"Harlequin" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... The intrigue of Willmore and La Nuche, together with the jocantries of the inimitable Blunt, Nick Fetherfool, and the antique Petronella Elenora, are all alive with the genius of Astrea, although it may be possibly objected that some of the episodes with the two Monsters and the pranks of Harlequin are apt to trench a little too nearly on ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. I (of 6) • Aphra Behn
... fellowship than a tribe; rather a residuum than a fellowship. It was all the riffraff of the universe, having for their trade a crime. It was a sort of harlequin people, all composed of rags. To recruit a man was to sew on ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... had six lovely little harlequin cups on a side-shelf in her china closet, and six different-patterned breakfast plates, with colored borders to match the cups; rose, and brown, and gray, and vermilion, and green, and blue. These were all the real china she had, ...
— Real Folks • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... that time had now nearly come, he did not forget to remind them of their promise. His birth-day was the fifteenth of January, which was lucky, because they always perform pantomimes in the Christmas holidays, and he was very desirous of seeing harlequin and columbine, and the clown, as he had heard a great deal about them from his young friends in the square, who had been to see them. As the day approached, Charles could think of nothing but the play, and said he thought it would be the happiest day of his life; but his mamma told him she hoped ...
— More Seeds of Knowledge; Or, Another Peep at Charles. • Julia Corner
... keeping time. Fancy this gentleman in the air, dressed in feathers, his coat-skirt sheared off alarmingly short and square, and looking like a cherub in jet, all head and wings,—although John is not exactly a cherub in his habits. A white spot on each wing adds a bit of the harlequin ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various
... in all the habitable Planets, that one may as plainly fee what a Clock it is by one of the Dials in the Moon, as if it were no farther off than Windsor-Castle; and had he liv'd to finish the Speaking-trumpet which he had contriv'd to convey Sound thither, Harlequin's Mock-Trumpet had been a Fool to it; and it had no doubt been an admirable Experiment, to have given us a general Advantage from all their acquir'd Knowledge in those Regions, where no doubt several useful Discoveries are daily ...
— The Consolidator • Daniel Defoe
... hands. She is an expert in beautiful costumes. I venture to promise you, Mr Savoyard, that what you are about to see will be like a Louis Quatorze ballet painted by Watteau. The heroine will be an exquisite Columbine, her lover a dainty Harlequin, her father a picturesque Pantaloon, and the valet who hoodwinks the father and brings about the happiness of the lovers a grotesque but perfectly tasteful Punchinello or Mascarille ...
— Fanny's First Play • George Bernard Shaw
... that night a harlequin tangle, and, above all, meaningless—yes, dispiritedly without sense. John, somehow, seemed displeased with her, as if she were responsible for Dickie's breaks. She laughed again as she thought of the sow story, and the way the women took it. ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... Blue-Winged Teal Cinnamon Teal Green-Winged Teal Wood Duck Black Duck Diving Ducks Canvasback Redheads Ringneck Scaup Goldeneye Bufflehead Ruddy Red-Breasted Merganser Common Merganser Hooded Merganser Whistling Ducks White-Winged Scoter Surf Scoter Black Scoter Common Eider Oldsquaw Harlequin Swans Canada Geese Brant Snow White-Fronted Geese At a Glance Guide Comparative Sizes Of Waterfowl Wetlands ...
— Ducks at a Distance - A Waterfowl Identification Guide • Robert W. Hines
... man in graver tragic known (Though his best part long since was done), Still on the stage desires to tarry; And he who played the Harlequin, After the jest still loads the scene, ...
— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis
... have perhaps the first germ of the Commedia dell' arte, the improvisatory farce with standing masks. A striking affinity between the latter and the Atellanae consists in the employment of dialects to produce a ludicrous effect. But how would Harlequin and Pulcinello be astonished were they to be told that they descended in a direct line from the buffoons of the ancient Romans, and even from the Oscans!—With what drollery would they requite the labours of the antiquarian ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... in a harlequin jacket, with a bone, or what the painter denominates a baton, in the right hand, is generally considered designed for Mrs. Mapp, a masculine woman, daughter to one Wallin, a bone-setter at Hindon, in Wiltshire. ...
— The Works of William Hogarth: In a Series of Engravings - With Descriptions, and a Comment on Their Moral Tendency • John Trusler
... "Resolute"! All this gay company is gone who have made her sides split with their laughter. Here is Harlequin's dress, lying in one of the wardrooms, but there is nobody to dance Harlequin's dances. "Here is a lovely clear day,—surely to-day they will come on deck and take a meridian!" No, nobody comes. The sun grows hot on the decks; but it is all one, nobody looks at the thermometer! ...
— If, Yes and Perhaps - Four Possibilities and Six Exaggerations with Some Bits of Fact • Edward Everett Hale
... amongst whom were several gumbie—men and flute—players, and John Canoes, as the negro Jack Pudding is called; the latter distinguishable by wearing white false faces, and enormous shocks of horsehair, fastened on to their woolly pates. Their character hovers somewhere between that of a harlequin and a clown, as they dance about, and thread through the negro groups, quizzing the women and slapping the men; and at Christmas time, the grand negro carnival, they don't confine their practical jokes to their own colour, but take all manner ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... not only his days, but his nights, to gleaning the scanty portion of actual information that he scatters through his volumes; they will have a much more substantive foundation than those of the theologian, who shall construct his morality upon the harlequin scenery of systems that so frequently change, even in his own distempered brain. If the atheist, as they please to call those who differ in opinion with themselves, objects to the correctness, of—their systems, he cannot deny his own existence, nor that of beings similar to himself, by whom he is ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 2 • Baron D'Holbach
... show his dexterity on the tight line. From one branch to another his Cobwebs he slung, Then quick as an arrow he darted along; But just in the middle,—Oh! shocking to tell, From his rope in an instant poor Harlequin fell. Yet he touch'd not the ground, but with talons outspread Hung suspended in air, at the end of a thread. Then the Grasshopper came with a jerk and a spring; Very long was his Leg, though but short ...
— The Peacock 'At Home' AND The Butterfly's Ball AND The Fancy Fair • Catherine Ann Dorset
... come in, answered the other.—Here we are!" and entering the room he folded his arms and began twirling his head round and round with immense rapidity, like Harlequin in the Pantomime when he first issues from his cocoon or envelope. Miss Fotheringay laughed with all her heart: a wink of Foker's would set her off laughing, when the bitterest joke Bows ever made could not ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... last time through the middle of the circle, he gave the signal for the whole party to loose hands and follow him, and away they all went. But they could not get on for laughing, for Lucy had as many pranks as Harlequin himself, so that several of the children, and amongst these Miss Darwell herself, fairly ...
— The Fairchild Family • Mary Martha Sherwood
... pantomime, and even I was able to go to it. We put our young sailor and our sister in the forefront, and believed that every one was as much struck with them as with the wonderful transformations of Goody-Two-Shoes under the wand of Harlequin. Brother-like, we might tease our one girl, and call her an affected little pussy cat, but our private opinion was that she excelled all other damsels with her bright blue eyes and pretty curling hair, which had the same chestnut shine as Griff's— enough to make us correct possible ...
— Chantry House • Charlotte M. Yonge
... sweetmeats; little boys so happy, and shop-people so polite, the music at the booths, and the bustle and eagerness of the people outside, made my heart quite jump. There was Richardson, with a clown and harlequin, and such beautiful women, dressed in clothes all over gold spangles, dancing reels and waltzes, and looking so happy! There was Flint and Gyngell, with fellows tumbling over head and heels, playing such tricks—eating fire, and drawing yards of tape out of their ...
— Peter Simple and The Three Cutters, Vol. 1-2 • Frederick Marryat
... this manifest brilliancy and Harlequin's-jacket character is essential in the color school. The essential matter is only that everything should be of its own definite color: it may be altogether sober and dark, yet the distinctness of hue preserved with entire fidelity. ...
— Ariadne Florentina - Six Lectures on Wood and Metal Engraving • John Ruskin
... boats along by the gunwales of the other boats, laughed at these witticisms rather inquiringly. Always slightly unconvinced, they seemed to have no inward desire to laugh, but yielded politely to the requirements, owing to the niggers' harlequin ...
— Abroad with the Jimmies • Lilian Bell
... and the club-men of St. James's Street, or Pall Mall, in London! Look at yonder prematurely old man, doubled up with work, and leaning on a rude stick more crooked than himself, slowly trudging to the club-house, in a shapeless hat like an Italian harlequin's, or an old brown- paper bag, leathern leggings, and dull green smock-frock, looking as though duck-weed had accumulated on it—the result of its stagnant life—or as if it were a vegetable production, originally meant to blow into something better, but stopped ...
— Contributions to All The Year Round • Charles Dickens
... your position in the country?" some one asks the Senate. "We are charged with the preservation of public liberty."—"What is your business in this city?" Pierrot demands of Harlequin.—"My business," replies Harlequin, "is to curry-comb ...
— Napoleon the Little • Victor Hugo
... once Harlequin stopped short and, turning to the public, he pointed with his hand to some one far down in the pit and exclaimed in ...
— Pinocchio - The Tale of a Puppet • C. Collodi
... of great value. The Dutch pastors still remember the distinction between 'Christenmenschen' and 'Hottentoten'; but the Church Mission Schools teach the Anglican Catechism to every child that will learn, and the congregation is as piebald as Harlequin's jacket. A pretty, coloured lad, about eleven years old, answered my questions in geography with great quickness and some wit. I said, 'Show me the country you belong to.' He pointed to England, and when I laughed, to the cape. 'This ...
— Letters from the Cape • Lady Duff Gordon
... raised, in which no voice is ever heard. Death is the ugly fact which nature has to hide, and she hides it well. Human life were otherwise an impossibility. The pantomime runs on merrily enough; but when once Harlequin lifts his vizor, Columbine disappears, the jest is frozen on the Clown's lips, and the hand of the filching Pantaloon is arrested in the act. Wherever death looks, there is silence and trembling. But although on every man he will one day or another look, he is coy of revealing ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... Russia in search of employment. Three years later he was sent by Prince Potemkin to superintend a great industrial establishment at Kritchev on a tributary of the Dnieper. There he was to be 'Jack-of-all-trades—building ships, like Harlequin, of odds and ends—a rope-maker, a sail-maker, a distiller, brewer, malster, tanner, glass-man, glass-grinder, potter, hemp-spinner, smith, and coppersmith.'[251] He was, that is, to transplant a fragment of ready-made Western civilisation into Russia. Bentham resolved ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... the coupe. Harlequin, and Colombine, and Humpty-Dumpty; shapes which came out of nowhere and instantly vanished into nothing, for all the world like the absurd pantomimes of his boyhood days. He kept close to the curb, scrutinizing the numbers as he went along. Never had he seen such a fog. Two paces ...
— The Voice in the Fog • Harold MacGrath
... associated with suchlike warmint. At last—out of the tunnel! and now, I presume, in the caves. Here someone, gradually assuming a palpable form, emerges from somewhere out of a dark corner, and hands to each of us a long piece of wood about the length of a harlequin's bat (note, pantomime again), only that this is an inch or so thick and quite two inches wide at one end, where presently a candle is fixed by an attendant sprite,—the slave of the tallow candle,—and the wand, so to speak, tapers off towards the handle. A propos of "tapers ...
— Punch, Volume 101, September 19, 1891 • Francis Burnand
... he enjoyed a party of pleasure in a good boat on the water, to one of the aits or islets in the Thames at the right season, to be regaled with eel-pie. One book he had read, and one play he liked—no, not a play, but a pantomime. The book was Robinson Crusoe—the pantomime, Harlequin Friday. He had been heard to say, that if ever he had a villa, there should be in it an island like Robinson Crusoe's; and why not a fortress, a castle, and a grotto? this would be something new; and why should he not have his fancy, and why should not there be Panton's Folly as well ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. VII - Patronage • Maria Edgeworth
... delight. Then she turned upon Anthony eyes swimming with tenderness, put up consoling lips.... The entrance of Polichinelle, however, cudgel and all, in the shape of a little white dog, dragging a bough with him, spoiled her game. Harlequin Sun, too, flashed out of hiding—before his cue, really, for the shower was ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... introduced into Golden Lane on the 16th of August. Pall Mall, however, was not lighted with gas until 1809, and it was really not finally and generally introduced into London until the year 1820. We meet with an excellent satire published by S. W. Fores, in 1807, wherein a harlequin is depicted sitting on a rope suspended between a couple of lamp posts. The lamps and the hat of the figure are garnished with lighted burners; the neighbours in the windows of the adjoining houses, the people on the pavement below, the fowls, the dogs, the cats on the ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... strength of this the leaders of the riot work on in security for ten days. One of them is a man named Jourdain, a lawyer of Lisieux, and, like most of his brethren, a demagogue in principles; the other is a strolling actor from Paris named Bordier, famous in the part of harlequin,[1319] a bully in a house of ill-fame, "a night-rover and drunkard, and who, fearing neither God nor devil," has taken up patriotism, and comes down into the provinces to play tragedy, and that, tragedy in real life. The ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 2 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 1 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... like to go back to Italy? Here is a steamer ticket. A boat sails for Genoa tomorrow. And here is a thousand dollars. It will buy you a vineyard in Sicily. Go home and bid the signora get ready." And then to disappear once more, like Harlequin, to flash your wand in some other corner of the human multitude. Oh, there would be fun for one's money, something worth while ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... in each politer Age, Triumphant, rear'd the Trophies of the Stage: But only Farce, and Shew, will now go down, And Harlequin's the ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson
... a laugh. "Tell the premier that I should lose when I have five million men to their three million! What a harlequin chief of staff I should be! Excellent fooling! ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... so long and so vociferous, that in my momentary anger I prayed some one might burst a blood-vessel, and frighten the rest. I put on a look of indescribable indignation, and cast a glance of what I intended should be most withering scorn on the assembly; but alas! my infernal harlequin costume ruined the effect; and confound me, if they did not laugh the louder. I turned from one to the other with the air of a man who marks out victims for his future wrath; but with no better success; at last, amid the continued mirth of the party, I made my ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Vol. 2 • Charles James Lever
... believe it, but do not wish to confirm it. There, Minha, you can take your choice between the gray mosquito, the hairy mosquito, the white-clawed mosquito, the dwarf mosquito, the trumpeter, the little fifer, the urtiquis, the harlequin, the big black, and the red of the woods; or rather they make take their choice of you for a little repast, and you will come back hardly recognizable! I fancy these bloodthirsty diptera guard the Brazilian frontier considerably better than the poverty-stricken ...
— Eight Hundred Leagues on the Amazon • Jules Verne
... a tree. Then out came the Spider, with finger so fine, To show his dexterity on the tight line. From one branch to another his cobwebs he slung, Then quick as an arrow he darted along. But just in the middle, oh, shocking to tell! From his rope in an instant poor Harlequin fell. Yet he touched not the ground, but with talons outspread, Hung suspended in air at the end of a thread. Then the Grasshopper came with a jerk and a spring; Very long was his leg, though but short was ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... Devil take it, you have an awkward way of playing harlequin when you're not wanted! Now to come blundering in upon a lady and her friend is— Well, not the best of form. Better drop it before it ...
— A Daughter of Raasay - A Tale of the '45 • William MacLeod Raine
... passage from your mouth to your belly," added an elastic Harlequin, reaching an arm across the women's shoulders. "Come, Cantapresto, we'll help you line it with good wine, to the health of his most superlatively serene Highness, the heir-presumptive of Pianura; and where is that fabulous ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... the other end of the room. Fenn had upset one chair and the noise had nearly deafened him. Now chairs seemed to be falling in dozens. Bang! Bang! Crash!! (two that time). And then somebody shot through the window like a harlequin and dashed away across the lawn. Fenn could hear his footsteps thudding on the soft turf. And at the same moment ...
— The Head of Kay's • P. G. Wodehouse
... prognosticate the declining taste for the Ullaloo in Ireland. In a comic theatrical entertainment, represented not long since on the Dublin stage, a chorus of old women was introduced, who set up the Irish howl round the relics of a physician, who is supposed to have fallen under the wooden sword of Harlequin. After the old women have continued their Ullaloo for a decent time, with all the necessary accompaniments of wringing their hands, wiping or rubbing their eyes with the corners of their gowns or aprons, &c. one of the mourners ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. IV • Maria Edgeworth
... of his brightest triumphs in the part of Samson. His history was romantic. In 1732 he married the Lady Henrietta, daughter of James, Earl of Waldegrave, and widow of Lord Edward Herbert, second son of the Marquis of Powis. In 1759 he took as his second wife Charlotte, daughter of John Rich, the harlequin."—Rockstro. ...
— The Standard Oratorios - Their Stories, Their Music, And Their Composers • George P. Upton
... mantilla, and decorated with pinks, leaned out of the box in the grandstand. Her relations with the doctor were almost common talk. That was amply proved by the fury with which the gentlemen of her coterie pulled him to pieces, declaring that he was an idiot and that his book was a Harlequin's coat, a series of excerpts from other men, poorly basted together, with the daring of ignorance. They, too, were stung by envy, in their senile, silent love, by the triumph of that stripling who carried off their idol, whom they had worshiped with ...
— Woman Triumphant - (La Maja Desnuda) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... be intimidated by the blunders of the past. Knowing that contemporary criticism has damned almost every true artist of the nineteenth century, they are determined not to be caught napping; and they join in shouts of applause as each new harlequin steps upon the stage. They forget that it is as dangerous to praise ignorantly as to blame unjustly, and that the railer at genius, though he may seem more malevolent, will scarce appear so ridiculous ...
— Artist and Public - And Other Essays On Art Subjects • Kenyon Cox
... fought hard and yet in vain) the most ludicrous images were mixed with the most awful personations; and whatever the subject might be, however sublime, however pathetic, yet the Vice and the Devil, who are the genuine antecessors of Harlequin and the Clown, were necessary component parts. I have myself a piece of this kind, which I transcribed a few years ago at Helmstadt, in Germany, on the education of Eve's children, in which after the fall and repentance of Adam, the offended ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... CATHERINE enters. In spite of her youth and girlish appearance, she is a good, thrifty housekeeper. She wears a simple summer gown, and carries a bunch of gay tulips and an old silver pitcher, from which she presently pours water into the Harlequin Delft vase on PETER GRIMM'S desk. She peeps into the office, retreating, with a smile on her ...
— The Return of Peter Grimm • David Belasco
... spryest wrestle till one falls into the water.... But all the fun's gone now. When I was young, there was different sport going. That was a sight! the corporation procession with the banners and the harlequin atop, and at Shrovetide, when the butchers led about an ox decked with ribbons and carnival twigs, with a boy on his back with wings and a little shirt.... All that's past now, people are got so fine. St. Knud's Fair is not what it ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... blest as bird could be, 65 Feeding in the apple-tree; Made such wanton spoil and rout, Turning blossoms inside out; Hung—head pointing towards the ground—[7] Fluttered, perched, into a round 70 Bound himself, and then unbound; Lithest, gaudiest Harlequin! Prettiest tumbler ever seen! Light of heart and light of limb; What is now become of Him? 75 Lambs, that through the mountains went Frisking, bleating merriment, When the year was in its prime, They are sobered by this time. ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth
... occasion to note at least once in our magazine a book which is incontestably the strangest production of wit and humor which has ever been brought forth. ... The author of this original book is a clergyman by the name of Sterne, who, under his Harlequin's name, Yorick, has given to the world the most excellent sermons." The review contains also a brief word of comparison with Rabelais and a quotation from an English critic expressing regret at Yorick's embroidering ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... about fifty years later, remarks, that, "of all that Marlowe hath written to the stage, his 'Dr. Faustus' has made the greatest noise with its devils and such-like tragical sport." In course of time it was "made into a farce, with the Humors of Harlequin and Scaramouch," and represented through the whole kingdom, like ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... grudged no work which could beautify the simple background. Poor Betty! For two whole gloomy afternoons did she work at a spray of roses on a linen work-bag, and on the third day a feeble gleam of sunlight showed itself, and lo, the roses were a harlequin ...
— Betty Trevor • Mrs. G. de Horne Vaizey
... his glass). No, by all the treasures of Mammon, I should not like to go through it a second time. Death is something more than a harlequin's leap, and its terrors are even worse than ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... him knowing that I should find opportunity for reproof, but should probably lack the will. For Pierre was my harlequin, and what man can easily censure his own amusements even when he sees their harm? Then there was more to make me lenient. The man's family had served my own for as many generations as the rooks had builded in our yews, and ...
— Montlivet • Alice Prescott Smith
... yet I own I was not a little scandalized at the introduction of theatrical airs and gestures into a place set apart to remind us of the saddest realities. Going nearer, I found inscribed under this harlequin figure the ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... of the Toy Symphony, a Harlequin ran in, with a Columbine, whom he twisted upon his bent knee, and tossed lightly through the upper window of a baker's shop, himself diving a moment later, with a slap of his wand, through the flap of the fishmonger's door, hard by. Next, as on a frozen slide, ...
— Corporal Sam and Other Stories • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... to remain with her over Christmas. I longed to see the pantomime, having heard much from my cousins and from Leo of its delights—and of the harlequin, columbine, and clown. But my father wanted to be at home again, and he took me and Rubens and Nurse Bundle with him at the ...
— A Flat Iron for a Farthing - or Some Passages in the Life of an only Son • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... Beltramo Bergamasco, i.e. a native of the town and province of Bergamo, in the north of Italy. Compare "Comasco." Harlequin ... was a Bergamasc, and the personification of the manners, accent, and jargon of the inhabitants of the Val Brembana.—Handbook: Northern Italy, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... where, shall he begin Who would paint thee, Harlequin? With thy waxen burnished leaf, With thy branches' red relief, With thy polytinted fruit,— In thy spring or autumn suit,— Where begin, and oh, where end, Thou whose ...
— Complete Poetical Works of Bret Harte • Bret Harte
... Castor and Pollux, and sturdy Ben Jonson enacted more wonders than when a volunteer with the army in Flanders. As to the dapper little compiler of farragos mentioned some time since, he had arrayed himself in as many patches and colors as harlequin, and there was as fierce a contention of claimants about him, as about the dead body of Patroclus. I was grieved to see many men, to whom I had been accustomed to look up with awe and reverence, fain to steal off with scarce a rag to cover their nakedness. Just then my eye was caught by the ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... from Venice the last summer, and taking Bergamo in my way homeward to England, it was my hap, sojourning there some four or five days, to light in fellowship with that famous Francattip Harlequin, who, perceiving me to be an Englishman by my habit and speech, asked me many particulars of the order and manner of our plays, which he termed by the name of representations. Amongst other talk he enquired of me if I knew any such ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VIII (4th edition) • Various
... informed me that the Diana was disabled. She was lying against the bank under a severe fire. The waters of the bayou seemed to be boiling like a kettle. An officer came to the side of the boat to speak to me, but before he could open his mouth a shell struck him, and he disappeared as suddenly as Harlequin in a pantomine. Semmes then reported his condition. Conical shells from the enemy's Parrotts had pierced the railway iron, killed and wounded several of his gunners and crew, and cut a steam pipe. Fortunately, he had kept down ...
— Destruction and Reconstruction: - Personal Experiences of the Late War • Richard Taylor
... passenger pigeon, wild turkey, great auk, trumpeter swan, Labrador duck, harlequin duck, Eskimo curlew, upland plover, golden plover, whooping crane, sandhill crane, purple martin, pileated woodpecker, moose, caribou, bison, elk, puma, gray wolf, wolverine, marten, fisher, beaver, fox, ...
— Our Vanishing Wild Life - Its Extermination and Preservation • William T. Hornaday
... a burlesque or Christmas pantomime, in which the Good Fairy warns the tenant to remove his crops lest the Demon Landlord should seize upon them—the tenant being of course transmuted into Harlequin and the landlord into Clown—this would be funny enough; but it is difficult to see how the everyday business of life could be carried on under such conditions. The case of Miss Gardiner against Thomas Browne is one purely of hide and seek. When he owed two years' ...
— Disturbed Ireland - Being the Letters Written During the Winter of 1880-81. • Bernard H. Becker
... simplicity, and mixes up so much grave drollery and merry pathos with all he says or does, and his ubiquity is so wonderful, that he gives an idea of a character, of whose existence we had previously no conception, that of a sentimental harlequin.[139] ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... colored men, and the domestic negroes of America are always light- handed and adroit. The nature of an American car is no doubt known to all men. It looks as far removed from all bed-room accommodation as the baker's barrow does from the steam engine into which it is to be converted by Harlequin's wand. But the negro goes to work much more quietly than the Harlequin; and for every four seats in the railway car he builds up four beds almost as quickly as the hero of the pantomime goes through his performance. The great ...
— Volume 1 • Anthony Trollope
... ordering, jesting, pondering; For the man was, we safely may assert, A thing to wonder at beyond most wondering; Hero, buffoon, half-demon, and half-dirt, Praying, instructing, desolating, plundering—Now Mars, now Momus—and when bent to storm A fortress, Harlequin in uniform.[408] ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... carriage, and gave his servant some money, which he counted twice over.' About a hundred-and-fifty drivers applied, but not one of them was the right man. We did, however, elicit a curious and unexpected piece of evidence in quite another quarter. What a racket that plaguey harlequin ...
— The Room in the Dragon Volant • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... an apparition and overture throw the best-trained orchestra of Old World birds into amazement or confusion, but astonish all the human listeners at an English concert. With what a wonderment would one of these blooming, country milkmaids look at the droll harlequin, and listen to those familiar words of his, set to his ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... entertain to-night, She brings imaginary kings and queens to light, Bids Common Sense in person mount the stage, And Harlequin to storm in tragick rage. Britons, attend; and decent reverence shew To her, who made th' Athenian bosoms glow; Whom the undaunted Romans could revere, And who in Shakespeare's time was worshipp'd here: If none of these can her success presage, ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding
... Frederick, exulting, "now we shall see a philosopheress in a passion; I'd give sixpence, half-price, for a harlequin entertainment, to see Sophy in a passion. Now, Marianne, look at her brush dabbing so fast in ...
— The Parent's Assistant • Maria Edgeworth
... or some stage in the game made such action desirable, he would leap the barrier, and jumping up and down like a harlequin in front of the bleacher benches, start his cohort into a combined school yell that must make the hot blood leap through the veins of everyone who called Chester ...
— Jack Winters' Gridiron Chums • Mark Overton
... Persepolis for the time; and the burning idol of their devotion almost converted me into a worshipper. I was awe-struck, and believed those significations to be something more than elemental fires. It was all enchantment and a dream. No such pleasure has since visited me but in dreams.—Harlequin's Invasion followed; where, I remember, the transformation of the magistrates into reverend beldams seemed to me a piece of grave historic justice, and the tailor carrying his own head to be as sober a verity as the legend of ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... South Street Theatre, and was especially pleased with a comedy called The Young Quaker; or the Fair Philadelphian by O'Keefe, a sketch that was followed by a pantomimic ballet, a musical piece called The Children in the Wood, a recitation of Goldsmith's Epilogue in the character of Harlequin, and a "grand finale" by some adventuresome actor who made a leap through a barrel of fire! Truly vaudeville began early ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... after him and Nedda falls on her knees to pray for her lover's escape, while Tonio the Fool triumphs over her misery. The husband however returns defeated; panting he claims the lover's name, and Nedda's lips remaining sealed, he is about to stab his wife, when Beppo the Harlequin intervenes, and, wrenching the dagger from his unfortunate master's hands intimates, that it is time to prepare for the play. While Nedda retires, Canio breaks out into a bitter wail of his hard lot, which compels him to take ...
— The Standard Operaglass - Detailed Plots of One Hundred and Fifty-one Celebrated Operas • Charles Annesley
... which was kept up for several centuries.[2041] These personages, remaining unchanged in character, were put in various assumed positions and conjunctures. The actors had to invent the dialogue and work out the situation. The characters have come down to us as Punch, Harlequin, Pantaloon, etc.[2042] Punch (Pulcino, Pulcinella) is only a Neapolitan rendering of Maccus, a character in the atellans. "Maccus," in Etruscan, meant a little cock.[2043] Christian antiphonal ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... were being cast off, Jolivet appeared, tearing along. The steamer was already sheering off, the gangway had been drawn onto the quay, but Alcide Jolivet would not stick at such a little thing as that, so, with a bound like a harlequin, he alighted on the deck of the Caucasus almost in ...
— Michael Strogoff - or, The Courier of the Czar • Jules Verne
... she reviewed the situation, her head leaned in the pose of the most plaintive of the pastels that Lord Dungory had commissioned his favourite artist to execute in imitation of the Lady Hamilton portraits. And now, his finger on his lip, like harlequin glancing after columbine, the old gentleman, who ...
— Muslin • George Moore
... most distinguished practitioner was Cerberus;{2} bear-garden meetings of mismanaged companies, in which directors and shareholders abuse each other in choice terms, not all to be found even in Rabelais; burstings of bank bubbles, which, like a touch of harlequin's wand, strip off their masks and dominoes from 'highly respectable' gentlemen, and leave them in their true figures of cheats and pickpockets; societies of all sorts, for teaching everybody everything, meddling ...
— Gryll Grange • Thomas Love Peacock
... saucy, impertinent, and suspicious, bubbling over with something important to tell, and afraid he will not be the first to tell it. When he discovers us watching, he sets up his clamorous cry of "Thief! Thief!" and hurries away to spread the alarm. A mighty borrower of trouble, this gayly dressed harlequin of the woods, and yet the forest would not seem complete ...
— Byways Around San Francisco Bay • William E. Hutchinson
... Tait's discreet, usual habit, had been left open. He vanished through it with harlequin-like agility as a terrible, white-faced black figure seemed ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... the table, he addressed the assemblage: "You shall see whether we are not Paris republicans. Now, sir, say your republican catechism—'What is God? what are the People? and what is a King?' His friend, with an air of contrition and in a nasal tone of voice, twisting himself about like a harlequin, replies: 'God is matter, the People are the poor, and the King is a lion, a tiger, an elephant who tears to pieces, devours, and crushes the people down.'"—"They could no longer restrain themselves. The shouts, cries, and enthusiasm were unbounded. They embraced the actors, hugged them, and ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 3 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 2 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... in his books, and those who looked deeply enough into human nature found it in the man, but superficial observers saw only the mocking man of the world. When suddenly observed, his face always had a sad, grave aspect, and it was often hard for him to throw off this seriousness and to put on his harlequin's mask. Upon religious matters he was always reticent, but reverent. Only upon rare occasions would he discuss serious subjects at all, and only with a chosen few. In one letter which has been published he departs from ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... VIII, or Queen Elizabeth, as much as if it was that of the King and Queen of the Cannibal Islands. All costume off a man is pitiful or grotesque. It is only the serious eye peering from and the sincere life passed within it which restrain laughter and consecrate the costume of any people. Let Harlequin be taken with a fit of the colic and his trappings will have to serve that mood too. When the soldier is hit by a cannonball, rags are as ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... ears, but as it were unheard. He was looking up at a window, with a couple of sooty scarlet geraniums in it. This was the court where Dame Dutton dwelt. He glided up her narrow stair and let himself in by the latch; and with his cane made a smacking like a harlequin's sword upon the old woman's deal table, crying: 'Mrs. Dutton; Mrs. Dutton. ...
— Wylder's Hand • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... have gone as harlequin, Or clad yourself in Zamiel's skin, Your tending spirits we; Or "Peeping Tom" may be more apt, Since all are in your record clapp'd ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... apple tree. The freedom of criticism is mine to-night! Did you ever see such ridiculous ideas of costume? For my part, the robe and the domino for me. All lines are destroyed; nothing is recognizable. My, my! There's Harlequin, too, walking ...
— Hearts and Masks • Harold MacGrath
... a story which is substantially the foundation of the slender plot of most modern scenic pantomimes preliminary to the bursting forth from their chrysalides of Harlequin, Columbine, Pantaloon, and company. A young girl, with the consent of her parents, has for some time promised her hand to an honest youth. The old mother, in despite of her word, has taken a caprice to give her daughter to another suitor. The father, ...
— Sign Language Among North American Indians Compared With That Among Other Peoples And Deaf-Mutes • Garrick Mallery
... paniers and garlands of roses, and shepherds in satin suits with knots of ribbons on their shepherd's crooks. Dear me, what pretty white sheep such shepherds must have in their flocks! And here are Alexander and Zarius, Pyerhus and Merope, Mahomet, Harlequin, Scapin, Blaise and Babette. They have come from everywhere, from Greece and Rome and blue distant countries, to dance with one another. It's a fine thing, a fancy dress ball, and very agreeable for an hour or two to be a great king or an ...
— Our Children - Scenes from the Country and the Town • Anatole France
... to wonder what's become of Yates. Woodward[29], endow'd with various tricks of face, Great master in the science of grimace, 370 From Ireland ventures, favourite of the town, Lured by the pleasing prospect of renown; A speaking harlequin, made up of whim, He twists, he twines, he tortures every limb; Plays to the eye with a mere monkey's art, And leaves to sense the conquest of the heart. We laugh indeed, but, on reflection's birth, We wonder at ourselves, and curse ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill
... together into a wild turbulent sea! A wild turbulent sea, indeed, over whose foaming waves the ghosts of the departed madly chased one another, their white shrouds floating in the wind, while behind all, goading them on with cracking whip, ran a many-colored harlequin—and I was the harlequin! Suddenly from the black waves the sea monsters raised their misshapen heads, snatched at me with extended claws, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... harlequin, fat boy, jester, funny rustic, vied with each other in mirth-provoking antics so aptly described by the circus press agent as a "merry-hodgepodge of fun-provoking, acrobatic idiosyncrasies of an ...
— The Circus Boys In Dixie Land • Edgar B. P. Darlington
... or overt guise, seemed to haunt Pierston just at this time with undignified mockery which savoured rather of Harlequin than of the torch-bearer. Two days after parting in a lone island from the girl he had so disinterestedly loved he met in Piccadilly his friend Somers, wonderfully spruced up, and hastening along with ...
— The Well-Beloved • Thomas Hardy
... back at the house he was surprised to see that the window through which they had come, and which he was quite sure had always been a straight-up-and-down, old-fashioned window, was now a round affair, with flaps running to a point in the centre, like the holes the harlequin ...
— Davy and The Goblin - What Followed Reading 'Alice's Adventures in Wonderland' • Charles E. Carryl
... HARLEQUIN QUILT, WITH TUCKS.—This is done in double knitting stitch, with six threads fleecy. The pieces are six inches square. Each square consists of about 24 stitches, and they are to be sewn together with a tuft of wool, black or ...
— The Ladies' Work-Table Book • Anonymous
... encampment on the Pecan are neither squaws, dogs, nor ponies; only men, naked to the breech clout, their bodies brightly painted from hip to head, chequered like a hatchment, or the jacket of a stage harlequin, with its fantastic devices, some ludicrous, others grotesque; still others of aspect terrible—showing a ...
— The Lone Ranche • Captain Mayne Reid
... and took her to an uptown library, and every afternoon she came back to the harlequin-fronted house at Number 37. Dyke's hours were such that he saw her only when she returned early, for he slept by day in his van, and worked most of the night on electrical experiments which he was conducting over on the river front, and which were to send his name resounding ...
— From a Bench in Our Square • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... "The Harlequin pattern is of the best sort, you know. Perhaps you like the watery ones best? This is fresh from Russia. There's a set I've my eye on. I shall complete it in time. I want Peggy Lovell to wear the jolliest opals in the world. It's rather ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... waking sleep. Napoleon IV! That there was a bar sinister did not matter. The dazzle radiated from a single point: a dream of empire! M. Ferraud had not jested; Breitmann was mad, obsessed, a monomaniac. It was grotesque; it troubled the senses as a Harlequin's dance troubles the eyes. A great-grandson of Napoleon, and plotting to enter France! And, good Lord! with what? Two million francs and half a dozen spendthrifts. Never had there been a wilder, more hopeless dreamer than this! Whatever ...
— A Splendid Hazard • Harold MacGrath
... black-back, herring and Bonaparte; two terns—arctic and common; the fulmar, two shearwaters, two cormorants, the red-breasted merganser and the gannet; seven ducks—the black, golden-eye, old squaw and harlequin, with the American, king and Greenland eiders; three scoters; four geese—snow, blue, brant and Canada; two phalaropes, several sandpipers, with the Hudsonian godwit and both yellowlegs; two snipes; ...
— Animal Sanctuaries in Labrador • William Wood
... egg-shaped body, bounding forward, with most grotesque strides, over the uncouth heap of dead bodies, ungainly masses with soles and nostrils uppermost, lying in beast-like confusion. This youth, with something of a harlequin in his jumps and in his ridiculous thin legs and preposterous round body, is evidently the model for the naked demi-gods of the "Resurrection" and the "Paradise:" he is the handsome boy as the fifteenth century gave him to Signorelli; opposite, he is the living youth of ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... scampered through the crowd, pelting right and left with confetti and balloons, and two stalwart monks and a thin Hamlet pursued them, keeping up the bombardment amid a great combustion of balloons. A spangled Harlequin snatched his hands full of confetti and ...
— The Fortieth Door • Mary Hastings Bradley
... fool, most valiant in words, but constantly being drubbed by Harlequin. Scaramouch is a common character in Italian farce, originally meant in ridicule of the Spanish don, and therefore dressed in Spanish costume. Our clown is an imbecile old idiot, and wholly unlike the dashing poltroon of Italian ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... figured, in a series of many wonderful harlequin attitudes, a certain Signor Lambetti. Very foreign was the curl of his hair and the waxen ends of his moustache; very magnificent was his physique; he wore the finest of silken tights and crimson small clothes, and medals were depicted hanging upon ...
— A Dozen Ways Of Love • Lily Dougall
... million—a mate who cheered and inspired. Every bit of that! She would presently see the real values of things; Charlie Menocal's monkey tricks would no longer amuse her, and she would perceive what a shallow harlequin he was, while she would comprehend Gretzinger's vicious, unprincipled sophistry and turn in disgust from the man. She was inexperienced, that ...
— The Iron Furrow • George C. Shedd
... flying up out of reach and sight, he puts on a tragical face, and complains that it is a base and soulless world. At this very moment, I make no doubt, he is requiring that under the masks of a Pantaloon or a Punch there should be a soul glowing with unearthly desires and ideal aspirations, and that Harlequin should outmoralize Hamlet on the nothingness of sublunary things: and if these expectations are disappointed, as they can never fail to be, the dew is sure to rise into his eyes, and he will turn his back on the whole motley scene ...
— The Old Man of the Mountain, The Lovecharm and Pietro of Abano - Tales from the German of Tieck • Ludwig Tieck
... romantic-minded girl of twenty with flaxen hair, imagined she could act. Mrs. Timberlake, a fat, indulgent mother, rather agreed with her. The whole idea, after a few discursive performances of Milton's "The Masque of Comus," "Pyramus and Thisbe," and an improved Harlequin and Columbine, written by one of the members, was transferred to the realm of the studios, then quartered in the New Arts Building. An artist by the name of Lane Cross, a portrait-painter, who was much less of an artist than he was a stage director, and not much of either, but who made ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... decorations, he exhibited a story from Ovid's Metamorphoses, or some other fabulous writer. Between the pauses, or acts, of this serious, representation he interwove a comic fable; consisting chiefly of the courtship of Harlequin and Columbine, with a variety of surprizing adventures and tricks, which were produced by the magic wand of Harlequin; such as the sudden transformation of palaces and temples to huts and cottages, of men and women into wheelbarrows and joint stools, of trees ...
— A Righte Merrie Christmasse - The Story of Christ-Tide • John Ashton
... enters the Brown suit and service, having spent Boxing-night and the proceeds of the Christmas-piece at the play, where he saw "Jane Shore" and "Harlequin House that Jack built;" the plot and tricks of which he recounted to Master Tommy, as he took that young gentleman for a walk, inoculating him with a great desire to go and behold it. So, after having coaxed his ...
— Christmas Comes but Once A Year - Showing What Mr. Brown Did, Thought, and Intended to Do, - during that Festive Season. • Luke Limner
... sundry passages of Scripture were piously portrayed. Tobit and his dog figured to great advantage; Haman swung conspicuously on his gibbet; and Jonah appeared most manfully leaping from the whale's mouth, like Harlequin through a barrel ...
— Eighth Reader • James Baldwin
... is in our day; a person might have fancied himself living hundreds of years ago, because so many customs prevailed then which belonged to an earlier age. The guilds walked in procession through the town with their harlequin before them with mace and bells; on Shrove Tuesday the butchers led the fattest ox through the streets adorned with garlands, whilst a boy in a white shirt and with great wings on his shoulders rode upon it; the sailors paraded through the ...
— The True Story of My Life • Hans Christian Andersen
... consequently his deputy, a renegade Mnyamwezi, gave ear to the business. With most of the Wagogo chiefs lives a Mnyamwezi, as their right-hand man, prime minister, counsellor, executioner, ready man at all things save the general good; a sort of harlequin Unyamwezi, who is such an intriguing, restless, unsatisfied person, that as soon as one hears that this kind of man forms one of and the chief of a Mgogo sultan's council, one feels very much tempted to do damage to his person. Most of the extortions practised ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... harlequin!" snapped Vilas, waving his hand to a mirror across the room. "Don't I look it?" And the phrase fitted him with tragic accuracy. "You see? What a merry wedding-guest I'll be! I invite you to join me on ...
— The Flirt • Booth Tarkington
... California celebrate an expulsion of devils every seven years, at which the devils are represented by disguised men. "Twenty or thirty men array themselves in harlequin rig and barbaric paint, and put vessels of pitch on their heads; then they secretly go out into the surrounding mountains. These are to personify the devils. A herald goes up to the top of the assembly-house, and makes a speech to the multitude. At a signal agreed upon in ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... poisonous, but of such retiring habits as hardly to be classed as dangerous. Most of their time is spent hidden under the sand and in the ground, but when they do come out their colors are so brilliant as not to be mistaken. On the harlequin snake the colors are bright coral-red, yellow, and black, which alternate in stripes that encircle the body. Its head is always banded with a broad yellow stripe. The coral-snake is much the same in color, and only a close observer would notice the ...
— On the Trail - An Outdoor Book for Girls • Lina Beard and Adelia Belle Beard
... contemporary convention. But how easily he wears them, and if no "severe pains and birth-throes" accompany the evolution of his conceptions, how graceful these conceptions are! They are perhaps of the Canova family; the "Harlequin," for instance, which has had such a prodigious success, is essentially Milanese sculpture; essentially even the "Genius Guarding the Secret of the Tomb" is a fantastic rather than an original work. But how the manner, the treatment, triumphs ...
— French Art - Classic and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture • W. C. Brownell
... forgiven; they are treated like perfect natures, others are blind to their defects, they are the world's spoiled children. And, on the other hand, the world is stern beyond measure to strong and complete natures. Perhaps in this apparently flagrant injustice society acts sublimely, taking a harlequin at his just worth, asking nothing of him but amusement, promptly forgetting him; and asking divine great deeds of those before whom she bends the knee. Everything is judged by laws of its being; the diamond must be flawless; ...
— Eve and David • Honore de Balzac
... groomsman; that the first child should be called Carpezan or Sybilla, after the tragedy, and so forth. They would not quite be able to keep a coach, but they might get a chariot and pasteboard dragons from Mr. Rich's theatre. The baby might be christened in Macbeth's caldron; and Harry and harlequin ought certainly ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... and tells Anne as June approaches that he hopes 'we shall sometimes think of him' in our own country. He wears a cloak, like Hamlet; and a very tall, big, limp, dusty black hat, which he exchanges on long journeys for a cap like Harlequin's. . . . He sings; and in some of our quarters, when his bedroom has been near ours, we have heard him grunting bass notes through the keyhole of his door, to attract our attention. His desire that I should formally ask him to sing, ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... been compelled to follow his quondam clerk, his present debtor, from court to court; had found his just claims met with well-invented but unfounded counter-claims, had seen his party shift his character of pursuer or defender, as often as Harlequin effects his transformations, till, in a chase so varied and so long, the unhappy litigant had lost substance, reputation, and almost the use of reason itself, and came before their lordships an object of thoughtless derision to the unreflecting, ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... so fearful and wonderful that we almost regret we cannot have a specimen; a rowdy sonnet is a thing to dream about. If people had said that epics were only fit for children and nursemaids, 'Paradise Lost' might have been an average pantomime: it might have been called 'Harlequin Satan, or How Adam 'Ad 'em.' For who would trouble to bring to perfection a work in which even perfection is grotesque? Why should Shakespeare write 'Othello' if even his triumph consisted in the eulogy, 'Mr. Shakespeare is fit for something ...
— The Defendant • G.K. Chesterton
... of a great poet (for mysterious is the life that connects all modes of passion with rhythmus), let us suppose the casual reader to have had enough. And now at closing for the sake of change, let us treat him to a harlequin trick upon another theme. Did the reader ever happen to see a sheriff's officer arresting an honest gentleman, who was doing no manner of harm to gentle or simple, and immediately afterwards a second sheriff's officer arresting ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... Circle.—An original, very entertaining, and instructive pastime, with a book giving 64 colored illustrations of the "Harlequin Circle." Put up in handsome box. ...
— The Nursery, January 1877, Volume XXI, No. 1 - A Monthly Magazine for Youngest Readers • Various
... ocean. At the noise of his fall, the dying Powers sat up in their beds of pain; and stealthily advancing with furtive tread, the royal spiders made partition of Europe, and the purple of Caesar became the motley of Harlequin. ...
— Child of a Century, Complete • Alfred de Musset
... are calculated to rend the heart with the profoundest emotions of trouble, do not fetter that exalted principle imbued in her very nature. It is true, her tender and feeling heart may often be moved (as she is thus constituted), but she is not conquered, she has not given up to the harlequin of disappointments, her energies have not become clouded in the last movement of misfortune, but she is continually invigorated by the archetype of her affections. She may bury her face in her hands, and ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... wearing a feather mantle on his back, reaching from the arm-pits down to the mid-thighs, zebra-painted on his breast and legs with black stripes, bear-skin shako on his head, and his arms stretched out at full length along a staff passing behind his neck. Accoutred in this harlequin rig, he dashes at the squaws, capering, dancing, whooping; and they and the children flee for life, keeping several hundred yards between him and themselves." It is believed that, if they were even to touch his stick, their children would die ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... engaged—plainly, boldly, and directly—vigorously always, sometimes vehemently; but with that strong sincerity which administers eloquence to even the most untaught orders of mankind, and without which the most decorated eloquence is only the wooden sword and mask of harlequin. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various
... but the world's so censorious. There's old Doctor Hoskins of Bath, who attended poor dear Drum in the quinsy; and poor dear old Fred Hoskins, the gouty General: I remember him as thin as a lath in the year '84, and as active as a harlequin, and in love with me—oh, how he ...
— The History of Samuel Titmarsh - and the Great Hoggarty Diamond • William Makepeace Thackeray
... would be vain to look in his earlier works. 'Iris' (1898), an opera on a rather unpleasant Japanese story, has met with a certain degree of favour, but 'Le Maschere' (1901), an attempt to introduce Harlequin and Columbine to the lyric stage, failed completely, nor does 'Amica' (1905) seen to have done much to rehabilitate the composer's waning reputation. Mascagni has as yet done little to justify the extravagant eulogies ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... account of politics, and a notion which the priests disseminated that I was in a league against the Germans,)—and, finally, my mother-in-law recovered last fortnight, and my play was damned last week! These are like 'the eight-and-twenty misfortunes of Harlequin.' But they must be borne. If I give in, it shall be after keeping up a spirit at least. I should not have cared so much about it, if our southern neighbours had not bungled us all out of freedom for these five hundred ...
— Life of Lord Byron, With His Letters And Journals, Vol. 5 (of 6) • (Lord Byron) George Gordon Byron
... slipped from his fingers, and fell on the coffee-cup, which broke. The china, said Leighton, was expensive. He believed it was impossible to match it now. Each cup was different. It was a harlequin set. The saucer, without the cup, was therefore useless. Would Mr. Elliot please explain to ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... by betraying the weakness of their nature. But why may not nature show itself in tragedy, as well as in comedy or farce? We see persons not ashamed to laugh loudly at the humour of a Falstaff,—or the tricks of a harlequin; and why should not the tear be equally allowed to flow for the misfortunes of a Juliet, or the forlornness of an Ophelia?" Sir Richard Steele records on this subject a saying of Mr. Wilks the actor, as ...
— The Book of Three Hundred Anecdotes - Historical, Literary, and Humorous—A New Selection • Various
... down from a tree. Then out came the Spider, with finger so fine, To show his dexterity on the tight-line, From one branch to another his cobwebs he slung, Then quick as an arrow he darted along, But just in the middle—oh! shocking to tell, From his rope, in an instant, poor Harlequin fell. Yet he touch'd not the ground, but with talons outspread, Hung suspended in air, at ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... taken in and the irons were taken off. I was then undressed, my clothes were removed to another room, and I was redressed in the prison uniform. This was a grotesque uniform indeed. The suit was red and blue, half and half, like a harlequin's, and to crown all came a hat or cap, like a fool's cap, a foot and a half high and running up to a peak. Miserable as I was, I could scarcely help smiling at the utterly absurd appearance I knew I then presented. I even ventured to remark upon it; but ...
— Seven Wives and Seven Prisons • L.A. Abbott
... bright copper colour, so different from black that one had painted his thighs with black chequered lines which made his skin very much resemble the dress of a harlequin. ...
— Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, Vol 2 (of 2) • Thomas Mitchell
... made their way to the palace. Gordon came out to meet them. The whole courtyard was filled with wild, harlequin figures and sharp, glittering blades. He attempted a parley. 'Where is your master, the Mahdi?' He knew his influence over native races. Perhaps he hoped to save the lives of some of the inhabitants. Perhaps in that supreme moment imagination ...
— The River War • Winston S. Churchill
... swords and daggers of every size Which nations of militant men could devise. Poisoned spears from tropic seas, That natives, under banana trees, Smear with the juice of some deadly snake. Blood-dipped arrows, which savages make And tip with feathers, orange and green, A quivering death, in harlequin sheen. High up, a fan of glancing steel Was formed of claymores in a wheel. Jewelled swords worn at kings' levees Were suspended next midshipmen's dirks, and these Elbowed stilettos come from Spain, Chased with some splendid Hidalgo's name. There were Samurai swords ...
— Sword Blades and Poppy Seed • Amy Lowell
... with a frittata of eggs and chopped sausages, or a slice of agnello, and enjoy the delicious air that breathes from the mountains. The old cardinals descend from their gilded carriages, and, accompanied by one of their household and followed by their ever-present lackeys in harlequin liveries, totter along on foot with swollen ankles, lifting their broad red hats to the passers-by who salute them, and pausing constantly in their discourse to enforce a phrase or take a pinch of snuff. Files of scholars from the Propaganda ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... tolerable representation of Falstaff; while Richard, Othello, Macbeth, Hamlet, Shylock, and other gentlemen of Shakespeare's creation, gave variety to the procession. Then there was a clown in full circus costume, accompanied by Harlequin in his glittering shape-dress. We sadly longed for a sprightly Columbine; but then we consoled ourselves with Pantaloon, admirably rendered by ...
— My Life: or the Adventures of Geo. Thompson - Being the Auto-Biography of an Author. Written by Himself. • George Thompson
... that was full to suffocation of the actors and their belongings, and of the peasantry who had come to gape at them. Everybody was engaged in getting drunk who was not drunk already. Some were fighting, some lovemaking, some filching. I saw a curious sight. A man dressed like a harlequin was picking a countryman's pocket, and having his own picked, while he was in the act, by some sharp-featured imp of a castrato. In fine, the whole house from floor to rafters was full; the bedchambers, ...
— The Fool Errant • Maurice Hewlett
... also true of the most trivial parlour game or the most unsophisticated meadow romp. We are never free until some institution frees us; and liberty cannot exist till it is declared by authority. Even the wild authority of the harlequin Smith was still authority, because it produced everywhere a crop of crazy regulations and conditions. He filled every one with his own half-lunatic life; but it was not expressed in destruction, but rather in a dizzy and toppling construction. Each person with a hobby found ...
— Manalive • G. K. Chesterton
... degree, will prevail in the aggregate of society: and the refinements of luxury, or the vicious repinings of envious poverty, will equally banish virtue from society, considered as the characteristic of that society, or only allow it to appear as one of the stripes of the harlequin coat, worn by the ...
— A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Title: Vindication of the Rights of Women • Mary Wollstonecraft [Godwin]
... disturbances were reproduced in miniature in the broker's offices. Maxwell shoved his chair against the wall and transacted business after the manner of a toe dancer. He jumped from ticker to 'phone, from desk to door with the trained agility of a harlequin. ...
— The Four Million • O. Henry
... my glade again, and to the thin sunshine, which came a little earlier, now that we were deep in July; and one afternoon I sat in the mouth of the path, just where I had played the bounding harlequin for the benefit of the lovely visitor at Quesnay. It was warm in the woods and quiet, warm with the heat of July, still with a July stillness. The leaves had no motion; if there were birds or insects within hearing they must have ...
— The Guest of Quesnay • Booth Tarkington
... this number. It is too soon yet to fix upon such poems, but surely they may be found among the following: such lyrics as "An Evening Song", "My Springs", "A Ballad of Trees and the Master", "Betrayal", "Night and Day", "The Stirrup-Cup", and "Nirvana"; such sonnets as "The Mocking-Bird" and "The Harlequin of Dreams"; such nature poems as "The Song of the Chattahoochee", "The Waving of the Corn", and "From the Flats"; such poems of high seriousness as "Individuality", "Opposition", "How Love looked for Hell", and "A Florida Sunday"; such a ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... The Grasshopper was performing antics which made him not easily distinguishable from the Frog, and the Spider was actually descending by a rope from the balusters, while his mother, standing somewhat aghast, breathed a hope that 'poor Harlequin's' fall was not part of the programme. But she did not interfere, having trust in the gymnastics that were studied at school by Jasper, who had been beguiled into the game by ...
— The Two Sides of the Shield • Charlotte M. Yonge
... not singular to find an harlequin at the court of Attila? Yet such is the origin of these buffoons. The colour of the black slaves, the strangeness of their face and manners, caused them to be sought after as excellent ministers of mirth; to complete the singularity, Zercho asks ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 70, March 1, 1851 • Various
... one or the other; but they don't. They shall see the shows, and stand all in a crowd before them, with open eyes and open mouths, wondering at the beauty of the dancing-women, and their gowns all over spangles, and at all the wit and grimaces, and somersets of harlequin and clown. They have had a merry dinner and a dance, like a dance of elephants and hippopotami; ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... a thing of literature, no other sort of book admits of such variety of topics, style, and treatment as the novel. As diverse in talent and quality as the story-teller himself,—now harlequin, now gossip, now threnodist,—with weird ghostliness, moping melancholy, uncouth laughter, or gentle serious smile,—now relating the story, with childlike interest in it, now with a good heart and now with a bad heart ridiculing mankind, now allegorical with rich meanings, now freighting ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... streets almost stunned me. One of the first objects we encountered was a barouche full of Turks and Sultanas, driven by an old woman in a tawdry court dress as coachman; while a merry-andrew and a harlequin capered behind as footmen. Owing to the immense size of the city, and the difficulty of making our way through the motley throng of masks, beggars, lazzaroni, eating-stalls, carts and carriages, we were nearly three hours traversing the streets ...
— The Diary of an Ennuyee • Anna Brownell Jameson
... little red or orange and black bug appears. This is called the harlequin bug from its fantastic appearance. This bug may come all summer long at any time. The whale oil soap spray is the one to use. Celery may be troubled with the light green caterpillar with the black bands before spoken of. This caterpillar arrives in August. It is not difficult at all to see, ...
— The Library of Work and Play: Gardening and Farming. • Ellen Eddy Shaw
... portly man who had passed the maturity of manhood, but active as Harlequin. He had a well-favoured countenance; fair, good-humoured, but very sly. He was dressed like the head butler of the London Tavern, and was particular as to his white waistcoats and black silk stockings, punctilious as to his knee-buckles, proud ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... does that necessity consist, what services does it perform, what is its business, and what are its merits? Doth the virtue consist in the metaphor or in the man? Doth the goldsmith that makes the crown make the virtue also? Doth it operate like Fortunatus's wishing-cap or Harlequin's wooden sword? Doth it make a man a conjurer? In fine, what is it? It appears to be a something going much out of fashion, falling into ridicule, and rejected in some countries both as unnecessary and expensive. In ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IV. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... worshippers, the old women, burn small candles to Dianom—the Diana of yore, whose other names were Luna and Hecate. The Lupercal (or wolf-man) is always following the women and children, disguised indeed under the dark face of ghost Hallequin (Harlequin). The Vigil of Venus was kept as a holiday precisely on the first of May. On Midsummer Day they kept the Sabaza by sacrificing the he-goat of Bacchus Sabasius. In all this there was no mockery; nothing but a harmless ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet
... of summer. In the open spaces on the slope, beyond the farthest shadow-reach of the manzanita, poised the mariposa lilies, like so many flights of jewelled moths suddenly arrested and on the verge of trembling into flight again. Here and there that woods harlequin, the madrone, permitting itself to be caught in the act of changing its pea-green trunk to madder-red, breathed its fragrance into the air from great clusters of waxen bells. Creamy white were these bells, shaped like ...
— Brown Wolf and Other Jack London Stories - Chosen and Edited By Franklin K. Mathiews • Jack London
... trappings! a new passion reigns! The madd'ning monarch revels in my veins. Oh! for a Richard's voice to catch the theme: 'Give me another horse! bind up my wounds! — soft — 'twas but a dream.' Aye, 'twas but a dream, for now there's no retreating: 25 If I cease Harlequin, I cease from eating. 'Twas thus that Aesop's stag, a creature blameless, Yet something vain, like one that shall be nameless, Once on the margin of a fountain stood, And cavill'd at his image in the flood. 30 'The deuce confound,' he cries, 'these drumstick shanks, They never ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith |
