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More "Background" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... our claim to respect? When we have acquired a foothold of our own in the world, when we have had some share in shaping its course, then we can meet others smilingly. Till then let us keep in the background, attending to ...
— Glimpses of Bengal • Sir Rabindranath Tagore
... only the scholar, also the simple worker, the laborer, the modest mother take a deep pleasure in forming their philosophy of life and the world. Side by side with the loud triumph of our industry goes this quieter existence, which has been rather pushed into the background in the last decades, but has not, therefore, ceased to exist. And the further the belief in miracles stepped into the background, the more the belief in duty acquired a warm religious tinge. The loud complaints about the vanishing of the sense of duty among the young, which has so ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... passing out to sea, leaving the mist thin and white. Suddenly voices forward cried, excitedly: "Land ho! Land ho! There she is! Isthmus in sight! Land ho!" The cries spread, with everybody on tiptoe, peering. At one end of the mist line had been uncurtained a background of rocky, surf-washed shore, with high green hills rising behind it. Next was uncovered a lower shore, indented by a large bay, and fringed with palm-trees. Next, as on sped the mist (like a swiftly rolling curtain, indeed) there came into view a lofty headland, with trees on its ...
— Gold Seekers of '49 • Edwin L. Sabin
... moonlight, I was attracted by a brilliant light beneath the trees, and cautiously approached it. A circle of thirty or forty soldiers sat around a roaring fire, while one old uncle, Cato by name, was narrating an interminable tale, to the insatiable delight of his audience. I came up into the dusky background, perceived only by a few, and he still continued. It was a narrative, dramatized to the last degree, of his adventures in escaping from his master to the Union vessels; and even I, who have heard the stories of Harriet Tubman, and such wonderful slave-comedians, never witnessed such ...
— Army Life in a Black Regiment • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... a charmingly pretty girl, dressed in white, with a sailor hat on her fair hair, and holding a lawn tennis racquet. She was bending half forward, with a winning smile, and in the background bloomed a mass of tropical plants. Mrs. Hableton uttered a cry of surprise ...
— The Mystery of a Hansom Cab • Fergus Hume
... Imperialism: the Elections of 1900.*—During the larger part of this Unionist decade the Liberal party, rent by factional disputes and personal rivalries, afforded but ineffective opposition.[219] The Home Rule question fell into the background; and although (p. 154) the Unionists carried through a considerable amount of social and industrial legislation, the interests of the period center largely in the Government's policies and achievements within the domain of foreign and colonial affairs. The most hotly contested issue of the ...
— The Governments of Europe • Frederic Austin Ogg
... was thinking that never in his life had he seen a girl so amazingly pretty. What it was that she had done to herself was beyond him; but something, some trick of dress, had given her a touch of the demure that made her irresistible. She was dressed in sober black, the ideal background for ...
— Something New • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... offering in obstinate agony, was an experience which for the time entirely robbed him of the power of seeing the elements of life in that proportion to which his mind's eye had grown accustomed—that is, seeing the things of religion as a shadowy background for life's important activities. ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... archbishop wins the Pope's consent to the customs." Fresh cases arose of clerks accused of theft and murder, but as the personal quarrel between Henry and Thomas increased in bitterness, questions of reform fell into the background. "I will humble thee," the king declared, "and will restore thee to the place from whence I took thee." Thomas, on his part, knew how to awaken all Henry's secret fears. All Europe was concerned in the dispute of king and archbishop. The Pope at Sens, the French king, ...
— Henry the Second • Mrs. J. R. Green
... there is the Superior-Race Lie: I do not know where it shall not be found. Races A, B, C, and D go on preaching it for centuries; each with an eye to its sublime self. In all countries, perhaps, history is taught with that lie for mental background. Then we wonder that there are wars. But Theosophy is called onto provide a true mental background for historical study; and it alone can do so. It is the mission of Point Loma, among many other things, to float a true philosophy of history on to the currents of world-thought: and for this end it ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... you of treacle on a marble background is scarcely greater than that of printers' ink on newspaper to me. But anything smaller than pica I do not read with comfort, and below long primer I cannot read at all. Hence the ...
— Four Max Carrados Detective Stories • Ernest Bramah
... simply on what the going will take you from, not on what it will bring you to. It means a lot to a woman, of course, to get away from a life like this." He summed up in a disparaging glance the background of indigent furniture. "The question is how you'll ...
— The Touchstone • Edith Wharton
... In the background among the trees were ranges of stables and kennels, and on the grass-plat in front of the windows was a row of beehives. A tame doe lay on the little green sward, not far from a large rough deer-hound, both close ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... gentle bribery. The great God of conscience is naturally the least popular object of cultus; though, were the animists right, He should be the most popular, seeing He would be the latest development demanded and created by the popular mind. But contrariwise, He tends to recede more and more into the background, behind the ever-multiplying crowd of patron-spirits, guardians, family-gods; till, as in Greece and Rome, He is almost entirely obscured, "an unknown God ignorantly worshipped"—the End, as usual, being forgotten and buried in the ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... and the bright blaze from the camp fire lighted up the glade, thus enabling Isaac to see the drooping figure on the log, and in the background Crow, holding a whispered consultation with the other Indians. Isaac heard enough of the colloquy to guess the facts. The chief had been desperately rounded; the palefaces were on their trail, and a march must be ...
— Betty Zane • Zane Grey
... of the transport-ships are in flames, two seem to have been sunk, and some of those further back have listed badly. The Olympia is heading straight for the enemy, but she seems to be damaged and is burning aft. There are two more cruisers in the background, but they are hidden by the smoke from the burning steamers; I can't see them ...
— Banzai! • Ferdinand Heinrich Grautoff
... rose on his elbow, watching. Charge after charge, wild and impetuous, break the slowly retreating battalions. In vain I heard Carter's stern oaths (may the angel of tears forgive him!), and Charlie Marsh's boyish calls. The men are facing us. The enemy, cheering, and in the background huge torches flaming with pitch, are ready ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... envy you, you know, living as you do. When you come to be a millionaire, you'll have an effective background for your millions. And then, you must know a great deal more about life than we do; and the knowledge that comes out of books must have quite another spiritual value for you than for the rest of us, who've been stuffed mechanically with 'lessons' and 'education' and so forth since ...
— The Great Hunger • Johan Bojer
... to make, I had not thought myself desperately in love with her at last, after a good many years of friendship. But now there had befallen the long days of peril and anxiety which had set her in the background altogether, and I had had time to come to more sober thoughts, as it were. Men have said that I aged more in that short time than in the next ten years of my life, and it is likely. Nevertheless, it needed ...
— A Prince of Cornwall - A Story of Glastonbury and the West in the Days of Ina of Wessex • Charles W. Whistler
... Metaxa said. He yawned. "I guess I'll have to go into my speech." He finished his drink. "Now, shut up till I give you some background. You're probably full of a lot of nonsense you picked ...
— Ultima Thule • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... these men through the background of history is to have a notion of the Day of Judgment. Old forgotten iniquities and adventures leap to light. Chirnside, like Logan and the Douglases of Whittingham, and John Colville, and the Laird of Spot, had followed ...
— James VI and the Gowrie Mystery • Andrew Lang
... taking part in the men's dances. They also act as assistants to the chief actors in the Totem Dances, three particularly expert and richly dressed women dancers ranging themselves behind the mask dancer as a pleasing background of streaming furs and glistening feathers. The only time they are forbidden to enter the kasgi is when the shaman is performing certain secret rites. They also have secret meetings of their own when all men are ...
— The Dance Festivals of the Alaskan Eskimo • Ernest William Hawkes
... obtain if and when the German tyrant is defeated and the nations of Europe commence their solemn task of reconstituting Europe. Of course, we must not press the analogy too far. The dawn of a new era might have been welcomed in 1815, but the proviso was always kept in the background that most of the older traditions should be preserved. Diplomacy was still inspired by its traditional watchwords. Above all, the transformation so keenly and so vaguely desired was in the hands of sovereigns who were more anxious about their own interests than perhaps was ...
— Armageddon—And After • W. L. Courtney
... little station, and with his head out of the window, Aynesworth waved his hand to the black-frocked child with her pale, eager face already stained with tears—a lone, strange little figure, full of a sort of plaintive grace as she stood there, against a background of milk cans, waving ...
— The Malefactor • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... once went tramping through the primeval forests, tearing down the branches of gigantic trees for food, and died in the dismal swamps of an unknown age. For a long time these strange creatures haunted my dreams, and this gloomy period formed a somber background to the joyous Now, filled with sunshine and roses and echoing with the gentle beat ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller
... diminished after marriage by that antagonism between individuation and reproduction everywhere operative throughout the organic world." I don't know why, but that passage made me as hot as a hornet. In the background of my brain I carried some vague memory of George Eliot once catching this same philosophizing Spencer fishing with a composite fly, and, remarking on his passion for generalizations, declaring that he even fished with a generalization. So I could afford to ...
— The Prairie Wife • Arthur Stringer
... bloodshed enough to make a Turk turn faint. The "art" illustrating that "literature" represents in vivid and shining colours a large and enraged black bull stamping upon a yellow snake writhing in emerald-green grass, with a cobalt-blue sky for a background. It is atrocious and it is an allegory. The snake symbolizes disease, weakness—perhaps mere hunger, which last is the chronic disease of the majority of mankind. Of course everybody knows the B. O. S. Ltd., with its unrivalled products: Vinobos, Jellybos, and the latest unequalled ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... definition can fully describe an art, but the relations between employers and men form without question the most important part of this art. In considering the subject, therefore, until this part of the problem has been fully discussed, the other phases of the art may be left in the background. ...
— Shop Management • Frederick Winslow Taylor
... on the verge of an altogether desperate scuffle. Never for a moment had violence come between these two since long ago he had, in spite of her mother's protest in the background, carried her kicking and squalling to the nursery for some forgotten crime. With something near to horror they found ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... friend,— Kind-hearted to the poor, and to the sick A double help and kindly comforter. In manner thus the seasons quickly pass, One after one,—the flowery Summer and The golden Autumn, with her bounty hand; Then, in the background, Winter, and again, When Spring, the early Summer; it was then, Her full time having come, the lady went Unto her chamber, and brought forth a child. And it was robed, and brought, and put into The father's hand, and he was very glad With ...
— A Leaf from the Old Forest • J. D. Cossar
... Till I could meet Sinclair's eye and discern in it the happy clearing-up of all his doubts, I should not feel free to be my own ordinary and sociable self again. But Sinclair showed every evidence of wishing to keep in the background; and while this was natural enough, so far as people in general were concerned, I thought it odd and very unlike him not to give me an opportunity to express my congratulations at the turn affairs had taken and the frank attitude assumed by Gilbertine. I own I felt much disturbed ...
— Room Number 3 - and Other Detective Stories • Anna Katharine Green
... wanting in all that human invention could produce. When we picture to ourselves the theatrical talent and the splendid costumes of the actors, the scenes constructed in the style of the architecture of the period, and hung with garlands and tapestry, and in the background the noble buildings of an Italian piazza, or the slender columns of some great courtyard or cloister, the effect is one of great brilliance. But just as the secular drama suffered from this passion for display, ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... surroundings. Above, the cold moon; all about, the grim, stolid, half-hostile natives; close by, that strange, serpentine, savage wife, guarding, cat-like, the sleep of her cannibal husband; behind, the watchful Eyes of Tu-Kila-Kila, waiting ever in the background, ready to raise a loud shout of alarm and warning the moment the fatal branch was actually broken, but mute, by their vows, till that moment was accomplished. Then a sudden wild impulse urged him on to the attempt. The banyan had dropped ...
— The Great Taboo • Grant Allen
... abstract idea is creeping into art, although, only yesterday, it was scorned and obscured by purely material ideals. Its gradual advance is natural enough, for in proportion as the organic form falls into the background, the abstract ideal ...
— Concerning the Spiritual in Art • Wassily Kandinsky
... harbour, erected at tremendous cost, permits ships of heavy burden to discharge passengers and cargo with comfort and safety at a long wharf, without that unpleasant interlude of rocking sampans and reckless boatmen common to Eastern travel. A background of blue peaks and clustering palms rises beyond the long line of quays and breakwaters flanked by the railway, and a wealth of tropical scenery covers a marshy plain with riotous luxuriance. No Europeans ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... the village and passing round the wood. At its corner, the sudden shape of a woman arose against the sportive sunbeams that outlined her with light. Alertly erect she stood, before the faintly violet background of the wood's marge and the crosshatched trees. She was slender, her head all afire with fair hair, and in her pale face we could see the night-dark caverns of great eyes. The resplendent being gazed fixedly upon us, trembling, then plunged abruptly ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... reach home in the evening—a very late time they would say; but, as the delay was a pure accident, they would deem her marriage to Mr Heddegan tomorrow still practicable. Then Charles would have to be produced from the background. It was a terrible undertaking to think of, and she almost regretted her temerity in wedding so hastily that morning. The rage of her father would be so crushing; the reproaches of her mother so bitter; and perhaps Charles would answer hotly, and perhaps cause estrangement till ...
— Victorian Short Stories, - Stories Of Successful Marriages • Elizabeth Gaskell, et al.
... she seemed to suck the radiance along. It became a great cone of glowing light that, arrow-like, raced away upward. For a long instant the black length of the ship, and the greenish fan of flame, were outlined against the scarlet background of Jupiter. Then the freighter rocket, flinging herself upward at three gravities or better, passed the edge of the planet ...
— The Indulgence of Negu Mah • Robert Andrew Arthur
... Parsonage, where Ursula was most eager that her friend should come in. And here Mr. May joined them, who was impressed, like everybody else, by Phoebe's appearance, and made himself so agreeable that Reginald felt eclipsed and driven into the background. Ursula had never been so satisfied with her father in her life; though there was a cloud on Mr. May's soul, it suited him to show a high good-humour with everybody in recompense for his son's satisfactory decision, and he was, indeed, in a state of high complacence with himself for having managed ...
— Phoebe, Junior • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... returned, but he was too poor to marry, and she was persuaded and almost forced to marry a rich man. Dear old Abbe, always taking snuff while he told me his agonies, and then finishing up by saying that he became a priest so as to put an end for ever to his passion. Who would have suspected such a background to his jovial face? I don't know how it was that people, much my seniors, so often confided to me their secret sufferings. I may have to mention some other cases, and I feel that after my friends are gone, and so many years have passed over their graves, there is no indiscretion in speaking of their ...
— My Autobiography - A Fragment • F. Max Mueller
... forest leaves, and as it approached the house, the fine old building, with its many gable ends and curiously twisted chimneys, its steep roofs and latticed windows—all monuments of the old colonial days—came more and more distinctly into view from its background of mountains. Lights were gleaming from upper and lower and all sorts of windows, and the whole aspect of the grand old hospitable mansion ...
— Cruel As The Grave • Mrs. Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... they were standing together at the space between the windows outside, the long-leaved creepers mingling with the decorations of her hat, and making a very effective background ...
— Phyllis of Philistia • Frank Frankfort Moore
... penetrated, from beginning to end, by the demonological beliefs of which the Gadarene story is a specimen; and, if the fourth Gospel indicates the existence of another and, in some respects, irreconcilably divergent narrative, in which the demonology retires into the background, it is ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... the ups and downs and circuits had quite wearied us. Gradually the rocks decreased in size, and were more widely spread; a plain slightly depressed in the centre, dotted here and there with thinly growing thickets, was reached. In the background there was a clump of firs and a glittering lake, quite a liquid oasis hidden in ...
— Adventures of a Young Naturalist • Lucien Biart
... little or no improvement in the type for a long period; it remained practically unchanged till the thirteenth century. Thus, while a Byzantine Madonna is to be found in nearly every old church in Italy, to see one is to see all. They are half-length figures against a background of gold leaf, at first laid on solidly, or, at a somewhat later date, studded with cherubs. The Virgin has a meagre, ascetic countenance, large, ill-shaped eyes, and an almost peevish expression; her head is draped in a heavy, dark blue veil, ...
— The Madonna in Art • Estelle M. Hurll
... back to it again and again. And to-night, sometimes Richard was himself, sometimes his personality seemed merged in that of Witherington, the crippled fighting-man, of whose maiming and deadly courage that stanza tells. And the battle was long and fierce, as from out a background of steeple-shaped, honey-combed rocks and sparse trees with large golden leaves—like those on the panels of the great, lacquered cabinets in the Long Gallery—innumerable hordes of fanatic Chinamen poured down ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... he should have been, with a revolutionary background. He dressed somberly in black, like most of the other Argentine men on board. There was Senora Pages, very fat, very indolent, very blank, much given to pink satin and diamonds at dinner. Senorita Pages, over-powdered, overfrizzed, marvelously gowned, with overplumpness just a few years ...
— Emma McChesney & Co. • Edna Ferber
... order' crowd out there; they're afraid. But I want forbidden books—sharp, pointed books. I'll slip them through their fingers. When the police commissioners or the priest see that they are illegal books, they'll think it's the teachers who circulate them. And in the meantime I'll remain in the background." ...
— Mother • Maxim Gorky
... a wad; then drawing his cutlass he handed it to Martin, exclaiming, "Come, lad, we're in for it now. Take you the cutlass and I'll try their skulls with the butt o' my pistol: it has done good work before now in that way. If there's no more o' the blackguards in the background ...
— Martin Rattler • R.M. Ballantyne
... rising crescendo as their speed increased. Then, abruptly, the sound broke off into deathly silence as the limit of audibility was passed. Against the brilliant background of swift color changes and geometric light-shapes that so quickly merged into the familiar blur, Bert saw his companions as dim wraithlike forms. He moved ...
— Wanderer of Infinity • Harl Vincent
... they halted anywhere for a rest or a view, the Lamont girl was sure to take an artistic pose, which the artist couldn't resist, and his whole occupation seemed to be drawing her, with the Catskills for a background. "There," he would say, "stay just as you are; yes, leaning a little so"—it was wonderful how the lithe figure adapted itself to any background—"and turn your head this way, looking at me." The artist began to draw, and every time he gave a quick glance upwards from his book, there were ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... taste nothing more till midnight. There was something so delightfully fresh and out of the common in having tea at a wayside inn; they felt true pilgrims of the road, and civilization and school seemed to have faded into a far background. The love of travel is in the blood of both Celt and Anglo-Saxon; our forefathers visited shrines for the joy of the journey as well as for religious motives, and maybe our Bronze Age ancestors, who flocked to the great Sun Festivals at Stonehenge or Avebury Circles, derived pleasure from the ...
— A Popular Schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... presented by some of those who stood to watch him go—yielding to the vast speculation how the poor creatures were to get on without him, was great, and sad, but not absorbed. He patted children on the head like Sir Roger de Coverley going to church, spoke to people in the background by their Christian names, and ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol III • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... beautiful sky effects on the march with the sun circling low on the southern horizon. Bright pink clouds hovered overhead on a deep grey-blue background. Gleams of bright sunlit mountains appeared through ...
— Scott's Last Expedition Volume I • Captain R. F. Scott
... as the necessary keyboard technic to give expression to the work,—but the veil is torn from the composer's hidden meaning, only becoming intimate with his creative personality as a master, by studying his life environments, by investigating the historical background of the period in which he worked, by learning of his joys and his sufferings, by cultivating a deep and heartfelt sympathy for his ideals and by the scrupulous and constant revision of one's own ...
— Great Pianists on Piano Playing • James Francis Cooke
... looking very beautiful," she went on. "Much more beautiful than before, but in such a different way! From diaphanous she has become opaque; from airy, solid. She brought a most wonderful wardrobe, and, kept in the background with ...
— Aurora the Magnificent • Gertrude Hall
... were trees. Of the faces which came out fresh and vivid as though painted in yellow and red, the most prominent was a girl's face. By a trick of the firelight she seemed to have no body. The oval of the face and hair hung beside the fire with a dark vacuum for background. As if dazed by the glare, her green-blue eyes stared at the flames. Every muscle of her face was taut. There was something tragic in her thus staring—her age ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... itself was invisible to Winfried and his companions. A great throng of people were gathered around it in a half-circle, their backs to the open glade, their faces towards the oak. Seen against that glowing background, it was but the silhouette of a crowd, ...
— The First Christmas Tree - A Story of the Forest • Henry Van Dyke
... Frank's father. Then, for the first time, the matter of the return home was seriously discussed. So happy had been the months since their arrival, nearly a year before, that even the discussion of the return trip had been kept in the background as much as possible. But now they were face to face with it, and sharp and quick must be their decision if they would avail themselves of the first opportunity for their departure. This would be by the return of these Hudson ...
— Winter Adventures of Three Boys • Egerton R. Young
... produced, I changed my mind. There again was that disturbing loveliness. It was a story of the passionate Florence of Lorenzo the Magnificent, and Esther Levenson drifted through the four long acts against a background of Tuscan walls, scarlet hangings, oaths, blood-spilling, dark and terrible vengeance. Grimshaw took London by the throat and put ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... Lady Jane was her mother's greatest friend when they were both girls together; and when she had married a certain Mr. Ashleigh, a man of great wealth, although their acquaintance had very much dropped into the background, yet still the stories about the beautiful and willful Lady Jane had delighted Rosamund when she was a little girl herself. Now, it seemed that Lady Jane was blessed with a daughter, and as naughty as she must have been in her own early days. This made matters exceedingly interesting ...
— A Modern Tomboy - A Story for Girls • L. T. Meade
... reign of the third Edward of England is illuminated with such a blaze of glory, that the dazzled eye can with difficulty distinguish the dark background of its domestic life. Cressy and Poitiers carried the military fame of England throughout the world, and struck terror into her enemies; but at home dwelt turbulence, corruption, rapine, and misery. The barons quarrelled and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 109, November, 1866 • Various
... for pleasure that is stolen or forbidden. It is a mistake to suppose that this is an indication of viciousness or perversity. It appears to be an impulse that occurs quite naturally in altogether innocent women. The exciting charm of the risky and dangerous naturally arises on a background of feminine shyness and timidity. We may trace its recognition at a very early stage of history in the story of Eve and the forbidden fruit that has so often been the symbol of the masculine organs of sex. It is on this ground that ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... scenery: a woodland, a Poor Interior, and a Rich Interior, the last also useful for railway stations, offices, and as a background for the Swedish Quartette from Chicago. There were three gradations of lighting: full on, half on, ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... spite of its public monuments. These little flights or frights in marble are as snug in their little squares, in front of their little halls, as are the majestic ruins in their poplar groves. In both instances, Nature and Circumstance have harmonised between the subject and the background. Come along. And let the rhymsters chisel on the monument whatever they like about sculptures and the wali. To condemn in this case ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... of the arch stood out with gloomy distinctness against a cold, lowering background of vapourous sky. Like a man who was still half dreaming, he crossed the road and entered the Park, making his way towards the trees. There was a spot about half-way down, where, in the afternoons, he usually ...
— Berenice • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... beheld the other yacht standing out in bold relief upon a blacker, more dismal background. She was beautiful at that moment—her sides and sails unnaturally whitened against the gloom, suggesting a cameo set on a piece of slate. Our blocks began to creak, sails bulged into huge scoops, masts tilted ...
— Wings of the Wind • Credo Harris
... Christ's College, and had been a benefactress to Oxford as well. On the outer gateways of both her colleges, therefore, we see the great antelopes of the Beauforts supporting the arms of Lady Margaret, with her emblem, the daisy, forming a background. Sprinkled freely over the buildings, too, are the Tudor rose ...
— Beautiful Britain—Cambridge • Gordon Home
... morning's mail, Dr. Britt's card came in, bringing with it instant, vivid recollection of Colorow. The beauty of his days there had by no means faded from his mind, although he had succeeded in putting his romance in the background of his working brain, and had given up all thought ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... led was small and obscure, concerned only in keeping out of trouble as long as it could. The nation which Wilson ruled was a powerful State whose attitude from the very first was of supreme importance to both sides. And the issues raised by the war pushed into the background questions which had seemed important in 1913—and which, when the war was over, became ...
— Woodrow Wilson's Administration and Achievements • Frank B. Lord and James William Bryan
... plot runs through them; they simply analyse and describe with extraordinary minuteness the feelings of a nervous and morbid boy—a male Marie Bashkirtseff. They are tales rather of the developments of the thoughts, than of the life of a child, with a pale background of men and events. The distinct charm lies in the sincerity with ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various
... poisonous tooth of bodily pain. Without any effort of his will, or power to restrain himself, he shrieked aloud; an outcry that went pealing through the night, and was beaten back from one house to another, and reverberated from the hills in the background; as if a company of devils, detecting so much misery and terror in it, had made a plaything of the sound, and were bandying ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... mixes her own colors. She grinds them with a pestle in the fashion of the old masters, and out of the most strange pigments she produces often only soft neutral tints for background and shadow, kneading a vast deal of bright colors away among the grays and browns; but now and then she takes a palette loaded with strong paint, and a great brush, and splashes a startling full ...
— An American Politician • F. Marion Crawford
... These are the gin-palaces." Naturally, among so much poverty gin-palaces and public-houses abounded. It is curious to note how many of Hogarth's pictures of misery and vice were drawn from St. Giles's. "Noon" has St. Giles's Church in the background, while his "Gin Lane" shows the neighbouring church of St. George, Bloomsbury; the scene of his "Harlot's Progress" is Drury Lane, and the idle apprentice is caught when wanted for murder in a ...
— Holborn and Bloomsbury - The Fascination of London • Sir Walter Besant
... abstractions. To Paul the realities of which they speak were more real than the firm and solid earth. And is it any wonder that a man with such a magnificent sense of the reality of the redemptive works of Christ, who felt the eternal purpose throbbing in the dark background and abyss of time, who conceived it operating upon our race in floods of grace and glory, and who realized in his own immediate consciousness the varied wealth of the resultant emancipation—is it any wonder ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Volume 10 (of 10) • Various
... understand how you can be so hard," his mother wailed, huskily. "You know why they don't run after her the way they do the other girls she goes with, Walter. It's because we're poor, and she hasn't got any background. ...
— Alice Adams • Booth Tarkington
... the language of their love. Gabrielle replied to Etienne's gifts by nosegays of her own,—nosegays which told the wise old doctor that his ignorant daughter already knew enough. The material ignorance of these two lovers was like a dark background on which the faintest lines of their all-spiritual intercourse were traced with exquisite delicacy, like the red, pure outlines of Etruscan figures. Their slightest words brought a flood of ideas, because ...
— The Hated Son • Honore de Balzac
... now stepped into the background, and the doors opened to admit the tall figure of the head mollah, who entered with eyes fixed upon the floor; and, on finding himself in presence of the Caliph, knelt down and touched ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... Melanchthon, immediately after the presentation of the Apology, resolved to revise and recast it, the original draft was forced into the background. It remained unknown for a long time and was published for the first time forty-seven years after the Diet. Chytraeus embodied it in his Historia Augustanae Confessionis, 1578, with the caption, "Prima ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente
... in the jungle, and the splashing in the water announced continual arrivals of game to the lonely drinking-place. Notwithstanding the immense quantity of animals that were congregated together, we could not distinguish them plainly on account of the dark background of jungle. Elk, deer, buffaloes, and hogs were all bathing and drinking in immense numbers, ...
— The Rifle and The Hound in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker
... and yonder, rich just in the joy of being alive. Shashai had never quite overcome his jealousy of his young half-brother, and now laid back his ears in reproof of his unseemly gambols; Shashai's own babyhood was not far enough in the background for ...
— Peggy Stewart: Navy Girl at Home • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... liked by his fellow-workers. I have been told that it was the same in his diocese, and that he was always a greater favourite with his laymen than with his priests. There can be no doubt that he put every one about him into the background. But his very violence made us like him, for we felt that all his thoughts were concentrated on us. He was without an equal in the art of rousing his pupils to exertion, and of getting the maximum amount of work out of each. Each pupil had a distinct existence in his mind, and for ...
— Recollections of My Youth • Ernest Renan
... Her friends' and her servants' manners were not alike, to be sure, but as far as intent went, they came to the same thing. They presented, whatever passions, misfortunes, dislikes, uncomfortable facts of any sort might lie in the background, a smooth and practically frictionless, bearing surface. A person accustomed to that surface develops a soft skin. This was about ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... The mist made a puzzling background and her eyes were getting dazzled; but there was something. Then she heard a chair jar on the flags and glanced at Railton, ...
— The Buccaneer Farmer - Published In England Under The Title "Askew's Victory" • Harold Bindloss
... background to this picture lies the Vettern—the bottomless lake as the commonalty believe—with its transparent water, its sea-like waves, and in calm, with "Hegring," or fata morgana on its steel-like surface. ...
— Pictures of Sweden • Hans Christian Andersen
... into contact with the traditional culture of the whites through the study of Latin, Greek, mathematics, and sometimes Hebrew, especially in the case of students for the ministry. The attempt was made to take the negro, fresh from slavery and with no cultural background, through the course generally pursued by whites. Numerous "universities" and "colleges" were founded with this end in view. Hampton Institute with its insistence upon fitting education to the needs of the race was unique for a time, ...
— The New South - A Chronicle Of Social And Industrial Evolution • Holland Thompson
... constitute what may be called the background of our life. My first ideas of men and women, and of the world at large, that is of the unknown world, were formed within the narrow walls of Dessau, for Dessau was still surrounded by walls, and the gates of the city ...
— My Autobiography - A Fragment • F. Max Mueller
... irradiated, and that the marriage of the hero is as subordinate to the main bent of the story as Henry the Fifth's courtship of Katherine is to the battle of Agincourt. Nay, the fortunes of the person who is nominally the subject of the tale are often little more than a background on which grander figures are to be drawn, and deeper fates forthshadowed. The judgments between the faith and chivalry of Scotland at Drumclog and Bothwell Bridge owe little of their interest in the mind of a sensible reader to the fact that the captain of the Popinjay ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... general in reply; and a volunteer company, doing duty as a guard, pricked ruthlessly with their bayonets at any particularly quiet person among the throng. So Ernest, being of an unobtrusive character, was thrust quite into the background, where he could see no more of Old Blood-and-Thunder's physiognomy than if it had been still blazing on the battle-field. To console himself, he turned toward the Great Stone Face, which, like a faithful and long-remembered friend, looked back and smiled upon him through the vista of the forest. ...
— Junior Classics, V6 • Various
... very white, her red mouth was very red. She was extravagantly slender— the merest thread of a girl, though not without little curves beneath her thin frock where little curves should be. She was looking out across the bay, and was sharply defined against the background of empty blue. She was full in the sun. Her feet dangled among the leaves and flowers of the lilies just as if it did not matter that they should be bent ...
— The Enchanted April • Elizabeth von Arnim
... for two Birmingham operatives fresh from the Black Country. The fairy city, with its crescent background of Alps; the port crowded with strange shipping; the marvellous blue sky and bluer sea; the painted houses on the quays; the quaint cathedral, faced with black and white marble; the street of jewellers, like an Arabian Nights' bazaar; the street of palaces, ...
— Mugby Junction • Charles Dickens
... be remembered that in every direction arose bergs of equal beauty; while in the background were lofty hills covered with snow, tinted of a pinkish hue, and above them, of dazzling whiteness, ranges of eternal glaciers, towering to the sky. I could scarcely have believed that a scene of such enchanting beauty could have existed in the arctic regions, and was inclined ...
— Peter the Whaler • W.H.G. Kingston
... details. Presently he lifted his arm and pointed. The son followed the direction of that long, strong, useful-looking forefinger, until his gaze rested upon a sign: "No Smoking"—big, black letters on a white background. ...
— The Second Generation • David Graham Phillips
... was very still, and the far-off, muffled rumble of omnibuses and cabs gave a background of dignity to this interior peace and luxurious quiet. For long she sat unmoving—nearly two hours—alone with her inmost thoughts. Then she went to the little piano in the corner where stood the statue of Andromeda, and began to play softly. ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... with Burne-Jones. This was the use of long stiff lily-stalks or other upright details in his compositions. Examples of this idea, which produced so weird an effect, will be found in his allegory of "Spring," where stiff tree-trunks form a part of the background. In the "Madonna of the Palms" upright lily-stalks are held in pale and trembling hands. Like Michael Angelo, who came years afterward, Botticelli was a guest of the great Lorenzo the "Magnificent," in Florence. It was by Botticelli's hand that the greater painter sent a letter to ...
— Pictures Every Child Should Know • Dolores Bacon
... completed, on the Sunday following his Majesty's return the Griselda of M. Paer was presented in this magnificent hall. Their Majesties' boxes were situated in front of the curtain, opposite each other, and presented a charming picture, with their hangings of crimson silk draped above, and forming a background to broad, movable mirrors, which reflected at will the audience or the play. The Emperor, still impressed with the recollections of the theaters of Italy, criticised unsparingly that of the Tuileries, saying that it was inconvenient, badly planned, ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... three-headed, or two-headed, Greek Kerberos. Is it not likely that the chthonic hell visions of the Greeks were also preceded by heavenly visions, and that Kerberos originally sprang from heaven? Consider, too, the breadth and the persistence of these ideas, their simple background, and their natural transition from one feature to another in the myth of Cerberus; that is, the notions of sun and moon (day and night) in their relation to the precarious life of man upon the earth, his death, and his future life. ...
— Cerberus, The Dog of Hades - The History of an Idea • Maurice Bloomfield
... easy for you to talk that way, my dear boy; but finally there must be something in the background in order to assume responsibility for another's debts. I must tell you frankly that if you can't meet this payment of three thousand marks of last month, there will be the devil to pay for me, since I went ...
— A Little Garrison - A Realistic Novel of German Army Life of To-day • Fritz von der Kyrburg
... his virtues, weren't much a man for a joke, and at another time this speech would have earned a rebuke from him in the name of law and order. But afore Cicely, and in sound of her voice, he felt amazed to find law and order sink into the background for a minute, though for a ...
— The Torch and Other Tales • Eden Phillpotts
... and forth between the houses, but Nan found him silent and, she decided, cross. Every day he went up to the hut to see whether the fire had been lighted, and every day found the place in its chilly order. It seemed to him as if the whole tragic background against which Tira had been moving had been wiped away by some wide sweeping sponge of oblivion, as if he had dreamed the story or at least its importance in his own life, as if Nan had always been living alone ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... life there. There had been only one little blot to mar her perfect enjoyment of freshman year, and that was Eleanor's unexplainable defection. And now Eleanor had come back, fascinating as ever, but wonderfully softened and sweetened. The old hauteur had not left her face, but it was in the background, veiled, as it were, by a determination to be different,—to meet life in a more friendly spirit, and to make the most of it and of herself. Betty could have hugged her for her cordial greetings to Katherine ...
— Betty Wales, Sophomore • Margaret Warde
... boat, shining like a jewel against the dark background of the trader's dun mantle, stood a most splendidly arrayed young warrior. The fading sunbeams that played on his gilded helm revealed shining armor and a golden cross embossed upon a gold-rimmed shield. Still nearer, and it could be seen that his cloak was of crimson ...
— The Thrall of Leif the Lucky • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz
... banana, thinking lazily that he wished he owned this car. For the first time in many a day his mind was not filled and boiling over with his trouble. Marie and all the bitterness she had come to mean to him receded into the misty background of his mind and hovered there, an indistinct memory of something painful in ...
— Cabin Fever • B. M. Bower
... instincts for which a democracy has neglected to provide. Wentworth, with its "tone," its backward references, its inflexible aversions and condemnations, its hard moral outline preserved intact against a whirling background of experiment, had been all the poetry and history of Margaret Ransom's life. Yes, what she had really esteemed in her husband was the fact of his being so intense an embodiment of Wentworth; so long and closely identified, for ...
— The Hermit and the Wild Woman and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... dream of suspicions on his part had come to her, but it was enough that something had happened to intensify his dislike of Hubert. Of her many fears, here was one which couched dark and shapeless in the background. ...
— Demos • George Gissing
... French thrift makes existence on this sum quite possible; but when it becomes a question of children to be fed and clothed, more than mere existence is impossible, and starvation stands always in the background. For the younger workers the great establishments, offer many advantages over the old system, and hours have been shortened and attempts made in a few cases to improve general conditions of those employed. But there ...
— Prisoners of Poverty Abroad • Helen Campbell
... age. The atmosphere of the place, with its disorderly surroundings and ill kept buildings, indicated that Hades Ranch was bachelor quarters exclusively. Half a dozen Mexicans and one or two Chinamen were in the background, curious onlookers. ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces and Uncle John • Edith Van Dyne
... smoking his corn-cob pipe; the slick and carpetless oak floor faintly mirroring the flame tongues, and freckled with black indentations where fire-coals had popped out and died a leisurely death; half a dozen children romping in the background twilight; splint-bottom chairs here and there—some with rockers; a cradle —out of ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... had ceased to trouble him with the irritating uncertainty of their first meetings. She apparently accepted him and his mutilated face as part of Doris Hollister's background and gave him no more thought or attention. Always in the little gatherings at his house Hollister contrived to keep in the shadow, to be an onlooker rather than a participant,—just as Charlie Mills did. Hollister was still sensitive about his face. ...
— The Hidden Places • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... Sebastopol. But I have no desire to interrupt yours, knowing how serious it is. Mr. Rogers brought off the news—this disquieting, not to say dumbfounding, news—to the yacht just now; and I hardly need to tell you that it puts my own errand into the background. Sir,"—he turned to the Commandant again—"I allowed Mr. Rogers to bring me here only on his surmise that your business would be over. If you will give me, having announced myself, your ...
— Major Vigoureux • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... said, "I think that you understand how it is that the burden, after all, is easier for me. A man may forget his troubles here, for all the while there is this eternal background ...
— A Lost Leader • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... was long now in speaking, Caius did not know it. Upon his brain crowded thoughts and imaginations: wild plans for saving the woman he loved; wild, unholy desires of revenge; and a wild vision of misery in the background as yet—a foreboding that the end might be submission to the worst ...
— The Mermaid - A Love Tale • Lily Dougall
... that the old lady was guided back to consciousness and comfort by the steady head and generous hand in the background; while the fledgeling physician reaped ...
— Some Personal Recollections of Dr. Janeway • James Bayard Clark
... to the great variety of scenes depicted. It must be remembered, however, that these are used for the most part to illustrate some action that is going forward, for which a library would be a singularly inappropriate background. Single figures, on the other hand, are frequently shewn with their books about them, either reading or writing. Such illustrations most frequently occur in Books of Hours, in representations of the Evangelists; or ...
— The Care of Books • John Willis Clark
... of Germany is completed and with it Kaiser and Reich." Up to this time he had taken no open steps towards the proclamation of the Empire; but it was unanimously demanded by almost the whole nation and especially by the South Germans. But here he kept himself in the background; he refused to make it appear as though he were to make the Emperor or found the Empire. He allowed the natural wish of the people to work itself out spontaneously. There was indeed some reluctance to assume the title at the Prussian Court; the King himself was not anxious for a new ...
— Bismarck and the Foundation of the German Empire • James Wycliffe Headlam
... fruit gardens had the golden-brown in their faces, and their plain features were transfigured. They were walking in the dusty road; there was as background a high, dusty hawthorn hedge which had lost the freshness of spring and was browned by the work of caterpillars; they were in rags and jags, their shoes had split, and their feet looked twice as wide in consequence. ...
— The Open Air • Richard Jefferies
... remember the effect of her splendor against the snow sifting down in a steady stream behind her. The pink velvet—the soft green of the curtains on either side—her brilliants—and the snow for a background! Yes, the murderer came in that way. Her figure would be plain to any one outside, and if she moved and the diamond shone—Don't you see what a probable theory it is? There must be ways by which a desperate man might reach that balcony. ...
— The Woman in the Alcove • Anna Katharine Green
... credited with being the first to write in the Wild-West genre. This book, with its background of the sea, is out of his usual line, but it is nevertheless a quite brilliant book. You will enjoy the part of the story that takes place on the sea-front of San Francisco ...
— The Flag of Distress - A Story of the South Sea • Mayne Reid
... martial music flying on invisible wings, in thousand forms, throughout every corridor. As this second summons for the masterpiece to be set in motion died away in turn, two bands of men detached themselves from the distant throng massed in the farthest background, and came slowly forward with bowed heads and deferential tread. At the same instant a hundred brilliant officers of the household stepped out of the corridors behind the King with drawn swords, and other hundreds crowded behind them prepared to ...
— The Arena - Volume 18, No. 92, July, 1897 • Various
... horizontal bands of white (top), blue, and red superimposed with the Slovak cross in a shield centered on the hoist side; the cross is white centered on a background of red and blue ...
— The 1995 CIA World Factbook • United States Central Intelligence Agency
... which she had of the woman as she went by; for the outlines of the figure and dress of the woman and of the basket and child were very simple. Mrs. Holiday afterwards put in some of the scenery for a background. ...
— Rollo in Geneva • Jacob Abbott
... Brown's personal aides, stayed after school at noon to decorate the room for the entertainment to be given at a quarter of two. Her desk was backed against the wall, and the cornstalks used by the drawing class as models for their efforts, were grouped against it to form a background for the impassioned actors. A supply of pumpkins, gourds, and other autumnal fruits of the earth, borrowed by the teacher from the grocer with whom her mother traded, gave still greater festivity to ...
— A Son of the City - A Story of Boy Life • Herman Gastrell Seely
... covered with trailing vines and blooming flowers. The air is rich with song of birds, sweet with perfume, and the blossoms gaily shower their petals on the passer-by. Overhead, white, billowy clouds float lazily over their background of ethereal blue. Cool June breezes fan the cheek. Distant knolls are dotted with flocks of sheep whose bells tinkle dreamily; and drowsy hum of beetle makes the bass, while lark song forms the air of the sweet symphony that Nature plays. Such was ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... the consequences announced by M. Prohibant: the only thing was, it produced others which he had not foreseen. To do him justice, his reasoning was not false, but only incomplete. In endeavouring to obtain a privilege, he had taken cognizance of the effects which are seen, leaving in the background those which are not seen. He had pointed out only two personages, whereas there are three concerned in the affair. It is for us to supply this involuntary or ...
— Essays on Political Economy • Frederic Bastiat
... to Annapolis he had tried to keep his temper in the background. But now, quivering in his righteous wrath, Darrin was once more the hot-headed, impulsive, generous Dave of old—a doer of deeds, and a ...
— Dave Darrin's First Year at Annapolis • H. Irving Hancock
... Against the blue background of the sky, it could be perceived that these men carried coils of rope, pieces of wood, and other implements that might be ...
— The Cliff Climbers - A Sequel to "The Plant Hunters" • Captain Mayne Reid
... some time, the two leaders agreed that it was too late in the day to retrace their steps across the narrow isthmus by which they had arrived and seek some other route; the camp was therefore pitched on the south-westerly slope of the peninsula, quite close to a little strip of sandy beach, with a background consisting of a hummock some fifteen feet high crowned by an extensive clump of strange-looking shrubs, the nature of which Earle ...
— In Search of El Dorado • Harry Collingwood
... their way up the steep road through the hills until, passing through Bethany, they came out on the crest of the hill looking down upon the Valley of Jehoshaphat; with the Temple rising immediately opposite to them, and the palace of Agrippa, and the crowded houses of the city, in the background. ...
— For the Temple - A Tale of the Fall of Jerusalem • G. A. Henty
... he saw the Beresina itself. The mimic Russia was so startlingly real, that several of his old comrades recognized the scene of their past sufferings. M. de Sucy kept the secret of the drama to be enacted with this tragical background, but it was looked upon as a mad freak in several circles of ...
— Farewell • Honore de Balzac
... and I received them the moment they stepped out of the boats, and then Ludwig Wolfen, who was disposed in the background with an accordion, and seated on a gin case, played 'The Star Spangled Banner,' to the accompaniment of several native drums, beaten by his wife and her sister and brothers. Then my boatman—a stalwart Maori half-caste—advanced from out the thronging crowd ...
— Ridan The Devil And Other Stories - 1899 • Louis Becke
... things but, standing aft by the useless wheel and looking forward, every detail of the ship's hull, spars, sails, and rigging stood out clearly and sharply, like a silhouette cut out of black paper, against a background of shining oil- smooth water and dense masses of twisting and writhing cloud-shapes all reflecting the weird, mysterious ruddy light. It was an awe-inspiring phenomenon, strongly suggestive of the supernatural, and from the uneasy glances that were directed aft from the forecastle ...
— The Strange Adventures of Eric Blackburn • Harry Collingwood
... in the mind of the average citizen with the idea of Pyramids and flesh pots. For the first, symbolic pictures were largely to blame. There never was a design representing "Britain's far flung battle line," which did not show a comfortable man in a sun helmet with a Pyramid in the background. Pyramids are so easy to draw. The artists were beaten by the flesh pot—because they had no very clear conception of what a flesh pot looks like. But the old Biblical phrase rose irresistibly to the mind ...
— The Fifth Battalion Highland Light Infantry in the War 1914-1918 • F.L. Morrison
... motive for his death, it was as romantic as his heart desired. He adored "La Belle Lucerce," the fascinating Snake Charmer, and somewhere in the background the artiste had a husband. Little the audience suspected the passion that devoured their grotesque comedian while he cut his capers and turned love to ridicule; little they divined the pathos of a situation ...
— A Chair on The Boulevard • Leonard Merrick
... water; and its lofty walls, whitewashed and picketed, with the large bastions at the angles, gave it quite an imposing appearance in the uncertain light of evening. A cluster of lodges, which the language told us belonged to Sioux Indians, was pitched under the walls; and, with the fine background of the Black hills and the prominent peak of Laramie mountain, strongly drawn in the clear light of the western sky, where the sun had already set, the whole formed at the moment a strikingly beautiful picture. From the company at St. Louis I had letters for Mr. Boudeau, the gentleman ...
— The Exploring Expedition to the Rocky Mountains, Oregon and California • Brevet Col. J.C. Fremont
... possible to make appeal to the principles of sociability, fraternity, and solidarity, when society itself rejects every solidary and fraternal transaction? At the beginning of each industry, at the first gleam of a discovery, the man who invents is isolated; society abandons him and remains in the background. To put it better, this man, relatively to the idea which he has conceived and the realization of which he pursues, becomes in himself alone entire society. He has no longer any associates, no longer any collaborators, no longer any ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... protecting its nectar from rain and marauding butterflies that are not adapted to its needs. But he is a powerful fellow. Watch him alight on a cluster of blossoms, select the younger, nectar-bearing ones, that are distinctly marked white against a light-blue background at the mouth of the corolla for his special guidance. Old flowers from which the nectar has been removed turn deep reddish purple, and the white pathfinders become indistinct. With some difficulty, it is true, the bumblebee (B. Americanorum) thrusts his tongue through the valve ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... on at this little pantomime with great satisfaction for some time, when, to our unspeakable astonishment, we perceived that the whole of the characters, including a numerous corps de ballet of boots and shoes in the background, into which we had been hastily thrusting as many feet as we could press into the service, were arranging themselves in order for dancing; and some music striking up at the moment, to it they went ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... is next drawn to a charming view on the north shore—a delicious little inlet, beautifully wooded, and surrounded by a background of hills, rising gradually to their highest height behind the centre of the little bay. There, right in amongst the bright green trees, I observe a gem of a house, with a broad terrace in front, ...
— A Boy's Voyage Round the World • The Son of Samuel Smiles
... army—infantry, cavalry, artillery—was drawn up in the immense piazza, each regiment carrying two flags—the banner of the Church, on which were depicted the keys of heaven, and the red, white, and green flag of Italian freedom. The background to this scene was furnished by the cathedral itself, a vast throng of spectators crowded the foreground, and the whole united to produce an effect of pomp and grandeur that ...
— Manasseh - A Romance of Transylvania • Maurus Jokai
... volcanoes to a traveller ignorant of volcanic facts. The villages which lie at the foot of these rocky hills are built of stones taken from the beds of the streams, and are so completely of one colour with the background of rock, that in many instances it is difficult to determine whether a distant mass of grey is a village or not. Ruined castles and towers abound; and these, and still more the walls which surround many of the villages, ...
— Ice-Caves of France and Switzerland • George Forrest Browne
... horizon. The northern edge of this expanse was ragged and broken, so firmly wedged together as to be utterly impassible, and extending about a mile to the southward. Behind it the frozen surface was comparatively smooth for some distance, until terminated in the extreme background by gigantic ranges of ice mountains, the one towering above the other. Captain Cook concluded that this vast field reached the southern pole or was joined to a continent. Mr. J. N. Reynolds, whose great exertions and perseverance have at length succeeded in getting ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... here the organization of Labour and the strike-weapon proved a highly convenient method for getting level with the money-printing press. Labour has been more fortunate than the professional and clerical classes, who, not being organized, have been left badly in the background. There are now many professors at the University of Vienna earning less than one-third of the wages of skilled artisans. There are teachers, clerks, doctors, journalists, and the like, in a most pitiable plight because ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... of the West Branch Valley was basically agrarian—a farmers' frontier. The "new order of Americanism"[1] which arose on this frontier was in part due to the cultural background of its inhabitants, the knowledge and traditional values which they had brought with them. It was further influenced by the frontier status of the region itself—an area of virgin land in the earliest stages of development. And finally, it was affected by the physical characteristics ...
— The Fair Play Settlers of the West Branch Valley, 1769-1784 - A Study of Frontier Ethnography • George D. Wolf
... surprise that was also meant as a call to wake her sleeping sisters. She stepped out on to a wooden balcony, and found herself poised high above the flooded river that was roaring down its channel, while in front of her was the most vivid and brilliant of pictures, the background formed by a vast semicircle of hills. She had it all to herself on this lovely morning—the fresh air and sunlight; the plunging river below; the terraced gardens on the opposite bank; over that again, the tumbled-about collection of gleaming white houses, and green casements, ...
— The Beautiful Wretch; The Pupil of Aurelius; and The Four Macnicols • William Black
... sculling at once. But once while Dick was sculling and looking for sponges he saw gliding beneath the dingy, a whip-ray, the most beautiful member of the ray family. Shaped like a butterfly, its back is covered with small, light rings on a black background. Its long, slim tail is like the lash of a coach-whip and at its base is a row of little spears with many barbs, which are capable of inflicting exceedingly painful wounds. The roof of the mouth and the tongue of the fish are hard as ivory and shell-fish are ...
— Dick in the Everglades • A. W. Dimock
... him, but still no one raised a revolver against the slender figure that opposed them. Only, after a moment, a cur in the background picked up a stone and flung it. It struck the doorpost, narrowly missing her shoulder. Dot did not flinch, but immediately, with tightened lips, she raised the revolver and fired ...
— The Odds - And Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... opposing mass, and crumble his adversary's host to pieces. With this design he prepared to throw the brunt of the fighting on the strongest half of his army, while he kept the weaker portion of it in the background, knowing certainly that if worsted it would only cause discouragement to his own division and add force to the foe. The cavalry on the side of his opponents were disposed like an ordinary phalanx of heavy infantry, regular in depth and ...
— Hellenica • Xenophon
... though," she decided. And having so determined, she gave her conscience a shove to the remotest background, yielding herself to the full ...
— Amarilly of Clothes-line Alley • Belle K. Maniates
... main path of the first terrace, Lanstron followed it past the rear of the house to the old tower. Long ago the moat that surrounded the castle had been filled in. The green of rows of grape-vines lay against the background of a mat of ivy on the ancient stone walls, which had been cut away from the loopholes set with window-glass. The door was open, showing a room that had been closed in by a ceiling of boards from the walls to the circular stairway that ran aloft from the dungeons. On ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... now. He was picturing himself walking long the shore, with the stormy ocean in the background. Ahead of him I saw the white body lying face downward in the pool. I saw him run up to the pool and lift the slim, pale figure in ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, March 1930 • Various
... grey officers bursting in with revolvers, and finding her there before them, in the big vaulted vestibule, "alone with my old men and my Sisters." Soeur Gabrielle Rosnet is a small round active woman, with a shrewd and ruddy face of the type that looks out calmly from the dark background of certain Flemish pictures. Her blue eyes are full of warmth and humour, and she puts as much gaiety as wrath into her tale. She does not spare epithets in talking of "ces satanes Allemands"—these Sisters and nurses of the front have seen sights to dry up ...
— Fighting France - From Dunkerque to Belport • Edith Wharton
... petted guest of our court, at the great soiree of the queen. Oh, my friend, my stupid German heart trembled with anger when I saw the kind and flattering attentions that were paid to this Frenchman, while German gentlemen of genius, merit, and ability were kept in the background, neither the king nor the queen seeming to take any notice of their presence! There were Count Hardenberg. and the noble President of Westphalia, Baron Stein; they stood neglected in a bay window, and looked sadly at the royal couple, who ...
— LOUISA OF PRUSSIA AND HER TIMES • Louise Muhlbach
... reply; and a volunteer company, doing duty as a guard, pricked ruthlessly with their bayonets at any particularly quiet person among the throng. So Ernest, being of an unobtrusive character, was thrust quite into the background, where he could see no more of Old Blood-and-Thunder's physiognomy than if it had been still blazing on the battle-field. To console himself, he turned toward the Great Stone Face, which, like a faithful and long-remembered friend, looked back and smiled upon him through ...
— Bible Stories and Religious Classics • Philip P. Wells
... the pieces move find a parallel in the topography of the theatre of war, in that the various battle-fields are more or less easy of access. But it is quite unjustifiable to assign to the Knights the functions of scouts, and to say that Rooks should stay in the background, as heavy artillery, and so on. Such pronouncements would not have the slightest practical value. What we take from the science of warfare is merely the definition. In each game the strategy of chess ...
— Chess Strategy • Edward Lasker
... silent, in the shadowy chamber, listening, each absorbed in his own thoughts. The thunderous drumming was continuous; sometimes it faded into a background for clattering storms as of thousands of machine guns, thousands of riveters at work at once upon a thousand metal frameworks; sometimes it was nearly submerged beneath splitting crashes as of meeting meteors of ...
— The Metal Monster • A. Merritt
... not going to destruction, Lady Augusta to the contrary, and the family luck must assert itself some time, since it has kept itself so long in the background. And in the mean time—well," with a little parting wave of her hand, "Vagabondia ...
— Vagabondia - 1884 • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... had not one evil thought about, nor intent towards her, and who, having pushed the mandates of his religion into the background for this one night, was living in the intoxication ...
— Leonie of the Jungle • Joan Conquest
... through his mind—a shape, perhaps, and a color. He felt no curiosity, and let the impression drift. As a sunbather drowsing on a crowded beach, hearing the background hum of the crowd and now and then a more clearly spoken phrase, so he caught the edge of this communication. It was not for him. A second mind entered ... was it a mind? Yes, and yet very different. It was ...
— The Short Life • Francis Donovan
... moment, Custard, who considered that he had been kept in the background quite long enough, came upstairs on his own account. As Sarah said, he seemed "ter sense the situation," for he trotted about making friends, lapping the tears from Tommy's face, and standing up on his hind legs to let Totty ...
— Patricia • Emilia Elliott
... am not inaccessible. I may now and then get an opportunity to talk again, and in a new background. Who knows? I am counting on nothing but the facts about me. So come on, Future. I've my back against the past. Anyway, as you see, it is too late to argue. I've crossed the Rubicon, and can return only when I have built a ...
— A Hilltop on the Marne • Mildred Aldrich
... to a pause in their walk, Gervase stopping to light a fresh cigarette. The rays of the rising moon fell upon him as he stood, a tall and stately figure, against a background of palms, and shone on his dark features with a touch of grayish- green luminance that gave him for the moment an almost spectral appearance. Dr. Dean glanced ...
— Ziska - The Problem of a Wicked Soul • Marie Corelli
... in arriving, but at last it came. All morning the boys kept close under cover of the training-house. Some one sent them a package of placards. These were round, in the shape of baseballs. They were in the college colors, the background of which was a bright red, and across this had been printed in white the words: ...
— The Young Pitcher • Zane Grey
... the later sepulchral stele appears in monuments which show just such urns projected in relief upon a plane surface. The relief is sometimes bounded by the outlines of the urn itself,[61] sometimes a surrounding background is indicated. In many cases this background assumes the form of the ordinary sepulchral stele. The Central Museum at Athens is especially rich in examples of this kind. On two steles which I have noticed there, three urns are ...
— The American Journal of Archaeology, 1893-1 • Various
... General received me in a dainty Louis Quinze room done in rose and French gray, and filled incongruously with delicate chairs and heavy brocaded curtains, a background which instantly you felt precisely suited his Excellency. In the English newspapers, which, by the way, are not barred from Berlin cafes, I had read of his Excellency as the "Iron Fist," or the "Heavy Heel," and I rather expected to see a heavy, domineering ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... whole character of a life seems to undergo solemn transformation. The hard will becomes gentle, the proud meek, the frivolous earnest. That awful moment when the things of earth pass away like dissolving scenes, leaving death visible on the background by the glare that shoots up in the ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... from Manila were the people of the United States, and it was as if everything else was relegated to the background until information could be had regarding that American fleet which sailed from Mirs Bay, in the China Sea, on the afternoon of ...
— The Boys of '98 • James Otis
... of Queen Anne, and when we read it we feel as if the days of Addison and Steele lived again. But with Thackeray the historical novel is very different from the historical novel of Scott. With Thackeray his imaginary people hold the chief place, the real people only form a background, while in many of Scott's novels the real ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... my brother?" asked Maccabeus, pointing to a pillar on the way to Shen, which was clearly visible against the background of the deep blue sky. "Yonder is Ebenezer, the stone of help, which Samuel set up in remembrance of victory over the Philistines, when God thundered from heaven, and discomfited the ...
— Hebrew Heroes - A Tale Founded on Jewish History • AKA A.L.O.E. A.L.O.E., Charlotte Maria Tucker
... souls never had any priority in the life of them; No background of eternity Over which they had traversed From eon to eon, Sun-system to sun-system, Planets and stars under them, Planets and stars over them; Now dwelling on immeasurable plains of azure Bigger than space, Dazzling with the super-tropical brightness Of ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 5, May, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... that judge us also unite us, because Americans of every party and background, Americans by choice and by birth, are bound to one another in the cause of freedom. We have known divisions, which must be healed to move forward in great purposes—and I will strive in good faith to heal them. Yet those divisions do not define America. We felt the unity ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various
... return to England from this tour of conquest she found a reception almost equally regal awaiting her. She was reinstated as chief favourite of the King, all his other mistresses—even the Queen herself being relegated to the background; and high statesmen and Ambassadors did their homage to her before they sought audience with Charles himself. She was, in fact, as Louis's deputy, Vice-Queen of England—plus roi que ...
— Love Romances of the Aristocracy • Thornton Hall
... that the art of the old Roman pantomimi was then revived, to add to the attractions of court-dances. Under the Roman empire the pantomimi had represented either a mythological story, or perhaps a scene from a Greek tragedy, by mute gestures, while a chorus, placed in the background, sang cantica to narrate the fable, or to describe the action of the scene. The question is whether mute pantomimic action, which is the essence of modern ballet, was carried through those court entertainments, in which kings, queens, princes and princesses, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... foot-ball all my life, nor would the heavy bass voice, so effective in the glee club, support a family, and deep in my heart I admitted the possibilities of a family. I might strive to keep that thought in the background, but it would rise when I dreamed of a home. That home was not a plain stone farm-house, hidden among giant trees. My view had broadened. I dreamed of a Queen Anne cottage, with many gables, and ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... the best rooms in the house, and all goes as merrily as it can, while the horrors which they have left behind them hang, like a black background, to all their thoughts. However, both Scoutbush and Campbell send as cheerful reports as they honestly can; and gradually the exceeding beauty of the scenery, and the amusing bustle of the village, make them forget, perhaps, a good deal which they ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley
... the reason why the sacrifice combined with a meal, formerly by far the chief, now falls completely into the background. One could eat flesh at home, but in Jerusalem one's business was to do worship. Accordingly, those sacrifices were preferred in which the religious character came to the front with the utmost possible purity and without any admixture ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen
... is the other possibility, all too often realized, that lies in the background of every such married woman's consciousness. She may be an ideally domestic woman, spending her time and strength on her home and for the Welfare of her husband and children, yet through no fault of hers, her home may be lost to her, or if not lost, at least kept together only ...
— The Trade Union Woman • Alice Henry
... Center operator said. There were a few clicks in the background. "Here's your party," she continued. ...
— The Lani People • J. F. Bone
... from the overcast sky flutter as they drop, now one side higher and then the other, as the leaves did in the still hours of autumn. The delicacy of the outer boughs of the great trees visible against the dark background of cloud is as beautiful in its own way as the massed foliage of summer. Each slender bough is drawn out to a line; line follows line as shade grows under the pencil, but each of these lines is separate. Great boles of beech, heavy timber at the foot, ...
— The Life of the Fields • Richard Jefferies
... unity of worship MUST have arisen as soon as Solomon's temple was built. Over against the splendid sanctuary with its imageless worship at the centre of the kingdom of Judah, the older holy places MUST ever have shrunk farther into the background, and that not merely in the eyes of the people, but quite specially also in those of the better classes and of those whose spiritual advancement was greatest (compare Amos iv. 4,viii.14). If even Hezekiah carried out the unification in Judah with tolerable ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen
... twenty-five views of the bird in motion could be taken. This brings us to the time of the early eighties. Marey remained indefatigable in improving the means for quick successive snapshots with the same camera. Human beings were photographed by him in white clothes on a black background. When ten pictures were taken in a second the subtlest motions in their jumping or running could be disentangled. The leading aim was still decidedly a scientific understanding of the motions, and the combination of the pictures into a unified ...
— The Photoplay - A Psychological Study • Hugo Muensterberg
... long windows, very unlike the twelfth- century pendants to the western rose. These five windows blaze with red, and their splendour throws the Virgin above quite into the background. The artists, who felt that the twelfth-century glass was too fine and too delicate for the new scale of the church, have not only enlarged their scale and coarsened their design, but have coarsened their colour-scheme also, discarding ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... of love, and needlessly religious zeal served the future Kindergartner a dark background on which to paint a joyous picture. Froebel was educated by antithesis. His home was the type etched so unforgetably by Colonel Ed. Howe in his "Story of a Country Town," which isn't bad enough to be one ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard
... of Unionists has always been to fight their opponents on the clear unmistakable issue of Home Rule. The policy of Separatists has been to keep Home Rule in the background whilst making its meaning indefinite, and to mix up all the multifarious issues raised by the Newcastle programme, as well as many others, with the one essential question whether we should or should not repeal or modify ...
— A Leap in the Dark - A Criticism of the Principles of Home Rule as Illustrated by the - Bill of 1893 • A.V. Dicey
... realized anew his physical and mental fatigue, and a certain confused clamour of thought, strangely persistent behind the more external experience alike of body and mind; like the murmur of a distant sea heard from far inland, as the bond and background of all ...
— The Case of Richard Meynell • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... your real skies The actor's short-lived triumph dies: On that broad stage of empire won, Whose footlights were the setting sun, Whose flats a distant background rose In trackless peaks of endless snows; Here genius bows, and talent waits To copy that but ...
— Complete Poetical Works of Bret Harte • Bret Harte
... that probably it was an "8." She hesitated, came down the steps, and walked on. It was impossible to see the names of the streets and squares. But presently she would come across a policeman. She went on and on, but no policeman bulked shadowy against the background of night and of the fog which at last ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... everywhere, and her azaleas and great lilies seemed to have a secret of perpetual flowering; a bright fire cast rosy lights and shadows over it all; and John would declare, as he sank into his easy-chair in the half twilight and surveyed the warm place, which seemed only a ruddy background for Lilian's fairness, that he never wanted anything better than this as long as he lived. It hurt him sometimes, though, to remember that Lilian never made any response to such words. "Well, well," he would say to himself in a way he had, "why should ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 87, March, 1875 • Various
... conceived it, without money and without price, and more especially without hope, is rare. Nevertheless there are Mennevals to be found, more perhaps in Paris than elsewhere, men who value a life in the background with its peaceful toil; these are the wandering Benedictines of our social world, which offers them no other monastery. These brave, meek hearts live, by their actions and in their hidden lives, the poetry that poets utter. They are poets themselves in soul, in tenderness, in their lonely vigils ...
— Modeste Mignon • Honore de Balzac
... ail ultimately intercepted by a plane (the retina of the eye, a focussing screen of a camera, &c.), they cause a confusion, named chromatic aberration; for instance, instead of a white margin on a dark background, there is perceived a coloured margin, or narrow spectrum. The absence of this error is termed achromatism, and an optical system so corrected is termed achromatic. A system is said to be "chromatically under-corrected'' when it shows the same kind of chromatic error as a thin positive ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... thoroughly dry atmosphere in these climates being perfectly transparent, there was no aerial perspective in this place of desolation. Every detail, sharp, accurate, bare, stood out, even in the background, with pitiless dryness, and the distance could only be guessed at by the smaller dimensions of objects. It seemed as though cruel nature had resolved not to conceal any wretchedness, any sadness of this bare ...
— The Works of Theophile Gautier, Volume 5 - The Romance of a Mummy and Egypt • Theophile Gautier
... of winter had unfolded the spathes of the vadgiai palm-tree, the leaves of which rise straight toward the sky. The eye is never wearied of the view of those scenes, where the trees and rocks give the landscape that grand and severe character which we admire in the background of the pictures of Salvator Rosa. We landed before sunset on the eastern bank of the Orinoco, at the Puerto de la Expedicion, in order to visit the cavern of Ataruipe, which is the place of sepulchre of a whole nation destroyed. I shall attempt to ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V2 • Alexander von Humboldt
... book, Maud Diver proves that she needs no Indian background against which to work a powerful and emotional drama. This novel is called by the author, "an episode of 1914," and is the story of a vigorous out-of-doors man who, severely wounded, is brought home in the ...
— Banked Fires • E. W. (Ethel Winifred) Savi
... was our last stage. We had halted the night before at a short distance from the Imperial camp. The black and white tents of Theodore, pitched on a high conical hill, stood out in bold relief as the setting sun made the dark background darker still. A faint, distant hum, such as one hears on approaching a large city, came now and then to us, carried by the soft evening breeze, and the smoke that arose for miles around the dark hill crowned by its silent tents, left us no, doubt that we should before ...
— A Narrative of Captivity in Abyssinia - With Some Account of the Late Emperor Theodore, - His Country and People • Henry Blanc
... him, and little Eileen, very intent and serious, held Toby's hand and looked on from the background. Captain Larpent was on the bridge, looking very forbidding, even contemptuous. He had never had any liking for the gay crowds with which it was Saltash's pleasure to surround himself. He had the air of a magnificent Viking, above the frivolities with which ...
— Charles Rex • Ethel M. Dell
... long time Myra had ceased to trouble him with the irritating uncertainty of their first meetings. She apparently accepted him and his mutilated face as part of Doris Hollister's background and gave him no more thought or attention. Always in the little gatherings at his house Hollister contrived to keep in the shadow, to be an onlooker rather than a participant,—just as Charlie Mills did. Hollister was still sensitive about his face. He was doubly sensitive ...
— The Hidden Places • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... livery, with a cockade in his hat, who had been standing reverently in the background, waddled forward, ...
— Four Days - The Story of a War Marriage • Hetty Hemenway
... the second cast set him for the campaign, and he worked down-stream, crouching behind the reed and meadowsweet; creeping between a hornbeam hedge and a foot-wide strip of bank, where he could see the trout, but where they could not distinguish him from the background; lying almost on his stomach to switch the blue-upright sidewise through the checkered shadows of a gravelly ripple under overarching trees. But he had known every inch of the water since he was four feet high. The aged and astute between sunk ...
— The Day's Work, Volume 1 • Rudyard Kipling
... had raised his eyes from the ground, and they fixed themselves on the wonderful features of the greatest man of the age, while his voice forgot to chant and his lips remained parted in wonder. Upon the bright green grass against the background of hewn stone walls, in the glorious autumn sunshine, Bernard of Clairvaux moved like the supernal vision of a heavenly dream. His head thrown back, the delicate silver-fair beard scarcely shadowing the spiritual outlines of an almost ...
— Via Crucis • F. Marion Crawford
... all in shimmering white with a background of small pine trees in large wooden pots. The floor was covered with white muslin and scattered with leaves, pine ...
— The White Christmas and other Merry Christmas Plays • Walter Ben Hare
... of conscious hatred of this vast panoramic beauty which had become the background of his tragedy, Ford pulled the curtain into place again and turned once more to the interior of the room. It began to seem more strange to him the more it grew familiar. Why was he here? How long was he to stay? How was ...
— The Wild Olive • Basil King
... impressionable minds was great indeed. The spirit of her art exactly harmonised with the new thoughts that were shaking the world of her contemporaries. Other artists had drawn their pictures with a strong ethical background, but she gave a finer colour and a more spacious air to her ethics by showing the individual passions and emotions of her characters, their adventures and their fortunes, as evolving themselves from long series of antecedent causes, and bound up with many widely operating forces ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol 3 of 3) - The Life of George Eliot • John Morley
... half-dream. The gray days followed each other without change, without adventure. But the brilliant throng of kings and queens, of knights and ladies, of pilgrims and lovers, and all the make- believe people of storyland stood out all the brighter for the grayness of the background. And perhaps to the Prince in his quiet tower the storied people were more real than the living, who only now and again came to visit him. For the storied people were with him always, while the living came and went again and were lost ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... scars of building had not all healed yet, but close to the house waved green grass and blooming flowers that might have been there always. Neither did the house itself look new. The soft, gray stucco had taken on a tone that melted into the sky and foliage of its background. At the entrance his domestic staff waited to greet him, and then he stepped across the threshold into the wide hall and stood in his own home for the first time in seventeen years. It was an anxious moment, and no one spoke immediately. But presently his ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... apostles present him as a mere man. They present his humanity as the background for his deity. His humanity in its most literal revelation is always declared by them to be the revelation and the manifestation of God. Never do the apostles attempt to reason about the incarnation, with ...
— Christ, Christianity and the Bible • I. M. Haldeman
... his stand and his attitude; and then the pretty business of the parade. All under that July sky; all under that flicker of cloud and sun, and the soft sweet breath of air that sometimes stole to us to relieve the hot stillness; and all with that setting and background of cedars and young foliage and bordering hills over which the cloud shadows swept. Then came the mounting-guard business. By and by Preston came ...
— Daisy • Elizabeth Wetherell
... All those circumstances had, of course, been talked over between Harry and Linda, and it was understood that Harry was now to resign his situation at the Weights and Measures. But Alaric's condition, Gertrude's misery, and Katie's illness, threw all such matters into the background. Katie became no better; but then the doctors said that she did not become any worse, and gave it as their opinion that she ought to recover. She had youth, they said, on her side; and then her lungs were not affected. This was the great question which they were all asking of each other continually. ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... cold season thousands of foreigners, especially the English, visit this winter paradise. On the high background are Roman ruins and an old castle enclosed by bastioned walls; leading to two squares, one of which is surrounded with porticoes, are streets embellished with theater, public library, baths, and handsome homes that are frescoed externally. ...
— The Harris-Ingram Experiment • Charles E. Bolton
... with the eye of a devout seer, or even critic, but through a pair of mere anti-Catholic spectacles. It is not a mighty drama, enacted on the theatre of infinitude, with suns for lamps and eternity as a background, whose author is God and whose purport leads to the throne of God, but a poor, wearisome debating-club dispute, spun through ten centuries, between ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... a box below, because my family-box had changed hands, hangings and keys at least five times in ten years, and seated myself in the background to avoid recognition, and leave undisturbed friends who would feel in duty bound to pay fashionable court to a traveller due ten years. I was not familiar with La Favorita, and my ear took in the new music ...
— The Cross of Berny • Emile de Girardin
... the apostles in both the other evangelists and in Acts, shows. Its use here may be a trace of a touching desire to make sure that readers, who only knew him as Matthew, should understand who this publican was. It is like the little likenesses of themselves, in some corner of a background, that early painters used to slip into a picture of Madonna and angels. There was no vanity in the wish, for he says nothing about his sacrifices, leaving it to Luke to tell that 'he left all,' but he does crave that ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... the integrity of the appearance of supremacy, are sustained by the assumption of the forms of empire or the imperialistic attitude. Empire is indeed what is dramatized in the forms which nations assume, and this dramatization of imperial form is the background of all the ideas of honor. The maintenance of the integrity of the imperial form, as an ideal realization of the supremacy a nation assumes, becomes more important than even the securing of material possessions, for the imperial form ...
— The Psychology of Nations - A Contribution to the Philosophy of History • G.E. Partridge
... perfectly needless extreme, of political foreboding that marked the advent of Jackson furnished a background of lurid solemnity for all this light comedy. Samuel Breck records in his diary that he conversed with Daniel Webster in Philadelphia, March 24, 1827, upon the prospects of the government. "Sir," said Mr. ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various
... usually enter into the color scheme as the low note in the scale. It is the background for the furniture, and should be deeper than the dado or wainscoting. The wood trims—baseboard, doors, plate-rails, and everything of that character, except the picture molding—should be like the woodwork of the furniture. This brings the woodwork into ...
— Color Value • C. R. Clifford
... slightest regret; he thought no more about the father, who had loved ten generations in his son, nor of the aunt, and her almost insane devotion. He was looking forward to Paris with vehement ill-starred longings; in thought he had lived in that fairyland, it had been the background of his brightest dreams. He imagined that he would be first in Paris, as he had been in the town and the department where his father's name was potent; but it was vanity, not pride, that filled his soul, and in his dreams his pleasures were to be magnified ...
— The Collection of Antiquities • Honore de Balzac
... confess to a lingering liking for the old ambrotype, the likeness taken on a glazed plate, on which the lights are represented in silver, and the shades are produced by a dark background. I like, too, the respectful privacy of the little inclosing case which you opened to gaze on the face of your friend. Best of all, I like its great durability and fadelessness. The name itself is a passport to favor in a picture, from ambrotos, immortal, and tupos, type, or impression: the ...
— When Life Was Young - At the Old Farm in Maine • C. A. Stephens
... loose in the world, with no guide but her own rashness and no protection but her vanity, made Leonora feel sick. Nevertheless, Millicent would soon be loose in the world, and at the best Leonora could only stand in the background, ...
— Leonora • Arnold Bennett
... before you were a great man, Phineas. It must necessarily be different now. You know so many people now, and people of such a different sort, that of course I fall a little into the background." ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope
... sure that he acted on impulse, not realizing. You can't judge him by ordinary standards. It isn't fair," pleaded Juliet. "There was probably some extenuating circumstance in the background—something we don't know about. I hope you haven't been very severe. You haven't, ...
— The Obstacle Race • Ethel M. Dell
... with books, documents, etc. Behind it stands the chair of the justice. By the middle window, small table and chair for the clerk of the court. In the foreground, right, a book case of soft wood, and on the left wall, shelves for documents and records. A small door in the background. ...
— The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume I • Gerhart Hauptmann
... aspirations of man, made in the image of his God, are always directed toward that wondrous background from which all life projects—the Infinite, we now propose to make a few remarks upon the manifestation of some of the remaining attributes revealed to him, and which he is forever striving to incarnate in ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 2, August, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... forth if they were taken away. We are told of the obscure rays of the spectrum, rays which have their proof and their effect, only not the same proof and effect as the visible ones which they accompany; and the background and latent suppositions of a great argument are as essential to it as its more prominent and elaborate constructions. And they show their importance sometimes in a remarkable and embarrassing way, when, after a long debate, their presence at the bottom of everything, unnoticed and ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... can hardly be understood, Deerfoot stood in the background and watched the antics of the warrior who had wrapped the bear-skin about his shoulders and body. He could not avoid a feeling of admiration for the cleverness with which the front was arranged, so as to resemble that of the beast, but ...
— The Lost Trail - I • Edward S. Ellis
... his feet. In a moment he had thrust his own happiness into the background at sight of the poor child's obvious suffering. He went quickly towards her, and would have spoken to her, but she run past him up to Madame Deroulede, as if she were beside herself with ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... whatever other bearings they may have. The ten pages thus in some way definitely have to do with the lapse of 72,000 days, or not quite 200 solar years, and the extension of the series to a full cycle of 20 katuns is quite likely. The background of this section e is ...
— Commentary Upon the Maya-Tzental Perez Codex - with a Concluding Note Upon the Linguistic Problem of the Maya Glyphs • William E. Gates
... Milwaukee was only one of many people from strange walks of life who entered that lottery. There were others whose background was equally alien to life in a homestead cabin, who came to see the West while it was still unchanged, drawn for reasons of personal adventure, or because the romantic legends of the West attracted them. People drawn by the intangibles, the freedom of ...
— Land of the Burnt Thigh • Edith Eudora Kohl
... and thrown out its gang plank. A hurried embrace; a struggle with rushing tears; another shriek from the boat whistle; and the Americans, with Carmen standing mute and motionless between them, looked back at the fading group on shore, where Rosendo's tall figure stood silhouetted against the green background of the forest. For a moment he held his arm extended toward them. Carmen knew, as she looked at the great-hearted man for the last time, that his benediction was following her—following her into that new world into which ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... Lilamani had too soon discovered that the ardent declaration, "I love India," was apt to mean merely that the speaker loved riding and dancing and sunshine and vast spaces, with 'the real India' for a dim effective background. And by now, she could almost tell at a glance which were the right and which the wrong kind of Anglo-Indian, so far as she and Nevil were concerned. It was not like Helen to inflict the wrong kind on her; but it had all been Mrs Bradley's doing. She had been tactlessly insistent ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... Italian, and after a minute or two the lady withdrew. It occurred to Lord George afterwards that the interview had certainly been arranged. Had his brother not wished him to see the lady, the lady could have been kept in the background here as well as at Manor Cross. "It's uncommon civil of you to come," said the Marquis as soon as the door was closed. "What can I ...
— Is He Popenjoy? • Anthony Trollope
... experience of any tumultuous emotion as this messenger of hope appeared on our horizon, but we knew that we were safe. How easy it is to write this simple word of four letters! but, to realize it, one must have a background of despair. Since that morning, the words "safe," "safety," "salvation," have always come to ...
— Out of the Fog • C. K. Ober
... enough to be still in the memory of persons living. Finding the place of its occurrence was the difficulty. If in the vicinity of Brindisi—well, he would go and ask. The yearning spoken of did not come alone; it had for companion, Conscience, as yet in the background. ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 2 • Lew. Wallace
... opposite his patients' doors like a Cape Ann fishing-smack. By the time he was thirty, he would have knocked the social pawns out of his way, and be ready to challenge a wife from the row of great pieces in the background. I would not have a man marry above his level, so as to become the appendage of a powerful family-connection; but I would not have him marry until he knew his level,—that is, again, looking at the matter in a purely worldly point of view, and not taking the sentiments at all into consideration. ...
— Elsie Venner • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... clerk's eye and held up the camera. The clerk frowned, then motioned him to come inside the rail. Rick did so and snapped a picture of the tribunal. Then he turned and got a photo of Tom Tyler and the men at his table, with the audience in the background. He looked at Jerry. The young reporter nodded, indicating that two pictures ...
— Smugglers' Reef • John Blaine
... noticing—we will say he did no more— the wonderful, the sacredly beautiful, drama which noiselessly displayed itself before him. Over in the east the intense deep blue of the sky softened a little. Then the trees in that quarter began to contrast themselves against the background and reveal their distinguishing shapes. Swiftly, and yet with such even velocity that in no one minute did there seem to be any progress compared with the minute preceding, the darkness was thinned, and resolved itself overhead into pure sapphire, shaded into yellow ...
— The Revolution in Tanner's Lane • Mark Rutherford
... throne are gathered, standing, many native princes, the higher officers of the government and the army, the members of the diplomatic corps and other favored persons, with their wives and daughters, and their costumes furnish a brilliant background to the scene. The rest of the great audience chamber, blazing with electric lights, is entirely empty. The viceroy greets every lady with a graceful bow, and Lady Curzon gives her a smile of welcome. The government band is playing all this ...
— Modern India • William Eleroy Curtis
... Newcastle we knew nothing of the kitchen area and the portico. I was filled with joy when, in passing through the Bloomsbury squares, I recognised, as I thought, the very houses, porticoes, and areas that Leech had made the background for his magnificent flunkeys ...
— Memoirs of Sir Wemyss Reid 1842-1885 • Stuart J. Reid, ed.
... done by them only to catch the public eye, and they disdained the perspective so much, that though they took the greatest pains with the circlet of a crown, or the rim of a crystal cup, in the heart of their picture, they would twist their capitals of columns and towers of churches about in the background in the most wanton way, wherever they liked the lines to go, provided only they left just perspective enough to please ...
— The Elements of Drawing - In Three Letters to Beginners • John Ruskin
... her into the background and thought over the work he had in hand. It was of great importance and dangerous. When war came he might be shot at any time if his doings were discovered. He was accustomed to dangers; many times had he risked his life; bad though he ...
— The Rider in Khaki - A Novel • Nat Gould
... good citizenship. They were created by people who had a background of self-government. New arrivals should be limited to our capacity to absorb them into the ranks of good citizenship. America must be kept American. For this purpose, it is necessary to continue a policy of restricted immigration. ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... down). He has so grown into our lives. I can't think of him as having gone out of them. He, with his sufferings and his loneliness, was like a cloudy background to our sunlit happiness. Well, perhaps it is best so. For him, anyway. (Standing still.) And perhaps for us too, Nora. We two are thrown quite upon each other now. (Puts his arms around her.) My darling wife, I don't ...
— A Doll's House • Henrik Ibsen
... any word that might fall from the general in reply; and a volunteer company, doing duty as a guard, pricked ruthlessly with their bayonets at any particularly quiet person among the throng. So Ernest, being of an unobtrusive character, was thrust quite into the background, where he could see no more of Old Blood-and-Thunder's physiognomy than if it had been still blazing on the battle-field. To console himself, he turned toward the Great Stone Face, which, like a faithful and long-remembered friend, looked back and smiled upon him through the vista of the forest. ...
— Junior Classics, V6 • Various
... Pennsylvania delegation in Congress was well disciplined and could be used with peculiar advantage for purposes of "pressure." Ratcliffe's success in his contest with the new President depended on the amount of "pressure" he could employ. To keep himself in the background, and to fling over the head of the raw Chief Magistrate a web of intertwined influences, any one of which alone would be useless, but which taken together were not to be broken through; to revive the lost art of the Roman retiarius, who from a safe ...
— Democracy An American Novel • Henry Adams
... situated in the depth of the valley behind Salisbury Crags, which has for a background the north-western shoulder of the mountain called Arthur's Seat, on whose descent still remain the ruins of what was once a chapel, or hermitage, dedicated to St. Anthony the Eremite. A better site ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... Island Queen. Amidst all the loveliness on which she looked, the fairest spot was that which was washed by the waters of Killany Bay, where the soft sweet vale of Shanganah, with its silver strand, its green bosom, and noble background, stretched away between Bray Head and Kingstown. They were scenes amidst which one of queenly taste might love to linger, and were well calculated to impress her majesty and family with the beauty of the fair but sorrowful land upon which she was ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... hand, and gazing at it with bent head. Her left hand was spread upon her breast. She wore a calico chemise reaching below her knees, and leggings, and moccasins. A heavy robe was thrown over the top of her head, falling on the sides and back to within a foot of the ground. In the middle background was a stream, with four Indians in a canoe. A tiny stone chapel stood on the bank ...
— The Road to Frontenac • Samuel Merwin
... looked at the young girl. She made a pretty picture as she sat leaning forward, the curves of her slim, light-gowned figure showing against the background of blue. Her face was pensive, and she was evidently ...
— Gordon Keith • Thomas Nelson Page
... brigand leader to remain in the background. Miko was no coward. But Coniston could impersonate Wilks, whereas Miko's giant stature at once would reveal his identity. Miko had been engaged in smashing the portes. He had looked up and seen me kill Coniston. He had ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, May, 1930 • Various
... as truthful and as general as possible. It did not select a dazzling and warlike heroine, as it would have done in the days of old: a Judith, a Lucretia, nor even a Joan of Arc. There was no need of resounding words, of splendid raiment, of tragic attitudes and accessories, of an imposing background. The beauty which we find so touching has grown simpler; it makes less stir and wins closer to our heart. And this is why destiny sought out in obscurity a little hospital nurse, one of many thousands of others. The sight of ...
— The Wrack of the Storm • Maurice Maeterlinck
... beauty! Yes, there is that unchangeable oval cut of face, those features which time will never impair, that graceful and thoughtful brow. The unknown is rich, well-educated, of noble birth: she will always be what she should be, she knows when to shine, when to remain in the background: she appears in all her glory and power, the being you have dreamed of, your wife that should have been, she whom you feel you could love forever. She would always have flattered your little vanities, she would understand and admirably serve your interests. She is tender and gay, ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... with buff cambric, ornamented with gold paper. Oval frames are frequently used, but they are not so easy to arrange and manage as a square frame. Cover the floor of the stage with a dark woollen carpet, drape the ceiling with light blue cambric, the background with black cambric; the sides should be arranged in the same style as the side scenes of a theatrical stage. Stout frames of wood, two feet wide, reaching to the ceiling, and covered with black cambric, should be placed on the extreme edge of ...
— Home Pastimes; or Tableaux Vivants • James H. Head
... early English stage, accounts for the want of prominence and theatrical display in Shakespeare's female characters from the circumstance, that women in those days were not allowed to play the parts of women, which made it necessary to keep them a good deal in the background. Does not this state of manners itself, which prevented their exhibiting themselves in public, and confined them to the relations and charities of domestic life, afford a truer explanation of the matter? His women ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt
... can expect," she said, in her quiet, sad manner. The sadness was not obtrusive, not on the surface; it was only the background ...
— Nobody • Susan Warner
... shadow of authority; theft and murder in the streets and on the highways; farms plundered and deserted; agitation, excitement, and utter insecurity everywhere, and the number of troops insufficient to compel peace and order. All this was not the worst, however. Deep in the background stood the sinister apparition of the Atchison cabal. "I find," wrote he, "that I have not simply to contend against bands of armed ruffians and brigands whose sole aim and end is assassination and robbery—infatuated adherents and advocates of conflicting political sentiments ...
— Abraham Lincoln, A History, Volume 2 • John George Nicolay and John Hay
... her resignation on stormy ones,—all those variations of expression by which character is displayed depend, like the effects in the sky, on unexpected and fugitive circumstances, which have no connection with each other except the background against which they rest, though all are necessarily mingled with the events of this history,—truly a household epic, as great to the eyes of a wise man as a tragedy to the eyes of the crowd, an epic ...
— The Lily of the Valley • Honore de Balzac
... with herself and her white or black horse as the case might be; a rich cloth of gold backdrop carefully suffused with rose. There could be nothing handsomer, for example, than young and graceful trapezists swinging melodically in turquoise blue doublets against a fine peacock background or it might be a rich pale coral—all the artificial and spectacular ornament dispensed with. We are expected to get an exceptional thrill when some dull person appears before a worn velvet curtain to expatiate with inappropriate gesture upon a theme of Chopin or of Beethoven, ideas and attitudes ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley
... these, covered in ivy, and with the old dim-toned bricks above, make a scheme of colour which is simply enchanting. Some wind-torn trees and the sand-dunes, piled in miniature mountains, form a delicious background ...
— My War Experiences in Two Continents • Sarah Macnaughtan
... might, but could they keep him overpowered while they bound him? A half hour of desperate endeavor convinced them that they could not, and so Mbonga, who, like all good rulers, had circled in the safety of the background, called to one to work his way in and spear the victim. Gradually, through the milling, battling men, the warrior approached the ...
— Jungle Tales of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... moaned through the long aisles, raising strange and ominous echoes, and making the vast folds of sable drapery wave slowly backward and forward, as if agitated by unseen hands. A few spectators, standing in the background, appeared like grim figures on a black tapestry; and the gleam of the wax tapers, oscillating on their countenances, made them seem death-like ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds
... blue sky; the paling crescent of the moon, resembling a bent thread of silver wire, seemed about to fade mistily away; and, toward the east, in the splendor of the rising sun, the branches of the trees stood out against a background of burnished gold as in a Byzantine painting. The dewy calm and freshness of the early morning enveloped everything as in a bath of purity ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... leap, she seemed to suck the radiance along. It became a great cone of glowing light that, arrow-like, raced away upward. For a long instant the black length of the ship, and the greenish fan of flame, were outlined against the scarlet background of Jupiter. Then the freighter rocket, flinging herself upward at three gravities or better, passed the edge of the planet ...
— The Indulgence of Negu Mah • Robert Andrew Arthur
... the foxglove, may sometimes be used, in a small group, at the end of a bay on the level of the path; but they are best placed behind the rock work, as a background, or as dominating features of the entrance or exit of the garden. At the entrance or exit such bold plants make a good bridge between the rock garden and the outer grounds. Spreading and trailing plants should be ...
— Making A Rock Garden • Henry Sherman Adams
... ear of Mrs. Scrimp, as she hovered in the background, brought a scowl to her brow. "As if she—an ignorant young thing—could do better for the child than I!" she ...
— Grandmother Elsie • Martha Finley
... headed by the two brothers, moved slowly to the gate. Mr Dorrit, yielding to the vast speculation how the poor creatures were to get on without him, was great, and sad, but not absorbed. He patted children on the head like Sir Roger de Coverley going to church, he spoke to people in the background by their Christian names, he condescended to all present, and seemed for their consolation to walk encircled by the legend in golden characters, 'Be comforted, ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... there came upon Howard a strange feeling, partly of intense admiration, partly a sort of half-jealousy that he should know so little of the girl's past, and a half-terror of all other influences and relations in the unknown background of her life. He wanted to know whom and what she cared about, what her hopes were, what her thoughts rested upon and concerned themselves with. He had never felt any such emotion before, and it was not ...
— Watersprings • Arthur Christopher Benson
... them; and while the light of blazing boughs is thrown upon the scene of festivity, the rude music is accompanied by a song. Darkness seems essential to the effect of the whole; and the painted figures coming forward from the obscurity of the background, while the singers and beaters of time are invisible, have a highly theatrical effect. Each dance appears most tastefully progressive; the movement being first slow, and introduced by two persons, displaying graceful motions, both of arms and legs; others, one by one, join in, ...
— Australia, its history and present condition • William Pridden
... Christian art, and it represents to fisher-folk what the fruits of the earth do to the field labourer. Both these little twin ports—Isaac and Gaverne—are entirely charming, and much to be commended to all who would know unspoiled Cornwall. Nestling within their tiny coves, they have a varied background of interesting country, pleasant little beaches, beautiful cliffs, and a glorious sea. There is one other resort to be visited before reaching Tintagel, and that is Trebarwith Strand, which similarly reaches the sea by a tiny cove, ...
— The Cornwall Coast • Arthur L. Salmon
... low relief may almost be considered as a branch of the painter's art. But this view seems opposed to the evidence of the facts. For there still exists a continuous series of pedimental groups, first in low relief then in high relief, and finally standing altogether free from the background, and becoming sculpture in the round. Examples in low relief are the Hydra pediment from the Acropolis and the pediment of the Page 35 Megarian Treasury at Olympia, which, on artistic grounds, can be set down as the two earliest ...
— The American Journal of Archaeology, 1893-1 • Various
... limbs are eternally knocking your hat off, and the spruce gum ruins your clothes, while ladies, like sheep, are for ever leaving fragments of their dress on every bush. He chooses the skirts of the forest therefore, the background is a glorious wood, and the foreground is diversified by the shipping. The o-heave-o of the sailors, as it rises and falls in the distance, is music to his ears, and suggestive of agreeable reflections, or profitable conversation peculiarly appropriate to the place and ...
— Nature and Human Nature • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... of these is to be found in the large head-piece to the above-mentioned Children's Games, the background of which exhibits the great square of Middleburgh, with its old Gothic houses and central clump of trees. This is, moreover, as delightful a picture as any in the gallery. Down the middle of the foreground, which is filled by a crowd of figures, advances a regiment ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... settled precariously for the night. The orchard was silent, except for the murmur of the stream that bounds it. In the mill-house itself lights gleamed in the windows, and I saw a pleasant family-party gathered at their evening meal. The whole scene with its background of sloping meadows and budding woods so tranquil and contented—a scene which William Morris would have loved—for there is a pleasant grace of antiquity about the old house, a sense of homely and solid life, and of all the family associations that have gone ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson
... and the singers and actors embraced this opportunity of revenge. 2. Music to the melodrama, "Die Rache wartet," (Vengeance waits,) by Willibald Alexis, the scenes of which are laid in Poland at the time of Napoleon's fatal Russian expedition. "This background was the theme of the music, which consisted of little more than the overture and entr'actes, but was held by musicians of note to be both grand and profound. The character of the campaign of 1812, especially, was given in the overture ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... watching your two friends. See what a fine study they make with the red flicker of the fire on their faces and the background of dark pines ...
— Moods • Louisa May Alcott
... the hammer-strokes of Force and Strength, Orestes hounded by his mother's Furies, Cassandra aghast before the palace of Mycenae, pure-souled Hippolytus, ruthful Alcestis, the divine youth of Helen, and Clytemnestra in her queenliness, emerge like faint grey films against the bluish background of Hymettus. The night air seems vocal with echoes of old Greek, more felt than heard, like voices wafted to our sense in sleep, the sound whereof we do not seize, though the burden ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... be rash to affirm that the romantic figure of Balder was nothing but a creation of the mythical fancy, a radiant phantom conjured up as by a wizard's wand to glitter for a time against the gloomy background of the stern Norwegian landscape. It may be so; yet it is also possible that the myth was founded on the tradition of a hero, popular and beloved in his lifetime, who long survived in the memory of the people, gathering more and more of the marvellous about him as he passed ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... here is love and charity and mercy and intelligence; the fair face of childhood, the beautiful face of youth, the clear, strong face of manhood and womanhood, and the calm, benign face of old age, seen, it is true, as against a background of their opposites, but seeming to indicate something above chance and change at the heart of Nature. Here is life in the midst of death; but death forever playing into the hands of life; here is the organic in the midst of the inorganic, ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs
... and raise my natural spirits, and laugh dull care away. True, there must be ideas, as in all amusements worthy of the name there is a certain seriousness impossible to define; only they must be kept in the background." ...
— Conversation - What to Say and How to Say it • Mary Greer Conklin
... trifle distant at first, but as she saw Quentin elevated to the pedestal of a god for feminine worship she thawed diplomatically, and, with rare tact, assumed a sort of proprietorship. Dorothy remained in the background, but he caught anxious glances at his arm, and, once or twice, a serious contemplation of his ...
— Castle Craneycrow • George Barr McCutcheon
... us, Linda girl, I am going to be dreadfully disappointed. I could use the material value that prize represents. I could start my life work which I hope to do in Lilac Valley on the prestige and the background that it would give me. I don't know, Linda, whether you ever learned to pray or not, but I have, and it's a thing that helps when the black shadow comes, when you reach the land of "benefits ...
— Her Father's Daughter • Gene Stratton-Porter
... join with the Huguenots in pulling down the Guises, and asserting the power of the nobility. A conspiracy for seizing the person of the king and destroying the Guises at the castle of Amboise was detected in time to make it fruitless. The two Bourbon princes kept in the background, though Conde was universally known to have been the true head and mover in it, and he was actually brought to trial. The discovery only strengthened the ...
— History of France • Charlotte M. Yonge
... sure that Miss Constance Holme has, in The Lonely Plough (Mills and Boon), written a clever and amusing novel. What she has not done is to make herself intelligible. Some of the mist that enwraps the background of her frontispiece has obscured her story and her characters. I know that she is writing about lively and entertaining people because there emerges, now and then, a page of dialogue that is witty and alive; and I know that her story is dramatic because she tells us now that someone ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, June 10, 1914 • Various
... salt solution, and run 1 c.c. into the assay bottle, letting it run down the side so that it forms a layer resting on the assay solution. If any silver remains in solution a cloudy layer will be formed at the junction where the two liquids meet. This is best observed against a black background If a cloudiness is seen, shake, to clear the liquid, and run in another c.c. of salt, and continue this until a cloudiness is no longer visible. Deduct 1.5 c.c. from the amount of the weaker sodium chloride solution run in. Divide the corrected reading ...
— A Textbook of Assaying: For the Use of Those Connected with Mines. • Cornelius Beringer and John Jacob Beringer
... their view, under the glow of the sunset. They could see the two great domes of the Exhibition, and the Law Courts, and also Government House, with its tall tower rising from the midst of the green trees. In the background was a bright crimson sky, barred with masses of black clouds, and over all the great city hung a cloud of smoke like a pall. The flaring red light of the sinking sun glared angrily on the heavy waters, and the steamer seemed to be making its way through a sea of blood. Madge, ...
— The Mystery of a Hansom Cab • Fergus Hume
... the water line turned northward at the root of the promontory, six or eight fishing boats were drawn up on the beach in various stages of existence. One was little more than half built, the fresh wood shining against the background of dark rock. Another was newly tarred; its sides glistened with the rich shadowy brown, and filled the air with a comfortable odour. Another wore age long neglect on every plank and seam; half its props had sunk or decayed, and the huge hollow leaned low on one side, disclosing the ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... dark, gloomy pines acted as a noble background, and once again the song of birds was heard, and the gentle tinkle, tinkle ...
— Little Frida - A Tale of the Black Forest • Anonymous
... foliage of the tenderest green. The flower beds are dotted about the lawn, which surrounds the house and slopes away from it, and they are brilliant patches of colour, gay with verbenas, geraniums, and petunias. Here and there clumps of tall trees rise above the shrubs, and as a background there is a thick plantation of red and blue gums, to shelter the garden from the strong N.W. winds. Then, in front, the country stretches away in undulating downs to a chain of high hills in the distance: every now and then there is a deep gap in these, through which ...
— Station Life in New Zealand • Lady Barker
... of 1870, uttered the words of deliverance to the other German princes, which finally gave us again a dignified and honorable existence as a nation, by creating the German empire. Could German art then remain in the background? Our artist was now all activity—a wonderfully joyous and stirring activity. To the "German army before Paris," he who had always thought and labored for his nation's glory, sang, in January, 1871, the song of triumphant joy ...
— Life of Wagner - Biographies of Musicians • Louis Nohl
... dazzling rise in life, had retained and still possessed a hearty appetite, a perfect digestion, mighty muscles, hard and solid, all over his hulking frame, and the vast strength of his early prime; all these chief actors framed against a background of gaudily caparisoned ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... about three weeks of daily bathing with water from 18 to 24 deg. C., however, the screaming decreased again. The experience that a pleasant feeling of warmth succeeded, may have forced the recollection of the unpleasant feeling into the background. But the screaming can not at all be represented by letters; ae and oe do not suffice. The same is true of the screaming, often prolonged, before falling asleep in the evening, which occurs not seldom also without any assignable ...
— The Mind of the Child, Part II • W. Preyer
... at the back of this desire. Blended with it was an intimate feeling, an obscure background of old beliefs, of which she herself was unaware. She hoped that if he were carried into the church, and sprinkled with holy water, Chevalier would be appeased, would become one of the peaceful dead, and would no longer torment her. She feared, on the other hand, that if he were deprived ...
— A Mummer's Tale • Anatole France
... ceiling; the proprietor at the counter, whereon appear gin and brandy, respectively contained in a tin pint-measure and an earthenware jug, with two or three tumblers beside them, out of which nearly all the party drank; some coming up to the counter frankly, others lingering in the background, waiting to be pressed, two paying for their own liquor and withdrawing. B—— treated them twice round. The pilot, after drinking his brandy, gave a history of our fishing expedition, and how many and how large fish we caught. B—— ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various
... ran from Betty's curls into her face, but she smiled politely as she followed Aunt Ailsey into the cabin and sat down in a split-bottomed chair upon the hearth. The walls were formed of rough, unpolished logs, and upon them, as against an unfinished background, the firelight threw reddish shadows of the old woman and the child. Overhead, from the uncovered rafters, hung several tattered sheepskins, and around the great fireplace there was a fringe of dead snakes and lizards, long since as dry as dust. Under the blazing logs, ...
— The Battle Ground • Ellen Glasgow
... his dress is as in the last scene, but shows signs of a struggle. Behind come two Attendants, guiding between them a veiled Woman, who seems like one asleep or unconscious. The Woman remains in the background while ...
— Alcestis • Euripides
... two hearers was the most dismayed at the idea which had taken possession of her. Mrs. Kirkpatrick had no fancy for being encumbered with a step-daughter before her time. If Molly came to be an inmate of her house, farewell to many little background economies, and a still more serious farewell to many little indulgences, that were innocent enough in themselves, but which Mrs. Kirkpatrick's former life had caused her to look upon as sins to ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... fainted—so missed the first excited turmoil—but soon revived to find myself lying on the moor, the centre of a kindly group of fellow-travellers, who were proffering essences, and brandy, and all other approved restoratives; while in the background, like distant thunder, were heard the adjurations of the guard and the coachman, who were swearing like troopers at the other—or rather at the male, inside passenger. Struggling into a sitting position, ...
— Fifty-Two Stories For Girls • Various
... winding ways of the English garden, which in those days had quite thrown into the background the earlier taste for stony, wall-like, rectilinear alleys. A man might now wander helplessly about for hours among densely foliaged trees without being able to find his destination. He would see the beds beside him everywhere thickly planted with flowers ...
— A Hungarian Nabob • Maurus Jokai
... the emotions, and the instincts loosened from the satisfying fixations of primary-group life. The raison d'etre of social work, as well as the fundamental problem of all social institutions in city life must be understood in its relation to this background. ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... buildings. Close by is the market, which the stranger, especially if a naturalist, will do well to visit. The variety of fruits and vegetables is great, that of fish scarcely less so. On the muddy shore in the background, the fishing canoes are drawn up on their arrival to discharge their cargoes, chiefly at this time consisting of a kind of sprat and an anchovy with a broad lateral silvery band. Baskets of land crabs covered with black slimy mud, of handsome Lupeae, and ...
— Narrative Of The Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Commanded By The Late Captain Owen Stanley, R.N., F.R.S. Etc. During The Years 1846-1850. Including Discoveries And Surveys In New Guinea, The Louisiade • John MacGillivray
... for the port of Tunis, the largest city of Barbary. But the sight of the glittering white town with its background of mountains, set in the gorgeous coloring of the African landscape, brought no gleam of joy or comfort to the sad hearts of the prisoners. Before them lay a life of slavery which might be worse than death; there was small prospect that they would ever see ...
— Life of St. Vincent de Paul • F.A. [Frances Alice] Forbes
... Revolution: secondly—and far more important—the deep, abiding and ineradicable animosity which Japanese of all classes felt for the man who had come out of the contest head and shoulders above everybody else—Yuan Shih-kai. These two remarkable features ended by completely thrusting into the background during the period 1911-1914 every other element in Japanese statesmanship; and of the two the second must be counted the decisive one. Dating back to Korea, when Yuan Shih-kai's extraordinary diplomatic talents constantly allowed him to worst his Japanese ...
— The Fight For The Republic In China • B.L. Putnam Weale
... Background: Following the breakup of the Ottoman Empire during World War I, Syria was administered by the French until independence in 1946. In the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, Syria lost the Golan Heights to Israel. Syrian troops - stationed in Lebanon since 1976 in an ostensible peacekeeping role ...
— The 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... carriage, ready to start, or rather starting. The interviewing gentlemen, two of whom had their heads jammed through the window, were forcibly drawn away—still asking questions, by the officials—the tall gentleman with the moustache, who was hovering in the background, smiled a soft farewell, in which modesty struggled visibly with hope, the station-master took off his cap, and in another minute they were ...
— Mr. Meeson's Will • H. Rider Haggard
... interrupted by a person who appeared in the background and resembled a judicial official. Voltaire saw who it was, and became furious: "Your Majesty, how can you allow this rag-tag and bob-tail to enter the castle-park? Why do you not enclose it with ...
— Historical Miniatures • August Strindberg
... reply to a dogmatic and comprehensive criticism which it is easy to foresee will be passed on them. It will undoubtedly be asserted that an undue prominence has been given to the religious side of the Irish question, while its many political aspects have been left in the background. This charge will be laid at the door of the clerical and religious character of the writer, and may give rise to the notion that the view here taken of the subject is not the right one, but a ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... needs good nerves to look at it. Forty or fifty figures, perhaps more, in full finish and detail in the mid-ground, with three times that number, or more, through the rest—swarms upon swarms of savage Sioux, in their war-bonnets, frantic, mostly on ponies, driving through the background, through the smoke, like a hurricane of demons. A dozen of the figures are wonderful. Altogether a western, autochthonic phase of America, the frontiers, culminating, typical, deadly, heroic to the uttermost—nothing ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... objects I discharged my musket. With a shriek of pain the object at which I had fired half raised itself to an erect position and then fell heavily forward. At the same moment a loud blood-curdling yell resounded upon the heavy night air, and the foggy background instantly became alive with the forms of the savages who sprang to their feet and came bounding toward the battery, hurling ...
— The Congo Rovers - A Story of the Slave Squadron • Harry Collingwood
... should avoid all unnecessary harshness; we should speak and act with all possible kindness; because love, rather than fear, love both of God and man, is the motive which we particularly wish to awaken. Thus, keeping punishment in the background and, as it were, out of sight, and putting forward encouragement and kindness, we should attract, as it were, the good and noble feelings of those with, whom we are dealing, and invite them to open, and to answer to, a system of confidence and kindness, rather ...
— The Christian Life - Its Course, Its Hindrances, And Its Helps • Thomas Arnold
... leaving him the pallor of ashes, while his mouth twitched and his head rolled slightly from side to side like a palsied old man's. The red of his lips was blanched, leaving two white streaks against a faded, muddy background, through which came strange and frightful oaths in a bastard tongue. Runnion drew back, fearful, and the older man ceased chopping and let his axe hang loosely in his hand. But evidently Poleon meant no violence, for he allowed ...
— The Barrier • Rex Beach
... my ear, I painting proudly with his breath on me, All his court round him, seeing with his eyes, Such frank French eyes, and such a fire of souls Profuse, my hand kept plying by those hearts,— And, best of all, this, this, this face beyond, This in the background, waiting on my work; To crown the issue with a last reward! A good time, was it not, my kingly days? And had you not grown restless... but I know— 'Tis done and past; 'twas right, my instinct said; Too live the life grew, golden and ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 2 (of 4) • Various
... wearin' them," he said weakly, and his eyes wandered about the armed circle, pausing on the ominous forms of Hal Purvis, Bill Kilduff, and especially Jim Silent, a head taller than the rest. He stood somewhat in the background, but the slight sneer with which he watched Whistling Dan dominated the ...
— The Untamed • Max Brand
... plainly visible to us, some at anchor, some under way; and some of them so near to us that we saw, or fancied we saw, with our night glasses, the men on watch on their forecastles; but as we were inside of them all, and invisible against the background of the land, we passed beyond them undiscovered. The roar of the surf breaking upon the beach, prevented the noise of our paddles from being heard. The Lee's head was not pointed seaward, however, until we had ...
— The Narrative of a Blockade-Runner • John Wilkinson
... himself he comes pretty near being boss of every one around him. He sent word to the Higher Lifer by one of the Pillars that he reckoned he was counting on him to preach a farewell sermon the next Sunday, and the young man, who'd been keeping in the background till whatever was going to drop, dropped, came around to welcome him in person. But while the Doc had been doing a heap of praying for grace, he didn't propose to take any chances, and he didn't see him. And he wouldn't talk to any ...
— Old Gorgon Graham - More Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son • George Horace Lorimer
... Jardine had himself made inquiry—the pale girl who kept in the background, with the little scar—was it—on her temple? Joanna quivered under the process, and the witness beneath the light brown hair throbbed painfully. She was glad when Mr. Jardine walked away quickly; but the next moment he came back and ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... whole picture of nature, youth and beauty, as it was set against the pure background of the sky, Walden realised that he was expected to say something,—in fact, he had been called upon to say something every year at this time, but he had never been able to conquer the singular nervousness which always overcame him on such occasions. It is one thing to preach ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... accuracy in Villette and The Professor. That, indeed, from the point of view of local colour, is made sufficiently plain to the casual visitor of to-day who calls in the Rue d'Isabelle. The house, it is true, is dismantled with a view to its incorporation into some city buildings in the background, but one may still eat pears from the 'old and huge fruit-trees' which flourished when Charlotte and Emily walked under them half a century ago; one may still wander through the school-rooms, the long dormitories, and into the 'vine-draped berceau'—little enough ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... was embroidering a bunch of roses in coloured wools. The canvas had once been stretched on a frame, but now, as the delicate labour of the petals and leaves was done, and nothing remained to do but the monotonous background, Constance was content to pin the stuff to her knee. With the long needle and several skeins of mustard-tinted wool, she bent over the canvas and resumed the filling-in of the tiny squares. The whole design was in squares—the gradations of red and greens, the curves of ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... thoroughly; did he give you any sort of a hint that he wished to break off with you? You must tell me all very plainly, and keep nothing back. I am older than you are Gerelda, and know more concerning worldly affairs. I now say this much: there must be a rival in the background. When a man has been in love with one girl, and suddenly cools off, there is a reason for it, depend ...
— Kidnapped at the Altar - or, The Romance of that Saucy Jessie Bain • Laura Jean Libbey
... a few naked figures appeared on the beach. One of them signalled with a branch, and soon others followed, till about fifty men had assembled, and in the background, half-hidden by shrubs, stood half a dozen women. We entered the whale-boats, two boys and a white man in each, and slowly approached the shore. All the natives carried their rifles in their right hands and yams in their left, making signs to show that ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser
... political developments of religion, which we have lately been examining,—about pontifices, augurs, and Sibylline books; these institutions, which had been so much used in the republican period for political and party purposes, it was rather his interest to keep in the background. But in one way or another he must have grasped the fundamental idea of the old Roman worship, that the prosperity and the fertility of man, and of his flocks and herds and crops on the farm, and the prosperity and fertility of the citizen within the city itself, ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler
... since the despised Birney, in 1844, received only a few thousand votes in the whole United States. Now the Rail-splitter had come! The tocsin of war sounded. The Union was rent. War with its flames of fire and streams of blood devastated the Republic. But the bow of promise was set on the dark background of the receding storm. American slavery was swept into oblivion, and the end of the third quarter of the century saw such a condition established in both the New World and the Old, as made the restoration of human ...
— Notable Events of the Nineteenth Century - Great Deeds of Men and Nations and the Progress of the World • Various
... disappears, or rather retires into the background, when we pass to Beatrix. She also has the Ewigweibliche in her—as much of it as any, or almost any, of Shakespeare's women, and therefore more than anybody else's. But she is very much more than a type—she is Beatrix Esmond in flesh and blood, ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... flash-riding, of course; but flash-riding at its best. And how the boys enjoyed it! Now the little group of "buckeroos," heretofore rather shyly in the background, shone ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White
... the boy, and waved his sword with hoarse cries to his men. They caught sight of the lonely little figure in the background, and his cry went to their hearts, and a great wave of rage and shame swept the line like a prairie fire. Like a landslide the men of Connecticut swept forward to recapture the ground they had yielded. Back fell the British before a countercharge they could ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... the Irishman, "you've but felt the tickle of the spur; when I drive it in, you'll yell like a whipped kid. Always you play into me hands, McTee. Now when you see Kate, you'll feel me grin in the background ...
— Harrigan • Max Brand
... seemed to open from ear to ear. All had horns growing on their foreheads. The old man was so surprised at what he saw that he lost his balance and fell out of the hollow tree. Fortunately for him the demons did not see him, as the tree was in the background. So he picked himself up and crept back ...
— Japanese Fairy Tales • Yei Theodora Ozaki
... can tell Smorthwaite and the rest of 'em that they can come on again on the old terms, but they'll not get a farthing more. Well, boy," as he noticed Frank standing humbly in the background, "what do ...
— Our Frank - and other stories • Amy Walton
... sunset effects here. At sundown night before last, on the sea near mouth of river, it was absolutely gorgeous with the purple mountains standing clear out against the orange and emerald sky and the dark gray shapes of our ships lying sombrely in the background, talking to each other in flashing Morse. The great mountain, Fernando Po, standing up out of the water to starboard and the Peak of Cameroon (13,760 feet) wreathed in mist to port; Victoria invisible, as also Buea—both hidden behind the clouds as we passed disdainfully by and ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 5, August, 1915 • Various
... conditions or problems, to know of the past out of which our modern life has developed. It is also necessary for one who would understand the problems of one community, or of one nation, to know, in so far as it is possible, of the experiences of other peoples. History and geography furnish a background, without which our current problems could not be reasonably attacked. Literature and science, the study of the fine arts, and of our social institutions, all become significant in proportion as they make possible contributions, ...
— How to Teach • George Drayton Strayer and Naomi Norsworthy
... of Col. Wm. C. Hunter, with his signature, makes a fine pocket piece. It has a hole in the center so you may tack it up on your desk, dresser or on the wall. It is engraved in heavy brass, background with black, baked enamel. This beautiful souvenir sent postpaid to any address for 10c ...
— Evening Round Up - More Good Stuff Like Pep • William Crosbie Hunter
... Charge in 1790, complains of this; and in the writings of the early Evangelical party we find, of course, constant complaints of the general ignoring of these doctrines. Now it is probable that the term Socinian was often applied to those who kept these doctrines in the background, and not, indeed, applied altogether improperly; only, if we assume that all those who were termed Socinians disbelieved in the true divinity or personality of the Son and the Holy Ghost, we shall be assuming more than was really ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... and function of removal of secretion of Pangenesis, Darwin's theory of Parathyroids function of secretion of Paulesco Pawlov Permutations, of types of personality, Perry, Caleb Personality, background of combinations of types of determined by the endocrines endocrine eunuchoid types of adrenal combinations of gonad-centric nature's experiments vs. man's permutations of pituitary of Philosophers, prejudices of Physics of the wish Physiologists, attitude of role of Pigment cells and the adrenals ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... that she had not the courage to tell what might befall the little ruler, all the while muttering something about the two little princes who had died in a tower ages and ages ago. Seeing that the boy was frightened, Tullis withdrew him to the background. The Countess Marlanx, who had returned that morning to Edelweiss as mysteriously as she had left, came ...
— Truxton King - A Story of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... clockmaking as a pupil of Aaron Willard, Junior. Howard was a boy of only sixteen at the time, and for five years he studied clocks under this excellent tutelage. Do not imagine, however, that this balcony clock of ours was made by Mr. Howard himself. What your father meant was that built into the background of the Howard Company were the ...
— Christopher and the Clockmakers • Sara Ware Bassett
... morning from my Golden Bed to find a stranger quietly smoking a cigarette on my paepae. Against the jungle background he was a strangely incongruous figure; a Frenchman, small, thin, meticulously neat in garments of faded blue denim and shining high boots. His blue eyes twinkled above a carefully trimmed beard, and as he rose to meet me, ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... guns or felt the earth shake under the tread of marching legions. We at home have had our own experiences, our deep anxieties, our doubts, our griefs, and always we have been conscious of the might of forces in grapple and the high issues that hung upon the fate of the armies. In the background of all our thoughts at all times has been the solemn consciousness that the destiny of mankind was at work in mighty throes toward an end hidden to our knowledge if not to our faith and hope. We have none of us passed through this experience without receiving ...
— America's War for Humanity • Thomas Herbert Russell
... MacBride and I received them the moment they stepped out of the boats, and then Ludwig Wolfen, who was disposed in the background with an accordion, and seated on a gin case, played 'The Star Spangled Banner,' to the accompaniment of several native drums, beaten by his wife and her sister and brothers. Then my boatman—a stalwart Maori half-caste—advanced from out the thronging crowd ...
— Ridan The Devil And Other Stories - 1899 • Louis Becke
... until its removal in 1856. It was then found that enough remained of the original to allow a faithful restoration to be made. But the scheme of colouring—red and green upon white—was not copied. In its stead Owen Jones suggested another—a background of blue plentifully ornamented with ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Carlisle - A Description of Its Fabric and A Brief History of the Episcopal See • C. King Eley
... was thus able to breathe again. The war continued, but under better auspices. Sound material could now be collected again for the army. Marius being in the background, the chosen knight of the aristocracy, Lucius Sylla, whose fame in the Cimbrian war had been only second to that of his commander's, came at once ...
— Caesar: A Sketch • James Anthony Froude
... flower-garden and potager in one, the bees were busy among the autumn growths—many-coloured asters, bignonias, scarlet-beans, and the old-fashioned parsonage flowers. The courteous owner readily showed me his tapestries, some of which hung on the walls of his parlour and staircase by way of a background for the display of the other curiosities of which he was a collector. Certainly, those tapestries and the stained glass dealt with the same theme. In both were the same musical instruments—pipes, cymbals, long reed-like trumpets. The story, ...
— Imaginary Portraits • Walter Pater
... Double-Crank, that had always seemed to him a synonym for success? Why must his first and only love affair be hampered by an element so disturbing as Mama Joy? Why, when he had hazed the Pilgrim out of his sight—and as he supposed, out of his life—must the man hover always in the immediate background, threating the peace of mind of Billy, who only wanted to be left alone that he and his friends might live unmolested in the ...
— The Long Shadow • B. M. Bower
... two or three framed coloured prints such as are presented with Christmas numbers of illustrated papers. There was also a photograph of a group of Sunday School girls with their teachers with the church for the background. In the centre of the room was a round deal table about three feet six inches across, with the legs stained red to look like mahogany. Against one wall was an old couch covered with faded cretonne, four chairs to match standing backs to wall in different ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... all was joy, jollity, and goodwill. The old boy shook hands with me, slapped Corky on the back, said that he didn't think he had ever seen such a fine day, and whacked his leg with his stick. Jeeves had projected himself into the background, ...
— My Man Jeeves • P. G. Wodehouse
... this,' she said determinedly, 'I'm not going to be kept in the background serving out beer any longer. If I am worth marrying I am worth acknowledging, and that's just what you've got to ...
— The Bishop's Secret • Fergus Hume
... He saw to her comfort with unfailing vigilance and consideration, but he never attempted to obtrude himself upon her. He seldom spoke to her unless she addressed him. He never by word or look referred to the compact between them. Her fear of him had sunk away into the background of her thoughts. Furtively she studied him, but he gave her no cause for fear. When she sat on the deck, he never joined her. He did not so much as eat with her till one day, not without much inward trepidation, she invited him to do so. And she ...
— The Swindler and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... attempt to assign limits to the inspiration and uplifting effects of great tone-poetry, it is quite certain that effects and influences of this kind are arrived at in the consciousness of the listener only when purely musical appreciation is active and deep. Without the background of living musical appreciation of this kind, the highest flights of the composer will pass as mere noise and fury, the hearer being in no whit uplifted or inspired. The uplifting which comes from the supposed assistance of a "story" or a poetic idea attached ...
— The Masters and their Music - A series of illustrative programs with biographical, - esthetical, and critical annotations • W. S. B. Mathews
... he ejaculated, and for a long minute the spoon was poised while his eyes fairly devoured the scene spread out before him against the background ...
— The Heart's Kingdom • Maria Thompson Daviess
... reception committee under cover of a headache, slipped away into the trees. The fringe of the wood was defaced with the litter of picnickers, and smelt of lunch; the din of the agents for new-fangled reapers and ploughs, whose gaudy paint was doubly garish against the sober background, had routed the squirrels and birds; but the remoter paths held only silent lovers, and the camp-ground, where the Widow Weatherwax had mouthed and played the prophet, stripped of its tents, its zealots, its wavering torchlights, was ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... Lady Fa—y K—w," shows Fielding's tall figure, his legs bandaged for gout, the sword of Justice in his hand and her scales hanging out of his pocket, speaking on behalf of his trembling client Elizabeth Canning; while opposed to him are my Lord Mayor, the notorious Dr Hill, and the old gipsy. The background is adorned with pictures of the newly built Mansion House, and of the College ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden
... women instinctively stepped back and lifted their skirts, and men looked vaguely around for a waiter—at least Ogilvy said so. As for Neville, he had a single study to show—a full length—just the back and head and the soft contour of limbs melting into a luminously sombre background—a masterpiece in technical perfection, which was instantly purchased by a wise and Western millionaire, and which left the ...
— The Common Law • Robert W. Chambers
... where the McAraveys now lived—a spot yet more retired and more lovely than any in the glens properly so called—we must once more return to the great "coast road." Having reached Cushendall, the scenery becomes more imposing, and the high background almost deserves the name of a mountain. Here, at length, the rugged and towering coast-line successfully defies further violation of its lonely majesty. Accordingly the baffled road bends abruptly to the left, and turning its back upon the sea proceeds to climb the long, dreary ...
— A Child of the Glens - or, Elsie's Fortune • Edward Newenham Hoare
... he knew nothing of the great results of his contrivance, and solemnly led the way towards the back of the house. Here there was a patch of turf, beginning to look a little brown, with a background of shrubs. In the middle of the turf, a boy of nine or ten was standing all alone, ...
— The House of Souls • Arthur Machen
... the hidden fires beneath that heat the water. It is the illusion caused by superheated steam escaping through a fissure in the rock and dividing the water. The reflection from the surface thus formed and a black background formed by the sides and bottom of the pool account for ...
— Wealth of the World's Waste Places and Oceania • Jewett Castello Gilson
... road, with nothing more enlivening than the dark hills, half-seen in the light of the rising moon, she settled down. Rupert turned to his silent companion. He had become aware during the evening that something was wrong, and his own sense of injury was frightened into the background. ...
— All on the Irish Shore - Irish Sketches • E. Somerville and Martin Ross
... never seen a finer woman, nor one whose features displayed a more heart-rending emotion. This called for respect, and I, for one, endeavored to show it by withdrawing into the background. But I soon stepped forward again. My desire to understand her was too great, the impression made by her bearing too complex, to be passed over lightly by one on the lookout for a key to the remarkable ...
— The Filigree Ball • Anna Katharine Green
... by my door, not thinking I could hear, Vulgar, naked truth, ungarnished for a royal ear; Fit for cooping in the background, ...
— Poems • Christina G. Rossetti
... have, not merely a finger, but, all his ten fingers, in the pie. Being only a visitor, however, and ignorant of everybody and everything connected with a floating light, he had modestly held his tongue and kept in the background. But he could no longer withstand the temptation to act. Without uttering a word, he leaped upon the rope-ladder of the lantern, and was half way up it before any one observed him, determined to forestall Jack Shales. Then there was a shouting of "Hallo! what is that ...
— The Floating Light of the Goodwin Sands • R.M. Ballantyne
... however, on these details that we desire to dwell, but to use the scenes before us as a background and contrast to magnify certain features in the death, grave, and abiding influence of ...
— John the Baptist • F. B. Meyer
... to recognize that quiet background of superiority. When she dropped an argument he always thought he had silenced her; when she laughed he thought it ...
— Herland • Charlotte Perkins Stetson Gilman
... Linder had half expected; she slipped quietly and gracefully into their presence. She was dressed in black, in a costume which did not too much conceal the charm of her figure, and the nut-brown lustre of her face and hair played against the sober background of her dress with an effect that was ...
— Dennison Grant - A Novel of To-day • Robert Stead
... treacle on a marble background is scarcely greater than that of printers' ink on newspaper to me. But anything smaller than pica I do not read with comfort, and below long primer I cannot read at all. Hence the secretary. Now the ...
— Four Max Carrados Detective Stories • Ernest Bramah
... had not been told." I was struck dumb with admiration as we threaded our way through a narrow channel between irregular reefs lying off the harbor of Port Royal. The spacious harbor itself was a noble sight, but the background was even more picturesque—the light, two-storied houses with their piazzas painted green and white, the varying hues of the gardens, filled with palms and cocoanut trees, and the lofty minarets of the Blue Mountains, towering to a great height ...
— Humphrey Bold - A Story of the Times of Benbow • Herbert Strang
... this apocalyptic vision. Mine certainly did so; and I cannot believe that our muscular vigor will ever be a superfluity. Even if the day ever dawns in which it will not be needed for fighting the old heavy battles against Nature, it will still always be needed to furnish the background of sanity, serenity, and cheerfulness to life, to give moral elasticity to our disposition, to round off the wiry edge of our fretfulness, and make us good-humored and easy of approach. Weakness is too apt to be what the doctors call irritable weakness. And that blessed internal ...
— Talks To Teachers On Psychology; And To Students On Some Of Life's Ideals • William James
... of bustle, the light on the cloth, the sheen on the silver, the grace and fragrance of fruit and flowers, and the gracious faces above it, remains a wide and steady luminous vision on the black background of midnight travel, of the train rushing through nothingness. Most charming of all, when after the early evening on the balcony, the traveller leaves the south, to hurtle by night, conscious only of the last impression ...
— Hortus Vitae - Essays on the Gardening of Life • Violet Paget, AKA Vernon Lee
... to the front the question of the Union, and let the question of slavery drop, at first, into the background. He used every exertion to hold the border States by moderate measures, and, in this way, prevented the spread of the rebellion. For this moderation, the antislavery extremists in the North assailed him, but nothing shows more his far-sighted wisdom and strength of purpose than his action at this ...
— Hero Tales From American History • Henry Cabot Lodge, and Theodore Roosevelt
... powers, after recognising and treating with the Consular Government, might display a different feeling, and entertain scruples with regard to a Government which had resumed its monarchical form. The question regarding the Bourbons was in some measure kept in the background as long as France remained a Republic, but the re-establishment of the throne naturally called to recollection the family which had occupied it for so many ages. Bonaparte fully felt the delicacy of his position, but he knew how to face obstacles, and had been accustomed ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... for Europe all the time. I could have them spend their Sunday afternoons going aboard the different boats, and looking up their accommodations. I could have them sail, in imagination, and discover an imaginary Europe, and give their grotesque misconceptions of it from travels and novels against a background of purely American experience. We needn't go abroad to manage that. I think ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... unless the colors of their costumes harmonize. You find a negress selling oranges or citrons; an Arab boy with red fez and white turban, carrying purple fruit in a basket of leaves—always the right juxtaposition of colors. The sky furnishes them a superb background of deep blue, and the repose of these solemn Orientals, who sit here like bronze statues, save that they smoke incessantly, inspires you with a curious respect. They are men who believe in fate—what need ...
— Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce • E. R. Billings
... the fruit gardens had the golden-brown in their faces, and their plain features were transfigured. They were walking in the dusty road; there was as background a high, dusty hawthorn hedge which had lost the freshness of spring and was browned by the work of caterpillars; they were in rags and jags, their shoes had split, and their feet looked twice as wide in consequence. Their hands were black; not grimy, but absolutely black, ...
— The Open Air • Richard Jefferies
... hood as she emerged? One might venture into the infernal regions to rescue such a woman; but why take her there? The group of adventurers stopped a moment on the platform, with the opening into the misty cavern for a background, and the artist said that the picture was, beyond all power of the pencil, strange and fantastic. There is nothing, after all, that the human race will not ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... scarlet on yonder dead hemlock, glowing like a live coal against the dark background, seeming almost too brilliant for the severe Northern climate, is his relative, the Scarlet Tanager. I occasionally meet him in the deep hemlocks, and know no stronger contrast in nature. I almost fear he will kindle the dry limb on which he alights. He is quite a solitary ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 104, June, 1866 • Various
... happy and cheerful again, anyway," retorted Kitty. "And if she'd fallen in love with Peter, knowing that there was a very much alive Mrs. Peter in the background, she would hardly ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler
... feathered from base to summit with the richest foliage, were the first objects which attracted our attention. Beyond these rose a range of mountains, running north and south through the island, and broken into the most fantastic shapes. As we sailed along the shore, having the mountains still as the background, here and there appeared the most lovely little caves and bays, fringed with luxuriant cane-fields, and enlivened by the neatly laid-out mansions of the planters; while numerous fishing and passage boats, with their long light masts and lateen sails, ...
— Charley Laurel - A Story of Adventure by Sea and Land • W. H. G. Kingston
... It was a large room. Two windows looked down the avenue, and three into the garden, with its background of timber and park. Mr. Mortimer Fenley could have commanded both views; his son sat with his back to the park; the ...
— The Strange Case of Mortimer Fenley • Louis Tracy
... discharge from Military Service and his "Entschwaebung" (Un-Swabian-ing); such petitions had only for result new sharper rebukes and hard threatening expressions, to which the mournful fate of Schubart in the Castle of Hohenasperg[53] formed a too questionable background. ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
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