild character was his riding during boyhood ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... fought with distinction and maintained their reputation right up to the end of the siege. Visitors to Mafeking may now see near the obelisk in front of the pretty town hall of the famous siege town, a five-pounder gun "captured by the Cape Police during the siege". This gun was seized by the coloured Sergeant Bell and two other subalterns of the "Cape Boys" contingent; their contingent was then ...
— Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since • Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje
... aged mother to him,—is not that the way in which kings and queens have their family reunions illustrated in the journals?—plus a cedar of Lebanon, brought from the end of the world,—a great caramantran of a tree, which was as costly to move and as much in the way as the obelisk—being hoisted and planted by force of men and money and horses; a tree which had wrought confusion among the shrubbery as the price of setting up a souvenir commemorative of the royal visit. On his present trip to France, at least, knowing that he had come for several ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... see them, we had kept more in mid-channel than we should otherwise have done. We now hauled up for Portsmouth Harbour. Far off, on the summit of the green heights of Portsdown Hill, we could see the obelisk-shaped monument to Nelson, an appropriate landmark in sight of the last spot of English ground on which he stepped before sailing to fight the great battle of Trafalgar, where he fell. We could also trace the outline ...
— A Yacht Voyage Round England • W.H.G. Kingston
... in June, memories that reached from Tacitus to Wordsworth, the embrasure that extends in front of the Egyptian obelisk for a standing place, and some children "swimming a dog";—that was the scene and circumstance of my first meeting with his father. A man of middle age was standing by. He wore the flashings of a Lieutenant-Colonel and for badges the Artillery grenades. He seemed ...
— In Flanders Fields and Other Poems - With an Essay in Character, by Sir Andrew Macphail • John McCrae
... up it a distance of three furlongs to the creek on starboard hand; pass into the creek and land on the island. The treasure lies buried at a spot one thousand feet due south from the base of the obelisk rock." ...
— The Cruise of the "Esmeralda" • Harry Collingwood
... sixty miles in circumference, and in which were one hundred gates of brass, must have had considerable architectural splendor. This account of Babylon, however, is probably exaggerated, especially as to the height of the walls. The tower of Belus, the Palace of Nebuchadnezzar, and the Obelisk of Semiramis were probably wonderful structures, certainly in size, which is one of the conditions of ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume III • John Lord
... illustrious Champollion and his ally Rosellini lived and worked together in 1829, during part of their long sojourn at Thebes. Here the naval officers sent out by the French in 1831 to remove the obelisk which now stands in the Place de la Concorde took up their temporary quarters. And here, most interesting to English readers, Lady Duff Gordon lingered through some of her last winters, and wrote most of her delightful "Letters from Egypt." A little balcony with a broken veranda and a bit of ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon
... moon, That tongueless tower hath cleaved the Sabbath air, Mute as an obelisk of ice ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... doctor's gig, there a mammoth express-wagon; a sullen Southerner contrasts with a grinning Gaul, a darkly-vested bishop with a gayly-attired child, a daintily-gloved belle with a mud-soiled drunkard; a little shoe-black and a blind fiddler ply their trades in the shadow of Emmet's obelisk, and a toy-merchant has Montgomery's mural tablet for a background; on the fence is a string of favorite ballads and popular songs; a mock auctioneer shouts from one door, and a silent wax effigy gazes from another. Pisani, who accompanied Prince Napoleon in his yacht-voyage ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 110, December, 1866 - A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics • Various
... great public places in the city of Paris, moreover, commemorate, more or less openly, what might be called the great stains on the history of the nation. The Place de la Concorde is that of the Guillotine, and the Luxor obelisk is the monument of the more than twenty-eight hundred victims beheaded by that axe. The Place de l'Hotel de Ville was formerly the Place de Greve, famous in all hangmen's annals,—burnings alive, tearings asunder by horses, breakings on the wheel, ...
— Paris from the Earliest Period to the Present Day; Volume 1 • William Walton
... and good. Your Excellency will see how I've improved the park: You'll not know it again. A hermitage here; serpentine walks there; an obelisk; a ruin; and all so sparingly, all done with the most ...
— The Stranger - A Drama, in Five Acts • August von Kotzebue
... of Washington in a sitting posture, to be placed on a high pedestal in the centre of the rotunda of the Capitol. The Washington National Monument Association, after consultation with men of acknowledged artistic taste, selected from among the numerous designs submitted a simple obelisk, five hundred feet in height, for the erection of which the American people began at ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... for the erection of the shaft in December, 1854. Major-General William J. Worth, of Mexican War fame, died at San Antonio, Texas, June 7, 1849. The monument was dedicated with a parade and a review November 25, 1857, and the General's remains interred under the south side. In bands around the obelisk are recorded the names of the battles in which Worth took part. On the east face, cut in the stone, may be read "Ducit Amor Patriae" and on the west face, "By the Corporation of the City of New York, 1857—Honor the Brave." At the moment ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice
... bad; secondly, that they are spurious; and thirdly, that, whether they be bad or good, spurious or genuine, Temple could know nothing of the matter; inasmuch as he was no more able to construe a line of them than to decipher an Egyptian obelisk. ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... chestnut-tree, on our farm, directly in front of the house, at the distance of less than half a mile. The withered trunk and boughs, surmounted by the coarse-wrought and capacious nest, was a more picturesque object than an obelisk; and the flights of the hawks, as they went forth to hunt, returned with their game, exercised themselves in wheeling round and round, and circling about it, were amusing to the beholder, almost from morning till night. The family of these hawks, old and young, was killed by the Hessian jagers. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 486 - Vol. 17, No. 486., Saturday, April 23, 1831 • Various
... river winds and forms an island, the point of which is tufted with trees in the prettiest manner imaginable; on the other side a rich scenery of wood, among which is Dr. Norris's house. To the right, on a rising ground on the banks of the river, is the obelisk, backed by a very bold declivity. Pursued the road till near it, quitted my chaise, and walked to the foot of it. It is founded on a rock which rises boldly from the river. It is a noble pillar, and admirably placed. I seated myself on the opposite rock, and ...
— A Tour in Ireland - 1776-1779 • Arthur Young
... might contrive to make ornament subservient to utility; a pleasing eye-trap might also contribute to promote science: an obelisk in a garden or park might be both an embellishment ...
— The Natural History of Selborne • Gilbert White
... that human life is under all circumstances to be preferred to vegetable existence,—had the great poplar cut down. It is so easy to say, "It is only a poplar!" and so much harder to replace its living cone than to build a granite obelisk! ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... France from the coupe of a diligence, upon Italy from the cushion of a carrozza. The broken windows of Apsley House were still boarded up when I was in London. The asphalt pavement was not laid in Paris. The Obelisk of Luxor was lying in its great boat in the Seine, as I remember it. I did not see it erected; it must have been an exciting scene to witness, the engineer standing underneath, so as to be crushed by the great stone if it disgraced him ...
— Our Hundred Days in Europe • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... The obelisk generously presented by the Khedive of Egypt to the city of New York has safely arrived in this country, and will soon be erected in that metropolis. A commission for the liquidation of the Egyptian debt has lately concluded ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... not easy to describe Rome," said the young sculptor. "It is a very large place; in the centre of it stands an obelisk, which ...
— The Sand-Hills of Jutland • Hans Christian Andersen
... of which gave their appellations to the very manors on which they stood—have been repeatedly demolished in Scotland. An obelisk of thirteen feet in height, and imparting its name to a landed estate in Kincardineshire, was recently thrown down; and a large monolith, which lent its old, venerable name to a property and mansion within three or four miles of Edinburgh, was, within the memory of some living witnesses, ...
— Archaeological Essays, Vol. 1 • James Y. Simpson
... horizontal beds, quite rotten and shaly; but there are other causes of difference in impressiveness which I am endeavouring to analyze, but find considerable embarrassment in doing so. There seems no sufficient reason why an isolated obelisk, one-fourth higher than any of them, should not be at least as sublime as they in their dependent grouping; but it assuredly is not. For this reason, as well as because I have not found here the near studies of primitive rock I expected,—for to my great ...
— The Life of John Ruskin • W. G. Collingwood
... preached. A bas-relief in white marble by the American sculptor, Story, commemorating the work of Wyclif, has been placed in the church at a cost of more than ten thousand dollars, and just outside a tall granite obelisk has been erected in his honor. In cleaning the walls recently, it was discovered that under several coats of paint there were some remarkable frescoes which, being slowly uncovered, were found to represent scenes in the life of the great ...
— British Highways And Byways From A Motor Car - Being A Record Of A Five Thousand Mile Tour In England, - Wales And Scotland • Thomas D. Murphy
... Panama, a secret trip several miles up the coast to look over a freighter placidly anchored there, a dolorous-appearing coast-tramp with unpainted upperworks and a rusty red hull. The side-plates of this red hull, Blake observed, were as pitted and scarred as the face of an Egyptian obelisk. Her ventilators were askew and her funnel was scrofulous and many of her rivet-heads seemed to be eaten away. But this was not once a source of apprehension to the ...
— Never-Fail Blake • Arthur Stringer
... immediate predecessors at Abusir. As now laid bare by the excavations of 1900, it is seen to consist of an artificial mound, with a great court in front to the eastward. On the mound was erected a truncated obelisk, the stone emblem of the Sun-god. The worshippers in the court below looked towards the Sun's stone erected upon its mound in the west, the quarter of the sun's setting; for the Sun-god of Heliopolis was primarily the setting sun, Tum-Ra, not Ra Harmachis, the rising sun, ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, And Assyria In The Light Of Recent Discovery • L.W. King and H.R. Hall
... Luxor temple does not face the river on the side we came in; to find it we have to scramble over heaps of rubbish to one end and there we see a great obelisk, a companion to the one which is now in the principal square of Paris, the Place de la Concorde, and we see also two huge buildings reared up on each side of the ancient entrance—these were called pylons and were always built in Egyptian temples. On festival ...
— Round the Wonderful World • G. E. Mitton
... war-ships, anchor'd peacefully—the Jersey side, the banks of Weehawken, the Palisades, and the gradually receding blue, lost in the distance—to the right the East river—the mast-hemm'd shores—the grand obelisk-like towers of the bridge, one on either side, in haze, yet plainly defin'd, giant brothers twain, throwing free graceful interlinking loops high across the tumbled tumultuous current below—(the tide is just changing to its ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... (about 1600 years B. C.), when, also, it was set up in the temple of Karnak, at Thebes. It is a tall, rectangular pillar, tapering from the base to near the top, where it is pointed like a flattened pyramid; its sides are inscribed with hieroglyphics. The obelisk was taken to Alexandria by Queen Cleopatra, and was named after her. Some think that Cleopatra's Needle was another stone, quarried by order of Ramesis II., and set up in Heliopolis, the City of the Sun; but several obelisks have borne the name, and this may have caused uncertainty ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, V. 5, April 1878 - Scribner's Illustrated • Various
... and, after a prosperous voyage, landed at Cape Town on the 16th of January, 1834. Choosing as the scene of his observations a rural spot under the shelter of Table Mountain, he began regular "sweeping" on the 5th of March. The site of his great reflector is now marked with an obelisk, and the name of Feldhausen has become memorable in the history of science; for the four years' work done there may truly be said to open the chapter of our knowledge as regards the ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... men and women, when he obtained possession of Calcutta in 1756—confining them in a narrow and noisome cell, which poisoned them with its malarious atmosphere, so that by morning only a few remained alive—is now part of a warehouse. But an obelisk stands at the entrance, inscribed with the names ...
— The Story of Ida Pfeiffer - and Her Travels in Many Lands • Anonymous
... high walls. So high and strong are the walls of the British Legation that in the Boxer War of 1900 it served the whole community for a fortress, wherein we sustained a siege of eight weeks. A marble obelisk near the Legation gate commemorates the siege, and a marble gateway on a neighbouring street marks the spot where Baron Ketteler was shot. Since that war a foreign quarter has been marked out, the approaches to which have been partially fortified. The streets are now greatly improved; ruined buildings ...
— The Awakening of China • W.A.P. Martin
... time in the service of the French Government as Director of the Theatre Francais, when he had no little share in the production of the dramas of Victor Hugo and Dumas. Later he was instrumental in bringing the Luxor obelisk from Egypt to Paris. He wrote books upon his travels in Spain, Portugal and Morocco.[133] He wandered all over Europe in search of art treasures for the French Government, and may very well have met Borrow again and again. Borrow tells us that he had met Taylor in France, in Russia, and in Ireland, ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... went on: and taking one or two turns through the tortuous lanes in the neighbourhood, arrived at a spot where a small obelisk, of no very graceful form or great dimensions, planted in the middle of the road, marked the boundary of four distinct parishes. She paused there for a moment, and leaned upon the landmark, as if from fatigue, weakness, or agitation. The light was ...
— The King's Highway • G. P. R. James
... are yet to be surpassed. The largest buildings elsewhere erected by man are smaller than their pyramids; which are also the oldest human works still remaining, the beauty of whose masonry, says Wilkinson, has not been surpassed in any subsequent age. An obelisk of a single stone now standing in Egypt weighs three hundred tons, and a colossus of Ramses II. nearly nine hundred. But Herodotus describes a monolithic temple, which must have weighed five thousand tons, and which ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... Travellers stopped to gaze, to moralize, and to pilfer; postilions and poets scraped off skulls and thigh-bones.... At last, in 1822, the vestiges were swept together and resepulchred, and a simple obelisk of marble was erected, to commemorate a victory well deserving of its fame as a military exploit, but all unworthy to be ranked with earlier triumphs, won by hands pure as well as strong, defending freedom and the right."—History of Charles the Bold, by J. ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... sculpture permits the purest expression of the classical ideal; painting, music, and poetry bear a romantic character. This does not exclude the recurrence of these three stages within each art—in architecture, for example, as monumental (the obelisk), useful (house and temple), and Gothic (the cathedral) architecture. As the plastic arts reached their culmination among the Hellenes, so the romantic arts culminate among the Christian nations. In poetry, as ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... Forlong that Solomon's temple was like hundreds observed in the East, except that its walls were a little higher than those usually seen, and the phallic spire out of proportion to the size of the structure. "The Jewish porch is but the obelisk which the Egyptian placed beside his temple; the Boodhist pillars which stood all around their Dagobas; the pillars of Hercules, which stood near the Phoenician temple; and the spire which ...
— The God-Idea of the Ancients - or Sex in Religion • Eliza Burt Gamble
... as the year 1804 it was proposed at Avignon, to erect an obelisk in memory of Petrarch, at Vaucluse: "il a ete decide, qu'on l'elevera, vis-avis l'ancien jardin de Petrache, lieu ou le lit de sorgue forme ...
— On the Portraits of English Authors on Gardening, • Samuel Felton
... a virtue must be free and not forced. Virtue may be defended, as vice may be withstood, by a statute, but no virtue is or can be created by a law, any more than by a battering ram a temple or obelisk can be reared.—Bartol. ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... presents itself under a more formidable aspect, and with steeper sides than those of the central diagram, then it may be assumed (as far as I know mountains) for next to a certainty, that it is not a pointed obelisk, but the end of a ridge more or less prolonged, of which we see the narrow edge or ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... before, in 1827, Lord Dalhousie laid the first stone of the beautiful obelisk overlooking what is now known as Dufferin Terrace, to commemorate the heroism of Wolfe and Montcalm, and bearing ...
— Old Quebec - The Fortress of New France • Sir Gilbert Parker and Claude Glennon Bryan
... pena [obs3][U.S.], picacho[obs3], tump[obs3]; knoll, hummock, hillock, barrow, mound, mole; steeps, bluff, cliff, craig[obs3], tor[obs3], peak, pike, clough[obs3]; escarpment, edge, ledge, brae; dizzy height. tower, pillar, column, obelisk, monument, steeple, spire, minaret, campanile, turret, dome, cupola;skyscraper. pole, pikestaff, maypole, flagstaff; top mast, topgallant mast. ceiling &c. (covering) 223. high water; high tide, flood tide, spring tide. altimetry &c. (angel) 244[obs3]; batophobia[obs3]. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... statue of Lille lay on the ground shattered by a projectile, while near at hand the statue of Strasbourg, shrouded in heavy veils of crape, seemed to be mourning the ruin that surrounded it on every side. And near the Obelisk, which had escaped unscathed, a gas-pipe in its trench had been broken by the pick of a careless workman, and the escaping gas, fired by some accident, was flaring up in a great undulating jet, with ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... footing, also left the village. Somehow or other, the red cross which had been set up mysteriously disappeared, but how it had been disposed of no one would ever reveal. It was lately proposed to commemorate the event of the archbishop's visit by the erection of an obelisk on the spot where he had set up the red cross; and a tablet, with a suitable inscription, was provided for it by the Rev. Mr. Freemantle, of Claydon. But when he was told that the site was exposed to the full force of the avalanches descending from the upper part of the mountain in winter, ...
— The Huguenots in France • Samuel Smiles |
