"Beholder" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... every tree is in foliage and full verdure, every shrub in flower; and when the river, swelled with a waste of waters from the mountains from which it derives its source, pours down in a tumultuous torrent, that equally charms and astonishes the beholder. ...
— The History of Emily Montague • Frances Brooke
... claiming her as a beauty, and the demand had been generally allowed by public opinion. Adelaide Palliser was always spoken of as a girl to be admired; but she was not one whose countenance would strike with special admiration any beholder who did not know her. Her eyes were pleasant and bright, and, being in truth green, might, perhaps with propriety, be described as grey. Her nose was well formed. Her mouth was, perhaps, too small. Her teeth were perfect. Her chin was ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... of shame does not this figure show forth! I discern in it the end of that Christian art which paints the soul and inspires the beholder with an ardent desire for heaven. Future painters will not restrain themselves as does this one to portraying on the side of a wall or on a wooden panel the cursed matter of which our bodies are formed; they will celebrate and glorify it. They will clothe their figures with dangerous ...
— Penguin Island • Anatole France
... or three Catholics, peasants of the neighbourhood, come to look on and listen. The simple, intelligible service, the quiet fervour of the assembly, might well impress a sceptical beholder. Even more impressive is the inscription over the door. A tablet records how the first Protestant church was pulled down by order of the king after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and rebuilt on the ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... very large temple, yet such is its grace, its exquisite proportions, its unapproachable charm—it never occurs to the beholder that it is of such great size. It is neither big nor little, nor heavy nor light—it is simply perfect. You can't tell why it is perfect, and you don't want to. You stand and look at the gem through ...
— Round the World • Andrew Carnegie
... book before, quoted, On Causes, each Cause infuses into its effect some of the goodness which it receives from its own Cause, which is "God." Wherefore, since in her are seen wonderful things, so much so on the part of the body that they make each beholder desirous to see those things, it is evident that her form, which is her Soul, guides it as its proper Cause and receives miraculously the gracious goodness ...
— The Banquet (Il Convito) • Dante Alighieri
... side. The Indian's trail conducted him to these wilds, which still remain the most unchanged of all his ancient haunts. Here are solitudes seldom visited by man, where are treasured sublimities that enchain the mind, and inspire a feeling of devotion in the heart of the beholder. Here the Indian, undisturbed by other sights or sounds, may yet listen to the voice of the waterfall as it sounded in the ear of his fathers, or to the gentle murmur of the stream discoursing now, as it did to them, in passing hurriedly over its ...
— An account of Sa-Go-Ye-Wat-Ha - Red Jacket and his people, 1750-1830 • John Niles Hubbard
... geologist is right; and due reflection on his teachings, instead of diminishing our reverence and our wonder, adds all the force of intellectual sublimity to the mere aesthetic intuition of the uninstructed beholder. ...
— On the Relations of Man to the Lower Animals • Thomas H. Huxley
... knickerbocker suit, but as at the same time he wore short socks under his laced boots, for reasons which, whether hygienic or conscientious, were surely imaginative, his calves, exposed to the public gaze and to the tonic air of high altitudes, dazzled the beholder by the splendour of their marble-like condition and their rich tone of young ivory. He was the leader of a small caravan. The light of a headlong, exalted satisfaction with the world of men and the scenery of mountains illumined his clean-cut, very red face, his short, silver-white ...
— A Personal Record • Joseph Conrad
... matching the ribbons which were drawn through the bordering interstices of the chair. A small table, another chair, a footstool, and two or three simple pictures on the walls, along with wash-stand and bureau, completed the furnishing of a room that instantly attracted and delighted the beholder. But the impression above all others that the room gave was of perfect purity and sweetness and health; and this was due to the beautiful tidiness and cleanliness everywhere apparent. Wash-stand and bureau were in perfect order, with their white mats, ...
— Letters to a Daughter and A Little Sermon to School Girls • Helen Ekin Starrett
... wrath of the multitude." A joke may be only a joke—or a comedy, or a tragedy; but the greatest caricature (which need by no means display the greatest art) is necessarily that which goes straightest to the heart and mind. No drawing is true caricature which does not make the beholder think, whether it springs simply from good-humour or has its source in the passion of contempt, hatred, or revenge, of hope or despair. Mere amusement, said Swift, "is the happiness of those who cannot think," while Humour, ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... he was still a man, and had eyes and apprehension; yet a little longer, and with a last sordid piece of pageantry, he would cease to be. And here, in the meantime, with a trait of human nature that caught at the beholder's breath, he was tending a ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... American, so there! I won't be a baroness!" Her great black eyes flashed lightnings at the girls, who looked at her in consternation. Veronica, in a passion, was something to strike awe into the breast of the beholder. ...
— The Camp Fire Girls Do Their Bit - Or, Over the Top with the Winnebagos • Hildegard G. Frey
... and disquiet redoubled on him, by reason of his loneliness. So he arose and went round about the palace and explored its every part; he opened the Princesses' apartments and found therein riches and treasures fit to ravish the beholder's reason; but he delighted not in aught thereof, by reason of their absence. His heart was fired by thinking of the door they had charged him not to approach or open on any account and he said in himself, "My sister had never enjoined me not to open this door, except ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 8 • Richard F. Burton
... have lost their lives; and the damage done to the city is estimated to be at least six millions of dollars, although it did not contain a larger population than 30,000 souls. Deserted streets, heaps of ruins, and tottering houses, threatening to crush the beholder, give but a faint idea of this desolate picture. General Soublette and General Bolivar were both present at the last fatal earthquake in Caraccas, and they both assert that this, of which I have now given a description, was ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 322, July 12, 1828 • Various
... difference between the trumpet and the bugle as regards the harmonic series. But although, to the casual beholder, these instruments may present a general similarity, there are other important structural distinctions. The tube of the trumpet is cylindrical, widening only at the bell, whereas that of the bugle, as stated above, is conical. Both instruments ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... of their own judgment. When they hear or see anything new, they are, unless strictly on their guard, so occupied with their own preconceived opinions that they perceive something quite different from the plain facts seen or heard, especially if such facts surpass the comprehension of the beholder or hearer, and, most of all, if he is interested in their ...
— The Philosophy of Spinoza • Baruch de Spinoza
... unique appearance. Seen from the east, it stretches for about three miles and a half or even four at its base, is 900 feet high, and about three miles on top of the plateau. The summit, even when the beholder is only half a mile away from it, appears like a flat straight line against the sky-line, a great boulder that stands up higher on the south-west being the only interruption to this uniformity. The black rocky sides of the mountain are very precipitous—in ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... an elaborate business table; spirits and soda-water (with the mark of Schweppe, no less) stood ready on a butler's tray, and in one corner, behind a half-drawn curtain, I spied a camp-bed and a capacious tub. Such a room in Barbizon astonished the beholder, like the glories of the ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... in women, they should have been the lords of those they met; but as it was they were simply the representatives of one of the suppressed races which, if they joined hands, could girdle the globe under British rule. Somehow they brought the sense of this home to the beholder, as none of the monuments or memorials of England's imperial glory had done, and then, having fulfilled their office, lost ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... with impatience the rising of the sun, which would display to our gaze two of the mightiest powers in Europe. Luckily, the day was fine and clear, and the two kingdoms lay before us, in such magnificence and proximity, that the beholder was almost inclined to believe that a sister people inhabited ...
— A Woman's Journey Round the World • Ida Pfeiffer
... was very sensitive to its associations with the toils and triumphs of mankind. Born beside the Thames, he grew up among boats and fraternized with sailors all his life. It was impossible for him to be the beholder of such a scene as the Temeraire's approach to her last moorings, save as a poet-painter; and stirred to the putting forth of all his powers, this Fighting Temeraire is ...
— The Book of Art for Young People • Agnes Conway
... rained a few days before—the last rain of many, it chanced—and there were damp spots in the road in places and the grass and the sage were fresh in color. Meadow-larks were trilling, and the whole scene was one of peace—provided the beholder could blot out the memory of the tenantless clay ...
— Mystery Ranch • Arthur Chapman
... violent passions and perturbations of the greatest and the busiest men. And both these effects are of equal use to human life; for the mind of man is like the sea, which is neither agreeable to the beholder nor the voyager in a calm or in a storm, but is so to both when a little agitated by gentle gales; and so the mind, when moved by soft and easy passions and affections. I know very well that many, who pretend to be wise by the ...
— A Book of English Prose - Part II, Arranged for Secondary and High Schools • Percy Lubbock
... Angelo. The plan was changed repeatedly, but in its final form the building is a Latin cross surmounted by a great dome, one hundred and thirty-eight feet in diameter. The dimensions and proportions of this greatest of all churches never fail to impress the beholder ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson
... stands to examine it more curiously, I discovered that there were two projections from the top, resembling eye-pieces, as though inviting the beholder to gaze into the inside of the stand. Then I thought I heard a faint metallic click above my head. Raising my eyes swiftly, I read a few words written, as it were, against the dark velvet of the heavy ...
— Tales of Fantasy and Fact • Brander Matthews
... religious faith, half the furious boilings in their hearts would stop their ebullition. It would be like pouring cold water into a kettle on the fire. It would end its bubbling. Everything has two handles. The aspect of any event depends largely on the beholder's point of view. 'There's nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.' 'Why art thou cast down, O my soul? and why art thou disquieted within me?' The answer is often very hard to give; the question is always very salutary ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... landscape which the stranger in Hellas would have remembered long. The haven of Troezene, noblest in Peloponnesus, girt by its two mountain promontories, Methana and the holy hill Calauria, opened its bright blue into the deeper blue of the Saronic bay. Under the eye of the beholder AEgina and the coasts of Attica stood forth, a fit frame to the far horizon. Sun, sea, hills, and shore wrought together to make one glorious harmony, endless variety, yet ordered and fashioned into a divine whole. "Euopis," "The Fair-Faced," the beauty-loving dwellers of the country called it, ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... from room to room studying the paintings in which the members of the club had caricatured themselves, their associates, and their aims. There was a slick French audacity about the workmanship of these men of toil unbending that went straight to the heart of the beholder. And yet it was not altogether French. A dry grimness of treatment, almost Dutch, marked the difference. The men painted as they spoke—with certainty. The club indulges in revelries which it calls "jinks"—high and low, at intervals—and each of these gatherings is faithfully portrayed ...
— American Notes • Rudyard Kipling
... a toilet of vast and artful simplicity wherewith to enrapture the eye of the beholder. The first profound effect thereof was wrought upon Reginald Currier, alias "Bim," some fifteen minutes later, at the outer portals of the ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... refinement, and a noble bearing are the characteristics which strike one in all portraits of Chopin, [FOOTNOTE: See Appendix IV.] and which struck the beholder still more strongly in the real Chopin, where they were reinforced by the gracefulness of his movements, and by manners that made people involuntarily treat him as a prince...[FOOTNOTE: See my description of Chopin, based on the most reliable information, ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... short-legged, of no particular color, of little elegance in flight or movement, with a disagreeable flirt of the tail, always quarreling with their neighbors and with one another, no birds are so little calculated to excite pleasurable emotions in the beholder, or to become objects of human interest and affection. The kingbird is the best dressed member of the family, but he is a braggart; and, though always snubbing his neighbors, is an arrant coward, and shows the white feather ...
— In the Catskills • John Burroughs
... spectacle of a great visible manifestation of GOD. It is a sight, a picture, a representation, that constitutes the heavenly state, not mere thought and contemplation. The glorified saint of Scripture is especially a beholder; he gazes, he looks, he fixes his eyes upon something before him; he does not merely ruminate within, but his whole mind is carried out towards and upon a great representation. And thus Heaven specially ...
— The Life of the Waiting Soul - in the Intermediate State • R. E. Sanderson
... you approach the island it seems to grow upon the sight, until at length its broad reflection darkens the surrounding waters. I can imagine nothing better calculated than an appearance of this kind to satisfy a beholder of the spherical figure of the earth, and it would seem almost incredible that early navigators should have failed to find conviction in the unvarying testimonies of their own experience, which an approach to ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 1. • J Lort Stokes
... secondly that conscience makes the way of transgressors hard; for every act of pleasure, every act of guilt his conscience smites him. The last of his stay on earth will appear horrible to the beholder. Sometimes, however, he will be stayed in his guilt. A death in a family of some favorite object, or be attacked by some disease himself, is brought to the portals of the grave. Then for a little time, perhaps, he is stayed in his wickedness, but ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... All listened in breathless silence, and again the wished-for sound which spoke of the proximity of human society and Christian worship, came pealing across the desolate wastes, deserted of everything having life, and impressing the fancy of the beholder as does the desolation of long-forgotten cities, or the shattered marbles ...
— Adrift in the Ice-Fields • Charles W. Hall
... once seen can never be forgotten. The long pointed features, narrow eye, and smirk of the one, so suggestive of merciless treachery; the bill-hook nose, large teeth, and bold eye of the other suggesting arrogance to the point of ferocity, haunt the beholder afterwards in ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... us. Perhaps no scene of beauty in the visible creation has proved a more hackneyed theme for the poet and the philosopher than a starry night. But not all the superabundance of simile and moral illustration with which the subject has been loaded can rob the beholder of the freshness of its grandeur or the force of its teaching; that noblest and most majestic vision of the handiwork of GOD on which the eye of man is ...
— The Brownies and Other Tales • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... no devotee of the god Wish, have we here; but an imperturbable beholder, whose dauntless and relentless eyeballs, telescopic and microscopic by turns, can and will see what the fact is. If the universe be bad, as some dream, he will see how bad; if good, he will perceive and respect ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... of the milk of the Blessed Virgin, which they sold for enormous sums; these bottles were preserved with pious care in many of the great religious establishments. But perhaps none of these impostures surpassed in audacity that offered by a monastery in Jerusalem, which presented to the beholder one of the fingers of the Holy Ghost! Modern society has silently rendered its verdict on these scandalous objects. Though they once nourished the piety of thousands of earnest people, they are now considered too vile to have a ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... wherein we went this morning was what they called a Calvary: a horrible, ghastly image of a Christ in a tomb, the figure of the natural size, and of the livid color of death; gaping red wounds on the body and round the brows: the whole piece enough to turn one sick, and fit only to brutalize the beholder of it. The Virgin is commonly represented with a dozen swords stuck in her heart; bleeding throats of headless John Baptists are perpetually thrust before your eyes. At the Cathedral gate was a papier-mache church-ornament shop—most of the carvings and reliefs ...
— Little Travels and Roadside Sketches • William Makepeace Thackeray
... psychae, mae kagae genomenae—" to those to whose imagination it has never been presented, how beautiful is the countenance of justice and wisdom; and that neither the morning nor the evening star are so fair. For in order to direct the view aright, it behoves that the beholder should have made himself congenerous and similar to the object beheld. Never could the eye have beheld the sun, had not its own essence been soliform," (i.e. pre- configured to light by a similarity of essence with ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... and smoke stacks of mammoth buildings—railway sheds, freight depots, power houses and the like—with finally a glimpse of docks and wharves and shipping. This, or at least a considerable section of it, was the kingdom. To the ordinary beholder it might have looked ugly, crowded, sordid, undesirable, but it appeared none of these things to the lucky person who had been invested with some sort of modest authority in ...
— The Girl and the Kingdom - Learning to Teach • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... treatment of their subjects, neither devoid of beauty of form nor of color, but which make neither the pulse quiver nor the eye wet; and then such a sweeping judgment is arrested by a work like the 'St. Jerome' in the Vatican, from which a spirit comes forth so strong and so exalted, that the beholder, however trained to examine, and compare, and collect, finds himself raised above all recollections of manner by the sudden ascent of talent into the higher world of genius. Essentially a second-rate composer,* Donizetti ...
— Great Italian and French Composers • George T. Ferris
... progressive order of things other inventors of more or less fame have laid substructures or added a wing here and a story there until the resultant great structure has attained such proportions as to evoke the admiration of the beholder; but the old foundation and the fundamental building still remain to support other parts. In other words, Edison created the incandescent electric lamp, and invented certain broad and fundamental systems of distribution of current, with all the essential devices of detail necessary for successful ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... without,—giving substance to shadows, and throwing a mist over all commonplace actualities. It is the nature of thought to be indefinite;—definiteness belongs to external imagery alone. Hence it is that the sense of sublimity arises, not from the sight of an outward object, but from the beholder's reflection upon it;—not from the sensuous impression, but from the imaginative reflex. Few have seen a celebrated waterfall without feeling something akin to disappointment: it is only subsequently that the image comes back full into the mind, ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... on the general question. Those who believe in design, will find it difficult to account for shyness being the most frequent and efficient of all the causes of blushing, as it makes the blusher to suffer and the beholder uncomfortable, without being of the least service to either of them. They will also find it difficult to account for negroes and other dark-coloured races blushing, in whom a change of colour in the skin is scarcely or not ...
— The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals • Charles Darwin
... lighting with its glory the matchless foliage of this enchanting spot, where every form of grace exhaustless nature can display is lavished on the arborial richness of the scene, which, in its unequalled luxuriance, gives to a fanciful beholder the idea that the trees themselves have a conscious pleasure in growing there. Oh! what ...
— Handy Andy, Vol. 2 - A Tale of Irish Life • Samuel Lover
... in having no particular accomplishments. I cannot sing either the old songs or the new; neither am I a performer on divers instruments. I can paint a little, but my paintings do not seem to rouse any enthusiasm in the beholder, nor do they add an inspiring strain to conversation. I can, indeed, make gingerbread and six different kinds of pudding, but I hesitate to mention it, because the cook is far in advance of me in all these particulars, not to mention numerous ...
— The Wit of Women - Fourth Edition • Kate Sanborn
... detestable thoughts which afterwards appeared in facto, according to the said Earl's own mot. For what other sense or allusion can the reaching at a crown with a sword in a stretched posture, and the impersonating of his device in a blackamore, yield to any intelligent and honest beholder?' {247} ...
— James VI and the Gowrie Mystery • Andrew Lang
... the chalk in the hand of the artist. Behold What beauteous forms as by magic unfold! The store-house of Nature he swiftly displays, Till the dazzled beholder is lost in the maze; Designs without number appear to the view, And show what the chalk and the blackboard ...
— 1001 Questions and Answers on Orthography and Reading • B. A. Hathaway
... good within our grip is sublime. To each the image rises. An army, a host of faces keen with knowledge, calm with contentment, eager with honest ambition looks up. Men, women, boys, girls—humanity gazes at the beholder. The eye does not glimpse the last face, far out beyond the faint horizon of the panorama. . . . The ...
— Catholic Problems in Western Canada • George Thomas Daly
... by making twenty trips back and forth over one and three-quarter miles of track. The excitement was intense. The London Times next morning said: "The 'Novelty' was the lightest and most elegant carriage on the road yesterday, and the velocity with which it moved surprised and amazed every beholder. It shot along the line at the amazing rate of thirty miles an hour! It seemed, indeed, to fly; presenting one of the most sublime spectacles of human ingenuity and human daring the world ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 6 of 8 • Various
... which the artist had rendered in some other medium. To understand how the artist felt, however, is not criticism; criticism is an investigation of what the work is good for. Its function may be chiefly to awaken certain emotions in the beholder, to deepen in him certain habits of apperception; but even this most aesthetic element in a work's operation does not borrow its value from the possible fact that the artist also shared those habits and emotions. If he did, and if they are desirable, so much the better for him; ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... heaped upon it. From the low mountain range on the north to the taller mountains southward, it was a virgin paradise in which reigned a peace so profound that it brought a reverent awe into the soul of the beholder. ...
— 'Drag' Harlan • Charles Alden Seltzer
... now before us the new-comer's eyes were fixed; meanwhile the fingers of his right hand mechanically played over something sticking up from his waistcoat-pocket—the bows of a pair of scissors, whose polish made them feebly responsive to the light within. In her present beholder's mind the scene formed by the girlish spar-maker composed itself into a post-Raffaelite picture of extremest quality, wherein the girl's hair alone, as the focus of observation, was depicted with intensity and distinctness, and her face, shoulders, hands, and figure in general, being a blurred ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... horrible, some odd, some commonplace, and some fantastical, and altogether, a medley of strange, undecipherable, yet impressive combination of devices, well calculated to excite a feeling of awe, and, with the timid, of terror, in the mind of the beholder. Into this singular assemblage Hurd was ushered, a wilderness of confused images before him. He was taken through a course introductory to the more serious parts of the formula of induction into the order, which were intended ...
— Eveline Mandeville - The Horse Thief Rival • Alvin Addison
... very tall, one of those cool, gray-eyed, ivory-skinned brunettes who always remind the beholder of white lilies blooming in the dark. Her lips were full, faintly pinkly purple, and affirmative, not beseeching. She stood with one hand upon the knob behind her, bent a little forward, the skirt of her white dress blown by ...
— The Co-Citizens • Corra Harris
... pair! as thus I gaze Upon the girl who smiles always, The little hand that ever plays Upon the lover's shoulder; In looking at your pretty shapes, A sort of envious wish escapes (Such as the Fox had for the Grapes) The Poet, your beholder. ...
— English Satires • Various
... craned his neck over the shoulder of that gentleman and leered into the mirror. When Happy liked, he could contort his naturally plain features into a diabolical grin which sent prickly waves creeping along the spine of the beholder. ...
— Chip, of the Flying U • B. M. Bower
... haughty in his bearing, richly dressed and with a certain air of the world investing him, but with a face—although possessing great natural beauty—so wretched and full of remorse, so lined and seamed with soul-anguish, that the heart of every beholder was ...
— The Masked Bridal • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... every degree of violence, varying from a moment's unconsciousness, from which the patient recovers so quickly that he cannot be convinced he has been ill, to that awful state which terrifies every beholder, and seems to menace the hapless victim with instant death. Every degree of frequency, too, is known, from one attack in a lifetime, down through one in a year, a month, a week, or a day; several in the same periods, to ...
— Epilepsy, Hysteria, and Neurasthenia • Isaac G. Briggs
... so gently shines to make romantic a lover's smile! But the reality of the Lunar night is cold beyond human belief. Cold and darkly silent. Grim desolation. Awesome. Majestic. A frowning majesty that even to the most intrepid human beholder is ...
— Brigands of the Moon • Ray Cummings
... devoted to the behoof of any man seized with a purpose of attaining speed and efficiency with firearms, did not always reach that smoothness and precision in the execution of this personal manoeuvre which alone could render it safe to themselves or impressive to the beholder. The owner of this accomplishment was never apt to find himself much crowded with company, in the way either of participants or spectators. Yet the art was a simple and harmless one, pertaining more especially to youth, enthusiasm, ...
— Heart's Desire • Emerson Hough
... canvas touches of none but the seven colours juxtaposed [Claude Monet has added black and white] and leave the individual rays of each of these colours to blend at a certain distance, so as to act like sunlight upon the eye of the beholder." This is called dissociation of tones; and here is a new convention; why banish all save the spectrum? We paint nature, ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... item about his personal appearance, apt to strike the beholder as being exceedingly strange and eccentric, was his costume—buck-skin throughout, and that dyed to the ...
— Deadwood Dick, The Prince of the Road - or, The Black Rider of the Black Hills • Edward L. Wheeler
... minor facts of English life, to serve as a background for the English romance he hoped to write afterwards. "On the mantle-piece," he writes, "are two little glass vases, and over it a looking-glass (not flattering to the beholder), and above hangs a colored view of some lake or seashore, and on each side a cheap colored print of Prince Albert and one of Queen Victoria. And, really, I have seen no picture, bust, or statue of her Majesty which I feel to be so good ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... space, which, however, has been miserably encroached upon by petty shops, called the Flower Gardens, is before this western front; so that it has some little breathing room in which to expand its beauties to the wondering eyes of the beholder. In my poor judgment, this western front has very few elevations comparable with it—including even those of Lincoln and York. The ornaments, especially upon the three porches, between the two towers, are numerous, rich, and for the greater part entire, in ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... of them might be pronounced comely. And yet the tout ensemble is not pleasing. Despite physical beauty, there is something in the man's face that appears repulsive, and causes shrinking in the heart of the beholder. Chiefly is it his eyes that seem to produce this effect; their glance inspiring fear, such as one feels while being ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... harbour is the only prospect to the northward, and immediately in its rear the land rises so as to prevent anymore distant view, and even the harbour appears dwindled to a miniature of itself, being seen in the same picture with the mighty ocean that nearly surrounds the beholder. The character of the whole scene is melancholy, presenting the memorials of former life and population, contrasted with its present apparent isolation from the natives of the earth. The impression is not weakened by the sight of the few miserable huts scattered ...
— Nature and Human Nature • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... to look, to see beauty that is worth seeing," he safely generalised. But then—he had put his foot in the stirrup—his hobby bolted with him. "It takes two to make a beautiful object. The eye of the beholder is every bit as indispensable as the hand of the artist. The artist does his work—the beholder must do his. They are collaborators. Each must be the other's equal; and they must also be like each other—with the likeness of opposites, of complements. Art, in short, is entirely a ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... passed through successive stages. It began at zero. An unexpected event in the heavens was accounted portentous, because it was unexpected, and it was interpreted in a good or bad sense according to the state of mind of the beholder. There can have been at first no system, no order, no linking up of one specific kind of prediction with one kind of astronomical event. It can have been originally nothing but a crude jumble of omens, just on a level with the superstitions of some of our peasantry ...
— The Astronomy of the Bible - An Elementary Commentary on the Astronomical References - of Holy Scripture • E. Walter Maunder
... free, open sinuses, and on the long, sharp, bristle-pointed lobes. A simple oval outline would include it all, if you connected the points of the leaf; but how much richer is it than that, with its half-dozen deep scollops, in which the eye and thought of the beholder are embayed! If I were a drawing-master, I would set my pupils to copying these leaves, that they might learn to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 60, October 1862 • Various
... customs and national habits in a nation virtually spirituelle must not be trifled with. The tree torn up by the roots dies for want of nourishment; but, on the contrary, when lopped carefully only of its branches the pruning makes it more valuable to the cultivator and more pleasing to the beholder. So it is with national prejudices, which are often but the excrescences of national virtues. Root them out and you root out virtue and all. They must only be: pruned and turned to profit. A Frenchman is more easily killed than subdued. Even his follies generally spring from a high sense of national ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XV. and XVI., Volume 4 • Madame du Hausset, and of an Unknown English Girl and the Princess Lamballe
... moment. I myself felt a kind of thrill go through me, for her wild beauty was almost tragical. Her madness was not grotesque, but solemn and dramatic. There was something terribly deliberate in her strangeness; it was full of awe to the beholder, more searching and ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... answering to sleight of hand, like letting a glass fall sideways off a table, or else a trick, like knowing the secret spring of a watch. Accomplishments are certain external graces, which are to be learned from others, and which are easily displayed to the admiration of the beholder, viz. dancing, riding, fencing, music, and so on. These ornamental acquirements are only proper to those who are at ease in mind and fortune. I know an individual who, if he had been born to an estate ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... you have sent us are most beautiful: so sharp that they will cut other weapons; so bright that they reflect with a sort of iron light[371] the face of the beholder; with the two blades descending to their edges with such absolute equality of slope, that you would fancy them the result of the furnace rather than of the whetstone[372]; in the middle, between the blades, channels carved ...
— The Letters of Cassiodorus - Being A Condensed Translation Of The Variae Epistolae Of - Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator • Cassiodorus (AKA Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator)
... less, while manners have this intrinsic utility, in the apprehension of the performer and the beholder alike, this sense of the intrinsic rightness of decorum is only the proximate ground of the vogue of manners and breeding. Their ulterior, economic ground is to be sought in the honorific character of that leisure or non-productive ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... Highlander, with his dirk and claymore. Athenian orators, Roman tribunes, Knights of the Round Table, Scandinavian Vikings and Peruvian Incas jostled one another against the rich velvet and tapestry which hung from ceiling to floor. Truly, a motley assemblage, and one well calculated to impress the beholder with the transitoriness of mortal fame. In this miscellaneous concourse the occupants of the picture frames of all the public and private galleries of Europe seemed to have been restored to life, and personally brought into contact for the first ...
— Canadian Notabilities, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... the jewels of the upper earth, which also shines with gold and silver and the like, and they are set in the light of day and are large and abundant and in all places, making the earth a sight to gladden the beholder's eye. And there are animals and men, some in a middle region, others dwelling about the air as we dwell about the sea; others in islands which the air flows round, near the continent: and in a word, the air is used by them as the water and the sea are by us, and the ...
— Phaedo - The Last Hours Of Socrates • Plato
... Goth cut off the fourteen aqueducts which supplied Rome with water. Those greatest monuments of imperial magnificence from that time have stretched their broken arches across the Campagna, the admiration and sorrow of every beholder in so many generations. What five hundred years of empire had done, the Goth, in his fury to recover the land which he had usurped, was able to ruin. The besiegers went on wasting the Campagna, and preventing the ...
— The Formation of Christendom, Volume VI - The Holy See and the Wandering of the Nations, from St. Leo I to St. Gregory I • Thomas W. (Thomas William) Allies
... present a boundless variety of the choicest productions of nature, which gratify the senses with their fragrance and magnificence; while the branches of the trees display a brilliant assemblage of the feathered race, whose plumage, "glittering in the sun," dazzles the eye of the beholder with its unmatched loveliness and lustre, and presenting, on the whole, a scene too rich for the pencil to pourtray—too glowing and animated for the feeble pen of mortal to describe with half the energy and beauty which belong to it, and without ...
— The Present Picture of New South Wales (1811) • David Dickinson Mann
... ruddy, hale, with the zest of a juicy old apple, slightly withered but still sappy. It should be mentioned that he had a dimple in his cheek which flashed unexpectedly when he smiled. It gave him a roguish—almost boyish—effect most appealing to the beholder. Especially the feminine beholder. Much of his spoiling at the hands of Ma Minick had doubtless been due to this mere depression of ...
— Gigolo • Edna Ferber
... Africa and Egypt; the inner meaning of this old ritual could not be revived, and we must own that all this restoration of the old caerimonia must have appealed rather to the eye than the mind of the beholder. It was necessary to put some new element into it to give it life. Here we come upon a most important fact in the work of Augustus, which will become apparent if we take a rapid glance at the work and history of the Fratres, ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler
... all these be obscured in what may seem a total eclipse,—still let one not forget "The Gleam;" still let one keep faith with the power of the exalted moment. It came from God and held its deep significance. It laid upon its beholder consecration of divinest aspiration and unfaltering effort. "If I could uncover the hearts of you who are listening to me this morning," said Phillips Brooks, in a memorable sermon, "I should find in almost all—perhaps in all—of them a sacred chamber where burns the bright memory ...
— The Life Radiant • Lilian Whiting
... lent, in turn, a poetic authenticity to its Greek columns and to the Roman arches of its doors and windows. Especially in these mild, fragrant, blue nights was this charm potent, and the fair home seemed to its hidden beholder forever set apart from the discords and distresses of a turbulent world. And now an upper window brightened, its sash went up, and at the veranda's balustrade Anna stood outlined against ...
— Kincaid's Battery • George W. Cable
... of lightning itself are sometimes such as to produce upon the mind of an impartial but unscientific beholder the firm idea that a bodily thunderbolt must necessarily have descended from heaven. In sand or rock, where lightning has struck, it often forms long hollow tubes, known to the calmly discriminating geological intelligence ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... Raffaelle has rendered the idea of Divine motherhood and Divine Sonship in intelligible forms. No one can rest in the individual figures. The tremulous fulness of emotion in the face of the Mother, the intense, far-reaching gaze of the Child, constrain the beholder to look beyond. For him too the curtain is drawn aside; he feels that there is a fellowship of earth with heaven and of heaven with earth, and understands the meaning of the attendant Saints who express the different ...
— A Christmas Faggot • Alfred Gurney
... beautiful than that of York; though, on recollection, I hardly deem it so majestic and mighty as that. It is vain to attempt a description, or seek even to record the feeling which the edifice inspires. It does not impress the beholder as an inanimate object, but as something that has a vast, quiet, long-enduring life of its own,—a creation which man did not build, though in some way or other it is connected with him, and kindred to human nature. In short, I fall straightway to talking nonsense, when I ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... when young, had that peculiar stamp of old-fashionedness in his face which makes it impossible for a beholder to predicate any particular age in the object. You can scarce make a guess between seventeen and seven-and-thirty. This antique cast always seems to promise ill-luck and penury. Yet it seems he was not always ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... and public spirit, or whatever proceeds from a tender sympathy with others, and a generous concern for our kind and species. These wherever they appear seem to transfuse themselves, in a manner, into each beholder, and to call forth, in their own behalf, the same favourable and affectionate sentiments, which they exert ...
— An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals • David Hume
... door was then cautiously pushed ajar to admit the head of the personage thus impressively heralded. And a most extraordinary head it was—of fearsome aspect; nothing but long and intimate familiarity could resign the beholder to the unexpected appearance of it. Long, tawny hair, now sadly unkempt, fell abundantly from crown to shoulders; and hair as tawny, as luxuriantly thick, almost as long, completely covered the face, from every part of which ...
— The Mother • Norman Duncan
... gross yoke Drops off, no more to be endured, Her teaching is not so obscured By errors and perversities, That no truth shines athwart the lies: And he, whose eye detects a spark Even where, to man's, the whole seems dark, May well see flame where each beholder Acknowledges the embers smoulder. But I, a mere man, fear to quit The clue God gave me as most fit To guide my footsteps through life's maze, Because himself discerns all ways Open to reach him: I, a man Able to mark where faith ...
— Christmas Eve • Robert Browning
... which its old towers are now chiselled and mortared. It looks as if it was washed every morning with soap and water, instead of exhibiting here and there a straggling flower, or creeping weather-stains. I believe this circumstance strikes every beholder; but most imposing, indeed, is its distant view, when the broad banner floats or sleeps in the sunshine, amidst the intense blue of the summer skies, and its picturesque and ancient architectural vastness harmonizes ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 12, Issue 327, August 16, 1828 • Various
... intelligent and manly-looking American, the dark, swarthy Spaniard side by side with the dark Italian-fit companions, both in outward hue and their native character-and many others, forming a group of peculiar interest to the beholder. ...
— The Duke's Prize - A Story of Art and Heart in Florence • Maturin Murray
... from the Raleigh stable yard in state, and took his way along Gloucester street, the admiration of every beholder. He was going to glory and conquest—probably: he was on his way to happiness—perhaps. He felt a sentiment of benevolent regard for all the human family, and even, in passing, cast his ...
— The Youth of Jefferson - A Chronicle of College Scrapes at Williamsburg, in Virginia, A.D. 1764 • Anonymous
... perhaps, the entire absence of beard, the more remarkable upon so manly a countenance. His chin, newly shaved, rested on a large and elevated black cravat, tied with a military ostentation which reminded the beholder, that this abbe-marquis this celebrated preacher—now one of the most active and influential chiefs of his order, had commanded a regiment of hussars upon the Restoration, and had fought in aid of the Russians ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... longer you examined him, the more his features seemed to breathe vitality and spirit, and the firmer grew the conviction that this was an exceptional being—a rare and strange phenomenon. Once accustomed to his apparent pale and sickly homeliness, the beholder soon saw it transformed into a fascinating beauty such as we admire on the antique Roman cameos and old imperial coins. His classical and regular profile seemed to be modelled after these antique coins; his forehead, framed in on both sides with fine chestnut hair, was high and statuesque. ...
— LOUISA OF PRUSSIA AND HER TIMES • Louise Muhlbach
... each other into the stream, or voluntarily rushed in to escape the fire of the Russians; and in the midst of their terror one of the bridges gave way, and the crowd passing over it perished. When that river was frozen, it presented to the eye of the beholder one vast heap of human beings. Those who gained the opposite bank were saved, and Napoleon, leaving them under the care of Murat, repaired to Paris. He was stripped of everything; and yet he hoped to repair his fortunes. It is said ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... was interrupted by a dark, thick wood. On the other hand, as I have told you, from the quiet little spot which we had left we could have a better view than from the little plateau on the hillside; and the Rhine, with the island of Nonnenwoerth in the middle, was just visible to the beholder who peered over the tree-tops. We therefore set off hastily towards this little spot, taking care, however, not to go too quickly for the philosopher's comfort. The night was pitch dark, and we seemed to find our way by instinct rather than by clearly distinguishing the path, as we ...
— On the Future of our Educational Institutions • Friedrich Nietzsche
... meeting-houses in our American seaports. The verdant appearance of the country, the hills and valleys, ponds and rivers, the banks of which are covered with cattle and fields of rice; each in turn attract the eye, and cause the beholder to exclaim, "Was this delightful country made to be the residence of idolaters?" ... Oh my friend, scenes like these, productive of feelings so various and so opposite, do notwithstanding, fire the soul with an unconquerable desire to rescue this people from destruction, ...
— Lives of the Three Mrs. Judsons • Arabella W. Stuart
... which hath always two faces, ofttimes two hearts; that can compose his forehead to sadness and gravity, while he bids his heart be wanton and careless within, and in the meantime laughs within himself to think how smoothly he hath cozened the beholder. In whose silent face are written the characters of religion, which his tongue and gestures pronounce but his hands recant. That hath a clean face and garment with a foul soul, whose mouth belies his heart, and his fingers belie his mouth. Walking ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various
... was that somewhat unusual combination, a Parisian Protestant, but in other respects remained one of the most typically French creatures who was ever born. Meet her in any quarter of the world, in any nation, in any garb, and for no fraction of a moment could the beholder doubt her nationality. She was French in appearance, in expression, in movement, in thought, in character, and in deed; lovable, intelligent, vivacious, easily irritated, but still more easily pleased, sharp of tongue, tender of heart, and full to overflowing with humour. ...
— The Love Affairs of Pixie • Mrs George de Horne Vaizey
... who yet is above all and Lord over all." "He that is infinitely above thee makes himselfe be to thee [visibly] what He is in thee."[73] Christ is the universal revealer of God to all who see Him, just as the portrait of a human face seems to fix and follow the beholder from any position in the room, while at the same time it does the same to all other beholders from whatever ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... though an undeniably good servant, and a cleanly one, striking the beholder as a creature born to unlimited caps and spotless aprons, is undoubtedly obtuse. She presents her back hair and heels—that would not have disgraced an elephant—to Miss Massereene's call, and goes on calmly with her occupation of shaking out and hanging up ...
— Molly Bawn • Margaret Wolfe Hamilton
... answer; only thus much now is to be said, that the comedy is an imitation of the common errors of our life, which he representeth in the most ridiculous and scornful sort that may be; so as it is impossible that any beholder can be content to be such a one. Now, as in geometry, the oblique must be known as well as the right, and in arithmetic, the odd as well as the even; so in the actions of our life, who seeth not the filthiness of evil, wanteth a great foil to ...
— A Defence of Poesie and Poems • Philip Sidney
... supposed to assume if formed into a similar shape.... Splendid and astonishing, however, as this remarkable phenomenon really was, and although it could not fail to call forth the admiration and applause of every beholder, yet I must confess that there was at the same time something in its singular and wonderful appearance that was appalling; and I can readily imagine that uncivilised nations may occasionally have become alarmed and terrified at such ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... knows that this, too, was needed: yet these endurings purchase but one hour. The hour passes, and therewith passes also Freydis, the high Queen. Only the memory of her hour remains, like a cruel gadfly, for which the crazed beholder of Queen Freydis must build a lodging in his images, madly endeavoring to commingle memories with wet mud: and so for him who has beheld the loveliness of Freydis there is ...
— Figures of Earth • James Branch Cabell
... economy than to the comfort of its inmate. At one end stood a small four-post bedstead, which, owing to some mysterious cause, chose to hold its near fore-leg up in the air, and slightly advanced, thereby impressing the beholder with the idea that it was about to trot into the middle of the room. On an unpainted deal table stood a looking-glass, which, from a habit it had of altering and embellishing the face of any one who consulted it, must evidently have possessed a strong natural taste for the ludicrous: ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... threw it into the dark void. The sulphurous light shot up and up into a dome unlike anything built by human hands, unless it might be the interior of some tremendous tower, eighty feet in width, and nearly two hundred in height, which the beholder viewed from without, looking inwards through a window placed at two thirds of the entire height from ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... floors, the rich Oriental carpets, and the sumptuous paintings that hung against the ivory-tinted paneling, so that in appearance the beauties of the apartment were continued in bewildering vistas upon every side toward which the beholder directed ...
— Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates • Howard I. Pyle
... marvellous charm. This fascination was something quite different from ordinary beauty. Its seat was in her eyes, which many thought not at all beautiful, for they were like those gems called aquamarine, of a puzzling tint varying from blue to green, lustrous and lapping the beholder with their gentle lambency, except when passion moved her, when I have seen them glow with a menacing light as though they might shoot forth green flames. But now she was all loveliness. The vicissitudes of her tragic life had left no trace except the slight scowl, ...
— Romance of Roman Villas - (The Renaissance) • Elizabeth W. (Elizbeth Williams) Champney
... kitchen-gardens, the Rosenthal, Golis, Raschwitz, and Konnewitz, would be the oddest ground to beat up poetical game in. And yet I was often induced by that motive to contrive that my walk should be solitary; and because many objects neither beautiful nor sublime met the eye of the beholder, and, in the truly splendid Rosenthal, the gnats, in the best season of the year, allowed no tender thoughts to arise, so did I, by unwearied, persevering endeavor, become extremely attentive to the small life of nature (I would use this word ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... silence of midnight, of the mist that rises from the bosom of the earth, are not without design. The mountain rising in its magnificence, the gently sloping hill and verdant vale, are so arranged as to fill the mind of the beholder with satisfaction, while the eye gazes upon the perfect harmony that ...
— Withered Leaves from Memory's Garland • Abigail Stanley Hanna
... springs renewed by flowing, that she seemed the perfect flowering of a day in June, for these are phrases. Does Nature know her wonders when she shines in her strength? Does a woman know the infinite meanings her beauty may have for the beholder? I cannot tell. Nor can I tell if I saw this girl as she may have seemed to those who read only the letter of the book and are blind to its spirit, or in the deepest sense as she really was in the sight of That which created her and of which she was a part. Surely it is a proof of the divinity of ...
— The Ninth Vibration And Other Stories • L. Adams Beck
... handsome people here, (10) Cleiton, runners, and wrestlers, and boxers, and pancratiasts—that I see and know; but how do you give the magic touch of life to your creations, which most of all allures the soul of the beholder through ...
— The Memorabilia - Recollections of Socrates • Xenophon
... by the objective method it is a branch of psychology. Aesthetic facts are mental facts. A work of art, no matter how material it may at first seem to be, exists only as perceived and enjoyed. The marble statue is beautiful only when it enters into and becomes alive in the experience of the beholder. Keys and strings and vibrations of the air are but stimuli for the auditory experience which is the real nocturne or etude. Ether vibrations and the retina upon which they impinge are nothing more than instruments ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... stretching back into centuries without number. Egypt has a human history that is almost appalling to the thoughtful mind; this limitless stretch of time may, in part, explain the peculiar, indefinable charm that Cairo has upon the imagination of the beholder, thus winning for herself the appropriate name of the "Mysterious City of ...
— Travels in the Far East • Ellen Mary Hayes Peck
... pray. To whom is it given to read the soul of man? And is not Sirona's form and face the loveliest image of the Most High? So to represent it, that the whole charm that her presence exercises over me might also be felt by every beholder, is a task that I have set myself ever since her arrival in our house. I had to go back to the capital, and the work I longed to achieve took a clearer form; at every hour I discovered something to change and to improve in the pose of the head, the glance of the eye ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... manage it well it exposes you terribly. Great riches are like an electric light—like a noonday sun; they reveal everything. If a man stands in a ridiculous attitude, or is clad scantily, the intense light displays him remorselessly to every beholder. Great riches do the same. I saw you at the Midases', dear Mrs. Grundy. Did you ever see a more sumptuous entertainment or a more splendid palace? What pictures and statues and vases! what exquisite ...
— From the Easy Chair, vol. 1 • George William Curtis
... that from the wayes arose, Which in their martch, the trampling Troupes doe reare: When as the Sunne their thicknesse doth oppose In his descending, shining wondrous cleare, To the beholder farre off standing showes Like some besieged Towne, that were on fire: As though fore-telling e'r they should returne, That many a Citie ...
— The Battaile of Agincourt • Michael Drayton
... to mend her glowing fire, While each man to his neighbour shuffled nigher, As witch-flame leapt and ever brighter grew, Till, to their horror, sudden it burned blue; Whereat each silent, fearful beholder Felt in the gloom to touch his fellow's shoulder, Yet, in that moment, knew an added dread To see the fire from blue turn ghastly red; Then, as the Witch did o'er it crooning lean, Behold! it changed again to baleful green. Whereat the Witch flung ...
— The Geste of Duke Jocelyn • Jeffery Farnol
... said to him without lose of time. Overt saw a tall girl, with magnificent red hair, in a dress of a pretty grey-green tint and of a limp silken texture, a garment that clearly shirked every modern effect. It had therefore somehow the stamp of the latest thing, so that our beholder quickly took her for nothing ...
— The Lesson of the Master • Henry James
... that hedges certain words. A sacred terror warns the profane off them as off something that might blast the beholder's sight. In fact it is so, and even a clear-sighted person may be blinded by such a word. Of these words none is more typical than the word "socialism." Not so very long ago a prominent public man, of high intelligence, but evidently susceptible to ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... term or two, perhaps at the rate of an hour's practice a week, is not drawing at all. It is only the performance of a few dexterous (not always even that) evolutions on paper with a black-lead pencil; profitless alike to performer and beholder, unless as a matter of vanity, and that the smallest possible vanity. If any young person, after being taught what is, in polite circles, called "drawing," will try to copy the commonest piece of real work—suppose a ...
— The Elements of Drawing - In Three Letters to Beginners • John Ruskin
... Egyptians have left us no books, and had they done so the art of deciphering hieroglyphics or even phonetic or demotic writing is not yet assured enough to allow of absolute trust being put in it. Happily the Egyptians performed a work of such mightiness that it amazes the beholder. By the side of the hieroglyphic inscriptions they carved on the walls of palaces and temples, on the sides of pylons, the faces of the corridors and the bays of funeral chambers, on the faces of the sarcophagi and on ...
— The Works of Theophile Gautier, Volume 5 - The Romance of a Mummy and Egypt • Theophile Gautier
... not so much the girth of the tree as its whole bearing that impresses a beholder; and I do not think either of us will forget its effect in the gloom and silence and mystery of the ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... how it was placed, and it is the incongruity of this contrast which strikes the beholder and blinds him to the merits of the work. For Greenough has represented Washington seated in a massive armchair, naked except for a drapery over the legs and right shoulder, one hand pointing dramatically at the heavens, the other extended holding a reversed sword. It shows ...
— American Men of Mind • Burton E. Stevenson
... They seem'd almost, with staring on one another, to tear the cases of their eyes; there was speech in their dumbness, language in their very gesture; they looked as they had heard of a world ransomed, or one destroyed: a notable passion of wonder appeared in them; but the wisest beholder, that knew no more but seeing could not say if the importance were joy or sorrow;—but in the extremity of the one, it must needs be. Here comes a ...
— The Winter's Tale - [Collins Edition] • William Shakespeare
... that flitted hither and thither in the cool, spray-laden atmosphere of the place—nor the marvellous profusion of new and wonderful flowers of every conceivable tint that everywhere met the eye, which so powerfully fascinated the beholder; it was the wonderful, exquisite blue colour of the water in the basin itself, which, although of crystalline transparency, receives its marvellous colouring through some freak of sky reflection penetrating through the branches of the overhanging ...
— The Cruise of the Nonsuch Buccaneer • Harry Collingwood
... possession of the females; male salmons have been observed fighting all day long; male stag-beetles sometimes bear wounds from the mandibles of other males; the males of certain other insects have been frequently seen fighting for a particular female who sits by, an apparently unconcerned beholder of the struggle, and then retires with the conqueror. The war is, perhaps, severest between the males of the polygamous animals, and these seem oftenest provided with special weapons. The males of carnivorous animals are already well armed, ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... there is no finer sight the sea can show. The towering masts; the canvas gleaming white, with its lines of curving {114} beauty drawn by the touch of the wind; the whole ship bounding forward as if just slipped from her leash—all this makes a scene to stir the beholder then and for ever after. The breeze pipes up. She's doing ten knots now; eleven, twelve; and later on, fifteen. This puts the lee rail under; for she lays over on her side so far that her deck is at a slope of forty-five. Her forefoot cuts through the ...
— All Afloat - A Chronicle of Craft and Waterways • William Wood
... Warka, where the enormous accumulation of human remains proves that it was a peculiarly sacred spot, and that it was so esteemed for many centuries. It is difficult to convey anything like a correct notion of the piles upon piles of human relics which there utterly astound the beholder. Excepting only the triangular space between the three principal ruins, the whole remainder of the platform, the whole space between the walls, and an unknown extent of desert beyond them, are everywhere filled with the bones and sepulchres of the ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot
... support incumbent floor or roof, For corbel is a figure sometimes seen, That crumples up its knees unto its breast, With the feign'd posture stirring ruth unfeign'd In the beholder's fancy; so I saw These fashion'd, when I noted well ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... slip. It is constant with the eye of the beholder, and constant with the constant that is always—" Spears faltered, his face flushing ...
— Treachery in Outer Space • Carey Rockwell and Louis Glanzman
... fell upon its glades and hollows, they looked spectral and awful, with a sort of churchyard loneliness; and even when the blush of the morning kissed its broad woodlands, there was a melancholy in the salute that saddened rather than cheered the heart of the beholder. ...
— The Evil Guest • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... beautiful, and the good, are distinguishable. You are wrong in resolving beauty into expression or interest; it is quite distinct; indeed it is opposite, although not contrary. Beauty is an immediate presence, between (inter) which and the beholder nihil est. It is always one and tranquil; whereas the interesting always disturbs and is disturbed. I exceedingly regret the loss of those essays on beauty, which I wrote in a Bristol newspaper. I would ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... the Major took. He growled and grumbled, and swore tremendous oaths under his breath, and the way the headwaiter and all his assistants scurried about the dining-room of the Club was a joy to the beholder. ...
— The Moneychangers • Upton Sinclair
... in the main of his character falls into distress, and sinks under the blows of fortune, at the end of a Tragedy, than when he is represented as happy and triumphant. Such an example corrects the insolence of human nature, softens the mind of the beholder with sentiments of pity and compassion, comforts him under his own private affliction, and teaches him not to judge of mens virtues by their successes[40]. I cannot think of one real hero in all antiquity so far ...
— Clarissa: Preface, Hints of Prefaces, and Postscript • Samuel Richardson
... to the eye more pleasing than a religious youth. By this I do not mean a gloomy, downcast, sorrowful young man, or young woman, whose countenance is overcast with shadows, and whose presence chills every beholder. It is a darkened superstition, a cold, cheerless asceticism, and not the Christian religion, which gives this unnatural and forbidding appearance. A religious youth is one who is cheerful and happy—whose countenance is pervaded with an expression of benevolence, a ...
— Golden Steps to Respectability, Usefulness and Happiness • John Mather Austin
... condescend. But is the forest oak less strong and majestic because spring drapes its branches with thousands of blossoms, or are those blossoms less truly flowers because their hue is too like that of the foliage to strike a careless beholder? Maccabeus, with his thoughtful reserved disposition, would as little have talked of his affection for Zarah as he would of the pulsations of his heart; but both were a part of his nature, a necessity of ...
— Hebrew Heroes - A Tale Founded on Jewish History • AKA A.L.O.E. A.L.O.E., Charlotte Maria Tucker
... exquisite nose, purest example of the degree of perfection which may be attained by that vulgarest of features. Under her great gray eyes were faint violet shadows which gave her a look of almost poignant wistfulness. Her slow, sweet smile give the beholder an actual physical pang. Only her family knew she was lazy as a behemoth, untidy about her person, and as sentimental as a hungry shark. The strange and cruel part of it was that, in some grotesque, exaggerated way, as a cartoon may be like a photograph, Sophy resembled Flora. ...
— One Basket • Edna Ferber
... attention of all. But then it is known of them, and momentarily seen, that their grace is peculiar. They have studied their graces, and the result is there only too evident. But Florence seemed to have studied nothing. The beholder felt that she must have been as graceful when playing with her doll in the nursery. And it was the same with her beauty. There was no peculiarity of chiselled features. Had you taken her face and measured it by certain rules, you would have found ...
— Mr. Scarborough's Family • Anthony Trollope
... presenting its own peculiar loveliness and majesty. The sides of the mountains were occasionally bare and rugged, but for the most part they were clothed with forests of fir; while above, pointed summits and fantastic crags everywhere met the eye, and filled the beholder with ...
— Scenes in Switzerland • American Tract Society
... there, too, lovers—not lovers like Francie's, a peculiar breed, but simply lovers—trembling, blushing, silent, sought each other by flying glances, sought to meet and touch in the mazes of the dance, and now and again dancing together, struck some beholder by the light ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... of contemporary studio life that Hawthorne rather than Story created the "Cleopatra," and one ingenious spirit suggests that as Mr. Story put nothing of expression or significance into his statues, the beholder could read into them anything he pleased; finding an empty mould, so to speak, into which to pour whatever image or embodiment he might conjure up from the infinite realm of imagination. One of the latest of these contemporary critics declares that "Story ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting
... beautiful canyon. It gradually grows deeper with every mile of travel; the walls are symmetrically curved and grandly arched, of a beautiful color, and reflected in the quiet waters in many places so as almost to deceive the eye and suggest to the beholder the thought that he is looking into profound depths. We are all in fine spirits and feel very gay, and the badinage of the men is echoed from wall to wall. Now and then we whistle or shout or discharge a pistol, to listen to ...
— Canyons of the Colorado • J. W. Powell
... the two friends—or of Stukely rather, for Dick Chichester somehow seemed almost entirely to lack the keen sense of beauty with which his friend was so bountifully endowed— was very different from that which greets the eye of the beholder to-day. Devonport and Stonehouse were mere villages; Mount Wise was farm land; where the citadel now stands was a trumpery fort which a modern gunboat would utterly destroy in half an hour; Drake's island was fortified, it is true, but with a battery even ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... their safety there. Gray Superstition's whisper dread Debarred the spot to vulgar tread; For there, she said, did fays resort, 655 And satyrs hold their silvan court, By moonlight tread their mystic maze, And blast the rash beholder's gaze. ...
— Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott |
