"Arabesque" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... we always sit; for the great music-room that opens on the verandah and fronts the sea is shut when my guardian is not here. This room looks over the sea, too, but from the side of the house and through an arabesque of trees. The walls are filled with books and flowering bulbs stand in the windows. We have had our tea and the sunlight slants in over the white freesia and white hyacinths. There are primroses everywhere, too, and they make the room seem more full of sunlight. You could hardly ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... colombettes! (I wonder what they may be?) and sent to vie with the variegated carpet of the Turk, and glow upon the arabesque towers of Barbary![2] Was not this a phase of provincial Picard life which an intelligent English traveller might do well to inquire into? Why should this fountain of rainbows leap up suddenly here ...
— Our Fathers Have Told Us - Part I. The Bible of Amiens • John Ruskin
... existence. But, little by little one herb and flower after the other becomes individualized—they are artists living themselves out into hues and lines and parts of a tableau; the vine draws itself in an arabesque which is perfect because self-forming; and the whole harmonize with the sway of sunlight and shadow, with rustling breeze and hurrying ant on the footpath, and chirping birds, so exquisitely that you may feel, as you never have in studying human art or in poetry, ...
— The Continental Monthly , Vol. 2 No. 5, November 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... examination, Master Headley and Tibble both confessed that they could produce nothing equal to it in workmanship, though Kit looked with contempt at the slight weapon of deep blue steel, with lines meandering on it like a watered silk, and the upper part inlaid with gold wire in exquisite arabesque patterns. He called it a mere toy, and muttered something about sorcery, and men who had been in foreign parts not thinking honest weight of English ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte M. Yonge
... in D is Chopin at his happiest. Its arabesque pattern conveys a most charming content; and there is a dewy freshness, a joy in life, that puts to flight much of the morbid tittle-tattle about Chopin's sickly soul. The few bars of this prelude, so ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... ear, he weaves elaborate compositions that by their form appeal also to the mind. This side of music resembles a richer versification; it may be compared also to mathematics or to arabesques. A moving arabesque that has a vital dimension, an audible mathematics, adding sense to form, and a versification that, since it has no subject-matter, cannot do violence to it by its complex artifices—these are types of pure living, altogether joyful and delightful things. They combine life with order, precision ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... "burst upon the town" a month ago. The "Religio Scriptoris"—which a puzzler at Latin might render as "The Religion of a Scribbler"—made a dainty appearance. The title-page was in two colors, with a pretty arabesque border. The type throughout was neatly leaded, with a column for summaries in the old fashion, and a wide margin of imitation hand-made paper. The book was pretty, like the writing, and opposite the title-page was ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (Second Series) • George W. Foote
... chased with gold and silver. The sheaths of their scimetars were richly labored and enamelled, the blades were of Damascus bearing texts from the Koran or martial and amorous mottoes; the belts were of golden filigree studded with gems; their poniards of Fez were wrought in the arabesque fashion; their lances bore gay bandaroles; their horses were sumptuously caparisoned with housings of green and crimson velvet, wrought with silk and enamelled with gold and silver. All this warlike luxury of the youthful chivalry was encouraged ...
— Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada • Washington Irving
... at the end and side, and fully a third was curtained off by a calico curtain, with a gorgeous Cretonne pattern upon it. I was delighted to see a four-post bed, with mosquito bars, and a clean pulu mattrass, with a linen sheet over it, covered with a beautiful quilt with a quaint arabesque pattern on a white ground running round it, and a wreath of green leaves in the centre. The native women exercise the utmost ingenuity in the patterns and colours of these quilts. Some of them are quite works of art. The ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... cognoscere vultus, Area longa patet, sancto contermina Marco, Celsus ubi Adriacas, Venetus Leo despicit undas, Hic circum gentes cunctis e partibus orbis, AEthiopes, Turcos, Slavos, Arabesque, Syrosque, Inveniesque Cypri, Cretae, Macedumque colonos, Innumerosque alios varia regione profectos: Saepe etiam nec visa prius, nec cognita cernes, Quae si cuncta velim tenui describere versu, Heic omnes citius nautas celeresque Phaselos, ...
— Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey through France, Italy, and Germany, Vol. I • Hester Lynch Piozzi
... central portion with Italian roof, and two colonnade side-sections flanked by castellated towers. Five forms of arches span the doors and windows, and the artist has contrived to associate all forms of ornament, running from an approach to the Greek fret down through the Arabesque ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, August, 1878 • Various
... make way for streets of commercial buildings, while the new districts of Kasr-el-Dubara and Ghezireh have arisen to house the well-to-do. Our interest in Cairo, therefore, is centred in the native quarters, where miles of streets and alleys, rich in Arabesque buildings, are untouched except by ...
— Peeps at Many Lands: Egypt • R. Talbot Kelly
... Liszt and all the world after him got that tempo rubato, that playing with the duration of notes without breaking the time, and those arabesque ornaments which are woven like fine embroidery all about the pages of Chopin's nocturnes, and lift what in others are mere casual flourishes into the dignity of interpretative phrases and poetic commentaries ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various
... now seems So tender to my dreams As he, discursive at our mutual desk, Most fervid and most ripe, When dreaming at his pipe, He made the opiate nights grow Arabesque. ...
— Bohemian Days - Three American Tales • Geo. Alfred Townsend
... arabesque this, don't you think? ... And now this movement; isn't it reckless and capricious, like a woman who hesitates and then takes the leap? Yet there's a certain nobility there, a feeling for ideals. You see it, of course.... And all the while this undercurrent of the sensual, and that feline, ...
— The Pit • Frank Norris
... always seemed to us, was the cleverest writer in his way that has ever contributed to the English periodicals. His fugitive lyrics and arabesque romances, half sardonic and half sentimental, published with Hookham Frere's "Whistlecraft" and Macaulay's Roundhead Ballads, in Knight's Quarterly Magazine, and after the suspension of that work, for the most part in the annual souvenirs, are altogether unequaled in the class of compositions ...
— The International Weekly Miscellany, Volume I. No. 8 - Of Literature, Art, and Science, August 19, 1850 • Various
... Peter Paul Rubens, with his facile brush, his acres of canvas, covered with the virile arabesque by which he has transmitted to us the record of a temperament so full of life that it needs no great effort of imagination, before one of his crowded canvases, to imagine the doughty Fleming back in our midst, and taking his place as Jupiter upon his painted Olympus, reawakened to life. Yet, ...
— McClure's Magazine December, 1895 • Edited by Ida M. Tarbell
... peculiarities, "something in the Haroun Alrasched style" that should have a dash of that Arabian spice which pervades every thing in Spain. The author set to work, con amore, and has produced two goodly volumes, with a few "Arabesque" sketches and tales founded on popular traditions. His study was THE ALHAMBRA, which must have inspired him for his task. To quote his own words: "how many legends and traditions, true and fabulous; ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 19, - Issue 549 (Supplementary issue) • Various
... will recount the memoranda that I made, lest memory should be unfaithful. When the third cover is unclosed, in the lowest part of the recess on the right hand, beneath a sliding panel, is a spring, on touching which the whole flies back, and discovers a rare device, beautifully wrought in arabesque relief. So far, in all likelihood, you being his confidential ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... massy gold at each angle: water issued from the mouths of the four lions; and as it fell, formed diamonds and pearls, resembling a jet d'eau, which springing from the middle of the fountain, rose nearly to the top of a cupola painted in Arabesque. ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Complete • Anonymous
... called also, "crewel stitch," as it has no claim to being used exclusively in crewel embroidery). It is most useful in work done in the hand, and especially in outlines of flowers, unshaded leaves, and arabesque, ...
— Handbook of Embroidery • L. Higgin
... more correct imagination than that of the pseudo-Herschel* had created them; and if they had been placed in rank and file, and copied by some skilful painter's hand, one would, without doubt, have exclaimed involuntarily, "What a beautiful arabesque!" ...
— Andersen's Fairy Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... girl keeps up her early habit of sketching heads and characters. Nobody is, I should think, more faithful and exact in the drawing of the academical figures given her as lessons, but there is a perpetual arabesque of fancies that runs round the margin of her drawings, and there is one book which I know she keeps to run riot in, where, if anywhere, a shrewd eye would be most likely to read her thoughts. This book of hers I mean to see, if I ...
— The Professor at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.)
... persistency by Mariotte the cook, can be seen, as in the days when kings were as poor in 1200 as the du Guaisnics are in 1830, four old goblets, an ancient embossed soup-tureen, and two salt-cellars, all of silver; also many pewter plates and many pitchers of gray and blue pottery, bearing arabesque designs and the arms of the du Guaisnics, covered by hinged pewter lids. The chimney-piece is modernized. Its condition proves that the family has lived in this room for the last century. It is of carved stone in the style of the Louis XV. period, and is ornamented with a mirror, let in to the back ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... of Lord Byron, engr. by J.T. Wedgwood from a painting by W.E. West, in arabesque frame, rests on miniatures of Newstead Abbey and Missolunghi (sic) designed by F. Sieurac. The Title-vignette is tomb, harp, willows, etc. A lithograph of letter, April 27, 1819, to the Editor of Galignani's Messenger, is inserted between ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Vol. 7. - Poetry • George Gordon Byron
... made." To them, as first leaders of ornamental design, belongs, of right, the praise of glistenings in gold, piercings in ivory, stainings in purple, burnishings in dark blue steel; of the fantasy of the Arabian roof,—quartering of the Christian shield,—rubric and arabesque of Christian scripture; in fine, all enlargement, and all diminution of adorning thought, from the temple to the toy, and from the mountainous pillars of Agrigentum to the last fineness of fretwork in the ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... more like toys than dwelling-places, they were so very small, rarely of more than one story, the walls whitewashed to such a degree as to be almost blinding. Now and then the monotony was broken by an arabesque window, but, as a rule, there were none opening outward; like all Moorish houses, they had a small inner court upon which doors and windows opened, thus avoiding being overlooked, and promoting the seclusion of the harem, which seems to be ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... Europe was there anything as fine as the hall and grand staircase where the Duchess received her guests. It exceeded my utmost conceptions of magnificence and beauty. The vast size of the apartment, the vaulted ceilings, the arabesque ornaments, the fine pictures, the profusion of flowers, the music, the flourish of trumpets, as the Queen passed backward and forward, the superb dresses and diamonds of the women, the parti-colored full dress of the ...
— Letters from England 1846-1849 • Elizabeth Davis Bancroft (Mrs. George Bancroft)
... Theatre in Philadelphia, while Fanny Ellsler appeared at the Park Theatre in New York City. Ralph Waldo Emerson published the "Dial." Other notable publications in American letters were Poe's "Tales of the Arabesque and Grotesque," Willis's "Loiterings of Travel," Cooper's "Pathfinder," and Dana's ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... the fanciful domed shrine. Upon the facade are mingled, in the true Renaissance spirit of genial acceptance, motives Christian and Pagan with supreme impartiality. Medallions of emperors and gods alternate with virtues, angels, and cupids in a maze of loveliest arabesque; and round the base of the building are told two stories—the one of Adam from his creation to his fall, the other of Hercules and his labors. Italian craftsmen of the quattrocento were not averse to setting thus together, in one frame-work, the myths of our first ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... Another, somewhat more elaborate, gives us 'Burke and Hare! As they were loving friends in life, so in death are they undivided! Erected by their affectionate disciples, Bishop and May.' Besides these there are many others all bearing names of mark and fame. The whole is surrounded by a pretty arabesque composed of crowbars and other implements of burglary, pistols, knives, death's heads and cross-bones, halters, handcuffs, and fetters, ingeniously disposed and prettily intertwined with ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... with the flux, with the use of a template of any ornamental or other desired form, these portions will retain their ordinary appearance, and will show the form of the design very strongly outlined beside the crackled surface. In this manner, letters, arabesque, and other patterns in white or colored glass can be produced with great ease and ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 358, November 11, 1882 • Various
... with what would possibly be called a moral in a tract; never with the ethical narrowness; conveying hints instead of life's larger limitations and that sort of sense which we seem to perceive in the arabesque of time and space. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... was evidently inspired by Raphael's classic figures and arabesques, but the column of design is naively broken by the far perspective of a formal garden. The Italian cartoonist would have built his border, figure and arabesque, one above another like a fantastic column (vide Mr. Blumenthal's Mercury border). The Fleming saw the intricacy, the multiplied detail, but missed the intellectual harmony. But, such trifles apart, the Flemish examples of this ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... colonnade, the whole extent of which was once beautifully adorned by Raphael. These pictures are almost worn away, and so defaced as to be untraceable and unintelligible, along the side wall of the gallery; although traceries of Arabesque, and compartments where there seem to have been rich paintings, but now only an indistinguishable waste of dull color, are still to be seen. In the coved ceiling, however, there are still some bright frescos, in better preservation than any others; not particularly beautiful, nevertheless. ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Real Presence that makes many words unfitting. When we are on the mount of Transfiguration, we do not care much for Peter, James or John. And so, dear, I recommend you to do as I do—if the minister must give us a doctrinal disquisition, or a learned argument, or an elaborate arabesque of fancy work, or an impassioned appeal, let him go his way and do not heed him. I want silence that I may commune with the Real Presence. If the minister does not give ...
— Laicus - The experiences of a Layman in a Country Parish • Lyman Abbott
... describe, so luxuriant, so various, so intricate, one might almost suppose that the matchless tool of the famous Benevanta Cellini had traced its wild and graceful grotesque. The four claws, which are like roots from the stem of the pedestal, partake of the same rich arabesque in their design, and terminate in ...
— The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter
... almost always follow certain styles. These are either heraldic, scriptural, symbolical, floral, or arabesque. ...
— Chats on Old Lace and Needlework • Emily Leigh Lowes
... toilet-cushion freshly encased with more of it, and edged with magic ruffling; the stained top and tied-up leg of a little disabled teapoy, kindly disguised in uniform,—varied only with a narrow stripe of chintz trimming in crimson arabesque,—made pretty with piles of books, and the Scripture scroll hung above it with its crimson cord and tassels; and in the window what she called afterward her "considering-chair," and in which she sat this morning; another ...
— We Girls: A Home Story • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... was enabled to see Omdurman, with Khartoum in the distance. The Mahdi's white, cone-shaped tomb, its dome girt with rings, and ornamented with brazen finials, globe and crescent, shone not six miles away in the midst of miles of mud and straw huts. Four arabesque finials rose, one from each corner of the supporting wall. Before the town was a wall of white tents, the original camping ground of the Khalifa's levies and reinforcements drawn from distant garrisons. Midway to Omdurman, or within ...
— Khartoum Campaign, 1898 - or the Re-Conquest of the Soudan • Bennet Burleigh
... much the more unanimously must have grown the agitation of the feasters; so much the more wild must have been the scene to any European who could have beheld them there, in the strong sun and the strong shadow of the banyan, rubbed with saffron to throw in a more high relief the arabesque of the tattoo; the women bleached by days of confinement to a complexion almost European; the chiefs crowned with silver plumes of old men's beards and girt with kirtles of the hair of dead women. All manner of ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... sculpture, which an Austrian decree had made inalienable! To live on a foundation of piles of campeachy wood worth nearly a million of francs, and have no furniture! To own sumptuous galleries, and live in an attic above the topmost arabesque cornice constructed of marble brought from the Morea—the land which a Memmius had marched over as conqueror in the time of the Romans! To see his ancestors in effigy on their tombs of precious marbles in one of the most splendid churches in Venice, and in a chapel graced with pictures ...
— Massimilla Doni • Honore de Balzac
... now miraculous lustre of the eye, above all things startled and even awed me. The silken hair, too, had been suffered to grow all unheeded, and as, in its wild gossamer texture, it floated rather than fell about the face, I could not, even with effort, connect its arabesque expression with any idea ...
— Selections From Poe • J. Montgomery Gambrill
... Lincoln we had a character of very marked and lofty type, the most suggestive study or sketch of the future American man that has yet appeared in our history. How broad, unconventional, and humane! How democratic! how adhesive! No fine arabesque carvings, but strong, unhewn, native traits, and deep lines of care, toil, and human sympathy. Lincoln's Gettysburg speech is one of the most genuine and characteristic utterances in our annals. It has the true antique simplicity and impressiveness. It came straight from the man, and is as ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... generally found on canvas-bound books; the Symbolical figures, and Portraits, on satin, rarely on velvet. The Floral and Arabesque designs are most common on small and unimportant works bound in satin, but they occur now and then on both canvas and velvet books. The true arabesques have no animal or insect forms among them, ...
— English Embroidered Bookbindings • Cyril James Humphries Davenport
... carefully, while Melky stood at his elbow, watching. The mysterious volume was certainly worthy of close inspection— a small quarto, wonderfully bound in old dark crimson morocco leather, and ornamented on sides and back with curious gold arabesque work: a heavy clasp, also intricately wrought, held the boards together. Lauriston, something of a book lover, whose natural inclination was to spend his last shilling on a book rather than on beef and bread, looked admiringly at this fine specimen of the binder's art as he turned ...
— The Orange-Yellow Diamond • J. S. Fletcher
... with an aspirate, according to the Arabesque guttural. It means what there is as yet no precise name for in England, though the practice is as common as in any tramontane ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... that mechanics and osteology are pure science. On the other hand, melody in music is pure art. You cannot reason about it; there is no proposition involved in it. So, again, in the pictorial art, an arabesque, or a "harmony in grey,"[80] touches none but the aesthetic faculty. But a great mathematician, and even many persons who are not great mathematicians, will tell you that they derive immense pleasure from geometrical ...
— Autobiography and Selected Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... the baroque and arabesque, there is the restaurant of the Hotel Vier Jahreszeiten, a masterpiece of the Munich glass cutters and upholsterers. It is in the very heart of things, with the royal riding school directly opposite, the palace a block ...
— Europe After 8:15 • H. L. Mencken, George Jean Nathan and Willard Huntington Wright
... old communion-tables set up in the reign of Elizabeth are yet remaining in our churches, and are sustained by a stand or frame, the bulging pillar-legs of which are often fantastically carved, with arabesque scroll-work and other detail according to the taste of the age. The communion-table in Sunningwell Church, Berkshire, probably set up during the time Bishop Jewell was pastor of that church, is a rich and interesting ...
— The Principles of Gothic Ecclesiastical Architecture, Elucidated by Question and Answer, 4th ed. • Matthew Holbeche Bloxam
... English effort. The English soldier is very likely to say something like, 'Oh, you'll be wanting to get home to your old woman before that, and asking for a kipper with your tea.' And it is quite likely that the American will be offended in his turn at having his arabesque of abstract beauty answered in so personal a fashion. Being an American, he will probably have a fine and chivalrous respect for his wife; and may object to her being called an old woman. Possibly he in turn may be under the extraordinary ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... of a warm spring day flashed through the open window, and made golden arabesque tracery on the walls, and portraits of the parlour at Huntingdon Hill. The costly crimson damask curtains had long since been cut into shirts for the soldiers, and transported to the army of Tennessee, and air and sunshine entered unimpeded. Electra sat before ...
— Macaria • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... tiles runs a decorative mosaic frieze, by Walter Crane, of an arabesque design on a gold ground. It is a beautiful and fanciful piece of work in itself, and it serves moreover to blend the prevailing colour of the tiles with the gilding of the upper regions. But it does not continue round the fourth side, because over the entrance, above the great ...
— Frederic Lord Leighton - An Illustrated Record of His Life and Work • Ernest Rhys
... Barrington had already heard fair ladies praising the gifts and graces of the young diplomat. He heard him play the piano; and he also heard the appreciation of discerning judgment. He heard him talking with arabesque agility. It was Geoffrey's turn to feel on the wrong side of a vast superiority, and in his turn he repaid the old debt of admiration; generosity filled the gulf and the two became firm friends. Reggie's intelligence flicked the inertia ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... into the shade. The Alhambra was nothing to it! The floor was yellow ochre; the ceiling was sky-blue; the cornices were scarlet, with flutings of blue and yellow, and, underneath, a broad belt of fruit and foliage, executed in an extremely arabesque style. The walls were light green, with narrow bands of red down the sides of each plank. The table was yellow, the chairs blue, and their bottoms red, by way of harmonious variety. But the grand point—the great masterpiece in the ornamentation of this apartment—was ...
— The Wild Man of the West - A Tale of the Rocky Mountains • R.M. Ballantyne
... resorted to by cabinet-makers who copied mosaics with their inlaying, and invented that form known as pietra-dura—polished bits of marble, agates, pebbles and lapis lazuli. Ivory was carved and used as bas-reliefs and ivory and tortoise shell, brass and mother-of-pearl used as inlay. Elaborate Arabesque designs inlaid were souvenirs of the Orient, and where the cabinetmaker's saw left a line, the cuts were filled in with black wood or stained glue, which brought out the design and so gave an added decorative effect. Skilled artisans had other designs bitten into wood by acids, and shading ...
— The Art of Interior Decoration • Grace Wood
... colonnade runs a richly decorated loggia that, with its suggestion of southern influences, enhances the warm, sunny atmosphere of the court. The repeated figure of the flower-decked and garlanded "Flower Girl" is by A. Stirling Calder. A conventionalized frieze in delicately colored arabesque runs between the balcony and the columns, the prevailing motif of which is the griffin. The colonnade is broken by three portals, opening respectively into the Palace of Manufactures on the west, the Palace of Varied Industries on ...
— The Architecture and Landscape Gardening of the Exposition • Louis Christian Mullgardt
... throughout these pamphlets to carry a multiplicity of meaning which brings them almost as close to symbolism as they are to the allegory that Carey claims to be writing (Key, pp. 18, 24 and 29). Collation of Dumpling with its Key clearly reveals (with due allowance for satiric arabesque) a series of allegories moving backwards and forwards through history. At various stages, Sir John Pudding (ostensibly Brawn [or John Brand], the famous cook of the Rummer in Queen Street who appears in Dr. King's Art of Cookery [1708]), ...
— A Learned Dissertation on Dumpling (1726) • Anonymous
... caliphs; but the Arab rapidly introduces characters half Persepolitan, half Egyptian, into the shafts and capitals: in his intense love of excitement he points the arch and writhes it into extravagant foliations; he banishes the animal imagery, and invents an ornamentation of his own (called Arabesque) to replace it: this not being adapted for covering large surfaces, he concentrates it on features of interest, and bars his surfaces with horizontal lines of color, the expression of the level of the Desert. He retains the dome, and adds the minaret. ...
— Stones of Venice [introductions] • John Ruskin
... home with him as a gift. "Or else," he said, "order one with the garden-view of Brazenface, and then they'll have more satisfaction in looking at that than at one of those offensive cockatoos, in an arabesque landscape, under a bronze sky, which usually sprawls over every thing that is papier mache. But you won't see that sort of thing here; so you can't well go wrong, whatever you buy." Finally, Mr. Verdant Green (N.B. Mr. Green, senior, would have eventually ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede
... guide into a room fitted up in Eastern style. Divans made of cushions piled one upon another were placed all around the room, with small carpets spread before them. Light stands of beautiful arabesque work were tastefully distributed in various places, and in the centre played a small fountain fed by aromatic water. The lower part of the room contained a recess, the interior of which was concealed by a semi-transparent screen, which ...
— Godey's Lady's Book, Vol. 42, January, 1851 • Various
... reveal his powerful originality, and the best qualities in which, as a draughtsman, he stood alone. Plainly there was something in common between the working moods of Poe and Dore. This would appear more clearly had the latter tried his hand upon the "Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque." Both resorted often to the elf-land of fantasy and romance. In melodramatic feats they both, through their command of the supernatural, avoided the danger-line between the ideal and the absurd. Poe was the truer worshipper of the Beautiful; his ...
— The Raven • Edgar Allan Poe
... with natural and popular interests, nor stimulated by mutual cooperation with their brother craftsmen, the mason builders, they adopted the fashionable mode of expression invented by the new architects and the painters of the time. Elaborate "arabesque" and other formal designs gave employment to the carvers, in making an infinite repetition of fiddles, festoons, and ribbons, in the execution of which they became so proficient, that their work is more often admired for its exquisite finish than for any ...
— Wood-Carving - Design and Workmanship • George Jack
... Abbey Farm welcomed Josian in due time as a daughter. When she and Alan had been married about three months Josian was surveying a panel of just-completed embroidery in which all the colors in exquisite proportion blended in a gold-green jeweled arabesque. Alan came up behind her and caught the sunlight through it. He asked to borrow it, and reproduced the design in painted glass. That was the first window which he made for ...
— Masters of the Guild • L. Lamprey
... see the olive walls, the unique copper-and-crimson arabesque frieze (his own selection), and the delicate draperies; an open grate full of glowing coals, to temper the sea winds; and in the midst of it, between a landscape by Enneking and an Indian in a canoe in a canyon, by Brush, he saw a somber landscape by a master greater than Millet, a melancholy ...
— Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... cathedral towers these stately pines Uplift their fretted summits tipped with cones; The arch beneath them is not built with stones, Not Art but Nature traced these lovely lines, And carved this graceful arabesque of vines; No organ but the wind here sighs and moans, No sepulchre conceals a martyr's bones, No marble bishop on his tomb reclines. Enter! the pavement, carpeted with leaves, Gives back a softened echo to thy tread! Listen! the choir is singing; all the birds, In leafy galleries beneath ...
— The World's Best Poetry — Volume 10 • Various
... consciousness; but when he leaves the Senate in 1850 I have nothing whatever to go by; and, being by nature both a timid, and, on occasions, by choice a truthful, man, I would prefer to have some foundation of fact, no matter how slender, on which to build the airy and arabesque superstructure of my fancy—especially as I am writing a history. Now I hesitate to give him a wholly fictitious date of death and to invent all of the work of his later years. Would it be too infernal a nuisance for you to hire some of ...
— Roosevelt in the Bad Lands • Hermann Hagedorn
... fountain springs of that happiness which is so essential to her. Merely external emancipation has made of the modern woman an artificial being, who reminds one of the products of French arboriculture with its arabesque trees and shrubs, pyramids, wheels, and wreaths; anything, except the forms which would be reached by the expression of her own inner qualities. Such artificially grown plants of the female sex are to be found ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... when we all get back to New York. And now you just sit down at that piano and play me Debussy's 'Arabesque.'... I know you love it just as much as I do. ...
— Three Soldiers • John Dos Passos
... small tumbler, after the soup. It was excellently well-brewed, and it seemed to me almost worth while to sup the soup for the sake of sipping the punch. The rest of the dinner was catalogued in a bill-of-fare printed on delicate white paper within an arabesque border of green and gold. It looked very good, not only in the English and French names of the numerous dishes, but also in the positive reality of the dishes themselves, which were all set on the table to be carved and distributed by the guests. ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... grotesque Against the sky, behind her seen, Like shapeless shapes of arabesque Wrought in an Oriental screen; And tall, austere and statuesque She loomed before it—e'en as though The spirit-hand of Angelo Had chiseled her to life complete, With chips of moonshine round her feet. And I grew ...
— The Complete Works • James Whitcomb Riley
... feature as one of the most prominent, and to see, in the multitude of trunks darkened above by clouds of foliage, that rise upon him in the prospect, the slim columns of an elder Alhambra, roughened with arabesque tracery and exquisite ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... which by careful investigation can be found. Among others the Arabesque, Chinese fret, Circle, Comb, various forms of the Cross, Mina Khani, Octagon, the S form, Scroll, Serrated leaves, Shah Abbas, the Star,—six or eight pointed,—the Tarantula, Triangle, the Y form, ...
— Rugs: Oriental and Occidental, Antique & Modern - A Handbook for Ready Reference • Rosa Belle Holt
... she holds her place, Her bodice bright is set with Genoa lace; O'er her rich robe, through every satin fold, Wanders an arabesque in threads of gold. From its green urn the rose unfolding grand, Weighs down the exquisite smallness of her hand. And when the child bends to the red leafs tip, Her laughing nostril, and her carmine lip, The royal flower purpureal, kissing there, Hides more than half that young face bright ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... delicate face, that must have been so beautiful, indeed, that was beautiful still, was a lady of middle age. Her seat was low—one of those chairs we are pleased to call, commonly and irreverently, a prie-dieu. Its back was carved in arabesque foliage, and its seat was of rich violet velvet. On a small inlaid table, whose carvings were as beautiful, and its top inlaid with mosaic-work, lay a dainty handkerchief of lace, a bottle of smelling-salts, and a book turned with its face downwards, all close at the lady's elbow. ...
— Verner's Pride • Mrs. Henry Wood
... door-way is at the side, and is Gothic, with a dash of Saracenic in the ornamental mouldings above it. The large window at the extremity of the nave is remarkable for having round arches, which circumstance, together with the traces of arabesque painted ornaments on the columns, led me to think it might have been a mosque; but Dr. Robinson, who is now here, considers it a Christian church, of the time of the Crusaders. The village of Aboo 'l Ghosh is said to be the site of the birth-place of the Prophet Jeremiah, and I can well ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor
... certainly mixed, some very beautiful things rubbing shoulders with modern specimens of clumsy early Victorian furniture. A room at the back was given up to the Delft china, but even this was spoilt by ordinary yellow arabesque wall-paper, on which were hung the rare plates and dishes, and by some gaudy window curtains, evidently recently added. The collection itself, made by Mrs. Koopman at very moderate prices, before experts bought up all the Dutch relics, ...
— South African Memories - Social, Warlike & Sporting From Diaries Written At The Time • Lady Sarah Wilson
... with the oak floor and ceiling. The scattered blues and crimsons of the carpets (repeated in duller tones in the old morocco bindings), the gilded tracery of the tooling, and here and there a blood-red lettering-piece, gave an effect as of some dim rich arabesque flung on to the darkness. At this hour the sunlight made the most of all it found there; it washed the faded carpet with a new dye; it licked every jutting angle, every polished surface, every patch of vellum; it streamed out of the great golden white busts on their pedestals in the windows, ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... and tasteful furniture of the building and rooms. Most of the latter were decorated in white and gold, with myriads of mirrors, rich silk curtains and furniture with all the soft and brilliant colourings of the old Arabesque style. There were fountains everywhere, and the floors were inlaid marble, ...
— The Life of King Edward VII - with a sketch of the career of King George V • J. Castell Hopkins
... is authentic evidence of such symbols being used in ecclesiastical inscriptions, the forms of them will tell nothing. For generally in such cases an antique form of symbol would be assumed, if it were the alteration of a "learned clerk;" or the arabesque taste of the carver of the inscription would be displayed in grotesque forms. We would rather look for genuine than coeval symbols of this kind upon tombs and monuments, and the altar, than upon the building itself; and these will furnish collateral ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 18. Saturday, March 2, 1850 • Various
... dining room she paused to look back at the veranda. She wanted to remember every arabesque that the vines were tracing in silhouette against the moonlit sea; but she could not see anything distinctly. As she left the restaurant some one presented her with a little bunch ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman
... from her through the folding doors into a retiring apartment, set with arabesque designs, and adorned with inlaid tables bearing statues of alabaster and enamel. Purposely he waited before he replied, and was gratified to see how curiously she regarded him when again his glance ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham
... for him to amuse himself with a book till school was over; so he sat down in a corner and looked on with an absent mind. It was a sort of scene which Adam had beheld almost weekly for years; he knew by heart every arabesque flourish in the framed specimen of Bartle Massey's handwriting which hung over the schoolmaster's head, by way of keeping a lofty ideal before the minds of his pupils; he knew the backs of all the books on the shelf running along the whitewashed ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... allowed his thoughts and his eyes to penetrate indiscreetly between the bars of that ancient, padlocked gate, twisted, tottering, fastened to two green and moss-covered pillars, and oddly crowned with a pediment of undecipherable arabesque. ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... stories, poems, essays and critiques which the indefatigable Dreamer was putting out, he found time to publish a collection of his "Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque," in book form. He was also (unfortunately for him) induced to prepare a work on sea-shells for the use of schools—"The Conchologist's First Book," it was called. This was unmistakably a mere "pot-boiler" ...
— The Dreamer - A Romantic Rendering of the Life-Story of Edgar Allan Poe • Mary Newton Stanard
... way his wonders to perform." If the greatest of all his wonders be the human individual, the richness with which the specimens thereof are diversified, the limitless variety of outline, from gothic to classic or flowing arabesque, the contradictory nature of the filling, composed of little and great, of comic, heroic, and pathetic elements blended inextricably, in personalities all of whom can go, and go successfully, must surely ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... waistcoat. As manufacturers of highgrade garments they had accompanied more than one customer to the entertainment described by Benson; but to Elkan the term "ponies" admitted of only one meaning, and this conversational arabesque of flies, little horses, aeroplanes and George DeFrees ...
— Elkan Lubliner, American • Montague Glass
... machines, et les principes c'est l'auteur." When this great palace is at last completed, he will write the science of it in "L'Essai sur les Forces Humaines"; and on the base, he, a child and a laugher, will trace the immense arabesque of the "Contes Drolatiques," those Rabelaisian stories in old French tracing the progress of the language, which he often declared would be his principal claim to fame. In 1842 the name "La Comedie Humaine" was after much consideration given to the whole structure, and in the preface he explains ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... liberal and accommodating to sight-seers than his predecessors, but because he was making very extensive and costly improvements in the buildings and grounds. I have seen nothing yet in England to compare, for ornate carving, with the new gate-way he is making to the park. It is of the finest kind of arabesque work done in stone that much resembles the Caen. This prevention barred me from even a distant view of the once famous residence of Lord Byron, as it could not be ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... young man who, according to custom, begins to read the end of his letters first finds an arabesque of this style at the bottom of a lady's letter, he ought to arm himself with patience and resignation before he reads ...
— Gerfaut, Complete • Charles de Bernard
... balustrade show that it consisted of a series of long quarry stones, on the ridges of which caryatidian pillars, representing the seven-headed serpent, supported other slabs grooved along the rim to receive semi-convex stones with arabesque sculptures, affording a hint of ...
— The English Governess At The Siamese Court • Anna Harriette Leonowens
... away from the record, but the book fell open of itself at a full-page insert of the Decalogue, illuminated by some artless printer with gaudy splotches of gold, red and blue and green initials, and silly curlicues of arabesque, as if the man had been ignorant of what they meant, those ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... engravers, who employed purely ornamental variations of line; thus in Plate IV., opposite Sec. 137, the drapery is sufficiently distinguished from the grass by the treatment of the latter as an ornamental arabesque. The grain of wood is elaborately engraved by Marc Antonio, with the same purpose, in the plate given in your ...
— Ariadne Florentina - Six Lectures on Wood and Metal Engraving • John Ruskin
... gold threads, through the dress, the flesh, the atmosphere, in Titian's Lace-girl, that staining of the whole fabric of the thing with a new, delightful physical quality. This drawing, then—the arabesque traced in the air by Tintoret's flying figures, by Titian's forest branches; this colouring—the magic conditions of light and hue in the atmosphere of Titian's Lace-girl, or Rubens's Descent from the Cross:—these essential pictorial qualities must first of all delight the sense, ...
— The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... monuments save that they are none of them in very good taste, the more interesting being those to Lady Digges, and a member of the Fogg family, both of the early seventeenth century, in which the Purbeck has been covered with a charming arabesque and ...
— England of My Heart—Spring • Edward Hutton
... despairingly awaited the apotheosis. His eyes were sated by the miracles of harmonies—noiseless harmonies. It was a new art, and one for the peoples of the earth. Never had the hues of the universe been so assembled, grouped, and modulated. And the human eye, adapting itself to the new synthesis of arabesque and rhythm, evoked order and symbolism from these novel chords of colour. There were solemn mountains of opalescent fire which burst and faded into flaming colonnades, and in an enchanting turquoise effervescence became starry spears and scimiters and sparkling shields, and finally ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... room, lit by a lamp on the centre table and candles elsewhere, was decorated and fitted up with cost and in a taste not English. He could see, for instance, that the ceiling was painted, and the walls were not papered, but painted in panels between arabesque pilasters. ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... sculptured arabesque to-day, But unhewn strength in mighty play, That heaves the ship on bursting billow And smites the ...
— Song-waves • Theodore H. Rand
... young girl, who continued devotedly attached to him notwithstanding his many aberrations, until her death in 1847. The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym appeared in 1838, and in 1839 P. became ed. of the Gentleman's Magazine, in which appeared as Tales of the Arabesque and Grotesque many of his best stories. In 1845 his famous poem, The Raven, came out, and in 1848 Eureka, a Prose Poem, a pseudo-scientific lucubration. The death of his wife gave a severe shock to his constitution, and a violent drinking bout on a visit to Baltimore ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... of the Hudson. The river, lonely as the sky, seemed to drift oily and sluggish down to plunge beneath the city at the lower end of the Tappan Zee. Allan Dane came over New York, gazed down at the ruin of its soaring towers, at the leaping arabesque of its street bridges. He peered into vast rifts of tumbled, chaotic concrete and steel. Nothing moved in all that spreading wonder that had ...
— When the Sleepers Woke • Arthur Leo Zagat
... were two Louis XIV. chairs that had really come from France. There were some square, heavy pieces of furniture that we should call Eastlake now. And the extravagant thing was a Brussels carpet with a scroll centerpiece and a border in arabesque. ...
— A Little Girl in Old Boston • Amanda Millie Douglas
... beautifully wrought and covered with precious stuffs, embroidered line and jewels. With an instinct given by paternity, the old man always chose his presents among the works of that fantastic order called arabesque, which, speaking neither to the soul nor the senses, addresses the mind only by ...
— The Hated Son • Honore de Balzac
... exceptionally rich in stories adapted to the juvenile mind, among which the most prominent are Mrs. Whitney's "Faith Gartney's Girlhood," Miss Alcott's "Little Women," and Mr. T.B. Aldrich's "Story of a Bad Boy." Edgar Allan Poe's "Tales of the Grotesque and the Arabesque," are remarkable for intensity and vividness of conception, combined with a circumstantial invention almost equal to that of Defoe. Mrs. Burnett and Mr. J.W. De Forest are still writing excellent novels of American life; and Mr. Henry James, Jr., is studying that peculiar form ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... The second hall, also for servants, gives tokens of increasing splendors in the richer decorations of the walls and the more elaborate mosaic of the floor. We next entered the audience chamber, in which the court-marshal receives the guests. The ceiling is of arabesque ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume V (of X) • Various
... quality. Among them is a group of four and eight-hand works for two pianos, as well as duets for a single instrument. Among her most important solo works are a sonata, an Etude Symphonique, a Valse Caprice, a Guitarre, an Arabesque, six Etudes de Concert, five Airs de Ballet, containing the well-known Scarf Dance, six Romances Sans Paroles, and six humourous pieces. She has also written a few selections for ...
— Woman's Work in Music • Arthur Elson
... the authorized version, is printed in purple and red ink, and ornamented with Arabesque ...
— The Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana - Translated From The Sanscrit In Seven Parts With Preface, - Introduction and Concluding Remarks • Vatsyayana
... in which a dozen card-tables were arranged, and thence into the receiving room. This was a large room, with a splendidly inlaid and polished floor, the walls covered with crimson satin, the cornices heavily incrusted with gold, and the ceiling beautifully painted in arabesque. The massive fauteuils and sofas, as also the drapery, were of crimson satin with a profusion of gilding. The ubiquitous portrait of the Emperor was the only picture, and was the same you see everywhere. This crimson room had two doors upon the side facing the three windows: The ...
— Memoir of John Lothrop Motley, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... spread, the walls were hung, with silken fabrics fine, And arabesque and lotus-flower bore each the broidered sign Of jewels plucked from land and sea, and red ...
— The Mistress of the Manse • J. G. Holland
... Albigenses; here is the Archbishop's fortified palace, still capable of withstanding a siege if there were no artillery; here are the old houses, one of pre-Gothic construction with very broad Romanesque window, slender columns and storied capitals, billet and arabesque mouldings; another of the sixteenth century quite encrusted with carved wood; and here are the dirty little streets like crooked lanes, where old women, who all through the summer months, Sundays excepted, give their feet an air-bath, may ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... wish to associate with the seat of a bishopric that is still so historic, and was formerly so important and even quasi-regal. Here, however, you should notice, just as in the great neighbour church of St. Jacques, the remarkable arabesque-pattern painting of the severies of the vault, and the splendour of the sixteenth-century glass. St. Jacques, I think, on the whole is the finer church of the two, and remarkable for the florid ornament of its spandrels, and for the elaborate, pendent cusping of the soffits of its arches—features ...
— Beautiful Europe - Belgium • Joseph E. Morris
... that Schiller, notwithstanding all his admiration of Kant and his prompt recognition of the far-reaching importance of Kant's doctrine, could not be perfectly satisfied with a philosophy which decreed that an arabesque is more beautiful than any woman, and that morality cannot be beautiful at all, except in some mystical poetic sense. Nor could he be content with Kant's sensus communis aestheticus, which seemed to leave the beautiful finally a matter of taste. His mental attitude ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... countermarching, sending off scouts into the far distance and foraging-parties to scour the yellow fields of air, pitching their tents and placing sentinels on guard around the camp,—amusing myself with fashioning quaint, arabesque fancies,—a sort of intellectual whittling-habit I have when idle,—I was roused from my reverie by the creaking of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... Maulevrier, grand senechal of Anjou, Poitou and Normandy. He was killed at the battle of Montlhery, the 16th july 1465. This monument is remarkable by its graceful proportions, its elegance and the delicacy of its architecture. It is composed of two pilasters of the arabesque style, supporting a pointed arcade, surmounted by a pediment; the whole of it is in open work and decorated on all sides with the initials PB, in gothic letters. The niche of the tomb is about five feet wide by about four deep. Its height is six feet ...
— Rouen, It's History and Monuments - A Guide to Strangers • Theodore Licquet
... Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque. Literati of New York. Conchologist's First Book (condensed from Wyatt). Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. Raven and other Poems. Eureka, a Prose Poem. ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly
... machine has distinct limitations; that it is better suited to certain pieces than to others. They find that music may be performed on it with the more triumphant success the less human it is and the nearer it comes to the soullessness of an arabesque. The best operator, by pumping or pulling stops or switching levers, cannot entirely succeed in imbuing it with the breath of life. The disquieting fact remains that the more a certain piece demands to be filled with soul, the thinner and more ghost-like ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler
... it all, she adored this mood of London: its nights of rain were sheer enchantment, arabesque, nights of secrecy and stealth, mystery, and romance under the rose. On nights such as this lovers prospered, adventures were to the venturesome, ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... once more their cloaks vanished or were discarded, so their silver-bright figures advanced, retreated, weaving a way from one arabesque to another. First about the outer rim and then in, by spirals and circles. No light except the crimson glowing rivulets on the floor, the silver bodies of the Foanna moving back and ...
— Key Out of Time • Andre Alice Norton
... revealed several places on the frame of the mirror over the mantel, where the gold had fallen away and had been replaced by an inferior sort of gilding. By some subtle trickery with the lace curtain that hung at the open window, it laid an arabesque of delicate shadow upon the polished floor. In the room beyond, where Madame's crystal ball lay on the mahogany table, with a bit of black velvet beneath it, the sun had made a living rainbow that carried colour and light into the hall and ...
— Master of the Vineyard • Myrtle Reed
... is a florid arabesque, reminding one of a fungus. If you can imagine a toadstool in joints, an interminable string of toadstools, budding and sprouting in endless convolutions—why, that is something ...
— The Yellow Wallpaper • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... and madrepore- stone, whose magnificence challenges all description. It might be said that there was a quantity of fairy flower and kitchen gardens in the sea, full of gigantic flowers, blossoms, and leaves, varied by fungi and pulse of every description, like open arabesque work, the whole interspersed with pretty groups of rocks of every hue. The most lovely shell-fish were clinging to these rocks, or lying scattered on the ground, while endless shoals of variegated fish darted in and out between them, like ...
— A Woman's Journey Round the World • Ida Pfeiffer
... they forced the feeble lock, and made a clean sweep of all portable property that lay within easy reach. The shawl formed the most valuable prize. It was very admirable, indeed, being of a dappled fawn colour, with an arabesque border of shaded chocolate and amber; but in the eyes of its new owners its greatest charm was its weight and thickness. Judy Quinlan declared, pinching a fold fondly between a finger and thumb, that just the feel of it done your heart good. Her own shawl was really only a ragged ...
— Strangers at Lisconnel • Barlow Jane
... need be said in commendation of it. Admitting every degree of merit to our present fashionable binders, and frankly allowing them the superiority over De Rome, Padaloup, and the old school of binding, I cannot but wish to see revived those beautiful portraits, arabesque borders, and sharp angular ornaments, that are often found on the outsides of books bound in the 16th century, with calf leather, upon oaken boards. These brilliant decorations almost make us forget the ivory crucifix, guarded with silver doors, which is frequently introduced in the interior of ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... residency. The German consulate also is on the river-front. As in all Mahommedan cities, the mosques are conspicuous objects. Of these very few are old. The Marjanieh mosque, not far from the minaret of Mostansir, although its body is modern, has some remains of old and very rich arabesque work on its surface, dating from the 14th century. The door is formed by a lofty arch of the pointed form guarded on both sides with red bands exquisitely sculptured and having numerous inscriptions. The mosque of ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... off before her mother had time to change her mind, and John-James began slowly to rinse the china through the darkened water, on whose surface the grease lay in a shimmering arabesque. Annie went round the kitchen rasping the chairs over the stone floor and making futile dabs at their seats with her apron. She had that curious uncertainty of aim usually seen in dogs, who never seem to be sure of touching the object at which ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... a mantle, on which were wrought flowers, animals, and human beings, entwined in an arabesque manner. She had large spectacles on, and beside her lantern she held a bag filled with old gilt cards—apparatus for witchcraft, and all the amulets of superstition: leaning on her crutch, wrinkled and shivering, she was, however, soaring, like ...
— Pictures of Sweden • Hans Christian Andersen
... the top of a swelling green hill, and saw the splendid vision of Loch Tay lying beneath him—an immense plate of polished silver, its dark heathy mountains and leafless thickets of oak serving as an arabesque frame ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott
... the pomp of a proud palace; writ In tinted arabesque on walls that gems o'erlay, The names of caliphs were who once held court in it, Their baths and bowers were mine to dwell in ...
— Poems • Alan Seeger
... a larger size than usual, judging of it by comparison with the dimensions of modern volumes. The binding was of blue velvet, with clasps of silver worked in beautiful arabesque patterns, and with a lock of the same precious metal to protect the book from prying eyes. When I took it up, I found that the lock ...
— The Law and the Lady • Wilkie Collins
... dramas as a child its astronomy lessons, without feeling. She saw Siegmund and Sieglinde entwined in that wondrous Song of Spring, and would have laughed in your face if you hinted that all this was anything but many-colored arabesque. It was her daily bread and butter, and like one of those pudic creatures of the Eleusinian mysteries she lived in the very tropics of passion, yet without one pulse-throb of its feverishness. ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... rich burnt-sienna tint of the carvings contrasts finely with the golden-brown of the massive marble walls,—a combination which is shown in no other building of the Middle Ages. The sunken rosettes, surrounded by raised arabesque borders, between the caryatides, are sculptured with such a careful reference to the distance at which they must be seen, that they appear as firm and delicate as if near ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... principles which I have set forth very summarily, Claude Monet arrived at painting by means of the infinitely varied juxtaposition of a quantity of colour spots which dissociate the tones of the spectrum and draw the forms of objects through the arabesque of their vibrations. A landscape thus conceived becomes a kind of symphony, starting from one theme (the most luminous point, f.i.), and developing all over the canvas the variations of this theme. This investigation is added to the habitual preoccupations of the landscapist study of ...
— The French Impressionists (1860-1900) • Camille Mauclair
... wanted to see it. The natives call it Mars-al-Kabia. In fact the Street in Cairo was all the curiosities of Egyptian Cairo's streets crowded into one Chicago Cairo Street. It was a splendid sight with its gardens and squares, its temples, its towers and minaret made in the most Arabesque architecture and ornamented with the most fantastic draperies. The inhabitants had been directly transported from old Cairo across the sea to Midway Plaisance. There were the importunate street venders, the donkey boys begging and pulling at the clothing of the visitors, ...
— The Adventures of Uncle Jeremiah and Family at the Great Fair - Their Observations and Triumphs • Charles McCellan Stevens (AKA 'Quondam')
... Opposite the tower is the Chapel of the Dukes of Savoy, 14th cent. Fee, fr. The three tall windows are filled with beautiful old glass. The roof is covered with stone groining, with cleverly-executed arabesque painting between the nervures. The roof of the cathedral is similarly painted, but on a blue ground. It is situated near the Rue de Boigne, and was built in the ...
— The South of France—East Half • Charles Bertram Black
... lovely smile, and an arch twinkle of her eye towards me, and then launched forth in full tide, accompanying her sweet and mellow voice on that too much neglected instrument, the guitar. It was a wild, irregular sort of ditty, with one or two startling arabesque bursts in it. As near as may be, the following conveys the ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... are covered with a coat of fine plaster, upon which were many Cufic inscriptions in bas-relief, running all round the wall, which was embellished also by numerous elegant Arabesque ornaments; a few traces of these, as well as of the inscriptions, still remain. The interior court-yard of the mosque is covered with the ruins of the roof, and with fragments of columns, among ...
— Travels in Syria and the Holy Land • John Burckhardt
... a very fine point. It was not polished and clear like European steel, but dull, rough, and dead, full of a curious-looking grain, as if two or three different kinds of metal had been welded together, while up near the hilt there was a beautiful arabesque pattern in gold. ...
— The Rajah of Dah • George Manville Fenn
... gives to this wonderful facade the effect of a dream. The baluster of this staircase forms a spiral connecting itself by a square landing to five of the six sides of the tower, requiring at each landing transversal corbels which are decorated with arabesque carvings without and within. This bewildering creation of ingenious and delicate details, of marvels which give speech to stones, can be compared only to the deeply worked and crowded carving of the Chinese ivories. Stone is made to look like lace-work. The ...
— Catherine de' Medici • Honore de Balzac
... patience to the proof, by remaining much longer than any one else ever did, in admiring the pillar, and rummaging the drawers of the cabinets. At last, the musk with which they are impregnated obliged me to desist, and I moved on to a suite of saloons, with low arched roofs, glittering with arabesque, in azure and gold. Several medallions appear amongst the wreaths of foliage, tolerably well painted, with representations of splendid feasts and tournaments for which Florence was once ...
— Dreams, Waking Thoughts, and Incidents • William Beckford
... mermaids on the ceiling the Sala das Sereias. The pointed door is enclosed in a square frame by a band of narrow dark and light tiles with white squares between, arranged in checks, while in the spandrels is a very beautiful arabesque pattern in black ...
— Portuguese Architecture • Walter Crum Watson
... themselves felt in me, to crop up in my work. I would start on a picture with a clear settled design; when it was finished, I would notice that by some unconscious freak I had introduced a figure, an arabesque, always something which made the whole incongruous and bizarre. I discovered the cause during the week after I received your last letter. The thoughts, the ideas were yours; better than mine perhaps, but none the less death ...
— Ensign Knightley and Other Stories • A. E. W. Mason
... pat the arabesque of shining hair that lay coiled so submissively against either glowing cheek. "Oh, my, no! I just thought I'd dress up in case Angie Hatton drove past in her auto and picked me up for a little ride. So's not ...
— Half Portions • Edna Ferber
... and what had happened. The blue door in the wall—this the house that adjoined the garden. She had slept—how long she did not know, but the beams of sunlight were orange in color and made a brilliant arabesque upon an embroidered hanging on the opposite wall. She must have slept long. Her dreams returned to her, fleeting and elusive, like the ignes fatui which had been a part of them. The whir of wheels, the vision of ...
— The Secret Witness • George Gibbs
... while attached to the American Legation at Lisbon. Straight, double-edged, with a cord-effect gilded hilt and double shell guard, one side of which is hinged. The ricasso of the blade is gilded and the blade is covered with arabesque work in gold and blue for about nine inches near the hilt and bright polished from there to the point. In general shape, resembles the small-swords ...
— A Catalogue of Early Pennsylvania and Other Firearms and Edged Weapons at "Restless Oaks" • Henry W. Shoemaker
... modern restorative processes commonly disfigured no more than this, it is a pity that the dust and cobwebs, and a little of the grime of ages, were not more often removed. Here is the very excess of dog-tooth, arabesque, and grotesque carving, never found in connection with a building which is constructively decorative. Here also is an ornate frieze of no great depth and possessing none of the beauties of the two other distinct elements. As there is no triforium in the nave proper, ...
— The Cathedrals of Northern France • Francis Miltoun
... bright blurs of light upon the primrose-tinted wall. A large arm-chair stood by the side of the burnt-out fire, shadowed over by the huge marble mantel-piece, the back of which was carried up twining and curving into a thousand arabesque and armorial devices until it blended with the richly painted ceiling. In one corner a narrow couch with a rug thrown across it showed where the faithful Bontems had spent ...
— The Refugees • Arthur Conan Doyle
... two women and Don Paolo stood looking on, occasionally shifting their position to get a better view of the work. Gianbattista was mounted upon a ladder which leaned against one of the marble pillars at the entrance of the side chapel closed by the grating. A heavy piece of arabesque work had just been got into its place, and was tied with cords while the young man ran a screw through the prepared holes to fasten one side of the fragment to the bar. He was awkwardly placed, but he had sent the men to uncover and clean ...
— Marzio's Crucifix and Zoroaster • F. Marion Crawford
... sufferings of our lowest class. But the mind refuses to consider the two states as analogous, and insists upon thinking that the state of physical and moral degradation often found amongst our working classes, with the arabesque of splendour and luxury which surrounds it, is a more shocking thing to contemplate than a pressing scarcity of provisions endured by a wandering horde of savage men sunk in equal barbarism. When we follow men home, who have been cooperating with ...
— The Claims of Labour - an essay on the duties of the employers to the employed • Arthur Helps
... that these strange designs are not only the manifestation of coquetry or vanity but that they are also made to frighten away the Evil Spirit you may well imagine how they each try to arabesque their skin in a more horrible way than the other, in order to look ...
— My Friends the Savages - Notes and Observations of a Perak settler (Malay Peninsula) • Giovanni Battista Cerruti
... exclamation as he turned his face towards her. Round his eyes were traced two yellow circles, and his mouth was enclosed by a parenthesis of vermilion; an arabesque pattern adorned ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe
... understand the curiously carved windows cut in arabesque-work of marble. (India) or basalt (the Hauran) and provided with small panes of glass set in emeralds where tin would be ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... The secretary absently drew an arabesque on the blotting-pad. "Of course they'll keep it up longer if you write yourself," ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... usual text, "Veni, Electa mea, et ponam te in thronum meum," &c. She bends slightly forward, and her hands are lifted in adoration. Above and around the circular glory the emblematical vine twines in arabesque form; among the branches and leaves sit peacocks and other birds; the peacock being the old emblem of immortality, as birds in general are emblems of spirituality. On each side of the glory are nine adoring angels, representing the nine choirs of ...
— Legends of the Madonna • Mrs. Jameson
... a strange "arabesque pattern," as it was called, with no special form,—so it seemed to my eyes,—bringing in gorgeous colors, but set in no shape which Nature ever produced, either above the earth or in metals or crystals hid far beneath. How ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, No. 38, December, 1860 • Various
... whose friendship I am indebted for many pleasant hours, is an extremely agreeable man, possessed of no small talent for poetry, music, and painting. At his house I really saw for the first time flower-painting elevated by a poetical idea. In one of his rooms he has introduced an arabesque of flowers which presents us with the flora of the whole year. It commences with the first spring flowers, the crocus, the snow drop, and so on; then come the summer flowers, then the autumn, and at length the garland ends with the red berries ...
— The True Story of My Life • Hans Christian Andersen |
