"Arabesque" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Against the sky, behind her seen, Like shapeless shapes of arabesque Wrought in an Oriental screen; And tall, austere and statuesque She loomed before it—e'en as though The spirit-hand of Angelo Had chiseled her to life complete, With chips of moonshine round her feet. And I grew jealous of the dusk, To see it softly ...
— The Complete Works • James Whitcomb Riley
... according to custom, begins to read the end of his letters first finds an arabesque of this style at the bottom of a lady's letter, he ought to arm himself with patience and resignation before he reads ...
— Gerfaut, Complete • Charles de Bernard
... and excellent in quality. Among them is a group of four and eight-hand works for two pianos, as well as duets for a single instrument. Among her most important solo works are a sonata, an Etude Symphonique, a Valse Caprice, a Guitarre, an Arabesque, six Etudes de Concert, five Airs de Ballet, containing the well-known Scarf Dance, six Romances Sans Paroles, and six humourous pieces. She has also written a few selections for violin ...
— Woman's Work in Music • Arthur Elson
... venture to belong. A variety of compliments having passed, a table was brought in and placed between them. It was circular, about two feet in diameter, and scarcely more than six inches from the ground, richly inlaid and painted in arabesque. A large bowl, full of a highly-seasoned soup, with some sort of macaroni in it, was first placed on the table. The bowl contained spoons, with which the guests were to help themselves at the same time. Next came a plate of ...
— Salt Water - The Sea Life and Adventures of Neil D'Arcy the Midshipman • W. H. G. Kingston
... most beautiful cathedral, around which cluster many interesting historical associations, and whereof we propose to give a brief description.[41] It is of the Byzantine order, but the architect has employed in its decoration a large amount of Moorish or arabesque ornament, and the whole building resembles a beautiful large mausoleum. The stone with which the cathedral is faced has usually been called marble, but it is a whitish grey limestone somewhat resembling lithographic stone,[42] which is very easily workable ...
— Roumania Past and Present • James Samuelson
... to-day on a donkey to a mosque in the bazaar, of what we call Arabesque style, like the Alhambra, very handsome. The Kibleh was very beautiful, and as I was admiring it Omar pulled a lemon out of his breast and smeared it on the porphyry pillar on one side of the arch, and then entreated me to lick ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon
... who continued devotedly attached to him notwithstanding his many aberrations, until her death in 1847. The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym appeared in 1838, and in 1839 P. became ed. of the Gentleman's Magazine, in which appeared as Tales of the Arabesque and Grotesque many of his best stories. In 1845 his famous poem, The Raven, came out, and in 1848 Eureka, a Prose Poem, a pseudo-scientific lucubration. The death of his wife gave a severe shock to his constitution, ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... any ornamental or other desired form, these portions will retain their ordinary appearance, and will show the form of the design very strongly outlined beside the crackled surface. In this manner, letters, arabesque, and other patterns in white or colored glass can be produced with great ease and ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 358, November 11, 1882 • Various
... revealed several places on the frame of the mirror over the mantel, where the gold had fallen away and had been replaced by an inferior sort of gilding. By some subtle trickery with the lace curtain that hung at the open window, it laid an arabesque of delicate shadow upon the polished floor. In the room beyond, where Madame's crystal ball lay on the mahogany table, with a bit of black velvet beneath it, the sun had made a living rainbow that carried colour and light into the hall ...
— Master of the Vineyard • Myrtle Reed
... issued from the mouths of the four lions; and as it fell, formed diamonds and pearls, resembling a jet d'eau, which springing from the middle of the fountain, rose nearly to the top of a cupola painted in Arabesque. ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments vol. 1 • Anon.
... peculiar feature as one of the most prominent, and to see, in the multitude of trunks darkened above by clouds of foliage, that rise upon him in the prospect, the slim columns of an elder Alhambra, roughened with arabesque tracery and exquisite ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... His eyes were sated by the miracles of harmonies—noiseless harmonies. It was a new art, and one for the peoples of the earth. Never had the hues of the universe been so assembled, grouped, and modulated. And the human eye, adapting itself to the new synthesis of arabesque and rhythm, evoked order and symbolism from these novel chords of colour. There were solemn mountains of opalescent fire which burst and faded into flaming colonnades, and in an enchanting turquoise effervescence became starry spears and scimiters ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... that, although necessary, was to be kept out of sight. The only mistake in the arrangements was a very large and gorgeous open-brass-work Egyptian lantern, with glass of various colours and outlandish patterns in Arabesque. In the evening we formed an irregular light-house, as two ordinary carriage-lamps were fixed above and on either side the entrance door, while the gorgeous many-coloured lantern swung from the roof inside, and flashed red, green, and yellow signals in wild confusion. ...
— Cyprus, as I Saw it in 1879 • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... about with curves, sinuous and full of pretty impediments. And there were, to her, vaguely agitating and even fearful things in this lacework also—confusions of outline, broken purposes, multiplicity of opposing intentions, struggle of good and evil powers in the intricacies of some rich arabesque; or monotonous repetitions of design which distressed her as with the terrors of imprisonment and of unescapable fate. She was filled with feverish anxiety until such portions of her self-imposed task were completed. Then she would ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... them almost as close to symbolism as they are to the allegory that Carey claims to be writing (Key, pp. 18, 24 and 29). Collation of Dumpling with its Key clearly reveals (with due allowance for satiric arabesque) a series of allegories moving backwards and forwards through history. At various stages, Sir John Pudding (ostensibly Brawn [or John Brand], the famous cook of the Rummer in Queen Street who appears in Dr. King's Art ...
— A Learned Dissertation on Dumpling (1726) • Anonymous
... with him as a gift. "Or else," he said, "order one with the garden-view of Brazenface, and then they'll have more satisfaction in looking at that than at one of those offensive cockatoos, in an arabesque landscape, under a bronze sky, which usually sprawls over every thing that is papier mache. But you won't see that sort of thing here; so you can't well go wrong, whatever you buy." Finally, Mr. Verdant Green (N.B. Mr. Green, senior, would have eventually to pay the bill) ordered a fire-screen ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede
... and then launched forth in full tide, accompanying her sweet and mellow voice on that too much neglected instrument, the guitar. It was a wild, irregular sort of ditty, with one or two startling arabesque bursts in it. As near as may be, the following conveys the meaning, ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... by a calico curtain, with a gorgeous Cretonne pattern upon it. I was delighted to see a four-post bed, with mosquito bars, and a clean pulu mattrass, with a linen sheet over it, covered with a beautiful quilt with a quaint arabesque pattern on a white ground running round it, and a wreath of green leaves in the centre. The native women exercise the utmost ingenuity in the patterns and colours of these quilts. Some of them are quite works of art. The materials, which are plain and printed cottons, cost about $8, ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... the ashes off his cigar on to the arabesque-patterned tapestry carpet—'why, no, not exactly; but these things, you know, are a good deal matter of course; just describe what you saw, you know, and butter Puff well, that's ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees
... grown the agitation of the feasters; so much the more wild must have been the scene to any European who could have beheld them there, in the strong sun and the strong shadow of the banyan, rubbed with saffron to throw in a more high relief the arabesque of the tattoo; the women bleached by days of confinement to a complexion almost European; the chiefs crowned with silver plumes of old men's beards and girt with kirtles of the hair of dead women. All manner of island food was meanwhile spread ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... there told us that nowhere in Europe was there anything as fine as the hall and grand staircase where the Duchess received her guests. It exceeded my utmost conceptions of magnificence and beauty. The vast size of the apartment, the vaulted ceilings, the arabesque ornaments, the fine pictures, the profusion of flowers, the music, the flourish of trumpets, as the Queen passed backward and forward, the superb dresses and diamonds of the women, the parti-colored full dress ...
— Letters from England 1846-1849 • Elizabeth Davis Bancroft (Mrs. George Bancroft)
... converse now seems So tender to my dreams As he, discursive at our mutual desk, Most fervid and most ripe, When dreaming at his pipe, He made the opiate nights grow Arabesque. ...
— Bohemian Days - Three American Tales • Geo. Alfred Townsend
... instead of tassels, in two tiny Indian lamps of gold filigreed-work, marvellously finished. By one of those ingenious combinations, so common in barbarous countries, these lamps served also to burn perfumes. Plates of blue crystal, let in between the openings of the arabesque, and illumined by the interior light, shone with so limpid an azure, that the golden lamps seemed starred with transparent sapphires. Light clouds, of whitish vapor rose incessantly from these lamps, and spread all around ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... declined. They had by this time reached a low, arched side-door, which grated on its hinges after the padre had turned the huge key in the rusty lock and opened it. They entered a wide stone vestibule, and found themselves opposite another arched door set in arabesque stone carvings: the flags echoed under their feet as they turned to the right and traversed a low, vaulted passage that ended in an open cloister. An arched gallery ran round the four sides, held up by slender, dark stone ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various
... that must have been so beautiful, indeed, that was beautiful still, was a lady of middle age. Her seat was low—one of those chairs we are pleased to call, commonly and irreverently, a prie-dieu. Its back was carved in arabesque foliage, and its seat was of rich violet velvet. On a small inlaid table, whose carvings were as beautiful, and its top inlaid with mosaic-work, lay a dainty handkerchief of lace, a bottle of smelling-salts, and a book turned with its face downwards, all close at the lady's elbow. ...
— Verner's Pride • Mrs. Henry Wood
... lighted, saffron-papered room, in which a dozen card-tables were arranged, and thence into the receiving room. This was a large room, with a splendidly inlaid and polished floor, the walls covered with crimson satin, the cornices heavily incrusted with gold, and the ceiling beautifully painted in arabesque. The massive fauteuils and sofas, as also the drapery, were of crimson satin with a profusion of gilding. The ubiquitous portrait of the Emperor was the only picture, and was the same you see everywhere. This crimson room had two doors upon the side facing the three windows: The innermost ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... him from my inner consciousness; but when he leaves the Senate in 1850 I have nothing whatever to go by; and, being by nature both a timid, and, on occasions, by choice a truthful, man, I would prefer to have some foundation of fact, no matter how slender, on which to build the airy and arabesque superstructure of my fancy—especially as I am writing a history. Now I hesitate to give him a wholly fictitious date of death and to invent all of the work of his later years. Would it be too infernal a nuisance for you to hire some of your minions on the Advertiser ...
— Roosevelt in the Bad Lands • Hermann Hagedorn
... charged with color so that it can receive no more; and instead of looking rugged, or cold, or stern, as anything that a rock is held to be at heart, it seems to be clothed with a soft, dark leopard skin, embroidered with arabesque of purple and silver. But in the lower ranges this is not so. The mosses grow in more independent spots, not in such a clinging and tender way over the whole surface; the lichens are far poorer and fewer; and the color ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... Austrian decree had made inalienable! To live on a foundation of piles of campeachy wood worth nearly a million of francs, and have no furniture! To own sumptuous galleries, and live in an attic above the topmost arabesque cornice constructed of marble brought from the Morea—the land which a Memmius had marched over as conqueror in the time of the Romans! To see his ancestors in effigy on their tombs of precious marbles ...
— Massimilla Doni • Honore de Balzac
... were now explained in the simplest manner. In the midst of her breast, like an island in a sea of pearl, reclined an exquisite little gold locket, embellished with arabesque work of blue, red, and white enamel. That was undoubtedly what Miss Aldclyffe had been contemplating; and, moreover, not having been put off with her other ornaments, it was to be retained during the night—a slight departure from the custom of ladies which Miss ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy
... in D is Chopin at his happiest. Its arabesque pattern conveys a most charming content; and there is a dewy freshness, a joy in life, that puts to flight much of the morbid tittle-tattle about Chopin's sickly soul. The few bars of this prelude, so seldom heard in public, reveal musicianship of the highest order. The harmonic ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... accommodating to sight-seers than his predecessors, but because he was making very extensive and costly improvements in the buildings and grounds. I have seen nothing yet in England to compare, for ornate carving, with the new gate-way he is making to the park. It is of the finest kind of arabesque work done in stone that much resembles the Caen. This prevention barred me from even a distant view of the once famous residence of Lord Byron, as it could not be seen from the ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... the colonnade runs a richly decorated loggia that, with its suggestion of southern influences, enhances the warm, sunny atmosphere of the court. The repeated figure of the flower-decked and garlanded "Flower Girl" is by A. Stirling Calder. A conventionalized frieze in delicately colored arabesque runs between the balcony and the columns, the prevailing motif of which is the griffin. The colonnade is broken by three portals, opening respectively into the Palace of Manufactures on the west, the Palace of Varied Industries on the east and the Court of Ages on the north. ...
— The Architecture and Landscape Gardening of the Exposition • Louis Christian Mullgardt
... followed the silver stream of the Hudson. The river, lonely as the sky, seemed to drift oily and sluggish down to plunge beneath the city at the lower end of the Tappan Zee. Allan Dane came over New York, gazed down at the ruin of its soaring towers, at the leaping arabesque of its street bridges. He peered into vast rifts of tumbled, chaotic concrete and steel. Nothing moved in all that spreading wonder that had housed twenty millions ...
— When the Sleepers Woke • Arthur Leo Zagat
... her through the folding doors into a retiring apartment, set with arabesque designs, and adorned with inlaid tables bearing statues of alabaster and enamel. Purposely he waited before he replied, and was gratified to see how curiously she regarded him when again his ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham
... Veil.' He seems not so much at home in his versification of the 'Silver Veil,' and a little embarrassed with his horrors; but the conception of the character of the impostor is fine, and the plan of great scope for his genius,—and I doubt not that, as a whole, it will be very Arabesque and beautiful. ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. IV - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... the shade. The Alhambra was nothing to it! The floor was yellow ochre; the ceiling was sky-blue; the cornices were scarlet, with flutings of blue and yellow, and, underneath, a broad belt of fruit and foliage, executed in an extremely arabesque style. The walls were light green, with narrow bands of red down the sides of each plank. The table was yellow, the chairs blue, and their bottoms red, by way of harmonious variety. But the grand point—the great masterpiece in the ornamentation of ...
— The Wild Man of the West - A Tale of the Rocky Mountains • R.M. Ballantyne
... to where Herr Hippe sat was placed a large square box of some dark wood, while over it was spread a casing of steel, so elaborately wrought in an open arabesque pattern that it seemed like a shining blue lace which was lightly stretched ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... the Sultana and her six beautiful children in a room which, though not imposing in size, glittered with decoration. The ceiling and walls were rich with tessellated and arabesque work. The floor was covered with a carpet of cut velvet, with a pattern of the richest and most brightly-coloured flowers; and this carpet was strewn with costly jewels, which shone in the variegated light of the stained-glass ...
— The Pirate City - An Algerine Tale • R.M. Ballantyne
... happy family did this of Mariam's appear to be. If you could judge by all the laughter and giggling, by the splendour of the women's attire, by the neatness of the little house, prettily decorated with arabesque paintings, neat mats, and gay carpets, they were a family well to do in the Beyrout world, and lived with as much comfort as any Europeans. They had one book; and, on the wall of the principal apartment, a black picture of the Virgin, whose name ...
— Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Bunyan, and yet in no case with what would possibly be called a moral in a tract; never with the ethical narrowness; conveying hints instead of life's larger limitations and that sort of sense which we seem to perceive in the arabesque ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... now, and we are in the morning room, where we always sit; for the great music-room that opens on the verandah and fronts the sea is shut when my guardian is not here. This room looks over the sea, too, but from the side of the house and through an arabesque of trees. The walls are filled with books and flowering bulbs stand in the windows. We have had our tea and the sunlight slants in over the white freesia and white hyacinths. There are primroses everywhere, ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... classical design; but being no longer in touch with natural and popular interests, nor stimulated by mutual cooperation with their brother craftsmen, the mason builders, they adopted the fashionable mode of expression invented by the new architects and the painters of the time. Elaborate "arabesque" and other formal designs gave employment to the carvers, in making an infinite repetition of fiddles, festoons, and ribbons, in the execution of which they became so proficient, that their work is more often admired for ...
— Wood-Carving - Design and Workmanship • George Jack
... more propitious place to make one's fortune than the smaller town of Leipsic. However he was able to compose a number of works which have become among the best known and beloved of all, including the "Arabesque," "Faschingsschwank," or "Carnival Strains from Vienna," the "Night Pieces," Op. ...
— The World's Great Men of Music - Story-Lives of Master Musicians • Harriette Brower
... rum-punch, in a very small tumbler, after the soup. It was excellently well-brewed, and it seemed to me almost worth while to sup the soup for the sake of sipping the punch. The rest of the dinner was catalogued in a bill-of-fare printed on delicate white paper within an arabesque border of green and gold. It looked very good, not only in the English and French names of the numerous dishes, but also in the positive reality of the dishes themselves, which were all set on the table to ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... end have entirely disappeared to make way for streets of commercial buildings, while the new districts of Kasr-el-Dubara and Ghezireh have arisen to house the well-to-do. Our interest in Cairo, therefore, is centred in the native quarters, where miles of streets and alleys, rich in Arabesque buildings, are untouched except by the mellowing ...
— Peeps at Many Lands: Egypt • R. Talbot Kelly
... clearly again. Slowly she realized where she was and what had happened. The blue door in the wall—this the house that adjoined the garden. She had slept—how long she did not know, but the beams of sunlight were orange in color and made a brilliant arabesque upon an embroidered hanging on the opposite wall. She must have slept long. Her dreams returned to her, fleeting and elusive, like the ignes fatui which had been a part of them. The whir of wheels, the vision of the vari-colored crowd, the ...
— The Secret Witness • George Gibbs
... dream—not even symbolically. It will be long ere you appreciate more than their fresh joy of existence. But, little by little one herb and flower after the other becomes individualized—they are artists living themselves out into hues and lines and parts of a tableau; the vine draws itself in an arabesque which is perfect because self-forming; and the whole harmonize with the sway of sunlight and shadow, with rustling breeze and hurrying ant on the footpath, and chirping birds, so exquisitely that you may feel, as ...
— The Continental Monthly , Vol. 2 No. 5, November 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... they had for offensive and defensive weapons, bows, of which the wood, twined with the cord, was ornamented with fringes; knives, whetted with a serpent's tongue; broad and long lances; shields of palm wood, decorated in arabesque style. For what there was of uniform, properly so called, it cost his majesty's treasury ...
— Dick Sand - A Captain at Fifteen • Jules Verne
... within arabesque border, at the foot of which are the initials T C, probably those of Thomas Creede the printer. Ornament at head and foot of each page. Collation: A-F^8, unpaged. A 1 blank but for signature, and F 8 blank. Epistle dedicatory to Anth. Croftes, dated, June 29, 1614. Epistle to the ...
— Catalogue of the Books Presented by Edward Capell to the Library of Trinity College in Cambridge • W. W. Greg
... pomp of a proud palace; writ In tinted arabesque on walls that gems o'erlay, The names of caliphs were who once held court in it, Their baths and bowers were mine to ...
— Poems • Alan Seeger
... and arabesque this, don't you think? ... And now this movement; isn't it reckless and capricious, like a woman who hesitates and then takes the leap? Yet there's a certain nobility there, a feeling for ideals. ...
— The Pit • Frank Norris
... Cairo was all the curiosities of Egyptian Cairo's streets crowded into one Chicago Cairo Street. It was a splendid sight with its gardens and squares, its temples, its towers and minaret made in the most Arabesque architecture and ornamented with the most fantastic draperies. The inhabitants had been directly transported from old Cairo across the sea to Midway Plaisance. There were the importunate street venders, the donkey boys begging and pulling at the clothing of the visitors, the pompous drivers ...
— The Adventures of Uncle Jeremiah and Family at the Great Fair - Their Observations and Triumphs • Charles McCellan Stevens (AKA 'Quondam')
... bottom. The robe should seem to be a monastic garment: but the figure is probably that of St. Jerom. It is standing before an opened book. The head is shaved at top; an azure glory is round the head. The back-ground of the whole is gold, with an arabesque border. I wish I could have spared time to make a facsimile of it. There are also figures of the four Evangelists, in the usual style of art of this period; the whole in fine preservation. The capital initials ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Three • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... the pseudo-Herschel* had created them; and if they had been placed in rank and file, and copied by some skilful painter's hand, one would, without doubt, have exclaimed involuntarily, "What a beautiful arabesque!" ...
— Andersen's Fairy Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... poems, essays and critiques which the indefatigable Dreamer was putting out, he found time to publish a collection of his "Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque," in book form. He was also (unfortunately for him) induced to prepare a work on sea-shells for the use of schools—"The Conchologist's First Book," it was called. This was unmistakably a mere "pot-boiler" and confessedly a compilation, but it set the little ...
— The Dreamer - A Romantic Rendering of the Life-Story of Edgar Allan Poe • Mary Newton Stanard
... also for servants, gives tokens of increasing splendors in the richer decorations of the walls and the more elaborate mosaic of the floor. We next entered the audience chamber, in which the court-marshal receives the guests. The ceiling is of arabesque sculpture profusely ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume V (of X) • Various
... it makes part of different figures. Joined with other colors you hardly recognize it, and in different lights it is dark or light. Thus the Greek fables blend and cross curiously in different directions, till they knit themselves into an arabesque where sometimes you cannot tell black from purple, nor blue from emerald—they being all the truer for this, because the truths of emotion they represent are interwoven in the same way, but all the more difficult to read, and to explain in any order. Thus ...
— The Queen of the Air • John Ruskin
... discourse viva voce. Imagine a city, whose very slums are full of palaces, whose every other house wall has a battered fresco, or a gothic bas-relief; imagine a sky fretted with every kind of pinnacle from the great dome of the Salute to the gothic spires of the Ducal Palace and the downright arabesque orientalism of the minarets of St. Mark's; and then imagine the whole flooded with a sea that seems only intended to reflect sunsets, and you still have no idea of the place I stopped in for more than 48 hours. Thence we went to Verona, where Romeo and Juliet languished and ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... spread, the walls were hung, with silken fabrics fine, And arabesque and lotus-flower bore each the broidered sign Of jewels plucked from land and sea, and red gold ...
— The Mistress of the Manse • J. G. Holland
... covering for the ottomans and the ebony bed, as a canopy for the bed, and as the gorgeous volutes of the curtains which partially shaded the window. The material was the richest cloth of gold. It was spotted all over, at irregular intervals, with arabesque figures, about a foot in diameter, and wrought upon the cloth in patterns of the most jetty black. But these figures partook of the true character of the arabesque only when regarded from a single point ...
— Famous Modern Ghost Stories • Various
... pearl-iridescent colombettes! (I wonder what they may be?) and sent to vie with the variegated carpet of the Turk, and glow upon the arabesque towers of Barbary![2] Was not this a phase of provincial Picard life which an intelligent English traveller might do well to inquire into? Why should this fountain of rainbows leap up suddenly here by Somme; and a little Frankish maid write herself the sister of Venice, ...
— Our Fathers Have Told Us - Part I. The Bible of Amiens • John Ruskin
... 1777, to his father. [We have here a suggestion of the tempo rubato as played by Chopin according to the testimony of Mikuli, who said that no matter how free Chopin was either in melody or arabesque with his right hand, the left always adhered strictly to the time. Mozart learned the principle from his father who in his method for the violin condemned the accompanists who spoiled the tempo rubato of an artist by ...
— Mozart: The Man and the Artist, as Revealed in his own Words • Friedrich Kerst and Henry Edward Krehbiel
... There were two Louis XIV. chairs that had really come from France. There were some square, heavy pieces of furniture that we should call Eastlake now. And the extravagant thing was a Brussels carpet with a scroll centerpiece and a border in arabesque. ...
— A Little Girl in Old Boston • Amanda Millie Douglas
... Senlis. The apsis is half a duodecagon. The pointed windows above are in two lancet divisions, surmounted by a trefoil; but the dividing masonry is not a mullion: it is the unperforated part of the wall. This perhaps is arabesque. There is a second arch within, which is really divided by a mullion or small pillar. A curious leaf projects above. Some of the painted glass is in the oldest style: dispersed patterns in a black outline, on a grey ground. In a side-chapel are painted tiles, brown and ...
— Architectural Antiquities of Normandy • John Sell Cotman
... and of aqua-marine, were ranged along the walls, the delicate beauty of their material and workmanship coming out well against the rich coloring of the hangings behind. The roof, a lofty dome, displayed the light Arabesque workmanship, peculiar to Moorish architecture, as did the form and ornaments of the windows. This apartment opened into another, much smaller, each side of which, apparently formed of silver plate, reflected as mirrors every object; and the pillars supporting the peculiarly ...
— The Vale of Cedars • Grace Aguilar
... countrymen, everything like comic intermixture. He has been censured for an occasional play on language in the expression of feeling. But is it just to exact the severity of the tragical cothurnus in light works of this description? Why should not Poetry also be allowed her arabesque? No person can be more an enemy to mannerism than I am; but to censure it aright, we ought first to understand the degree of nature and truth which we have a right to expect from each species, and what is alone compatible ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... walls were of one blackness with the oak floor and ceiling. The scattered blues and crimsons of the carpets (repeated in duller tones in the old morocco bindings), the gilded tracery of the tooling, and here and there a blood-red lettering-piece, gave an effect as of some dim rich arabesque flung on to the darkness. At this hour the sunlight made the most of all it found there; it washed the faded carpet with a new dye; it licked every jutting angle, every polished surface, every patch ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... place for his climax; and therefore he was obliged, as soon as he had laid Ligeia in the grave, to begin an elaborate description of the stage settings of his final scene. The place must be wild and weird and arabesque. It must be worthy to receive a resurrected mortal revisiting the glimpses of the moon. The place was found, the time—midnight—decided upon: but the question remained,—how ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton
... more designs which by careful investigation can be found. Among others the Arabesque, Chinese fret, Circle, Comb, various forms of the Cross, Mina Khani, Octagon, the S form, Scroll, Serrated leaves, Shah Abbas, the Star,—six or eight pointed,—the Tarantula, Triangle, the Y form, and ...
— Rugs: Oriental and Occidental, Antique & Modern - A Handbook for Ready Reference • Rosa Belle Holt
... piano music] the embellishment itself made the starting-point for almost a new art in tonal combination, the effects of which one sees on every hand to-day. To realise its influence one need only compare the easy mastery of the arabesque displayed in the simplest piano piece of to-day with the awkward and gargoyle-like figuration of Beethoven and his predecessors. We may justly attribute this to Liszt rather than to Chopin, whose nocturne embellishments are but first cousins ...
— Edward MacDowell • Lawrence Gilman
... portrait of Lord Byron, engr. by J.T. Wedgwood from a painting by W.E. West, in arabesque frame, rests on miniatures of Newstead Abbey and Missolunghi (sic) designed by F. Sieurac. The Title-vignette is tomb, harp, willows, etc. A lithograph of letter, April 27, 1819, to the Editor of Galignani's Messenger, is inserted between ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Vol. 7. - Poetry • George Gordon Byron
... elaborate, gives us 'Burke and Hare! As they were loving friends in life, so in death are they undivided! Erected by their affectionate disciples, Bishop and May.' Besides these there are many others all bearing names of mark and fame. The whole is surrounded by a pretty arabesque composed of crowbars and other implements of burglary, pistols, knives, death's heads and cross-bones, halters, handcuffs, and fetters, ingeniously disposed and prettily intertwined with ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... introduce delightful items into their works: elaborately embroidered veils, scarves, and gold fringes. But being a man of fine imagination and most delicate sense of form, he does not, like Angelico or Benozzo or Carpaccio, merely stick pretty things about; he works them all into his strange arabesque, half intellectual, half physical. Thus the screen of roses[7] behind certain of his Madonnas, forming an exquisite Morris pattern with the greenish-blue sky interlaced; and those beautiful, carefully-drawn branches of spruce-fir and cypress, lace-like in his Primavera; ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... is pronounced Corteho, with an aspirate, according to the Arabesque guttural. It means what there is as yet no precise name for in England, though the practice is as common as in ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... size than usual, judging of it by comparison with the dimensions of modern volumes. The binding was of blue velvet, with clasps of silver worked in beautiful arabesque patterns, and with a lock of the same precious metal to protect the book from prying eyes. When I took it up, I found that the lock ...
— The Law and the Lady • Wilkie Collins
... S. de R——d is not more distinguished by its profuse decoration, than by the fine taste which has guided the vast expenditure. Its halls of arabesque are almost without a rival; there is not the slightest embellishment in which the hand and feeling of art are not recognised. The rooms were very crowded; everybody distinguished in Paris was there: the lady of the Court, ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... search. I will recount the memoranda that I made, lest memory should be unfaithful. When the third cover is unclosed, in the lowest part of the recess on the right hand, beneath a sliding panel, is a spring, on touching which the whole flies back, and discovers a rare device, beautifully wrought in arabesque relief. So far, in all likelihood, you being his ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... Loggie, which consist of a long gallery, or arcade or colonnade, the whole extent of which was once beautifully adorned by Raphael. These pictures are almost worn away, and so defaced as to be untraceable and unintelligible, along the side wall of the gallery; although traceries of Arabesque, and compartments where there seem to have been rich paintings, but now only an indistinguishable waste of dull color, are still to be seen. In the coved ceiling, however, there are still some bright frescos, in better preservation than any others; not particularly beautiful, nevertheless. ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... talked to him of 'Dame Nature.' 'Damn Nature!' retorted Aubrey Beardsley, and pulled down the blinds and worked by gaslight on the finest days. But he was a real Englishman, who from his glass-house peppered the English public. No Latin could have contrived his arabesque. The grotesques of Jerome Bosch are positively pleasant company beside many of Beardsley's inventions. Even in his odd little landscapes, with their twisted promontories sloping seaward, he suggested mocking laughter; and the flowers of 'Under the Hill' are ...
— Masques & Phases • Robert Ross
... constantly exercised upon and around great thoughts, and their influence may be felt in the austerity and intensity of his noblest portraits and other creations. But "great thoughts" in respect of works of art either means the communication of a profound emotion by the creation of a suitable arabesque for a deeply significant subject, as in the flowing masses of Michael Angelo's Creation of Man, or it means the pictorial enhancing of the telling incidents of a dramatic situation such as we find it in Rembrandt's treatment of the Crucifixion, Deposition, ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore
... principles which I have set forth very summarily, Claude Monet arrived at painting by means of the infinitely varied juxtaposition of a quantity of colour spots which dissociate the tones of the spectrum and draw the forms of objects through the arabesque of their vibrations. A landscape thus conceived becomes a kind of symphony, starting from one theme (the most luminous point, f.i.), and developing all over the canvas the variations of this theme. This investigation is added to the ...
— The French Impressionists (1860-1900) • Camille Mauclair
... limbs, frisk all over the walls, and by their gambols and contortions form a pattern of curves and lines, which is a maze of animated life, retaining at the same time the broad and harmonious effect of an arabesque. ...
— Luca Signorelli • Maud Cruttwell
... which the monthly parts made their appearance, should have had a purely sporting character, and exhibited Mr. Pickwick sleepily fishing in a punt, and Mr. Winkle shooting at what looks like a cock-sparrow, the whole surrounded by a chaste arabesque of guns, rods, and landing-nets. To Seymour, too, we owe the portrait of Mr. Pickwick, which has impressed that excellent old gentleman's face and figure upon all our memories. But to return to Dickens' interview with Mr. Hall. They seem to have parted in mutual satisfaction. ...
— Life of Charles Dickens • Frank Marzials
... him to form splendid collections of them. In 1751 he purchased a property at Merly, near Wimborne, Dorsetshire, where in 1752 he built a noble mansion, which later he enlarged by adding two wings, in one of which he constructed a handsome room for a library, which he ornamented with frescoes and arabesque designs. A description of this library, written by Willett in English and French, was printed in 1776 in octavo, and reprinted in 1785 by John Nichols in a large folio volume, with twenty-five illustrations of the designs. ...
— English Book Collectors • William Younger Fletcher
... clever and even very pretty, but they are rather a painful effort of pictorial art under difficulties, than legitimate embroideries. These pictures would have served the purpose of decoration better as medallions in the centres of arabesque panels, than framed and glazed in imitation of oil paintings. Some of the followers of this school produced works that are shocking to all artistic sense, especially as seen now, when the moths have spoiled them. They can only be classed with ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford
... might be said that there was a quantity of fairy flower and kitchen gardens in the sea, full of gigantic flowers, blossoms, and leaves, varied by fungi and pulse of every description, like open arabesque work, the whole interspersed with pretty groups of rocks of every hue. The most lovely shell-fish were clinging to these rocks, or lying scattered on the ground, while endless shoals of variegated fish darted in and out ...
— A Woman's Journey Round the World • Ida Pfeiffer
... table there is a Real Presence that makes many words unfitting. When we are on the mount of Transfiguration, we do not care much for Peter, James or John. And so, dear, I recommend you to do as I do—if the minister must give us a doctrinal disquisition, or a learned argument, or an elaborate arabesque of fancy work, or an impassioned appeal, let him go his way and do not heed him. I want silence that I may commune with the Real Presence. If the minister does not give ...
— Laicus - The experiences of a Layman in a Country Parish • Lyman Abbott
... insufficiency of the English effort. The English soldier is very likely to say something like, 'Oh, you'll be wanting to get home to your old woman before that, and asking for a kipper with your tea.' And it is quite likely that the American will be offended in his turn at having his arabesque of abstract beauty answered in so personal a fashion. Being an American, he will probably have a fine and chivalrous respect for his wife; and may object to her being called an old woman. Possibly he in turn may be under the extraordinary delusion that ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... arabesque Of sifted sun And forest star-grass, cool With shadows tunnelling: Witch-work that tauntingly Webs my bare floor: Ah, Pan ...
— Path Flower and Other Verses • Olive T. Dargan
... merit to our present fashionable binders, and frankly allowing them the superiority over De Rome, Padaloup, and the old school of binding, I cannot but wish to see revived those beautiful portraits, arabesque borders, and sharp angular ornaments, that are often found on the outsides of books bound in the 16th century, with calf leather, upon oaken boards. These brilliant decorations almost make us forget the ivory crucifix, guarded with silver doors, which is frequently introduced in the interior ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... cathedral towers these stately pines Uplift their fretted summits tipped with cones; The arch beneath them is not built with stones, Not Art but Nature traced these lovely lines, And carved this graceful arabesque of vines; No organ but the wind here sighs and moans, No sepulchre conceals a martyr's bones, No marble bishop on his tomb reclines. Enter! the pavement, carpeted with leaves, Gives back a softened echo to thy tread! Listen! the choir is singing; all ...
— The World's Best Poetry — Volume 10 • Various
... for morning walking dresses, redingote form, open down the front, and embroidered in arabesque pattern, in silk braid and other trimming; the sleeves are worked at bottom, and open, to admit underneath cambric or muslin sleeves tight at the wrist; the body is embroidered to match the skirts. With this redingote is worn a pardessus of the same cloth, embroidered ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... also, "crewel stitch," as it has no claim to being used exclusively in crewel embroidery). It is most useful in work done in the hand, and especially in outlines of flowers, unshaded leaves, and arabesque, ...
— Handbook of Embroidery • L. Higgin
... receive but gave forth light, who was sweet and fresh, and whose fluffy curls, whose fragrant breath, seemed too heavy, too harsh, too overpowering for that shadow, for that man of dust—ah! the thought that came into my mind was of death and life, an imaginary arabesque, a half-hideous chimera, divinely ...
— Sarrasine • Honore de Balzac
... arches. The door-way is at the side, and is Gothic, with a dash of Saracenic in the ornamental mouldings above it. The large window at the extremity of the nave is remarkable for having round arches, which circumstance, together with the traces of arabesque painted ornaments on the columns, led me to think it might have been a mosque; but Dr. Robinson, who is now here, considers it a Christian church, of the time of the Crusaders. The village of Aboo 'l Ghosh is said to be the site of the birth-place of the Prophet Jeremiah, ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor
... was covered with silver and gold and ultramarine and costly minerals. Then they set up for the latticed windows colonnettes of gold and silver and noble ores, and the doors of the sitting chamber were made of chaunders-wood alternating with ebony which they studded with jewels and arabesque'd with gold and silver. Also they placed in each sitting-room a pillar of Comorin lign-aloes and the best of sandal-wood encrusted with gems; and over the speak-room they threw cupolas supported upon arches and connecting ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... enfant l'herbe est splendide et semble Pleine de vrais rubis et de diamants fins; Un jet de saphirs sort des bouches des dauphins. Elle se tient au bord de l'eau; sa fleur l'occupe. Sa basquine est en point de Genes; sur sa jupe Une arabesque, errant dans les plis du satin, Suit les mille detours d'un fil d'or florentin. La rose epanouie et toute grande ouverte, Sortant du frais bouton comme d'une urne ouverte, Charge la petitesse exquise de sa main; Quand l'enfant, ...
— La Legende des Siecles • Victor Hugo
... nuns' balconies are not confined to the interior of churches, but form a distinct and picturesque feature in the long line of the Toledo. Projecting in a bold curve whose undersurface is gaily painted in arabesque, their thick bars and narrow openings nevertheless leave a gloomy impression on the mind, while they add to the Oriental character of the city. A somewhat unsuccessful effort to identify the church whose bell gave signal for the ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... realize that their machine has distinct limitations; that it is better suited to certain pieces than to others. They find that music may be performed on it with the more triumphant success the less human it is and the nearer it comes to the soullessness of an arabesque. The best operator, by pumping or pulling stops or switching levers, cannot entirely succeed in imbuing it with the breath of life. The disquieting fact remains that the more a certain piece demands to be filled with soul, the ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler
... Khartoum in the distance. The Mahdi's white, cone-shaped tomb, its dome girt with rings, and ornamented with brazen finials, globe and crescent, shone not six miles away in the midst of miles of mud and straw huts. Four arabesque finials rose, one from each corner of the supporting wall. Before the town was a wall of white tents, the original camping ground of the Khalifa's levies and reinforcements drawn from distant garrisons. Midway ...
— Khartoum Campaign, 1898 - or the Re-Conquest of the Soudan • Bennet Burleigh
... fix that when we all get back to New York. And now you just sit down at that piano and play me Debussy's 'Arabesque.'... I know you love it just as much as I do. But ...
— Three Soldiers • John Dos Passos
... the water's side she holds her place, Her bodice bright is set with Genoa lace; O'er her rich robe, through every satin fold, Wanders an arabesque in threads of gold. From its green urn the rose unfolding grand, Weighs down the exquisite smallness of her hand. And when the child bends to the red leafs tip, Her laughing nostril, and her carmine lip, The royal flower purpureal, ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... silences, and the words were ambiguous, hesitating, often repeated, like the words of peasants or children. They were rarely beautiful in themselves, rarely even significant, but they suggested a singular kind of beauty and significance, through their adjustment in a pattern or arabesque. Atmosphere, the suggestion of what was not said, was everything; and in an essay in "Le Tresor des Humbles" Maeterlinck told us that in drama, as he conceived it, it was only the words that were not said ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... pat the arabesque of shining hair that lay coiled so submissively against either glowing cheek. "Oh, my, no! I just thought I'd dress up in case Angie Hatton drove past in her auto and picked me up for a little ride. So's ...
— Half Portions • Edna Ferber
... threaded swiftly, in shifting arabesque, in Gothic traceries, in lace-like fantasies; utterly bizarre, unutterably ...
— The Metal Monster • A. Merritt
... pleasing, and overlooks the whole of the town. Fee, fr. Opposite the tower is the Chapel of the Dukes of Savoy, 14th cent. Fee, fr. The three tall windows are filled with beautiful old glass. The roof is covered with stone groining, with cleverly-executed arabesque painting between the nervures. The roof of the cathedral is similarly painted, but on a blue ground. It is situated near the Rue de Boigne, and was built in the ...
— The South of France—East Half • Charles Bertram Black
... the audience part, to what appeared to be a large well, fenced by a parapet; and looking down ten or twelve feet, saw below us the centre chandelier, the aperture, which would otherwise be unsightly, being closed by an open framework in Arabesque. Through this the chandelier is lighted by a long rod, having at the end a wire, to which is attached a piece of ignited sponge soaked in spirits of wine: the chandelier is raised and lowered at pleasure by ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 443 - Volume 17, New Series, June 26, 1852 • Various
... impressions; I was conscious of the ebb and flow of blood through my heart, felt it when it eddied up into my face, and touched my brain with its flame-colored wave. I loved life again. The stuff of which each day was woven was covered with an arabesque which suited my fancy. I missed nothing that the present unrolled for me, but looked neither to the past nor to the future. In truth there was little that was elevated in me. Could I have perceived it if there had ...
— The Morgesons • Elizabeth Stoddard
... palace of the Czars, called the Terema. It is complete as a residence in itself, but the halls and sleeping-rooms are remarkably small compared to those of the huge modern edifice by its side. The walls from top to bottom are covered with the most strange arabesque devices which imagination could design—birds, beasts, and fish, interwoven with leaves and sea-weed of every description. In each room a different tint predominates, although the same style of ornament is carried throughout, and the same colours are ...
— Fred Markham in Russia - The Boy Travellers in the Land of the Czar • W. H. G. Kingston
... Platonic sonneteers; and a good dose of the ironical, scurrilous, moralizing immoral anecdote gossiping of Boccaccio and Sacchetti. Such is the stuff. The conception, though rarely comic, and sometimes bond fide serious, is never earnest. All this is a purely artistic world, a world of decorative arabesque incident, intended to please, scarcely ever to move, or to move, at most, like some Decameronian tale of Isabella and the Basil Plant, or Constance and Martuccio. On the other hand, there is none of the grotesque irreverence ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. II • Vernon Lee
... a mysterious way his wonders to perform." If the greatest of all his wonders be the human individual, the richness with which the specimens thereof are diversified, the limitless variety of outline, from gothic to classic or flowing arabesque, the contradictory nature of the filling, composed of little and great, of comic, heroic, and pathetic elements blended inextricably, in personalities all of whom can go, and go successfully, must surely be reckoned the supreme miracle of creative ingenuity. Rarely has Nature performed an odder ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... ancient garden With high red walls around; Over them grey and green lichens In shadowy arabesque wound. ...
— Poetical Works of George MacDonald, Vol. 2 • George MacDonald
... published all the prose stories he had then written, in two volumes, under the title of "Tales of the Grotesque and the Arabesque." The work was not salable, perhaps because its contents were too familiar from recent separate publication in magazines; and it was not so warmly praised, generally, as I think it should have been, though in point ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... people, like some very fine pictures, are best at a distance. But Leonora is not one of these: the nearer you approach, the better you like her; as in arabesque-work you may admire the beauty of the design even at a distance, but you cannot appreciate the delicacy of the execution till you examine it closely, and discover that every line is formed of grains of gold, almost imperceptibly fine. I am glad that the "small sweet courtesies ...
— Tales And Novels, Vol. 8 • Maria Edgeworth
... was composed of crimson velvet, embroidered with seed-pearl. On the top of the canopy were two coronets, resembling those of an earl and countess. Stools covered with velvet, and some cushions disposed in the Moorish fashion, and ornamented with Arabesque needle-work, supplied the place of chairs in this apartment, which contained musical instruments, embroidery frames, and other articles for ladies' pastime. Besides lesser lights, the withdrawing-room ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... fronting this Porte or gateway, Charles V., in 1541, stayed two days and a night on his return from his unsuccessful expedition against Algiers. Overtaken by a storm, he had taken refuge in the Gulf of Santa Manza. The door of the house, decorated with an arabesque on marble, is in the narrow side street. In the Place d'Armes are the church of San Domenico, built by the Templars, characterised by its octagonal tower with an embrasured termination; and the great tower "Torrione," part of the fortifications ...
— Itinerary through Corsica - by its Rail, Carriage & Forest Roads • Charles Bertram Black
... spider's webs of gold and silver; mists of silk embroidered by fairy fingers; plumes colored by the fire of the tropics drooping from haughty heads; pearls twined in braided hair; shot or ribbed or brocaded silks, as though the genius of arabesque had presided over French manufactures,—all this luxury was in harmony with the beauties collected there as if to realize a "Keepsake." The eye received there an impression of the whitest shoulders, some amber-tinted, ...
— A Daughter of Eve • Honore de Balzac
... weaving, alas! a strange "arabesque pattern," as it was called, with no special form,—so it seemed to my eyes,—bringing in gorgeous colors, but set in no shape which Nature ever produced, either above the earth or in metals or crystals hid far beneath. How I reproached myself, on Mr. Clarkson's account, that ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, No. 38, December, 1860 • Various
... carved windows cut in arabesque-work of marble. (India) or basalt (the Hauran) and provided with small panes of glass set in emeralds where tin would be used by ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... by their tasteful comfort. The boudoir was lined with some red stuff, over which an Indian muslin was stretched, fluted after the fashion of Corinthian columns, in plaits going in and out, and bound at the top and bottom by bands of poppy-colored stuff, on which were designs in black arabesque. ...
— The Girl with the Golden Eyes • Honore de Balzac
... always seemed to us, was the cleverest writer in his way that has ever contributed to the English periodicals. His fugitive lyrics and arabesque romances, half sardonic and half sentimental, published with Hookham Frere's "Whistlecraft" and Macaulay's Roundhead Ballads, in Knight's Quarterly Magazine, and after the suspension of that work, for the ...
— The International Weekly Miscellany, Volume I. No. 8 - Of Literature, Art, and Science, August 19, 1850 • Various
... have isolated woman and have robbed her of the fountain springs of that happiness which is so essential to her. Merely external emancipation has made of the modern woman an artificial being, who reminds one of the products of French arboriculture with its arabesque trees and shrubs, pyramids, wheels, and wreaths; anything, except the forms which would be reached by the expression of her own inner qualities. Such artificially grown plants of the female sex are to be found in large numbers, especially ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... entering his home this convalescent whom he had known months before—elegant and slender, with a delicate and somewhat feminine beauty. His face was now furrowed by a network of scars that had transformed it into a purplish arabesque. Within his body were hidden many such. His left hand had disappeared with a part of the forearm, the empty sleeve hanging over the remainder. The other hand was supported on a cane, a necessary aid in order to be able to move a ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... carvings, far beyond my power to describe, so luxuriant, so various, so intricate, one might almost suppose that the matchless tool of the famous Benevanta Cellini had traced its wild and graceful grotesque. The four claws, which are like roots from the stem of the pedestal, partake of the same rich arabesque in their design, and terminate in the ...
— The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter
... girl keeps up her childish habit of sketching heads and characters. Nobody is, I should think, more faithful and exact in the drawing of the academical figures given her as lessons; but there is a perpetual arabesque of fancies that runs round the margin of her drawings, and there is one book which I know she keeps to run riot in, where, if anywhere, a shrewd eye would be most likely to read her thoughts. This book of hers I mean to see, if I can ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various |
