"Work of art" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... a well-worn case, and Dick proudly displayed the likeness of a stout, much bejewelled young woman with two staring infants on her knee. In his sight, the poor picture was a more perfect work of art than any of Sir Joshua's baby-beauties, or Raphael's Madonnas, and the little story needed no better sequel than the young father's praises of his twins, the covert kiss he gave their mother when he turned as if ...
— Kitty's Class Day And Other Stories • Louisa M. Alcott
... newcomer were by no means as analytical as this, of course. His first impressions were those of one coming upon a beautiful work of art, a general wonder and admiration, not detailed at all. Judah, standing behind him with an armful of wood, must have had similar feelings, for he whispered, hoarsely, "Creepin' Moses, Cap'n Sears, is that the Prince ...
— Fair Harbor • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... a specimen, of large size, of an emerald green glassy substance, which was unfortunately broken when sent to me, but described as presenting a regular polygonal figure: two of the faces, measuring some inches, are yet perfect. It is a work of art, and was found in ...
— Canada and the Canadians, Vol. 2 • Richard Henry Bonnycastle
... In your reading you must have in view some definite aim—some aim other than the wish to derive pleasure. I conceive that to give pleasure is the highest end of any work of art, because the pleasure procured from any art is tonic, and transforms the life into which it enters. But the maximum of pleasure can only be obtained by regular effort, and regular effort implies the organisation of that effort. Open-air ...
— LITERARY TASTE • ARNOLD BENNETT
... in many instances, and the author put the most notable of these together, and always alluded to them with roars of laughter. The book has never yet received justice at the hands of any literary tribunal. It requires, indeed, a large amount of culture to appreciate it, either as a work of art, or as a living flame-painting of spiritual struggle and revelation. In his previous writings he had insisted upon the sacredness and infinite value of the human soul,—upon the wonder and mystery ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... a valuable thing which we possess, known as the "Alfred Jewel": it has on it an inscription which we can truly say applies to far more than this work of art. Its application to Alfred's work is ...
— Our Catholic Heritage in English Literature of Pre-Conquest Days • Emily Hickey
... when the master of Last's Holding had lain a month beneath the staring mound under the pine tree out to the east where they had buried Harkness, that Jose finished a work of art. For many days he had laboured secretly in a calf-shed out behind the small corrals, and in his slim dark fingers there was beauty unleashed. Finest carving he knew, since his forbears, peons across the Border, had spent their lives upon the beams of ...
— Tharon of Lost Valley • Vingie E. Roe
... of her chosen city, to carry out her will in contributing his best efforts to its supremacy in politics, in literature, and in art." That Scipio had some feeling of this kind need not be doubted, though the statue was not a great work of art like that of Phidias. Cp. ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler
... remind us of that noble truth which the 107th Psalm is meant to teach. You hear it all of you every Sunday morning. I mean the Litany. That noble composition, which seems to me more wise as a work of theology, more beautiful as a work of art, the oftener I use it—That Litany, I say, is modelled on the 107th Psalm; and it expresses the very heart and spirit of our forefathers three hundred years ago. It bids us pray to be delivered from every conceivable harm, to Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And then it prays for every conceivable ...
— True Words for Brave Men • Charles Kingsley
... great artists. 'What is implied is that in artistic creation, in the work of genius and imagination, we have pure novelty issuing from no premeditated or rational idea, but simply pure irrationality and unaccountableness.'[20] The work of art cannot be predicated; it is beyond reason, as life is beyond logic and law.[21] But so far from finding life unintelligible, it would be nearer the truth to say that man's reason can, strictly speaking, understand ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... ideals and ideas and impressions, and by so doing make us respond to their moods. Their "beauty and their terror are sublime". But what may seem poetic to us, was invariably a grim reality to the Babylonians. The statue or picture was not merely a work of art but a manifestation of the god or demon. As has been said, they believed that the spirit of the god inhabited the idol; the frown of the brazen image was the frown of the wicked demon. They entertained as much dread of the winged and human-headed ...
— Myths of Babylonia and Assyria • Donald A. Mackenzie
... fell trees in such a way that they'd be caught half-way to the ground by other trees. Then I'd have to clear away branches and roots so that when the trees did fall the rest of the way it would be clean, plumb, and sudden. It was a wonderful trap when it was finished and it was the most dangerous work of art I ever saw. If you touched any of a dozen triggers you stood to have a whole grove of trees come banging down on top of you—same as if you went for a walk in the woods and a tornado came along and blew the woods down. ...
— IT and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... her down in the little lift, he vaguely wondered whether he had ever thought of her till now except as an animated work of art; comparable in beauty with his encaustic painting or his dearly loved Aphrodite; worth more than either of them as a possible possession, as life is worth more than stone, and endowed with a divine ...
— Fair Margaret - A Portrait • Francis Marion Crawford
... say twenty guineas for this work of art?—fifteen, five, name your own price. The gentleman without the elephant is ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... to it, he would have an effect glorified by all the fervor of his primal inspiration. But he never did that, or even tried to do it. Perhaps, when he came to consider it more carefully, it appeared impossible; perhaps it approved itself ridiculous without experiment. His work of art, such as it was, was a growth from all his thinking and feeling about it; and without that it could no more eventuate in a climax than a tree could ripen fruit without the preliminaries of striking its roots into the ground, coming of the age to bear, and then some springtime budding, putting out ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... has been built expressly to carry away the earth. The cars are drawn by mules. The girls prefer carrying their baskets on their heads. The men have to dig carefully, for there is no knowing when they may come across some rare and valuable work of art. ...
— Round-about Rambles in Lands of Fact and Fancy • Frank Richard Stockton
... motion and gesture of the distinguished Feathertop came in its proper place; nothing had been left rude or native in him; a well-digested conventionalism had incorporated itself thoroughly with his substance and transformed him into a work of art. Perhaps it was this peculiarity that invested him with a species of ghastliness and awe. It is the effect of anything completely and consummately artificial, in human shape, that the person impresses ...
— Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... represented a little child in the attitude of prayer. Anyone seeing it for the first time would probably have taken it for a representation of the Infant Samuel. I have called it commonplace; and considered as a work of art, such it undoubtedly was; yet it must have possessed a certain distinctive individuality, for the brief glance which I had caught of it, even at that distance, had been sufficient to convince me that the figure was an old acquaintance of mine. ...
— The Gerrard Street Mystery and Other Weird Tales • John Charles Dent
... indifference and freedom of mind, united with power and elasticity, is the disposition in which a true work of art ought to dismiss us, and there is no better test of true aesthetic excellence. If after an enjoyment of this kind we find ourselves specially impelled to a particular mode of feeling or action, and unfit ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... to it as a work of art that there is too much pain; and many have said to me, with some bitterness, "Why did you make me suffer so?" But I think of my father's answer when I told him this: "And why shouldn't they suffer? SHE ...
— Rab and His Friends • John Brown, M. D.
... until the word quivered, palpitated, and lived; until the transcription was no longer an illusion, a phantom, a vision devoid of reality, but a faithful echo, a sincere translation, a finished interpretation, reflecting entire the fundamental essence of the thing; in a word, a work of art, a parallel ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... attended to some duty at the church of San Andrea delle Fratte. Instead of waiting in the carriage, I entered the church myself to look at it. The church of San Andrea was poor, small, and empty; I believe that I found myself there almost alone. No work of art attracted my attention; and I passed my eyes mechanically over its interior without being arrested by any particular thought. I can only remember an entirely black dog which went trotting and turning before me as I mused. In an instant the dog had disappeared, the whole church ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... belief that there is just as truly a good way, and many bad ways, in poetry as in morals or in playing billiards. This is no place to try to sum up its main conclusions. But it is characteristic of the classical view that Aristotle lays his greatest stress, first, on the need for Unity in the work of art, the need that each part should subserve the whole, while irrelevancies, however brilliant in themselves, should be cast away; and next, on the demand that great art must have for its subject the great way of living. These judgements have ...
— The Poetics • Aristotle
... Even in his most complicated concerted pieces he never loses grip of the idiosyncrasies of his characters, and in the most piteous and tragic situations he never relinquishes for a moment his pure ideal of intrinsic musical beauty. If there be such a thing as immortality for any work of art, it must surely ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... Canterbury Tales contain, without reckoning the two in prose — the conception of the poem is yet so closely and harmoniously worked out, that all the parts are perfectly balanced, and from first to last scarcely a single line is superfluous or misplaced. The finish and beauty of the poem as a work of art, are not more conspicuous than the knowledge of human nature displayed in the portraits of the principal characters. The result is, that the poem is more modern, in form and in spirit, than almost any other work of its author; the chaste style and sedulous polish of the stanzas admit of easy change ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... dexterously framed, All the precautions and contrivances Were with such craft foreplanned; the perjuries Were all so well adjusted; my pure life Was made to seem so black; the witnesses Were so well drilled, so perfect in their parts,— In short, it was a work of art so thorough, I did not marvel at the Court's decision, Which was, for her,—divorce and alimony; For me,—no freedom, since no privilege Of marrying again. ...
— The Woman Who Dared • Epes Sargent
... his personages he should at least pretend that they are creations, and not boast of them as copies. The justification of a character in a novel is not that other persons are what they are, but that the author is what he is. Otherwise the novel is not a work of art. As for M. Paul Bourget, the master of the roman psychologique, he commits the error of imagining that the men and women of modern life are capable of being infinitely analysed for an innumerable series of chapters. In point of fact what is interesting about people in good society—and ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde
... work of art grows slowly from confusion and lack of form to coherence and symmetry to the moral joy of its maker, so her experience in human plastic enterprise filled the heart of Miss Willis with a vital happiness. ...
— The Law-Breakers and Other Stories • Robert Grant
... has no traditions to overcome. Its mind is not burdened with set ideas, its heart has not grown cold with class and caste distinctions. The child is to the teacher what clay is to the sculptor. Whether the world will receive a work of art or a wretched imitation, depends to a large extent on the creative power of ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... night, with jealous care studying the libretto Gillier had sold to Claude, which had been put into her hands by Mrs. Shiffney. At once she had recognized its unusual merit. She had in a high degree the faculty, possessed by many clever Frenchwomen, of detecting and appraising the value of a work of art. She was furious because Gillier's libretto had never been submitted to her husband; but she could not say all that was in her mind. She and Adelaide Shiffney had been frank with each other in the matter, and she had no intention of making any ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... brooding, musing intelligence that has foreseen, loved, created, elaborated, perfected, until, in the middle ground which we call life, somewhere between nothing and nothing, hangs the perfect thing which we love and cannot understand, but which we are compelled to confess a work of art. It is at once something and nothing, a dream of happy memory, a song, a benediction. In viewing it one finds nothing to criticise or to regret. The thing sings, it has colour. It has rapture. You wonder at the loving, patient ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... admiring this work of art, a fat wheezy steamtug, with the word AJAX in staring black letters on the paddlebox, came puffing up alongside the Typhoon. It was ridiculously small and conceited, compared with our stately ship. I speculated as to what it was going to do. In a few minutes we were lashed to the little monster, ...
— The Story of a Bad Boy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... boots lent distinction to his somewhat incoherent legs. A train of touch-paper connected with a Roman candle was cunningly devised to protrude in the form of a tongue from his mouth, while ginger-beer bottles filled with gunpowder served as hands. And the whole work of art was one dark evening conveyed by me tenderly and deposited among a wilderness of broken forms, empty hampers, and old bottles in the lumber room under the school gymnasium, "to be called for" ...
— Tom, Dick and Harry • Talbot Baines Reed
... was still scrutinizing the rosary and crucifix. "To be sure, to be sure," he said absently; "I will say nothing of it; but this is a work of art, this crucifix; do you know what you have here? And this,—is this not an altar-cloth?" he added, lifting up the beautiful wrought altar-cloth, which Ramona, in honor of his coming, had pinned on the wall below the ...
— Ramona • Helen Hunt Jackson
... performance by the Boston Academy of Music in the old Odeon forty years ago were a kind of manual for the intelligent audience. They showed that an elaborate orchestral musical composition might be as serious a work of art, as full of thought and passion, and, in a word, of genius, as a great poem, and that no form of art was more spiritually elevating. They lifted the performance of such music from the category of mere amusement, and asserted for the authors a dignity like that of the master poets. If to some hearers ...
— Early Letters of George Wm. Curtis • G. W. Curtis, ed. George Willis Cooke
... impresses us less as a defense of Socialism than as a work of art. In a literary sense, Mr. Wells has never ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... Norman plain, is as unlike Sicily as may be. But, on another side, the greater Mount of the Archangel may be seen far away floating on its bay, and the position of the chapel itself—old, but modernised and no great work of art—called up for a moment that chapel of Saint Blaise on the Akragantine rocks, which once was the temple of Demeter and her Child. And, if one only had the means of finding out, it may be that the Archangel displaced some Celtic powers, such as those which ...
— Sketches of Travel in Normandy and Maine • Edward A. Freeman
... broader-minded man than many of his day, found this passage especially objectionable. The poem was allowed to see the light only through the interposition of a friend of Milton. Upon such slender chances may hang the life of an incomparable work of art! But it is easy to see that in the turbulent days when Charles the Second had returned to power, after the death of Cromwell, these lines should have been deemed dangerously suggestive, in imputing to monarchs 'perplexity' and 'fear ...
— The Story of Eclipses • George Chambers
... there were none to listen to the words of their preaching, there were thousands who came to admire the production of their skill. Moreover, Huss, who perfectly understood the object of their attempt, and entirely coincided with it, made frequent reference to their work of art in his discourses. In a word, the seed was sown; and but a little while elapsed ere the plant sprang up and ...
— Germany, Bohemia, and Hungary, Visited in 1837. Vol. II • G. R. Gleig
... Westminster and Birmingham. Greenville chewing wine-glasses at table makes no very pleasant figure, any more than a thousand other artists when they are viewed in the body, or met in private life; but his work of art, his finished tragedy, is an eloquent performance; and I contend it ought not only to enliven men of the sword as they go into battle, but send back merchant-clerks with more heart and spirit to ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the mountains, the sublimities of sunsets, and the lessons taught by the flowerets. These things are impressive, but it ought to be possible to give them praise without slandering man's creations, for a God that could make a man that could make a work of art would have to be a better God than one who could merely make ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... great exertion of the mind to appreciate its beauty. Wagner's "Seigfried" and "Parsifal" are altogether too long to be enjoyed thoroughly. The composer would have done well to eliminate a third of each, for as they are produced they strain the attention to the point of fatigue, and no work of art ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... publication of; Leutze's coincidence; passage compared with Bunyan; theme of revenge in; analysis of the romance; as a work of art Scotland and New England Scott, Sir Walter; Hawthorne's estimate of Scuderi; Madeleine de Sebago Lake Sense of form in Hawthorne; in Poe Septimius Felton; symbolism of; origin of "Seven Tales of my Native Land." Shakespere Shelley's Latin verses; The Cenci, ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... of the beholder was as fully and unreservedly satisfied as in looking at a masterpiece of painting or sculpture, and at the same time was soothed and elevated by a sense of amplitude and grandeur such as no single work of art could produce. The glamour of old association that illumines Athens or Venice was in a way compensated by our deep impression of the pathetic transitoriness of the dream of beauty before us, and by the revelation it afforded of the soul of a great nation. For it will to all time remain impossibly ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... Pludderman's celebrated painting, "The Discovery of America by Columbus." Under the laws of Germany, as well as under the rules and regulations of the National Gallery, no person is permitted to lithograph, photograph, or make any sort of a copy of any picture or other work of art in the care or custody of any national gallery, in case when the artist has not been dead for a period of thirty years, without having first obtained the written permission of the legal representative of the deceased artist, coupled with the consent of the ...
— Christopher Columbus and His Monument Columbia • Various
... quite agree with this opinion. I should say, rather, that literature resembles painting in being one of the fine arts, and that when a book, like a picture, is a fine work of art, it has a great chance of ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... who was acknowledged to be the mistress of society at Newport, and was destined some day to be mistress in New York. Reggie and Oliver were "thick," and he had stayed in town on purpose to attend to her attiring—having seen her picture, and vowed that he would make a work of art out of her. And then Mrs. Robbie Walling would give her a dance; and all the world would come to ...
— The Metropolis • Upton Sinclair
... remarked. A work of art may stand very far from Nature, provided its own parts are consistent. Heaven forbid that a critic should decry an author for being fantastic, so long as he is true to ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... eternal gloom. He sees Alcathous in the front aspire: Great AEsyetes was the hero's sire; His spouse Hippodame, divinely fair, Anchises' eldest hope, and darling care: Who charm'd her parents' and her husband's heart With beauty, sense, and every work of art: He once of Ilion's youth the loveliest boy, The fairest she of all the fair of Troy. By Neptune now the hapless hero dies, Who covers with a cloud those beauteous eyes, And fetters every limb: yet bent to meet His fate he stands; nor shuns ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... morning. His body was covered with a shiny coating of yellow mud, and looked like a statue made of bronze. He had a beautiful face, with finely shaped head covered with close curling hair, and looked more like some work of art than a human being. The huge shell holes were half full of water often reddened with human blood and many of the wounded had rolled down into the pools and been drowned. As I went on, some one I met ...
— The Great War As I Saw It • Frederick George Scott
... staircase, or the queenly lady in the next room, forever stepping down from her gilded frame into the midst of tapestry and leather in the library. It may have been that Betty's mother was quite as much a work of art in her way as these other treasures that had come from the Old World. But to Betty Harris, who had slight knowledge of art values, her mother was beautiful, because her eyes had little points of light in them that danced when she laughed, and her lips curved prettily, ...
— Mr. Achilles • Jennette Lee
... a beautiful portrait there," said the Princess sincerely. "Every year for his birthday I give my husband some work of art. If you do not find me too unworthy a subject it shall be ...
— The Idol of Paris • Sarah Bernhardt
... increase of knowledge, the loss of belief in doctrines that were fundamental in Dante's creed, the changes in the order of society, the new thoughts of the world, have not lessened the moral import of the poem, any more than they have lessened its excellence as a work of art. Its real substance is as independent as its artistic beauty, of science, of creed, and of institutions. Human nature has not changed; the motives of action are the same, though their relative force and the desires and ideals by which they are inspired vary ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 1, Hell [The Inferno] • Dante Alighieri
... pin them on the wall, and are received into the landlady's heart at once. I don't know which is the finer study: the picture of his Majesty William III. crossing the Boyne, or the plump little Queen presenting a huge family Bible to an apparently uninterested black youth. In the latter work of art the eye is confused at first as the three principal features approach each other very nearly in size, and Francesca asked innocently, "Which IS the secret of England's greatness—the Bible, the ...
— Penelope's Irish Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... black-puddings—ah! a magnificent black, which I have never managed to produce on my palette. And naturally, the crepine, the small sausages, the chitterlings, and the crumbed trotters provided me with delicate greys and browns. I produced a perfect work of art. I took the dishes, the plates, the pans, and the jars, and arranged the different colours; and I devised a wonderful picture of still life, with subtle scales of tints leading up to brilliant flashes of colour. The red tongues seemed to thrust themselves out like greedy flames, and the black-puddings, ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... of Raveloe," begun about November, 1860, and published early in 1861, is in many respects the most admirable of all George Eliot's works. It is not a long story, but it is a most carefully finished novel—"a perfect gem, a pure work of art," Mr. Oscar Browning describes it. Mr. Blackwood, the publisher, found it rather sombre, and George Eliot replied to him, "I hope you will not find it at all a sad story as a whole, since it sets—or is intended to ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IV. • Editors: Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... with less vehemence in reference to those poems which are generally supposed to be permeated with defiance, scorn, and misanthropy. In "Manfred" and "Cain," it was with Byron a work of art to describe the utterances of impious spirits against the sovereign rule of God. Had he not fallen from high estate as an interpreter of the soul, the critics might have seen here nothing more to condemn than in some of the Grecian tragedies, many passages in the "Paradise Lost," and ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... Nothing but casual variations could permanently improve such a creature; and casual variations will seldom improve it. But if experience can co-operate in forming instincts, and if human nature can be partly a work of art, mastery can be carried quickly to much greater lengths. This is the secret of man's pre-eminence. His liquid brain is unfit for years to control action advantageously. He has an age of play which is his apprenticeship; ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... of rubbish, under vulgar appearances, a product of the marvellous chisel of the Greeks? He sets himself, with a zeal full of respect, to free the noble statue from the impurities which defile it. Every soul of man is the work of art Divine, and every charitable heart is an artist who desires to labor at its restoration. Henceforward we can understand that love of suffering and of poverty, that passion for the galleys and the hospital, which ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... communications (several from abroad) from enthusiasts, bestowing the warmest praise on the writer as a Maker and an Author; and all are unanimous in declaring that the simple and explicit style of the work has enabled them to readily grasp the difficulties pertaining to the Violin as a work of Art. These correspondents (who are quite strangers to me) have also greatly commended the high class appearance of the volume, particularly the excellence of the fine illustrations. Such expressions of approval would have been gratifying ...
— Violin Making - 'The Strad' Library, No. IX. • Walter H. Mayson
... Bowser, while the rest murmured in the effort to admire the work of art. "And is that stuff burning ...
— Blindfolded • Earle Ashley Walcott
... shears I have a personal fancy for the French, hand-made instrument, each one individual, a work of art and a potential legacy to one's horticultural heir, if one doesn't let the village blacksmith monkey with it, as ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Fifteenth Annual Meeting • Various
... themselves, though unquestionably a small race, are wiry and capable of enduring great hardships. They are very skilful artisans, the filigree jewellery of their silversmiths, for example, is unequalled as a work of art by anything of its kind in Europe. They are splendid divers, and seem equally at home in the water as on the land; the smallest coin thrown overboard being brought to the surface in a twinkling. Whatever their original language might ...
— In Eastern Seas - The Commission of H.M.S. 'Iron Duke,' flag-ship in China, 1878-83 • J. J. Smith
... to the Prince's ball having duly arrived from his Secretary the Chevalier O'Sullivan, I ask you to believe that my toilet Tuesday evening was even more a work of art than that of Sunday. In huge disorder scarfs, lace cravats, muffs, and other necessary equipment were littered about the room. I much missed the neat touch of my valet Simpkins, and the gillie Hamish Gorm, whom Major Macleod had put at my service, ...
— A Daughter of Raasay - A Tale of the '45 • William MacLeod Raine
... "There is another work of art connected with this wonderful mechanism," said the count, after Marie had rolled and unrolled the screen several times. "The cord which releases the screen rings a bell in my room. When I hear the bell I shall know ...
— The Nameless Castle • Maurus Jokai
... a work of art and needs a master hand to bring out its noblest qualities. We have good and bad tea, as we have good and bad paintings—generally the latter. There is no single recipe for making the perfect tea, as there are no rules for producing a Titian or a Sesson. Each preparation of the ...
— The Book of Tea • Kakuzo Okakura
... Virgil was a practical farmer; he tells you correctly what to do. But he makes a work of art of it all poetical. He suffuses his directions for stock-raising and cabbage-hoeing with the light of mythology and poetry. He gives you the Golden Age and Saturn's Italy, and makes the soil seem sacred. He had ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... the "left or most northwardly" of the indentures in figure 4, it is more than probable that the opinion of Peters was correct, and that the hieroglyphical appearance was really the work of art, and intended as the representation of a human form. The delineation is before the reader, and he may, or may not, perceive the resemblance suggested; but the rest of the indentures afford strong confirmation of Peters' idea. The upper range is ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... improvement to the home where years gone by and years to come give a sort of permanence to the intangible present. An American is sometimes tempted to fancy that only by this long process can real homes be produced. One man's lifetime is not enough for the accomplishment of such a work of Art and Nature, almost the greatest merely temporary one that is confided to him; too little, at any rate,—yet perhaps too long, when he is discouraged by the idea that he must make his house warm and delightful for a ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... have to produce such passports to show that they are not expatriated, that they are not a break in the unity of the whole. The logical relationship present in an intellectual proposition, and the aesthetic relationship indicated in the proportions of a work of art, both agree in one thing. They affirm that truth consists, not in facts, but in harmony of facts. Of this fundamental note of reality it is that the poet has said, ...
— Creative Unity • Rabindranath Tagore
... the light of the past. The sedate man of affairs who decries athletic sports, and has never taken part in them, cannot understand the wild enthusiasm which prevails between rival teams in a hotly contested event. The fine work of art is to the one who has never experienced the appeal which comes through beauty, only so much of canvas and variegated patches of color. Paul says that Jesus was "unto the Greeks, foolishness." He was foolishness to them because nothing in their experience with their ...
— The Mind and Its Education • George Herbert Betts
... literature in the original, or that the aesthetic qualities of a literature can be fully appreciated only in the original language. Some people, however, maintain that every literary production is primarily a work of art, and consequently that its aesthetic qualities are its most essential qualities: that to teach the classical literature through the medium of translations would be aiming at an imperfect appreciation of its most essential qualities, and would also divert students from the study of its original ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... you what," said Karl, "I could put you up to a thing or two for all that. We live in Modern Europe, you know, and not in ancient Egypt. Now, for instance, why is this beautiful hall, a perfect work of art in its way, so ...
— Fairy Tales from the German Forests • Margaret Arndt
... management of light and shade; the color; the composition and drawing; and finally those technical processes of brush-work by means of which the canvas gets covered, and the idea of the artist becomes visible. All these things are important in some degree; they all go to the making of the complete work of art: and you do not understand the picture, you do not really and fully judge it, unless you know how to appreciate the bearing on the result, of all the means which were used to bring it about. All this adds to your own technical knowledge as well as to your critical judgment, both of ...
— The Painter in Oil - A complete treatise on the principles and technique - necessary to the painting of pictures in oil colors • Daniel Burleigh Parkhurst
... HERKOMER, the Artist, and Dr. W. W. BALDWIN, Nov. 2d, 1878, the former explained to me that when he would execute a work of art, he just determined it with care or Forethought in his mind, and gave it a rest, as by sleep, during which time it unconsciously fructified or germinated, even as a seed when planted in the ground at last grows upward into ...
— The Mystic Will • Charles Godfrey Leland
... is no one place, however we may envy it, which would be indisputably good for us to occupy; much less for us to remain in. The zest of life, like the pleasure which we receive from a work of art, or from nature, comes from undulations—from inequalities; not from any monotony, even though it be the monotony of seeming perfection. The beauty of the landscape depends upon contrasts, and would be lost in one common surface of splendor. ...
— The Crown of Thorns - A Token for the Sorrowing • E. H. Chapin
... Tragedy.' As a 'work of art' it seems to me far superior to either 'Alton Locke' or 'Yeast.' Faulty it may be, crude and unequal, yet there are portions where some of the deep chords of human nature are swept with a hand which is strong ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... the situation is grander than that of the Roman capitol. The edifice itself is worthy of the situation. It has beauty of form and sublimity in proportions, even if it lacks originality in conception. In itself it is a work of art. It ought not to receive in the way of ornamentation any thing which is not a work of art. Unhappily this rule has not always prevailed, or there would not be so few pictures and marbles about us worthy of the place they occupy. But ...
— History of the Thirty-Ninth Congress of the United States • Wiliam H. Barnes
... and Black (METHUEN), by GRACE S. RICHMOND, is what is known to the superior as a serious work of art or that the men (particularly) of her creating are what would be called likely. But there's a sincerity about the writing which one has to respect. Of her two heroes, Red is Redfield Pepper Burns, the rude and rugged doctor, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, March 17, 1920 • Various
... roulette is played there is another swindle—the restaurants. They fleece one frightfully and feed one magnificently. Every dish is a regular work of art, before which one is expected to bow one's knee in homage and to be too awe-stricken to eat it. Every morsel is rigged out with lots of artichokes, truffles, and nightingales' tongues of all sorts. And, good Lord! how contemptible and loathsome this life is with ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... as if they had been upon parade. The glitter of their clear arms shone strangely in the setting sun, and the fire from them went on no otherwise than a continued peal of thunder." Grand picture indeed; but not to be enjoyed as a Work of Art, for it is coming upon us! "The spirits of our Army sank altogether", continues he; "the Foot plainly giving way, Horse refusing to come forward, all things wavering towards dissolution:"—so that Neipperg, to avoid worse, gives the word to go;—and they roll off at double-quick ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... every part of the world (the necessity of a previous provision of habitation, seed, stock, capital), that map will show you, that the uses of the influences of Heaven itself are in that country a work of art. The Carnatic is refreshed by few or no living brooks or running streams, and it has rain only at a season; but its product of rice exacts the use of water subject to perpetual command. This is the national bank of the Carnatic, on which it must have a perpetual credit, or it perishes irretrievably. ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... represented as caressing a swan; and, looking farther, he saw the whole floor was similarly laid in mosaic pictures of mythological subjects. And there were stools and chairs, each a separate design, and a work of art exquisitely composed, and tables much carven, and here and there couches which were invitations of themselves. The articles of furniture, which stood out from the walls, were duplicated on the floor distinctly as if they floated unrippled water; even the panelling of the walls, ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... the Apollo Sauroctonos there are two copies, one in the Vatican, and another in bronze in the Villa Albani. Of the Venus of Cnidos of Praxiteles there are several copies in the Vatican; one in particular, in the Chiaramonte Gallery, No. 112, though very inferior as a work of art, gives the exact pose of the original statue as it appears on the coin of Cnidos. The Venus of the Capitol is a Roman version of the Praxitelean statue; it differs in attitude. Several copies of the Discobolos of Myron are still in existence: ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... prosperity, when it stood on the top of the book-case. By what accident had it become broken? And why had Major Fitz-David's face changed when he found that I had discovered the remains of his shattered work of art in the ...
— The Law and the Lady • Wilkie Collins
... minister to their wants while they produce their immortal pictures or deathless books; whereas, the woman would tend him as carefully were he a crossing-sweeper, and is only following the dictates of an instinct which is loftier than his highest thought and more admirable than his most astounding work of art. ...
— Barlasch of the Guard • H. S. Merriman
... Magdala. In the very centre the corpse of NELSON, enclosed in wood from a mast of the Orient, reposes within the circle of columns in a plain tomb, and underneath a magnificent black and white sarcophagus of the sixteenth century. Let us pause to reflect that this fine work of art, on which Benedetto da Rovanza and his masons spent much labour, was intended by Wolsey for his own monument, but was confiscated with the rest of his goods. To this day no one knows the exact spot where the Abbot of Leicester and ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of St. Paul - An Account of the Old and New Buildings with a Short Historical Sketch • Arthur Dimock
... the astonishment of those within—had Mr. Crewe but known it. An oil painting of the prominent men gathered about the marble-topped table in the centre of the room, with an outline key beneath it, would have been an appropriate work of art to hang in the state-house, as emblematic of the statesmanship of the past twenty years. The Honourable Hilary Vane sat at one end in a padded chair; Mr. Manning, the division superintendent, startled out of a meditation, was upright ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... the historical records of American stamina goes The End of the Trail by James Earle Fraser. No single work of art at the Exposition has attracted more popular applause than this. It has a gripping, manly pathos that makes a direct appeal. The physical vigor of the rider, over-tried but sound, saves it from mere ...
— The Sculpture and Mural Decorations of the Exposition • Stella G. S. Perry
... work of art it is remarkable—almost, indeed, a gallery in itself, comprising as it does portraiture, design, topography, and the delineation of one of the most spirited episodes in religious history. After the magic words "One Pound," it is, of course, to St. George ...
— A Boswell of Baghdad - With Diversions • E. V. Lucas
... by the dexterity with which those nimble fingers took from one cluster and another cluster the very flowers he would himself have chosen; and by the rapid fashion in which they were dressed, fitted, and arranged. The work of art grew apace. ...
— Macleod of Dare • William Black
... as a work of art. He justly held that a poem should have "one purpose, and that the materials of which it is composed should be so selected and arranged as to help enforce it." He distinguished between the moment of inspiration, "when the great ...
— Poets of the South • F.V.N. Painter
... glass of beer. Evidently this is the Grand Turk. And finally by an odalisque, who fills his goblet with the foaming infusion of malt and hops. This odalisque is very fair and stout, and some fair Alsatian damsel has evidently sat as the model. As Tantaine was gazing upon this wondrous work of art he heard a squeaking ...
— Caught In The Net • Emile Gaboriau
... the arrangement seemed very good indeed, but rather for the more practical reason that the proximity of food and drink would very likely have distracted the attention of some of the more hungry visitors to such a degree that the work of art might have been ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... larger scale than any which George Eliot has elsewhere undertaken; and in the career of Tito Melema there is a fuller representation of the development of a character. Considerable as are our author's qualities as an artist, and largely as they are displayed in "Romola," the book strikes me less as a work of art than as a work of morals. Like all of George Eliot's works, its dramatic construction is feeble; the story drags and halts,—the setting is too large for the picture; but I remember that, the first time I read it, I declared to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various
... loops of small pink roses at the foot, heading a triple flounce of white, and on the shoulders and around the top of the bodice. You know for a portrait, madame, you want no epoch-making effect. It should be quite simple, so that in the years to come it may still please the eye as a work of art and not a creation ...
— Abroad with the Jimmies • Lilian Bell
... the nation. The building was completed and in use within ten years from the time of its beginning. The construction of the State-house at Albany, a building not so large, and containing to-day no work of art either in painting or sculpture worthy of notice, has dragged along during thirty years, and cost nearly four times as much as the Berlin edifice; the latter having demanded an outlay of a trifle over five million dollars, and the former considerably ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... d'Oro is of course its greatest possession. Venice has nothing more satisfyingly ornate: richness without floridity. But let no one think to know all its beauty until he has penetrated to the little chapel and stood before Mantegna's S. Sebastian, that great simple work of art by an intellectual master. This noble painting, possibly the last from his brush, was found in Mantegna's studio after his death. Notice the smoking candle-wick at the foot, and the motto which says that everything that is not of God ...
— A Wanderer in Venice • E.V. Lucas
... highest type of metallic value among them. A round copper coin with a serpent stamped on it was found at Palenque, and T-shaped copper coins are very abundant in the ruins of Central America. This too we can understand, for copper was necessary in every work of art or utility. ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly
... now—by "we" I mean intelligent people under sixty—that a work of art is like a rose. A rose is not beautiful because it is like something else. Neither is a work of art. Roses and works of art are beautiful in themselves. Unluckily, the matter does not end there: a rose is the visible result of an infinitude of complicated goings on ...
— Since Cezanne • Clive Bell
... a thought, an idea, must always constitute the significance, the soul of its outward form. The mere delusive imitations, the servile copyings of the actual shapes of reality, are not the proper objects of art. To form a master work of art, the idea symbolized must be pure and noble; the technical execution, faultless. No heavier censure can, however, be passed upon an artist, than that he possesses only the technic or rhetoric of art, without having penetrated to its subtle ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No. V, May, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... this place is celebrated. A picturesque path among plantations and ravines brought us to a beautiful circular basin about forty feet in diameter, bordered by a calcareous ledge, so uniform and truly curved, that it looked like a work of art. It was filled with clear water very near the boiling point, and emitted clouds of steam with a strong sulphureous odour. It overflows at one point and forms a little stream of hot water, which at a hundred yards' distance is still too hot to hold the hand in. A little further on, in a piece of rough ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume I. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... nothing for her," he said, scowling at that work of art. "I do not believe any living man can do anything for her. But I do not say—exactly—that there is ...
— Kilmeny of the Orchard • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... found in the 'Heimskringla.' There are few more signal illustrations in literature of the power of genius to transfuse with its own life a bare mediaeval chronicle, and to create from a few meagre suggestions a vital and impressive work of art. One thinks instinctively, in seeking for some adequate parallel, of what Goethe did with the materials of the Faust legend, or of what Shakespeare did with the indications offered for 'King Lear' and 'Cymbeline' by Holinshed's chronicle-history. And ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... that the lamb had assimilated the lion. For the heir of all literary studies, according to Professor Gates, is the appreciative critic; and he it is who shall fulfill the true function of criticism. He is to consider the work of art in its historical setting and its psychological origin, "as a characteristic moment in the development of human spirit, and as a delicately transparent illustration of aesthetic law." But, "in regarding the work of art under all these aspects, his aim is, primarily, not to explain, ...
— The Psychology of Beauty • Ethel D. Puffer
... critically examined the sleeping man, holding his head a little on one side, whistling softly, and stepping backwards to get a good perspective, but always with contemplative good humor, as if Catron were a work of art, which he (the captain) had created, yet one that he was not yet entirely satisfied with. Then he put a large pea-jacket over his flannel blouse, dragged a Mexican serape from the corner, and putting it over his shoulders, opened the cabin door, sat down on the doorstep, and leaning ...
— Drift from Two Shores • Bret Harte
... prowling furtively about where people are conversing, with ears on the alert and an anxious expression; sometimes it is an old father who thanks you with a glance for a kindly word said in passing, or assumes a despairing expression at the epigram which you hurl at a work of art and which strikes a heart behind you. A face not to be omitted surely, if ever some painter in love with things modern should conceive the idea of reproducing on canvas that perfectly typical manifestation of Parisian life, the opening of the Salon ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... room in deep thought. For the first time he found himself an actor in modern life, which hitherto for him meant digging among excavations, or making romantic restoration for jaded connoisseurs, of some faultless work of art described by Pausanias and hidden for centuries beneath the rubbish of modern Greece. The entire absence of horror appalled him. Even the dignity of tragedy was not there. He was wrestling with hideous melodrama, often described to him by patrons ...
— Masques & Phases • Robert Ross
... It was a work of art in miniature. The crescendo passages were sung relatively with that introductory golden whisper as a standard. For the moment Sylvia forgot that the singer's shoulders were beautifully compact and vigorous. She was visualizing ...
— Children of the Desert • Louis Dodge
... Silvester, but its architectural arrangement contains six circles of subjects, worked like the other in silk and gold, with gold groundings; and both are embroidered on linen. On careful examination of this splendid work of art, I have come to the conclusion that it is English. ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford
... quick emotion, the sudden thrill, bear eloquent witness to that deeper and diviner life in which we all share, but of which we rarely seem aware. This perception of the presence of a man's soul comes to us when we stand before a true work of art. We not only uncover our heads, but our hearts are uncovered as well. Here is one who through all his skill speaks to us in a language which we understand, but which we rarely hear. A great work of art not only liberates ...
— Essays On Work And Culture • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... like a man demented, stopping occasionally to lean against a pew and think it over; then he stood staring at a blank old monument bordered tastefully with skulls and cross-bones, as if it were the finest work of Art he had ever seen, although at other times he held it in unspeakable contempt; then he sat down; then walked to and fro again; then went wandering up into the organ-loft, and touched the keys. But their minstrelsy was changed, their music gone; and sounding one long melancholy chord, ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... Every work of art is the child of its age and, in many cases, the mother of our emotions. It follows that each period of culture produces an art of its own which can never be repeated. Efforts to revive the art-principles of the past will at best produce an art that is still-born. It is impossible for us to ...
— Concerning the Spiritual in Art • Wassily Kandinsky
... perception of our senses, together with his statement concerning the futility of philosophy—these were the two things in him which rendered me such useful assistance in my conceptions of an all-embracing work of art, of a perfect drama which should appeal to the simplest and most purely human emotions at the very moment when it approached its fulfilment as Kunstwerk der Zukunft. It must have been this which Sulzer had in his mind when he spoke deprecatingly of Feuerbach's influence over ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... devotion, you may remind me, even with unfaltering and delighted industry, many thousand artists spend their lives, if the result be regarded, utterly in vain: a thousand artists, and never one work of art. But the vast mass of mankind are incapable of doing anything reasonably well, art among the rest. The worthless artist would not improbably have been a quite incompetent baker. And the artist, even if he does not amuse the public, amuses himself; ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Lincoln's Inn Fields was too far off for a servant of the Council who might have to attend meetings at seven in the morning. He accordingly migrated to Charing Cross, now become again Charing without the cross, this work of art having been an early (1647) victim of religious barbarism. In November he was accommodated with chambers in Whitehall. But from these he was soon ousted by claimants more considerable or more importunate, and in 1651 he removed to "a pretty garden-house" in Petty France, in Westminster, ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison
... Mohawk undergraduate at Oxford to study his language, writes of it in emphatic terms: "To my mind the structure of such a language as the Mohawk is quite sufficient evidence that those who worked out such a work of art were powerful reasoners and accurate classifiers." [Footnote: In a letter to the author, dated Feb. 14, 1882. In a subsequent letter Prof. Muller writes, in regard to the study of the aboriginal languages of this continent: "It has long ...
— The Iroquois Book of Rites • Horatio Hale
... recalling to my memory the most imaginative efforts of Mr. Martin's saepia drawing, and showing how far the painter's fancy may anticipate nature. But, at the gorge of this valley, there stood a sort of watch-tower, as if to guard the entrance, so like a work of art, that even here, where men and kangaroos were equally wild and artless, I was obliged to look very attentively, to be quite convinced that the tower was the work of nature only. A turret with a pointed roof, of a colour corresponding, first appeared through the trees, ...
— Journal of an Expedition into the Interior of Tropical Australia • Thomas Mitchell
... "beetling," that the sun sank in "a cauldron of daffodil chaos," and the like. {2} You may use common words in an unwonted sense, keeping some private interpretation clearly before you. Thus you may speak, if you like to write partly in the tongue of Hellas, about "assimilating the ethos" of a work of art, and so write that people shall think of the processes of digestion. You may speak of "exhausting the beauty" of a landscape, and, somehow, convey the notion of sucking an orange dry. Or you may wildly mix your metaphors, as when a critic accuses Mr. Browning of "giving the ...
— How to Fail in Literature • Andrew Lang
... passions, the most anti-social, the most savage, the most barbarous. So the world judges it more severely than mere gallantry or looseness of manners. In one sense the world is right. A woman in love betrays her nature and fails in her function, which is to be admired by all men, like a work of art. A woman is a work of art, the most marvellous that man's industry ever has produced. A woman is a wonderful artifice, due to the concourse of all the arts mechanical and of all the arts liberal. She is the work of everybody, ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France
... less than 125 years old, and "Don Giovanni" only 122—an inconsiderable age for a first-class work of art compared with its companion pieces in literature, painting, and sculpture, yet a highly respectable one for an opera. Music has undergone a greater revolution within the last century than any other ...
— A Book of Operas - Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... is a work of art. Bless me, the girl must be thirty-seven or thirty-eight now, and just look at her! These photographers have got a trick now, if your face is one of the long kind, of raising the camera, bending your head forward, and firing down at you. So our Minnie becomes ...
— Select Conversations with an Uncle • H. G. Wells
... the artist who painted the picture of me now in your possession, found that it did not give entire satisfaction, he refused to receive any payment for it, saying that he wished to have it back, because, as a work of art, it was valuable to him, and that he would execute another likeness (what a good word execute is, so applied!) upon me, instead of that you have. We have never been able to alter this determination ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... Some of these ecclesiastical figures were very stately and noble, and knelt and bowed, and bore aloft the cross, and swung the censers in a way that I liked to see. The ceremonies of the Catholic Church were a superb work of art, or perhaps a true growth of man's religious nature; and so long as men felt their original meaning, they must have been full of awe and glory. Being of another parish, I looked on coldly, but not irreverently, and was glad to see the funeral service so well performed, ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... best is always cumulative. One's eating and drinking one wants fresh, and for the nonce, right off, and have done with it—but I would not give a straw for that person or poem, or friend, or city, or work of art, that was not more grateful the second time than the first—and more still the third. Nay, I do not believe any grandest eligibility ever comes forth at first. In my own experience, (persons, poems, places, characters,) I discover the best ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... which fronts the White House at Washington, there is an equestrian statue of a very thin, long-headed old man whose most striking physical characteristics are the firm chin and lips and the bristling, upright hair. The piece is not a great work of art, but it gives one a strong impression of determination, if not of pugnacity. Sculptors have not the means to represent the human eye, else this impression might have been made stronger; for the old gentleman whose warlike aspect is here reproduced had a glance like a hawk's. ...
— Andrew Jackson • William Garrott Brown
... corrupted you. I cajoled; I bribed; I held out hopes; and with every one, as with you, I succeeded. It is in that power that the secret of the greatness which is virtue, lies. I had to set about a work of art, of an art strange to you; as strange, as alien as the arts of dead peoples. You are the dead now, mine the art of an ensuing day. All that remains to you is to fold your hands and wonder, as you wondered before the gates of Nineveh. I had to sound the knell of ...
— The Inheritors • Joseph Conrad
... likely that she will be known to posterity. We are indebted for this privilege, as we shall presently explain, to the kindness and courtesy of her husband, Mr. J.W. Cross, who has allowed us to be the first to usher this beautiful work of art to the world. In doing so, we believe it will interest readers of The Century Magazine to learn, for the first time, the exact truth regarding the portraits of George Eliot, and we have therefore obtained from the three artists ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... creepers climbing up it; the third showed a vine with squirrels and woodpeckers half hidden in its branches; and the fourth a clump of bulrushes rising from their leaves. The internal panels of the walls were a fanciful mosaic of carving; every table and chair was a work of art, and exquisitely inlaid with light-colored woods to make a pleasant contrast with the dark walnut. Each door and window betrayed some original invention; some disappeared in the wall, some slid up into the roof, and all were opened and shut by curious wooden bolts—for as Timar ...
— Timar's Two Worlds • Mr Jkai
... been delighted with the appearance of the place in which I found myself. It was like a magnificent cavern of the purest white marble, ornamented with glass stalactites of the most brilliant rainbow hues. I should call it rather a gallery, because it extended up and down to an indefinite distance. No work of art could ...
— Dick Onslow - Among the Redskins • W.H.G. Kingston
... box with frilled border, ornamented with quaint little red-and-green German figures in sugar, and labeled Nurnberg in stout letters, for it had come all the way from that kuchen-famous city. The Lebkuchen I placed on my mantel shelf as befitted so magnificent a work of art. It was quite too elaborate and imposing to be sent the way of ordinary food, although it had a certain tantalizingly spicy scent that tempted one to break off ...
— Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed • Edna Ferber
... pine boards in the dado are two feet in width. In this room are placed many memorials of the poet of interest to visitors. What to him was the most precious thing in the house is the portrait of his mother over the mantel—a work of art that holds the attention of the most casual visitor. The likeness to her distinguished son is remarked by all. One sees strength of character in the beautiful face, and a dignity that is softened by sweetness and serenity ...
— Whittier-land - A Handbook of North Essex • Samuel T. Pickard
... Ariosto—or more exactly with Boiardo's epic. Duke Federigo planned his palace at Urbino just at the moment when the Count of Scandiano had began to chaunt his lays of Roland in the Castle of Ferrara. Chivalry, transmuted by the Italian genius into something fanciful and quaint, survived as a frail work of art. The men-at-arms of the Condottieri still glittered in gilded hauberks. Their helmets waved with plumes and bizarre crests. Their surcoats blazed with heraldries; their velvet caps with medals bearing legendary emblems. The pomp and circumstance of feudal war had not yet yielded ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... present in nowise concerned. Only, I have no respect for the weakness that will outrage a promising bit of narrative for the sake of keeping to the facts. Imbecile! the facts are given you, like the block of marble or the elements of a landscape, as material for the construction of a work of art. Which would you rather be, a photographer or Michael Angelo? "Non vero ma ben trovato" should be your motto; and if you refuse to kill your heroine on the Saturday night because, forsooth, she really did, despite all dramatic propriety, ...
— Archibald Malmaison • Julian Hawthorne
... of the steel." Every swing of the sledge, every plunge into water, every friction on the grindstone, was a religious act of no slight import. Was it the spirit of the master or of his tutelary god that cast a formidable spell over our sword? Perfect as a work of art, setting at defiance its Toledo and Damascus rivals, there is more than art could impart. Its cold blade, collecting on its surface the moment it is drawn the vapors of the atmosphere; its immaculate texture, flashing light of bluish hue; its matchless edge, upon ...
— Bushido, the Soul of Japan • Inazo Nitobe
... circumstances which I had so often witnessed came back to my memory, and I regretted her death as one might regret the destruction of a beautiful work of art. ...
— Camille (La Dame aux Camilias) • Alexandre Dumas, fils
... roughly hewn in reddish wood, coloured scarlet, where the blood streams from the five wounds. Over the head an oval medallion, nailed into the cross, serves as framework to a miniature of the Madonna, softly smiling with a Correggiesque simper. The whole Crucifix is not a work of art, but such as may be found in every convent. Its date cannot be earlier than the beginning of the eighteenth century. As I held it in my hand, I thought—perhaps this has been carried to the bedside of the sick and dying; preachers have brandished it from the pulpit over conscience-stricken ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... it from many sides, we may lose sight for a time of the unity and beauty of the whole composition. This is peculiarly unfortunate, for the poet intends us to view his work as a whole, and to produce his effect with the whole. It is The Tempest that we will remember as a work of art, and, if our studies are fruitful, that will draw us back to it at intervals for many years to come. Before we leave it, we must take it and read it through in a leisurely manner, pausing merely to enjoy its beauty, to smile at its playfulness and to feel our hearts expand under ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 8 • Charles H. Sylvester
... thus permitting her to see his raven locks smoothly parted, with one little curl upon the brow. Dolly prided himself upon that bow, and practised it before his glass, but did not bestow it upon all alike, regarding it as a work of art, fit only for the fairest and most favoured of his female admirers; for he was a pretty youth, ...
— Jo's Boys • Louisa May Alcott
... Indian. There was nothing to do but to point out J. Q. A. Ward's sculptured Indian which stands in the midst of the park, a replica of the one in Central Park, New York, and better mounted, altogether a fine work of art, but— ...
— The Story of Cooperstown • Ralph Birdsall
... Stallbridge, standing by a table and brandishing a document; Singleton Carthew, Esquire, represented in the foreground of a herd of cattle—doubtless at the desire of his tenantry, who had made him a compliment of this work of art; and the Venerable Archdeacon Carthew, D.D., LL.D., A.M., laying his hand on the head of a little child in a manner highly frigid and ridiculous. So far as my memory serves me, there were no other pictures in this exclusive ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... by, when the four choristers of the four churches of the town agreed together to give Lottchen am Hofe.[5] Above all, he was wont to extol the toleration which united the singers in the production of this work of art, for not only the Catholic and the Evangelical but also the Reformed community was split into two bodies—those speaking German and those speaking French. The French chorister was not daunted by the Lottchen, but, as my uncle maintained, sang his part, spectacles ...
— Weird Tales. Vol. I • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... eye, and say: "You don't want to be convinced." This includes the editor of The New York Times Book Review. When he made an egregious blunder by stating that "Derelict" was an unskilled sailor's jingle, a wave of protest reached him. He then printed Walt Mason's letter describing the poem as a work of art and altered his editorial characterization of it to "famous old chanty." In the same breath he wrote that it was not likely that Mr. Allison was the author—but why not likely? It is plain that somebody must have written it. Nobody else's name had ever been ...
— The Dead Men's Song - Being the Story of a Poem and a Reminiscent Sketch of its - Author Young Ewing Allison • Champion Ingraham Hitchcock |
