"Arabesque" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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 labours. Italian craftsmen of the quattrocento were not averse to setting thus ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... Animals, real and fictitious, flowers, leaves, fruit, the human form, etc., were conventionalized and made to contribute their part to enhance the beauty of the whole. Some of the principal characteristics of the Cinquecento style are the delicate arabesque scroll work, the profusion and beauty of the curves, its admirable variations of standard classic ornaments, such as the anthemion and scroll. The coloring, also, was one of its most pleasing features. This style flourished principally in Italy and France. Farnese Palace ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 598, June 18, 1887 • Various
... 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 ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... 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 seen ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... such ideas as may occur to me, in order that you may have the picking and choosing amongst them, with the chance of finding something to your mind—something which may assist you to a decision. Artists in arabesque get an idea by watching the shifting forms of the kaleidoscope; in the same manner you hope—if I will but turn my mind about a little—that some lucky adjustment of its fragments of observation may help you to a serviceable thought or two. At all events, you shall ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • 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
... center. Perpetual shadow reigned on the northern and western faces of these towering Nights—not enough warmth and sunshine reaching them in the cold months to check the growth of the ever-lengthening icicles hanging from the jutting cliffs, or melt the arabesque frost-forms with which the many dashing cascades decorated the adjacent rocks and shrubbery. Occasionally we would see where some little stream ran down over the face of the bare, black rocks for ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... attempted to leave the carriage, but the shrieks and kicks became so vigorous, that she was obliged to put the child down. The pages, gentlemen, and ladies in waiting, stared in astonishment as her majesty went by, holding the refractory little peasant by the hand, his rosy cheeks covered with many an arabesque, the joint production of tears and dirt. Little cared Jacob for the splendor around him; still less for the caresses of ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... Columns, arabesque ceilings charged with gilding, light pieces of sculpture applied on blue and violet grounds, imitating cameo, china, or enamel; every thing excites astonishment, and concurs in calling to mind the first epoch of the regeneration of the arts ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon
... 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 ...
— Catherine de' Medici • Honore de Balzac
... made a great heap of jewels on the buhl top of the table, above the intricate arabesque of silver ...
— The Sleuth of St. James's Square • Melville Davisson Post
... a portrait 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, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Vol. 7. - Poetry • George Gordon Byron
... Poor fellow, he was much comforted by these thoughts, because, had it been otherwise, how terrible would have been his fate!—either, on the one hand, to marry her and go and dwell with her savage relations—perhaps be compelled to paint his visage scarlet with arabesque devices in charcoal, and go on the war-path against the white man; or, on the other hand, to introduce his Indian bride into the salons of civilisation, with the certainty of beholding the sneer of contempt ...
— The Rover of the Andes - A Tale of Adventure on South America • R.M. Ballantyne
... at the business of selling a girl, neither was he a stranger to the house to which he had taken me. For, after breakfast, he showed me into a little room with one quaint, Arabesque window. In this room there was a bath, and every toilette requisite, while, from a tin box that he brought in, he took out a number of most exquisite outer and under garments. Telling me to make ...
— The Mark of the Beast • Sidney Watson
... Autour de cette enfant l'herbe est splendide et semble Pleine de vrais rubis et de diamants fins; Un jet de saphirs sort des bouches des dauphins. Elle se tient au bord de l'eau; sa fleur l'occupe. Sa basquine est en point de Genes; sur sa jupe Une arabesque, errant dans les plis du satin, Suit les mille detours d'un fil d'or florentin. La rose epanouie et toute grande ouverte, Sortant du frais bouton comme d'une urne ouverte, Charge la petitesse exquise de sa main; Quand l'enfant, allongeant ses levres ...
— La Legende des Siecles • Victor Hugo
... 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
... like some very fine pictures, are best at a distance. But Leonora is not one of these: the nearer you approach, the better you like her; as in arabesque-work you may admire the beauty of the design even at a distance, but you cannot appreciate the delicacy of the execution till you examine it closely, and discover that every line is formed of grains of gold, almost imperceptibly fine. I am glad that the ...
— Tales And Novels, Vol. 8 • Maria Edgeworth
... 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, ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... in length, terminated, instead of tassels, in two tiny Indian lamps of gold filigreed-work, marvellously finished. By one of those ingenious combinations, so common in barbarous countries, these lamps served also to burn perfumes. Plates of blue crystal, let in between the openings of the arabesque, and illumined by the interior light, shone with so limpid an azure, that the golden lamps seemed starred with transparent sapphires. Light clouds, of whitish vapor rose incessantly from these lamps, and spread all around their ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... that 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, this decoration is, ...
— The Cathedrals of Northern France • Francis Miltoun
... 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 ...
— Masters of the Guild • L. Lamprey
... touch 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 ...
— Wood-Carving - Design and Workmanship • George Jack
... capital was a no more propitious place to make one's fortune than the smaller town of Leipsic. However he was able to compose a number of works which have become among the best known and beloved of all, including the "Arabesque," "Faschingsschwank," or "Carnival Strains from Vienna," the "Night Pieces," Op. ...
— The World's Great Men of Music - Story-Lives of Master Musicians • Harriette Brower
... drew a little book from my pocket. In this little book John had copied out for me some sweet quaint rhymes which were favourites of his and mine, and because I had thought the writing and the writer could never be glorified enough, I had wrought round the margin of the pages a border of fanciful arabesque, which I had filled in with colours ...
— The Late Miss Hollingford • Rosa Mulholland
... 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, ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... 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 jealous of the dusk, To see it softly touch her face, As lover-like, with fond ...
— The Complete Works • James Whitcomb Riley
... of the British 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 Khaseki, supposed to have been an old Christian church, is chiefly distinguished for ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... Porte or gateway, Charles V., in 1541, stayed two days and a night on his return from his unsuccessful expedition against Algiers. Overtaken by a storm, he had taken refuge in the Gulf of Santa Manza. The door of the house, decorated with an arabesque on marble, is in the narrow side street. In the Place d'Armes are the church of San Domenico, built by the Templars, characterised by its octagonal tower with an embrasured termination; and the great tower "Torrione," part ...
— Itinerary through Corsica - by its Rail, Carriage & Forest Roads • Charles Bertram Black
... light and color. Nothing could be more exquisite, for depth of green swimming in a bath of shadow, than the meadows curled beneath the cliffs; nothing more tempting, to the painter's brush, than the arabesque of blossoms netted across the sky; and would you have the living eye of nature, bristling with animation, alive with winged sails, and steeped in the very soul of yellow sunshine, look out over the great sheet of the waters, and steep the senses in such ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... 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 ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... after having been a poet, after having demonstrated an entire social system, I shall revert to science in an Essay on the Human Powers. And around the base of my palatial structure, with boyish glee I shall trace the immense arabesque of my Hundred ...
— Honor de Balzac • Albert Keim and Louis Lumet
... in gold and color—a 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
... were her wish, he would forever be as silent as the grave, and last no scandal would besmear her virtue. And the lewd fellow, perceiving that the lady did not stop her ears, commenced to describe to her, after the fashion of arabesque pictures, which at that time were much esteemed, the wanton inventions of debauchery. Then did his eyes shoot flame, his words burn, and his voice ring, and he himself took great pleasure in calling to mind the various ways of his ladies, naming them to ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 2 • Honore de Balzac
... 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
... there is a 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
... 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 be reckoned the supreme ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... published all the prose stories he had then written, in two volumes, under the title of "Tales of the Grotesque and the Arabesque." The work was not salable, perhaps because its contents were too familiar from recent separate publication in magazines; and it was not so warmly praised, generally, as I think it should have been, though in point of style the pieces ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... alternate crystal and frosted silver, on pedestals of alabaster and of aqua-marine, were ranged along the walls, the delicate beauty of their material and workmanship coming out well against the rich coloring of the hangings behind. The roof, a lofty dome, displayed the light Arabesque workmanship, peculiar to Moorish architecture, as did the form and ornaments of the windows. This apartment opened into another, much smaller, each side of which, apparently formed of silver plate, reflected as mirrors every object; and the pillars supporting the peculiarly light roof of the same ...
— The Vale of Cedars • Grace Aguilar
... figures. Joined with other colors you hardly recognize it, and in different lights it is dark or light. Thus the Greek fables blend and cross curiously in different directions, till they knit themselves into an arabesque where sometimes you cannot tell black from purple, nor blue from emerald—they being all the truer for this, because the truths of emotion they represent are interwoven in the same way, but all the more difficult to read, and to explain in any order. ...
— The Queen of the Air • John Ruskin
... results so far achieved have isolated woman and have robbed her of the 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 in large numbers, especially in the ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... how impossible it would be to convince anybody with the tale of her intention merely to borrow the clothing for a single night of arabesque adventure, finding it difficult now to believe in on her own part, and hurried breathlessly on ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... 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 ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... the 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" and confessedly a compilation, but it set the little ...
— The Dreamer - A Romantic Rendering of the Life-Story of Edgar Allan Poe • Mary Newton Stanard
... house wall has a battered fresco, or a gothic bas-relief; imagine a sky fretted with every kind of pinnacle from the great dome of the Salute to the gothic spires of the Ducal Palace and the downright arabesque orientalism of the minarets of St. Mark's; and then imagine the whole flooded with a sea that seems only intended to reflect sunsets, and you still have no idea of the place I stopped in for more than 48 hours. Thence we went to Verona, where Romeo and Juliet languished and ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... about her. She is with me now, and we are in the morning room, where 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 ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... panel—or say a carpet—we might decide to throw the weight of pattern, colour, or emphasis upon either the field or border. Supposing the field had a dark ground upon which the arabesque or floral design was relieved, in the border it would be most effective to transpose this arrangement, making the ground light, and bringing out the border design dark upon it. Or, if the motive were reversed, giving a light ground to the centre, with the pattern dark, the border might ...
— Line and Form (1900) • Walter Crane
... 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 ...
— Macaria • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... 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 style that have come to us are thrilling in their beauty of colour, ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... 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 even up ...
— Master of the Vineyard • Myrtle Reed
... 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 ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... room to break in 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 ...
— The Refugees • Arthur Conan Doyle
... number, and excellent in 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 ...
— Woman's Work in Music • Arthur Elson
... 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 seldom heard in public, ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... emblazoned on a fire-screen, and taking it 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
... 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. All is done ...
— Stones of Venice [introductions] • John Ruskin
... S. de R——d is not more distinguished by its profuse decoration, than by the fine taste which has guided the vast expenditure. Its halls of arabesque are almost without a rival; there is not the slightest embellishment in which the hand and feeling of art are not recognised. The rooms were very crowded; everybody distinguished in Paris was there: the lady of the ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... husks,—wheat-colored husks,—large, flat, and disposed evenly along the lee-side of each swaying stalk, so as to present only their edges to the wind. But, if you approach, those pale husks all break open to display strange splendors of scarlet and seal-brown, with arabesque mottlings in white and black: they change into wondrous living blossoms, which detach themselves before your eyes and rise in air, and flutter away by thousands to settle down farther off, and turn into ...
— Chita: A Memory of Last Island • Lafcadio Hearn
... inspired also with a vague idea of attending the Gamma Psi dance. He wanted to see Edith—Edith whom he hadn't met since one romantic night at the Harrisburg Country Club just before he went to France. The affair had died, drowned in the turmoil of the war and quite forgotten in the arabesque of these three months, but a picture of her, poignant, debonnaire, immersed in her own inconsequential chatter, recurred to him unexpectedly and brought a hundred memories with it. It was Edith's face that he had cherished through college with a sort ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... 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 ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... 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 island food was meanwhile spread for the women and the commons; and, for ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... 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 ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... did part of the work of preparing a school textbook on "Conchology." He soon became associate editor of The Gentleman's Magazine with its proprietor Burton. The following year, 1840, his first volume of stories was published, under the title, "Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque." The volume was not a popular success. An edition of seven hundred and fifty copies was barely disposed of, and all that Poe received was twenty copies for distribution ...
— Four Famous American Writers: Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, • Sherwin Cody
... her six beautiful children in a room which, though not imposing in size, glittered with decoration. The ceiling and walls were rich with tessellated and arabesque work. The floor was covered with a carpet of cut velvet, with a pattern of the richest and most brightly-coloured flowers; and this carpet was strewn with costly jewels, which shone in the variegated light of the stained-glass windows above like ...
— The Pirate City - An Algerine Tale • R.M. Ballantyne
... is hardly the kind of structure that one would 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 ...
— Beautiful Europe - Belgium • Joseph E. Morris
... 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 ...
— Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada • Washington Irving
... All the world swings at the top of its beauty; and those hills where we shall live, what robes of color fold them! Tawny filemot gilding the valleys, each seam and rut a scroll or arabesque, and all the year pouring out her heart's blood to flush the maples, the great impurpled granites warm with the sunshine they have drunk all summer! So I am to be married to-day, at noon. I like it best so; it is my hour. There is my veil, that regal Venice point. Fling ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 5, No. 28, February, 1860 • Various
... 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 ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... effort in that line quite 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 centre-piece ...
— The Wild Man of the West - A Tale of the Rocky Mountains • R.M. Ballantyne
... the special correspondent of the Court Journal arrived in due course, written on very coarse copy-paper in the King's arabesque of handwriting, in which three words filled a page, and yet were illegible. Moreover, the contribution was the more perplexing at first, as it opened with a succession of erased paragraphs. The writer appeared to have attempted ...
— The Napoleon of Notting Hill • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... which one has in the Vatican Library is that of surprise. You might walk through the Great Hall and adjoining galleries without suspecting the place to be a library at all; for the bookcases that line the lower portion of the walls are closed with panelled doors, painted in arabesque on a ground of white and slate colour, and surrounded by gilded mouldings, and not a single book is visible. The vaulted ceiling of the rooms is glowing with gold and ultramarine; the walls are adorned with beautiful ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... snug and happy family did this of Mariam's appear to be. If you could judge by all the laughter and giggling, by the splendour of the women's attire, by the neatness of the little house, prettily decorated with arabesque paintings, neat mats, and gay carpets, they were a family well to do in the Beyrout world, and lived with as much comfort as any Europeans. They had one book; and, on the wall of the principal apartment, a black picture of the Virgin, whose name is ...
— Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo • William Makepeace Thackeray
... flow of blood through my heart, felt it when it eddied up into my face, and touched my brain with its flame-colored wave. I loved life again. The stuff of which each day was woven was covered with an arabesque which suited my fancy. I missed nothing that the present unrolled for me, but looked neither to the past nor to the future. In truth there was little that was elevated in me. Could I have perceived it if there had been? Whichever way the circumstances ...
— The Morgesons • Elizabeth Stoddard
... with gold), was more commonly used for outlining, and is quite peculiarly suited to give a firm line. A beautiful example of outline work in coloured silk upon white linen is pictured in Illustration 90, in which the lines of delicate Renaissance arabesque are perfectly preserved. The rare practice of such work as this, notwithstanding its distinction, is perhaps sufficiently accounted for by its modesty. It is true, it wants well-considered and definitely ...
— Art in Needlework - A Book about Embroidery • Lewis F. Day
... saffron-papered room, 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 ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... East—from the banks of Windermere to the shores of the Bosphorus. It was a circular apartment with a low cushioned divan running completely round it, except where broken by the two doorways, curtained with hangings of dark brown. The floor was an arabesque of different-coloured tiles, covered here and there with a tiny square of bright-hued Persian carpet. The walls were panelled with stamped leather to the height of six feet from the ground; above the panelling they were painted of a delicate cream colour with here and there ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 3, March, 1891 • Various
... a court-yard, into which the carriage drove through an arched gateway. The court, in the inside, had evidently been arranged to gratify a picturesque and voluptuous ideality. Wide galleries ran all around the four sides, whose Moorish arches, slender pillars, and arabesque ornaments, carried the mind back, as in a dream, to the reign of oriental romance in Spain. In the middle of the court, a fountain threw high its silvery water, falling in a never-ceasing spray into a marble basin, fringed with a deep border of fragrant violets. The water in the fountain, ...
— Uncle Tom's Cabin • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... almost always follow certain styles. These are either heraldic, scriptural, symbolical, floral, or arabesque. ...
— Chats on Old Lace and Needlework • Emily Leigh Lowes
... 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 so many butterflies ...
— A Woman's Journey Round the World • Ida Pfeiffer
... irreducible into any other kind. An impression of this order, vanishing in an instant, is, so to speak, an impression sine materia. Presumably the notes which we hear at such moments tend to spread out before our eyes, over surfaces greater or smaller according to their pitch and volume; to trace arabesque designs, to give us the sensation of breath or tenuity, stability or caprice. But the notes themselves have vanished before these sensations have developed sufficiently to escape submersion under those ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... the tower is very pleasing, and overlooks the whole of the town. Fee, fr. 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 14th, 15th, ...
— The South of France—East Half • Charles Bertram Black
... the ashes off his cigar on to the arabesque-patterned tapestry carpet—'why, no, not exactly; but these things, you know, are a good deal matter of course; just describe what you saw, you know, and butter Puff ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees
... up as a visible scene, or image: it is the colouring—that weaving as of just perceptible gold threads of light through the dress, the flesh, the atmosphere, in Titian's Lace-girl—the 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, delight ...
— The Renaissance - Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Pater
... as it were thus gently and harmoniously into the outline of the pillars, the transition of surface is the less perceptible, owing to the whole of the vault and pillars being painted in a uniform delicate pattern of arabesque, by Zuccari, as it is affirmed; but at all events, in figures of plants and flowers, almost as light and exquisite as the paintings on a china teacup, and thrown into relief by the prevalence of a clear white ground; so that an appearance ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... transformed motion in music has been well brought out in a suggestive essay by Goblot ("La Musique Descriptive," Revue Philosophique, July, 1901): "Sung or played, melody figures to the ear a successive design, a moving arabesque. We talk of ascending and descending the gamut, of high notes or low notes; the; higher voice of woman is called soprano, or above, the deeper voice of man is called bass. Grave tones were so called by the Greeks because they seemed heavy and ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 4 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... 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. ...
— Khartoum Campaign, 1898 - or the Re-Conquest of the Soudan • Bennet Burleigh
... or glory; and now the Cathedral of Milan is perhaps the most numerous assemblage of beauties in stone which the world contains. Impossible it were to enumerate the elegances that cover it from top to bottom,—its carved portals, its flying buttresses, its arabesque pilasters, its richly mullioned windows, its basso-reliefs, its beautiful tracery, and its forest of snow-white pinnacles soaring in the sunlight, so calm and moveless, and yet so airy and light, that you fear the nest breeze will scatter them. You can compare it only to some Alpine ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... 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 ...
— Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... doorway of the 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 ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman
... brown diversified with moss and lichen, it stood with one wall to the street in the angle of the Doctor's property. It was roomy, draughty, and inconvenient. The large rafters were here and there engraven with rude marks and patterns; the hand-rail of the stair was carved in countrified arabesque; a stout timber pillar, which did duty to support the dining-room roof, bore mysterious characters on its darker side, runes, according to the Doctor; nor did he fail, when he ran over the legendary history of the house and its possessors, to dwell upon ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 6 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... 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, ...
— The International Weekly Miscellany, Volume I. No. 8 - Of Literature, Art, and Science, August 19, 1850 • Various
... "stem stitch" (wrongly 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, and ...
— Handbook of Embroidery • L. Higgin
... maroons or deep reds. Plain tinted walls and ceilings in fresco or wainscot are also frequently used. The latest shades of wall paper come in wood colors, dark olive-greens, stone color, and grays, in tile, arabesque and landscape designs, and with these are used a corresponding dado ...
— The Ladies Book of Useful Information - Compiled from many sources • Anonymous
... vaults, richly painted, and the more valuable because few ceilings have been found in existence. We should attempt in vain to describe the complicated subjects, the intricate and varied patterns with which the fertile fancy of the arabesque painter has clothed the walls and ceilings, without the aid of drawings, which we are unable to give; and, indeed, colored plates would be requisite to convey an adequate notion of their effect. In the splendid work which Mr. Donaldson has published upon Pompeii, several subjects taken ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... 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
... huge dismal cavern with branching tunnels around that disappeared in thick obscurity, and heights above that lost themselves in gloom; holes in the sides and floor that were of invisible depth, and curious irregular ledges, that formed a sort of arabesque ...
— Charlie to the Rescue • R.M. Ballantyne
... for an occasional play on language in the expression of feeling. But is it just to exact the severity of the tragical cothurnus in light works of this description? Why should not Poetry also be allowed her arabesque? No person can be more an enemy to mannerism than I am; but to censure it aright, we ought first to understand the degree of nature and truth which we have a right to expect from each species, and what is alone compatible with it. The verses of Quinault ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... from the midday heat, drowsy and content. It was a pleasant resting-place, under that leafy arbour, through which only a few rays of light could filter, weaving arabesque designs that moved and melted on the floor as the wind stirred the foliage overhead. And a pleasant occupation, listening to those amiable amphibians in the mere below—they carried my thought back to other frog-concerts, ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... more designs 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
... 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 can get ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... officers, and finally into a more remote part of the building where they met only an occasional servant. At last they came into a great room entirely empty but for themselves. About the walls hung ripened portraits. The decorations were of Arabesque mosaics with fantastic panels of Moorish tiling. It might have been a grandee's house in Seville, patterned on the Alcazar. Evidently this was part of a private suite. Heavy portieres were only partly drawn across a wide window with the ...
— The Lighted Match • Charles Neville Buck
... finest specimens of the luxuriant French gothic: roses are introduced with great effect amongst the tracery and friezes, with which the walls are covered. The decorations of the chapels round the choir, although they display a tendency towards Italian architecture, are of the most elaborate arabesque. The niches are formed by escalop shells, swelling cylinders of foliage, and scrolls: some of the pendants from the roofs are of wonderfully varied and beautiful workmanship.—The nave has nothing remarkable, saving the capital of one of the side pillars. Its sculptures, with the exception ...
— Account of a Tour in Normandy, Vol. II. (of 2) • Dawson Turner
... 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
... that 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. But first what's ...
— Three Soldiers • John Dos Passos
... 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, ...
— Marzio's Crucifix and Zoroaster • F. Marion Crawford
... another exceedingly handsome church, stands on the borders of the Lago Maggiore, and is full of magnificent frescoes, surrounded by arabesque borders. The latter appear as though they were gilded, and the effect thus produced is remarkably fine. This spacious building contains a number of small chapels, partitioned off by massive gratings. The great cupola ...
— A Visit to the Holy Land • Ida Pfeiffer
... 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, brave rewards ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... now fairly broken, we chatted away gaily as we passed through the handsome dining room, the ancient salle des gardes of Queen Catherine, where our new cicerone pointed out to us in the painted ceiling her own personal cipher interwoven with an arabesque. From the great dining room a door, on which are carved the arms of the Bohiers, leads directly, one might say abruptly, into a chapel, "as if," said Monsieur Crapaud, "to remind those who sit at meat here that the things of the spirit are near ...
— In Chteau Land • Anne Hollingsworth Wharton
... 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
... 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 materials, which ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... tell you 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 uglier and be ...
— My Friends the Savages - Notes and Observations of a Perak settler (Malay Peninsula) • Giovanni Battista Cerruti
... was grey and had a dusty smell. I saw two chairs, one of which held my valise, two narrow-backed armchairs with smeary upholstery, a table with a piece of green felt set into the top, and an oriental carpet with an arabesque pattern that ...
— The Inferno • Henri Barbusse
... 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 your minions on the Advertiser (of course, at my expense) ...
— Roosevelt in the Bad Lands • Hermann Hagedorn
... growing less Dutch and more English,—like the Philipse name and blood themselves,—and so the new embellishments were English. The second lord imported marble mantels from England, had the walls beautifully wainscoted, adorned the ceilings richly with arabesque work in wood. He laid out, in the best English fashion, a lawn between the eastern front and the Albany post-road. He it was who married Joanna, daughter of Governor Anthony Brockholst, of a very ancient family of Lancashire, England; and ...
— The Continental Dragoon - A Love Story of Philipse Manor-House in 1778 • Robert Neilson Stephens
... to his rock promontory; but his humour had in the meantime changed. The sun now shone more fairly on the pool; and over its brown, welling surface, the blue of heaven and the golden green of the spring foliage danced in fleeting arabesque. The eddies laughed and brightened with essential colour. And the beauty of the dell began to rankle in the Prince's mind; it was so near to his own borders, yet without. He had never had much of the joy of possessorship in any of the thousand and one beautiful ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... 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 ...
— A Learned Dissertation on Dumpling (1726) • Anonymous
... insufficiency of the 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 ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... 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 ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... moment approaching with a large lighted lantern in each hand. These, placed upon the mignonette shelves, and snugly protected from wind and rain by the deep hoods, threw a clear light into the test-room, and brought out in grotesque distinctness the arabesque pattern wrought with dust and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various
... delightful items into their works: elaborately embroidered veils, scarves, and gold fringes. But being a man of fine imagination and most delicate sense of form, he does not, like Angelico or Benozzo or Carpaccio, merely stick pretty things about; he works them all into his strange arabesque, half intellectual, half physical. Thus the screen of roses[7] behind certain of his Madonnas, forming an exquisite Morris pattern with the greenish-blue sky interlaced; and those beautiful, carefully-drawn branches ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... 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 form ...
— The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter
... 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 for ...
— Poems • Alan Seeger
... 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
... small room adjoining the entrance hall. Of the latter he derived no very definite impression, except that it was queerly furnished. Wherein this queerness was manifested he found himself unable to decide on subsequent reflection. But the ante-room was markedly Eastern, having Arabesque mosaics, rugs and low tables of the Orient, and being lighted by a brass mosque-lamp. The footman who had opened the door for him was a foreigner of some kind, ...
— The Orchard of Tears • Sax Rohmer
... their little courts one behind the other. Major Russell established himself in the chief's palace, which was exactly like the other houses except that the alcoves were very lofty, and their roofs supported by pillars. These, with their red paint, their arabesque adornments, and their quaint character, gave the courtyard the precise ...
— By Sheer Pluck - A Tale of the Ashanti War • G. A. Henty
... 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
... right hand; in the left he holds an open book, with the 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 the heavenly hierarchy; beyond these ...
— Legends of the Madonna • Mrs. Jameson
... in my wanderings; many and various cathedrals, basilicas, and mosques have delighted me. I know the color and the value of tapestry and rich hangings; of mosaics, porphyry, and verd-antiques; of fluted alabaster and the delicate tracery of the arabesque; but the velvety quality of London soot when applied to the rough surfaces of rudely chiselled stones, and the soft loveliness gained by grime and smoke, came to ...
— Outdoor Sketching - Four Talks Given before the Art Institute of Chicago; The Scammon Lectures, 1914 • Francis Hopkinson Smith
... its ample and sable covering, was prepared a banquet after the most gorgeous fashion of the East, extended upon carpets of the richest stuffs, with cushions laid for the guests. But we cannot stop to describe the cloth of gold and silver, the superb embroidery in Arabesque, the shawls of Cashmere, and the muslins of India, which were here unfolded in all their splendor; far less to tell the different sweetmeats, ragouts edged with rice colored in various manners, with all the other niceties of Eastern cookery. Lambs roasted whole, and game and poultry dressed in ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... have robbed her of the 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 their own inner qualities. Such artificially grown plants of the female sex are to be found in large numbers, especially in the so-called ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 1, March 1906 • Various
... the high-road dips down to the dingle, A coppice in arabesque gleams Whose traceries melt and commingle, Like ghost trees in moon-fretted streams, As the tremulous glamour sweeps o'er it And skirts the inscrutable sky; Then, Fairyland flitting before ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, April 28, 1920 • Various
... 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 ...
— The Rajah of Dah • George Manville Fenn
... and that to them geometry is pure science. So I think it may be said 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 reasonings. Everybody ...
— Autobiography and Selected Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... the 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 ...
— Frederic Lord Leighton - An Illustrated Record of His Life and Work • Ernest Rhys
... She remembered still how, standing on the narrow ledge, he had passed his arm about her while their gaze flew to the long, tossed horizon-line of the downs, and then dropped contentedly back to trace the arabesque of yew hedges about the fish-pond, and the shadow of ...
— The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Part 2 (of 10) • Edith Wharton
... 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 ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, No. 38, December, 1860 • Various
... "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; how many songs and romances, Spanish and Arabian, of love ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 19, - Issue 549 (Supplementary issue) • Various
... 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 of Geoffrey's mind, quickened his powers ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... half hour the Rajah was occupied in bidding goodby to his guests. When the last had gone he turned and entered the palace, passed through the great halls, and, pushing aside a curtain, entered a small room. The walls and the columns were of white marble, inlaid with arabesque work of colored stones. Four golden lamps hung from the ceiling, the floor was covered with costly carpets, and at one end ran a raised platform a foot in height, piled with soft cushions. He took ...
— Rujub, the Juggler • G. A. Henty
... 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 ...
— Rouen, It's History and Monuments - A Guide to Strangers • Theodore Licquet
... 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 ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 18. Saturday, March 2, 1850 • Various
... soldier or two, he met; but as every one who saw him, knew him instantly for a prince of good blood, he could, of course, wander where he pleased. He passed on among the golden columns and sculptured doorways, and under vaulted and arabesque ceilings, until he came to a door of mother-of-pearl, which had a golden lock, an alabaster knob, and a diamond key-hole. It turned easily on silver hinges, and the Prince passed by it into a beautiful garden. He had never been in such ...
— Ting-a-ling • Frank Richard Stockton
... earth was 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 gold from ...
— The Mistress of the Manse • J. G. Holland
... war as when he saw entering his home this convalescent whom he had known months before—elegant and slender, with a delicate and somewhat feminine beauty. His face was now furrowed by a network of scars that had transformed it into a purplish arabesque. Within his body were hidden many such. His left hand had disappeared with a part of the forearm, the empty sleeve hanging over the remainder. The other hand was supported on a cane, a necessary aid in order to be able to move a leg that ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... until you advance within four or five miles of the Black Sea, is almost uninterruptedly studded with fanciful and ornamental buildings: beautiful villages, and brilliant summer palaces, and bright kiosks, painted in arabesque, and often gilt. The green background to the scene is a sparkling screen of terraced gardens, rising up a chain of hills whose graceful undulations are crowned with groves of cypress and of chestnut, occasionally breaking into fair and delicate valleys, ...
— Sketches • Benjamin Disraeli
... Above the keystone of each arch is the carved figure of a saint. The new brasses of the choir are wonderfully elaborate. The bronze scroll and vine work of the gates and lamps, for grace and Oriental luxuriance of fancy, for their arabesque and flower designs, might fitly have belonged to King Solomon's Temple of old. The modern woodwork of the choir compares also well with the ancient woodwork carving. Gold stars on azure ground, and all vivid coloring and gilding, are ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume I. - Great Britain and Ireland • Various
... varios hominum 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, Et ...
— Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey through France, Italy, and Germany, Vol. I • Hester Lynch Piozzi
... with a very long tail. The tail of the kite is the Maydan, the poorest part of Damascus, but rich in ruined mosques and hammams, and houses which at first sight look as though they are in decay. But when we got to know these houses better, we found that marble courts, inlaid chambers, arabesque ceilings, often lay behind the muddy exteriors. The city itself is divided into three districts: the Jewish in the southern part, the Moslem in the northern and western, and the Christian in the ...
— The Romance of Isabel Lady Burton Volume II • Isabel Lady Burton & W. H. Wilkins
... 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 ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne |
