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More "Obelisk" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of these more recent portions. There are some pleasing public walks, after the English fashion; and a public garden, where a colossal sphinx, erected by the late philosopher Gleichen, has a very imposing appearance. Here is also an obelisk erected to the memory of Gleichen himself, the founder of these gardens; and a monument to the memory of Kepler, the astronomer; which latter was luckily spared in the assault of this town by ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume V (of X) • Various
... Within its walls the illustrious Champollion and his ally Rosellini lived and worked together in 1829, during part of their long sojourn at Thebes. Here the naval officers sent out by the French in 1831 to remove the obelisk which now stands in the Place de la Concorde took up their temporary quarters. And here, most interesting to English readers, Lady Duff Gordon lingered through some of her last winters, and wrote most of her delightful ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon
... the shadeless road leading out of the town towards the north-east, and after walking about a mile between vineyards, I came to the commemorative monument of the battle raised in 1888 by the Union Patriotique de France. It is a low obelisk, with no ornament save a mediaeval sword carved upon it, with point turned upwards. Facing the road is the ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... family. Madame Gorka's instinct had at least served her in leading her upon a route on which she met no one. Now the sense of reality returned. She recognized the objects around her, and that framework, so familiar to her piety of fervent Catholicism, the enormous square, the obelisk of Sixte-Quint in the centre, the fountains, the circular portico crowned with bishops and martyrs, the palace of the Vatican at the corner, and yonder the facade of the large papal cathedral, with the Saviour and the apostles erect upon the ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... and were quite able to appreciate, though by no means able to rival, the skill with which Addison imitated Virgil. His lines on the Barometer and the Bowling Green were applauded by hundreds, to whom the Dissertation on the Epistles of Phalaris was as unintelligible as the hieroglyphics on an obelisk. ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... sail up it a distance of three furlongs to the creek on starboard hand; pass into the creek and land on the island. The treasure lies buried at a spot one thousand feet due south from the base of the obelisk rock." ...
— The Cruise of the "Esmeralda" • Harry Collingwood
... contain variety enough to form a picture upon canvas; and this is no bad test, as I think the landscape painter is the gardener's best designer. The eye requires a sort of balance here; but not so as to encroach upon probable nature. A wood or hill may balance a house or obelisk; for exactness would be displeasing. . . It is not easy to account for the fondness of former times for straight-lined avenues to their houses; straight-lined walks through their woods; and, in short, every kind of straight line, ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... shaft in December, 1854. Major-General William J. Worth, of Mexican War fame, died at San Antonio, Texas, June 7, 1849. The monument was dedicated with a parade and a review November 25, 1857, and the General's remains interred under the south side. In bands around the obelisk are recorded the names of the battles in which Worth took part. On the east face, cut in the stone, may be read "Ducit Amor Patriae" and on the west face, "By the Corporation of the City of New York, 1857—Honor ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice
... her vituperative fury? Her throat ached; she was very tired, and, as the night darkened from pale to deep and starless shadows, she strolled mechanically from the Strand to the Embankment, and after walking some little distance she sat down in a corner close to Cleopatra's Needle—that mocking obelisk that has looked upon the decay of empires, itself impassive, and that still appears to say, "Pass on, ye puny generations! I, a mere carven block of stone, shall outlive you all!" For the first time in all her experience the child in her arms seemed a heavy burden. She put aside ...
— Stories By English Authors: London • Various
... plate, with an interposing piece of oiled or waxed paper, was touched lightly to the body; the flesh swelled, and the form of the brand could never be obliterated. Many slaves passed from one plantation to another, being sold and resold, till their bodies were as thick with marks as an obelisk. How different from the symbols of care in the furrowed face and stooping form of a free laborer, where the history of a humble home, planted in marriage and nursed by independent sorrow, is printed by ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... no reply, but went on: and taking one or two turns through the tortuous lanes in the neighbourhood, arrived at a spot where a small obelisk, of no very graceful form or great dimensions, planted in the middle of the road, marked the boundary of four distinct parishes. She paused there for a moment, and leaned upon the landmark, as if from fatigue, weakness, or agitation. The light was ...
— The King's Highway • G. P. R. James
... "While I on towers and banging terraces, In shaft and obelisk, behold my sign. Creative, shape of ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... stands a representation of the noble figure of the Prince, attended by his greyhound, Eos. On another spur of the same hill is an obelisk, erected by the tenantry and servants to the master who had their interests ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen, (Victoria) Vol II • Sarah Tytler
... intelligent. She was also intensely bored with her home where, as if packed in a tight box, her individuality—of which she was very conscious—had no play. She strode like a grenadier, was strong and upright like an obelisk, had a beautiful face, a candid brow, pure eyes, and not a thought of her own in her head. He surrendered quickly to all those charms, and she appeared to him so unquestionably of the right sort that he ...
— Tales of Unrest • Joseph Conrad
... guess it is four feet through; it is of iron, tubular; there is room for a winding spiral staircase within it; as for its height, I will not risk a guess at it. Could Othello's war-ships carry it they would consider it a feat, as the bringing of the Egyptian obelisk to London was thought a feat. The petty ripples of the Adriatic, what were they? This red bowsprit at its roots is high enough to suspend a trapeze; at its head a ladder would be required to mount it from the quay; yet by-and-by, when the ...
— The Life of the Fields • Richard Jefferies
... up Stonehenge. What the engineer is to the mathematician, the active statesman is to the contemplative statesman. It is indeed most important that legislators and administrators should be versed in the philosophy of government, as it is most important that the architect, who has to fix an obelisk on its pedestal, or to hang a tubular bridge over an estuary, should be versed in the philosophy of equilibrium and motion. But, as he who has actually to build must bear in mind many things never noticed by D'Alembert and Euler, so must he who has actually to govern ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... hundreds observed in the East, except that its walls were a little higher than those usually seen, and the phallic spire out of proportion to the size of the structure. "The Jewish porch is but the obelisk which the Egyptian placed beside his temple; the Boodhist pillars which stood all around their Dagobas; the pillars of Hercules, which stood near the Phoenician temple; and the spire which ...
— The God-Idea of the Ancients - or Sex in Religion • Eliza Burt Gamble
... here that the stone which Doctor Franklin erected, as above, became so dilapidated that in 1827, the citizens of Boston replaced it by a granite obelisk. The bodies repose in the old Granary ...
— From Boyhood to Manhood • William M. Thayer
... we catch sight of the monticule crowned by an obelisk; surmounting the vine-clad slopes, we also obtain a glimpse of its "Ormes de Sully," or group of magnificent elms, one of many in France supposed to have been planted by the great Sully. Since my first acquaintance ...
— East of Paris - Sketches in the Gatinais, Bourbonnais, and Champagne • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... The largest buildings elsewhere erected by man are smaller than their pyramids; which are also the oldest human works still remaining, the beauty of whose masonry, says Wilkinson, has not been surpassed in any subsequent age. An obelisk of a single stone now standing in Egypt weighs three hundred tons, and a colossus of Ramses II. nearly nine hundred. But Herodotus describes a monolithic temple, which must have weighed five thousand tons, and which was carried the whole length of ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... before, in 1827, Lord Dalhousie laid the first stone of the beautiful obelisk overlooking what is now known as Dufferin Terrace, to commemorate the heroism of Wolfe and Montcalm, and ...
— Old Quebec - The Fortress of New France • Sir Gilbert Parker and Claude Glennon Bryan
... "Descent from the Cross," by Perriss; (5) the window in the chancel to the memory of Colonel J.R.M. Chard, of Rorke's Drift fame, with a wreath preserved beneath it sent by Queen Victoria. The obelisk near the S. door is said to have once ...
— Somerset • G.W. Wade and J.H. Wade
... of the triumphal monuments are the obelisks, gigantic monoliths of red or white granite, some of which are more than two hundred feet high, covered with inscriptions, and bearing the image of the triumphant king, painted or engraved. The splendid obelisk in the Place de la Concorde, at Paris, celebrates the glories of ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... a mammoth express-wagon; a sullen Southerner contrasts with a grinning Gaul, a darkly-vested bishop with a gayly-attired child, a daintily-gloved belle with a mud-soiled drunkard; a little shoe-black and a blind fiddler ply their trades in the shadow of Emmet's obelisk, and a toy-merchant has Montgomery's mural tablet for a background; on the fence is a string of favorite ballads and popular songs; a mock auctioneer shouts from one door, and a silent wax effigy gazes ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 110, December, 1866 - A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics • Various
... little left but the ruinous mansion and the ground immediately around it. His tomb stands near the house,—a spacious receptacle, an iron door at the end of a turf-covered mound, and surmounted by an obelisk of the Thomaston marble. There are inscriptions to the memory of several of his family; for he had many children, all of whom are now dead, except one daughter, a widow of fifty, recently married to Hon. John ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various
... they can be said to have any vices at all, perhaps drinking and cheating are the most conspicuous among them. Their residences are usually on the outskirts of 'the Rules,' chiefly lying within a circle of one mile from the obelisk in St. George's Fields. Their looks are not prepossessing, and ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... square, are two fountains, one on either side, casting up water in showers; between them, in the midst, is an obelisk, brought from Egypt, and covered with mysterious writing; on your right rises an edifice, not beautiful nor grand, but huge and bulky, where lives a strange kind of priest whom men call the Pope, a very horrible old individual, who would fain keep Christ in leading strings, calls ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... waiting to see the queer word fall visibly from the white man's lips. "Sofala," Captain Whalley repeated; and suddenly his heart failed him. He paused. The shores, the islets, the high ground, the low points, were dark: the horizon had grown somber; and across the eastern sweep of the shore the white obelisk, marking the landing-place of the telegraph-cable, stood like a pale ghost on the beach before the dark spread of uneven roofs, intermingled with palms, of the native town. Captain ...
— End of the Tether • Joseph Conrad
... turf-covered graves. Reared against the buttresses of the church was an old stone coffin, together with a fragment of a curious monumental effigy, likewise of stone; but the most striking objects in the place, and deservedly ranked amongst the wonders of Whalley, were three remarkable obelisk-shaped crosses, set in a line upon pedestals, covered with singular devices in fretwork, and all three differing in size and design. Evidently of remotest antiquity, these crosses were traditionally assigned to Paullinus, who, according to the Venerable Bede, first preached the Gospel ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... and Aventine Hills, was built for chariot races, boxing, and gymnastic contests. It was an immense structure, with galleries three stories high, and a canal called Euripus, and it accommodated one hundred thousand spectators. In the centre Caesar erected an obelisk one hundred and thirty-two feet high, brought from Egypt. The seats were arranged as in the theatre. Six kinds of games were celebrated: 1st, chariot racing; 2d, a sham-fight between young men on horseback; 3d, a sham-fight between infantry and cavalry; 4th, athletic sports ...
— History of Rome from the Earliest times down to 476 AD • Robert F. Pennell
... clime, abundantly over those green, central lawns; who scooped out hollows in fit places, and, setting great basins of marble in them, caused ever-gushing fountains to fill them to the brim; who reared up the immemorial obelisk out of the soil that had long hidden it; who placed pedestals along the borders of the avenues, and crowned them with busts of that multitude of worthies—statesmen, heroes, artists, men of letters and of ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume I. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Bignonne, the Phelipee. These are compliments proper to be made by the botanists, not only to those of their own rank, but to the greatest persons; for a plant is a monument of a more durable nature than a medal or an obelisk; and yet, as a proof that even these vehicles are not always sufficient to transmit to futurity the name conjoined with them, the Nicotiana is now scarcely known by any other name than that ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 6 - Reviews, Political Tracts, and Lives of Eminent Persons • Samuel Johnson
... the sad event an obelisk was erected on the place where they fell, and in the cemetery at Wimille, their place of burial is marked by the stone carving ...
— Chatterbox, 1905. • Various
... swarming in the gardens, and fancied the Swiss in the windows yonder; where they were to be slaughtered when the King had turned his back. What a great man that Carlyle is! I have read the battle in his History so often, that I knew it before I had seen it. Our windows look out on the obelisk where the guillotine stood. The Colonel doesn't admire Carlyle. He says Mrs. Graham's Letters from Paris are excellent, and we bought Scott's Visit to Paris, and Paris Re-visited, and read them in the diligence. They are famous good reading; but the Palais Royal is very much ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Aryans by Herodotus. They had spread over the highlands of Western Asia in the primeval ages, and formed various tribes. The first notice of this Aryan (or Arian) race, appears in the inscriptions on the black obelisk of Nimrod, B.C. 880, from which it would appear that this was about the period of the immigration into Media, and they were then exposed to the aggressions of the Assyrians. "The first king who menaced their independence was the monarch whose victories are recorded on the ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... return, the bragging, boasting blasphemies of this or that conquering king, all to the same tune—'I came, I saw, I conquered; I slew so many thousands of the people—I took so many thousands into captivity—I built this temple to the gods—I raised this obelisk or that pyramid'—and all by hand labour, with the miserable, belaboured slaves dying by their thousands upon thousands under their taskmasters' lashes, to be cast afterwards into the Nile, or left to the jackals and ...
— In the Mahdi's Grasp • George Manville Fenn
... them to the Ground; Here Art to Nature join'd makes it compleat, And Pyramids and Trees together meet; Statues amidst the thickest Grove arise, And lofty Columns tow'ring to the Skies; Then next an Obelisk its Shade displays, And rustic Rockwork fills each empty Space; Each joins to make it noble, and excells Beaufets for Food, Grotto's for ...
— The Ladies Delight • Anonymous
... sleigh and waded through a deep snowdrift to the granite obelisk erected by the first Alexander to mark the line between the two continents. It Is a plain shaft—- Bunker Hill monument in miniature—bearing the word "EUROPE" on one side, and "ASIA" on the other. Two fir trees planted by His August Majesty are on ...
— Overland through Asia; Pictures of Siberian, Chinese, and Tartar - Life • Thomas Wallace Knox
... other summits; for by this time I was thousands of feet above Little Ararat, the next highest peak visible, and could scarcely guess how many thousands. From this tremendous height it looked more like a broken obelisk than an independent summit twelve thousand eight hundred feet in height. Clouds covered the farther side of the great snow basin, and were seething like waves about the savage pinnacles, the towers of the Jinn palace, which guard its lower margin, and past which my upward ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... pretty towers. The bats came out, as if they knew how precious is their black at evening against the ethereal lemon color, the orange and the red. The little obelisk beyond the last sphinx on the left began to change, as in Egypt all things change at sunset—pylon and dusty bush, colossus and baked earth hovel, sycamore, and tamarisk, statue and trotting donkey. It looked like a mysterious finger ...
— The Spell of Egypt • Robert Hichens
... perplexed at the enigma, feeling just on the verge of comprehension, but baffled. I kept gazing from one to the other till Palus rounded the further goal and was largely hidden by the posts, the stand for the bronze tally-eggs, the obelisk and the other ornaments of the spina. ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... his arrival Sir Rufane Donkin laid the foundation of the first house of the now wealthy and flourishing, though not very imposing, town of Port Elizabeth, so named after his deceased wife, to whose memory an obelisk was subsequently erected on ...
— The Settler and the Savage • R.M. Ballantyne
... liv'd, In mansion prudently contriv'd; 400 Where neither tree nor house could bar The free detection of a star And nigh an ancient obelisk Was rais'd by him, found out by FISK, On which was a written not in words, 405 But hieroglyphic mute of birds, Many rare pithy saws concerning The worth of astrologic learning. From top of this there ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler
... this cairn was not allowed to remain, there has lately been erected, within sight of the Castle of St. Andrews, a granite obelisk, to commemorate the names of the more eminent Scotish Martyrs. ...
— The Works of John Knox, Vol. 1 (of 6) • John Knox
... now form the glory of the Vatican. The spot of the apostles' execution was indicated "by immemorial tradition" as between the two goals (inter duas metas) of Nero's Circus, which spot Signor Lanciani tells us is exactly the site of the obelisk now standing in the piazza of St. Peter. A little chapel, called the Chapel of the Crucifixion, stood there in the early ages, before any great basilica or ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 8 - The Later Renaissance: From Gutenberg To The Reformation • Editor-in-Chief: Rossiter Johnson
... also long pillars, or obelisks, which referred to the sea; and upon which was delineated the whole system both of heaven and earth; [Greek: amphis], all around, both on the front of the obelisk, and on the other sides. [Greek: Kiones Kosmou] were certainly maps, and histories of the universe; in the knowledge of which the Atlantians seem to have instructed their brethren the Herculeans. The Grecians, in their accounts, by putting one person for a people, have ...
— A New System; or, an Analysis of Antient Mythology. Volume II. (of VI.) • Jacob Bryant
... was necessary, as a matter of form, that the clothes I wore should be seen by the official appraiser. I had a half-holiday to enable me to call upon him, at his own time, at a house somewhere beyond the Obelisk. I recollect his coming out to look at me with his mouth full, and a strong smell of beer upon him, and saying good-naturedly that 'that would do,' and 'it was all right.' Certainly the hardest creditor would not have been disposed ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... disposed by millions, represented lofty arcades of elegant proportion, with their several pillars, cornices, and other suitable ornaments. The eye, astonished, though not dazzled, penetrated through the garden, and, directed by this avenue of light, embraced a view of the temporary obelisk erected on the ridge of the gradual ascent, where stands the Barriere de Chaillot; the road on each side of the Champs Elysees presenting an illuminated perspective, whose vanishing ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon
... One obelisk standing in the midst of the open plain, a few waste mounds of debris, scattered blocks, and two or three lengths of crumbling wall, alone mark the place where once the city stood. Ka was worshipped there, and the Greek name of Heliopolis is but the translation of that which was given to ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 1 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... (Al-Haris), etc. Mr. Isaac Taylor (The Alphabet i. 169), preserves the old absurdity of "eleph-ant or ox-like (!) beast of Africa." Prof. Sayce finds the word al-ab (two distinct characters) in line 3, above the figure of an (Indian) elephant, on the black obelisk of Nimrod Mound, and ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... public places in the city of Paris, moreover, commemorate, more or less openly, what might be called the great stains on the history of the nation. The Place de la Concorde is that of the Guillotine, and the Luxor obelisk is the monument of the more than twenty-eight hundred victims beheaded by that axe. The Place de l'Hotel de Ville was formerly the Place de Greve, famous in all hangmen's annals,—burnings alive, tearings asunder by horses, breakings on the wheel, decapitations, hangings,—from Catherine de ...
— Paris from the Earliest Period to the Present Day; Volume 1 • William Walton
... life and motion seemed to have invaded this assemblage of human beings, carriages and horses. In the distance the outlines of the Obelisk could be discerned in ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... he obtained possession of Calcutta in 1756—confining them in a narrow and noisome cell, which poisoned them with its malarious atmosphere, so that by morning only a few remained alive—is now part of a warehouse. But an obelisk stands at the entrance, inscribed with ...
— The Story of Ida Pfeiffer - and Her Travels in Many Lands • Anonymous
... The narrow streets, devoid of footways, and choked, in every obscure corner, by heaps of dung-hill-rubbish, contrast so strongly, in their cramped dimensions, and their filth and darkness, with the broad square before some haughty church; in the center of which, a hieroglyphic-covered obelisk, brought from Egypt in the days of the Emperors, looks strangely on the foreign scene about it; or perhaps an ancient pillar, with its honored statue overthrown, supports a Christian saint; Marcus Aurelius giving place to Paul, and Trajan to St. Peter. Then, there are the ponderous ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 7 - Italy, Sicily, and Greece (Part One) • Various
... man with a very little empty donkey-cart, standing near the Obelisk, in the Blackfriars Road, whose eye I caught as I was going by, and who, addressing me as 'Sixpenn'orth of bad ha'pence,' hoped 'I should know him agin to swear to'—in allusion, I have no doubt, to my staring at him. I stopped to assure ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... granite obelisk covered with hieroglyphics at the end of the square is called the Obelisk of Theodosius the Great. It was originally erected in the Temple of the Sun in Egypt in 1600 B.C. by a haughty king who inscribed on the stone a statement that he had 'conquered the whole ...
— A Trip to the Orient - The Story of a Mediterranean Cruise • Robert Urie Jacob
... our fishing proceeded energetically but without bringing up any rarities. Our dragnet was filled with Midas abalone, harp shells, obelisk snails, and especially the finest hammer shells I had seen to that day. We also gathered in a few sea cucumbers, some pearl oysters, and a dozen small turtles that we saved for the ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... Colonna gardens with bridges over the way, and green-clipped hedges and reddening Judas-trees under the big pines, and a row of marble Emperors turning their backs; and, further, the Quirinal with tip of obelisk, and plaster trumpet-blowing Fame; and a palm-tree, its head rising out of I know not what hidden yard, in front of a terrace of drying rags. And at every vista end, pines of the Pincian, Villa Doria, &c.; and domes; and the pale blond roofs with the telephone wires like gossamer ...
— The Spirit of Rome • Vernon Lee
... was doing neither, and the needle proved refractory in his cold fingers, he was swearing to himself. For there was no fire in the room. The materials for a fire were there, and a white tile stove, as cozy as an obelisk in a cemetery, stood in the corner. But fires are expensive, and hardly necessary when one sleeps with all one's windows open—one window, to be exact, the room being very small—and spends most of the day in a warm and comfortable ...
— The Street of Seven Stars • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... end of the Rue de Rome the violent chilly breath of the mistral enveloped the victoria in a great widening of brilliant sunshine without heat. We turned to the right, circling at a stately pace about the rather mean obelisk which stands at ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... Rome were again borne off to decorate this new Capitol. The Emperor Constantine there erected a column a hundred feet high, and placed his statue on it; Theodosius also erected a column and an obelisk; but Justinian excelled all these, and about 543 A.D. set up a monument with a colossal equestrian statue of himself in bronze upon it. The column which supported this statue was of brick masonry covered with plates of bronze. ...
— A History of Art for Beginners and Students - Painting, Sculpture, Architecture • Clara Erskine Clement
... city stood on a height beside the sea, and contained a great sanctuary of Astarte, where in the midst of a spacious open court, surrounded by cloisters and approached from below by staircases, rose a tall cone or obelisk, the holy image of the goddess. In this sanctuary the rites of Adonis were celebrated. Indeed the whole city was sacred to him, and the river Nahr Ibrahim, which falls into the sea a little to the south of Byblus, bore in antiquity the name ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... side. In the opposite direction, at the top of a long, gentle slope, a mile and a half away, you will see the grand Triumphal Arch. That is at the barrier of the city. The view is not entirely open, however, out to the arch. About midway, in the centre of the Grand Alley, is a tall obelisk, standing on a high pedestal, and farther along there are one or two fountains. Still you can see the Triumphal Arch very plainly, it is so large, ...
— Rollo in Paris • Jacob Abbott
... The obelisk generously presented by the Khedive of Egypt to the city of New York has safely arrived in this country, and will soon be erected in that metropolis. A commission for the liquidation of the Egyptian ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Rutherford B. Hayes • Rutherford B. Hayes
... of which are clearly interpolations in the places where they are given. This is especially true of the one [Footnote: IV. 36.] which refers to the Anu-Adad and Ishtar temples, for not only is the insertion awkward, we know from the Obelisk [Footnote: II. 13.] that the Anu-Adad temple was not completed till year five, so that it must be an interpolation of that date. In spite of its general resemblance to D, especially in its omissions, B is very poorly ...
— Assyrian Historiography • Albert Ten Eyck Olmstead
... own side, but both sides of this controversy. O too humble fools, why should you wish to destroy your enemies? You have done something more to them. You have created your enemies. You wish to pull down that gigantic silver hammer, which stands, like an obelisk, in the centre of the Broadway of Hammersmith. Fools! Before Notting Hill arose, did any person passing through Hammersmith Broadway expect to see there a gigantic silver hammer? You wish to abolish the great bronze figure of a knight standing upon the artificial bridge at ...
— The Napoleon of Notting Hill • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... characteristic of the hero. This pyramid ended in a funeral urn surmounted by a crown of fire. On the front of the pyramid were placed the arms of the duke, and medallions commemorating the most remarkable events of his life borne by genii. Under the obelisk was placed the sarcophagus containing the remains of the marshal, at the corners of which were trophies composed of banners taken from his enemies, and innumerable silver candelabra were placed on the steps by which the platform ...
— The Private Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Constant
... his servile disposition, had drored up his leg with a higher and a higher relish, and was now discovered to be waving his corkscrew over his head. It was at this moment that Mrs. Sniff, who had kep' her eye upon him like the fabled obelisk, descended on her victim. Our Missis followed them both out, and cries was heard in the ...
— Mugby Junction • Charles Dickens
... we have any record has avoided a recrudescence of barbarism for an hundred generations. A few centuries of our wasting climate obliterates inscriptions on brass and wrecks the proudest monuments of marble. The recently imported Egyptian obelisk, which stood for ages on Nilus' plain, is already falling into ruins. We can scarce decipher the deep-cut epitaphs of the Pilgrim Fathers. The mansion of the sire is uninhabitable for the son. The history of McKinley's promised era of "Progress and Prosperity" will be written by the press reporter, ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... the piazza itself, it had not yet, as the reader will understand from the foregoing explanation, either the fine colonnade of Bernini, or the dancing fountains, or that Egyptian obelisk which, according to Pliny, was set up by the Pharaoh at Heliopolis, and transferred to Rome by Caligula, who set it up in Nero's Circus, where it remained till 1586. Now, as Nero's Circus was situate on the very ground where ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... cultivation ceased in despair of success; and alike on the bare uplands and in the deep-scored valleys there were few signs of human life. Then, suddenly, in such a setting, we came upon the grandest of the Seven Marvels, the most wonderful lone rock in Europe, Mont Aiguille, more like an obelisk of incalculable immensity than a mountain. Once, it had been considered unscalable, and might have remained virgin until this century of hardy climbers, had not Charles the Eighth had a fancy to hear (not to see!) what was on top. Up went a few ...
— The Princess Passes • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... expressive of the gratitude of the people. The pyramid in the Rue d'Angiviller was supported on a base six feet high by twelve broad; it rose to the height of fifteen feet, and was terminated by a globe. Four blocks of stone, placed at the angles, corresponded with the obelisk, and gave it an elegant appearance. Several inscriptions, in honour of the King and Queen, were affixed to it. I went to see this singular monument, ...
— Memoirs Of The Court Of Marie Antoinette, Queen Of France, Complete • Madame Campan
... the stillness of a holiday evening, and the lawns of Bagatelle were as fresh as June. Below the Arc de Triomphe, the Champs Elysees sloped downward in a sun-powdered haze to the mist of fountains and the ethereal obelisk; and the currents of summer life ebbed and flowed with a normal beat under the trees of the radiating avenues. The great city, so made for peace and art and all humanest graces, seemed to lie by her river-side like a princess guarded by the watchful ...
— Fighting France - From Dunkerque to Belport • Edith Wharton
... obelisk in the garden, erected by Pope to the memory of his mother, he placed the ...
— Flowers and Flower-Gardens • David Lester Richardson
... I looked upon England from the box of a stage-coach, upon France from the coupe of a diligence, upon Italy from the cushion of a carrozza. The broken windows of Apsley House were still boarded up when I was in London. The asphalt pavement was not laid in Paris. The Obelisk of Luxor was lying in its great boat in the Seine, as I remember it. I did not see it erected; it must have been an exciting scene to witness, the engineer standing underneath, so as to be crushed by the great stone if it disgraced him by falling in the process. As for the dynasties which ...
— Our Hundred Days in Europe • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... shining and hardened element were seen modelled into a thousand quaint and grotesque patterns. Here a fountain, perfectly formed with Ionic and Doric columns, was reflecting a thousand prismatic hues from the diamond-like stalactites which had attached themselves to its crest. There a huge obelisk, which, if of stone, might have come from ancient Thebes, lay half buried beneath a pile of fleecy snow. Farther on we came to what might have been a Roman temple or vast hall in the palace of a Caesar, where many half-hidden pillars and monuments erected their tapering summits above ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various
... McKinlay, the leader of the Burke Relief Expedition, and the explorer, under great difficulties, of the northern territory. Mr. McKinlay died at Gawler in December, 1874, and it was resolved to perpetuate his memory by the erection of an obelisk in the cemetery. The 14th of November was the day appointed for the ceremony, and after I had laid the stone with the customary forms, there was a luncheon, presided over by Mr. W.F. Wincey, the Mayor of Gawler. He delivered a really eloquent address, describing the character ...
— Explorations in Australia • John Forrest
... of the golden statue of Dura, sixty cubits by six, is irreconcileable with any theory of proportion suited to the human figure, and still more so with the canon of Assyrian art, as seen in their sculpture, and can apply only to an obelisk; (4) that Daniel has made honourable mention of himself; (5) that the position of the book in the third part of the Jewish canon, the Cethubim or Hagiographa, shows that it was written later ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... During the periodical cuttings of the copse, which the necessities of the family of St. Ronan's brought round more frequently than Ponty would have recommended, some oaks had been spared in the neighbourhood of this massive obelisk, old enough perhaps to have heard the whoop and halloo which followed the fall of the stag, and to have witnessed the raising of the rude monument by which that great event was commemorated. These trees, with their broad ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... on the tower; and here I must declare that though I forgive the tower, I cannot forgive the horrid obelisk which has latterly been built opposite to it, on the Canadian side, up above the fall; built apparently—for I did not go to it—with some camera-obscura intention for which the projector deserves to be put in Coventry by all good Christian men and women. At such a place ...
— Volume 1 • Anthony Trollope
... sires the old man appears again. When eighty years had passed, he walked once more in King street. Five years later, in the twilight of an April morning, he stood on the green beside the meeting-house at Lexington where now the obelisk of granite with a slab of slate inlaid commemorates the first-fallen of the Revolution. And when our fathers were toiling at the breastwork on Bunker's Hill, all through that night the old warrior walked his rounds. Long, long may it ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... stood near the arch, and the volunteer companies, and the U. S. troops passed him in regular succession, with flags flying and music floating in the air. The troops then formed themselves again in line, and Lafayette on foot, passed down the line. He was carried to the obelisk, situated on the spot where Vimionel had stormed the second redoubt.—The review over, and Lafayette having seen and been seen by all the troops, be mounted his barouche in company with the governor, and was followed by the other carriages. The whole body of ...
— Memoirs of General Lafayette • Lafayette
... the shrubberies, hidden from public view, is an obelisk commemorating the fall of Simon de Montfort, and in the plantation near the lower road is a tower, like the house denoting the period of the late Georgian Gothic revival, and bearing the name of ...
— Evesham • Edmund H. New
... sufficiently identified the Ground of the Battle with the contemporaneous Accounts of it. As I happened to know the Field well—the greater part of it then belonging to my Family—I knew that Carlyle and Arnold had been mistaken—misled in part by an Obelisk which my Father had set up as on the highest Ground of the Field, but which they mistook for the centre-ground of the Battle. This I told Carlyle, who was very reluctant to believe that he and Arnold could have ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... three quarters of an hour. We had coffee with him. He spoke much of his wishes to improve his people, enquired where I was going, if I was pleased with Egypt, and paid me some compliments. After the interview I rode to the Obelisk. On my return I called on Mr Salt. I found him much alarmed at the non-arrival of a despatch which had been sent by an English sloop of war. The Porte had refused the mediation, and the English Admiral ...
— Diaries of Sir Moses and Lady Montefiore, Volume I • Sir Moses Montefiore
... the emperor returned to the east, he determined to revisit the ancient capital; and Rome, after an interval of more than thirty years, became for a brief space the residence the sovereign. He signalized his visit by presenting to the city an obelisk, which at a vast expense he procured to be transported from Egypt. 23. The renewed efforts of the Persians and other enemies of the empire in the East, recalled Constan'tius to Constantinople, ...
— Pinnock's Improved Edition of Dr. Goldsmith's History of Rome • Oliver Goldsmith
... with distinction and maintained their reputation right up to the end of the siege. Visitors to Mafeking may now see near the obelisk in front of the pretty town hall of the famous siege town, a five-pounder gun "captured by the Cape Police during the siege". This gun was seized by the coloured Sergeant Bell and two other subalterns of the "Cape Boys" contingent; their contingent was then under the command of ...
— Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since • Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje
... city, broad avenues lined by negro shanties and patches of cultivation, great public buildings and an immense post office, a lifeless museum, an inert university, a splendid desert library, a street of souvenir shops, a certain industry of "seeing Washington," an idiotic colossal obelisk. It seems an ideal nest for the tariff manipulator, a festering corner of delegates and agents and secondary people. In the White House, in the time of President Roosevelt, the present writer found a transitory glow of intellectual activity, the spittoons ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... the representatives of the ancient sacrifice to the dead. We drink to the memory of the deceased as though pouring out libations to them. Our tombstones are direct descendants of the menhir and the obelisk, our altar-tombs of the dolmen, our family vault ...
— Castles and Cave Dwellings of Europe • Sabine Baring-Gould
... him to his feet, set him by his obelisk to face me. I loaded his piece for him, put it into his hands, then stepped back, facing him always, till I was fifteen yards away. "Drop your glove when you are ready," I ...
— The Fool Errant • Maurice Hewlett
... Marrying him would be a deed committed in spite of his express warning. She went so far as to conceive him subsequently saying: "I warned you." She conceived the state of marriage with him as that of a woman tied not to a man of heart, but to an obelisk lettered all over with hieroglyphics, and everlastingly hearing him expound them, relishing renewing his lectures ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... beyond, on the other side of the Rhine, which are very much loftier—the first impression gives no idea of the extraordinary height of the spire. We continued to descend, slowly and cautiously, with Saverne before us in the bottom. To the left, close to the road side, stands an obelisk: on which is fixed, hi gilt letters, this ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Two • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... mother's, in this great wild heart of Luther;" and adds: "I will call this Luther a true Great Man; great in intellect, in courage, affection, and integrity; one of our most lovable and precious men. Great not as a hewn obelisk, but as an Alpine mountain, so simple, honest, spontaneous; not setting up to be great at all; there for quite another purpose than being great. Ah, yes, unsubduable granite, piercing far and wide into the Heavens; yet, in the clefts of it, fountains, ...
— Luther and the Reformation: - The Life-Springs of Our Liberties • Joseph A. Seiss
... time and activity in editing and arranging the manuscripts of the departed. The "Grammar," the "Monuments," the "Dictionary," were all published by Figeac. At "Pere Lachaise" Cemetery, in Paris, a weather-beaten obelisk and a broken stone tablet indicate the spot where the ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various
... mar the grand outlines of such a history," he murmured to himself; "who would carve flowers upon the pyramids, or crown with daisies an obelisk pointing to ...
— Hebrew Heroes - A Tale Founded on Jewish History • AKA A.L.O.E. A.L.O.E., Charlotte Maria Tucker
... interest is the Aiguille, a Roman obelisk seventy-six feet high. There is a square base, pierced by arches in each face, and the obelisk, or pyramid rather, stands on this. It is not very beautiful, but it is worth examining. It is thought that the monument to Marius ...
— In Troubadour-Land - A Ramble in Provence and Languedoc • S. Baring-Gould
... great light upon many obscure periods of history. Among these volumes, it is said, some are calculated to give a complete interpretation of hieroglyphic writing—the discoverer having already successfully applied them to the interpretation of the inscriptions engraved on the obelisk of the Hippodrome at Constantinople. This may be quite true, but such statements are to be received ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... tobacco-manufactory of Sedlitz, near which we first see the Elbe, but only for a short time, as it soon takes another direction. Passing the small town of Collin, we are whirled close by the battle-field where, in the year 1757, the great King Frederick paid his score to the Austrians. An obelisk, erected a few years since to the memory of General Daun, occupies a small eminence on the right. On the left is the plain of Klephorcz, where the Austrian army ...
— Visit to Iceland - and the Scandinavian North • Ida Pfeiffer
... which is tufted with trees in the prettiest manner imaginable; on the other side a rich scenery of wood, among which is Dr. Norris's house. To the right, on a rising ground on the banks of the river, is the obelisk, backed by a very bold declivity. Pursued the road till near it, quitted my chaise, and walked to the foot of it. It is founded on a rock which rises boldly from the river. It is a noble pillar, and admirably placed. I seated myself on the ...
— A Tour in Ireland - 1776-1779 • Arthur Young
... The great obelisk in Central Park, New York, is one of the most noted monoliths in the world. It was quarried, carved and erected about the time of Abraham, to commemorate the deeds of an ancient Pharaoh. Five hundred years later the conquering Sesostris, the bad ...
— Reading Made Easy for Foreigners - Third Reader • John L. Huelshof
... kverko. Oakum stupo. Oar remilo. Oasis oazo. Oath (legal) jxuro. Oath (curse) blasfemo. Oatmeal grio. Obduracy obstineco. Obdurate obstina. Obedience obeo. Obedient obea. Obeisance riverenco. Obelisk obelisko. Obese grasega. Obesity vastkorpeco. Obey obei. Obituary nekrologio. Object (end, aim) celo. Object kontrauxparoli. Object objekto. Objection kontrauxparolo. Objectionable riprocxeblinda. Objective (purpose) celo. Oblation ofero. Obligation ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... great square, with its obelisk and circle of statues, its pavilions and balustrades; beautiful now, and peaceful, but peopled with ghastly memories—for it was here the Revolution set up its guillotine, and it was here that some four thousand men and women, high and low, looked their ...
— The Destroyer - A Tale of International Intrigue • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... from various parts of the country had assembled for the occasion, and formed a brilliant escort to an immense procession, as it moved from Boston to the battle-ground on the hill. The bank which slopes down from the obelisk on the eastern side of Monument Square was covered with seats, rising in the form of an amphitheatre, under the open sky. These had been prepared for ladies, who had assembled in great numbers, awaiting ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... reports, letters, pamphlets and books, a man had cleared a space for himself where he was now seated, clutching his hair impatiently from time to time, as he endeavored to decipher a page of notes, compared to which the hieroglyphics on the obelisk of Luxor, would have been transparently intelligible. Just as the secretary's impatience was approaching desperation, the door opened and a young officer wearing ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas
... and is wretchedly got up; their black turns rusty, like old mourning; they wear very indifferent fur; and take to the shabbiest cotton velvet, instead of silk velvet. I am on terms of recognition with several small streets of cats, about the Obelisk in Saint George's Fields, and also in the vicinity of Clerkenwell Green, and also in the back settlements of Drury Lane. In appearance, they are very like the women among whom they live. They seem to turn ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... governor and his lady, that he remained at St. Salvador's a month, every day being a festival, and then left it with regret. In commemoration of the visit, a spot was cleared near the fortress of St. Peter's, and commanding a fine view over the whole of the beautiful bay, and there an obelisk was erected with an inscription, stating its purpose, and the surrounding ground was planted and converted into ...
— Journal of a Voyage to Brazil - And Residence There During Part of the Years 1821, 1822, 1823 • Maria Graham
... other ornaments were rows of gigantic heads, which, no doubt, were intended to represent those of apes; for amongst the fragments were the remains of the body of a colossal ape, strongly resembling in outline and appearance one of the four monstrous animals which once stood in front of the obelisk of Luxor, and which, under the name of Cynocephali, were worshipped at Thebes. This fragment was ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... having uttered her news, so did he fly from her. The afflicted walk fast. He was soon down by the river, and turned West along its wall. The moon was up, bright and nearly full, and the steel-like shimmer of its light burnished the ebbing water. A cruel night! He came to the Obelisk, and leaned against it, overcome by a spasm of realisation. He seemed to see his dead wife's face staring at him out of the past, like an accusation. "How have you cared for Nollie, that she should have come to this?" It became the face of the moonlit sphinx, staring straight at him, the ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... lord of Kau in his ancestral temple, assisted by his ministers or great officers in pouring out the libations to the spirits of the departed. The libation-cup was fitted with a handle of jade, that used by the king having a complete kwei, the obelisk-like symbol of rank, while the cups used by a minister had for a handle ...
— The Shih King • James Legge
... Brewster. Macpherson in his will ordered that his body should be buried in Westminster Abbey, and left a sum of money to erect a monument to him near Belleville. He lies, accordingly, in Poets' Corner, and a marble obelisk to his memory may be seen near Kingussie, in the centre ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... for his interment; the brethren were ordered to attend with white aprons and gloves, and he forbade that the marks of blood which had been spilled in the temple, should be effaced until the assassins had been punished. In the meantime, Adoniram furnished a plan for a superb tomb and obelisk of white and black marble, which were finished in nine days. The tomb was entered by passing between two pillars, supporting a square stone surrounded by three circles; on the stone was engraved the letter J. On the tomb, was a device representing a virgin, etc. (as in third ...
— The Mysteries of Free Masonry - Containing All the Degrees of the Order Conferred in a Master's Lodge • William Morgan
... expression of phallic ideas. The simple upright for purposes of sex worship is universally found. An upright conical stone is frequently mentioned. Many of the stone idols or pillars, the worship of which was forbidden by the Bible, come under this group. Likewise, the obelisk, found not only in Egypt, but in modified forms in many other countries as well, embodies the same phallic principle. The usual explanation of the obelisk is that it represented the rays of the sun ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... expresses the River God's terror lest the tower should fall upon him; and how the architect retorted upon the sculptor by placing Saint Agnes on the summit of the church, in the act of reassuring the Romans as to the safety of her shrine; and again, how Bernini's enemies said that the obelisk of the fountain was tottering, till he came alone on foot and tied four lengths of twine to the four corners of the pedestal, and fastened the strings to the nearest houses, in derision, and went away laughing. It was at that time that he modelled four grinning masks for ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 1 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... Monument on the Field of Mollwitz, and so closing his old career. Subscriptions did not take, in that April, 1841, nor in the following months or twelve-months: the zealous Doctor, therefore, indignantly drew his own purse; got a big Obelisk of Granite hewn ready, with suitable Inscription on it; carted his big Obelisk from the quarries of Strehlen; assembled the Country round it, on Mollwitz Field; and passionately discoursed and ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... guests listened to the "Eglogue de Versailles," composed for the occasion by Lully, leader of the Petits-Violons, Louis' favorite Court orchestra. Afterwards all the nobles and their fair companions returned to sup at Versailles in a wood where the Basin of the Obelisk now is. ...
— The Story of Versailles • Francis Loring Payne
... came upon it ere I was aware, and the Pillar of Pompey got entangled in the various wheels of the machine, and damaged the whole considerably. Still I drove on through thick and thin, till, passing over that great obelisk, the Needle of Cleopatra, the work got entangled again, and jolted at a miserable rate over the mud and swampy ground of all that country; yet my poor bulls trotted on with astonishing labour across the Isthmus of Suez into the Red Sea, and left a track, ...
— The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen • Rudolph Erich Raspe
... ancestors, are to be obtained only by analyzing their virtues. These virtues, indeed, are not seen charactered in breathing bronze, or in living marble. Our ancestors have left no Corinthian temples on our hills, no Gothic cathedrals on our plains, no proud pyramid, no storied obelisk, in our cities. But mind is there. Sagacious enterprise is there. An active, vigorous, intelligent, moral population throng our cities, and predominate in our fields;—men, patient of labor, submissive to law, respectful ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... continued to descend the Corso. As they approached the Piazza del Popolo, the crowd became more dense, and above the heads of the multitude two objects were visible: the obelisk, surmounted by a cross, which marks the centre of the square, and in front of the obelisk, at the point where the three streets, del Babuino, del Corso, and di Ripetta, meet, the two uprights of the scaffold, between which glittered the curved ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... the best point of vantage from which the visitor can get a good view of the cathedral is the summit of the Dane John, a lofty mound crowned by an obelisk; from this height we look across at the roof and towers of the cathedral rising above thickly clustering trees: from here also there is a fine view over the beautiful valley of the Stour in the ...
— The Cathedral Church of Canterbury [2nd ed.]. • Hartley Withers
... Arabian, Abenephi, who uses this language: (This Arabic writing is preserved in the Vatican library, but not as yet printed: it is often quoted by Athanasius Kircher, in his Treatise on the Pamphilian Obelisk, whence these and other matters stated by us have been taken.) 'But there were four kinds of writing among the Egyptians: First, that in use among the populace and the ignorant; secondly, that in vogue among the philosophers and the educated; thirdly, ...
— Mysticism and its Results - Being an Inquiry into the Uses and Abuses of Secrecy • John Delafield
... Maurice Donnay occasionally, there has not been a single writer in the history of the French theatre so inevitably au courant with human nature. His form is frankly farcical and his plays are so funny, so enjoyable merely as good shows that it seems a pity to raise an obelisk in the playwright's honour, and yet the fact remains that he understands the political, social, domestic, amorous, even cloacal conditions of the French better than any of his contemporaries, always excepting the aforementioned Mirbeau. In On Purge Bebe he has ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... besides this granite obelisk: One, the house I built on the hill, With its spires, bay windows, and roof of slate. The other, the lake-front in Chicago, Where the railroad keeps a switching yard, With whistling engines and crunching wheels And ...
— Spoon River Anthology • Edgar Lee Masters
... lay on the ground shattered by a projectile, while near at hand the statue of Strasbourg, shrouded in heavy veils of crape, seemed to be mourning the ruin that surrounded it on every side. And near the Obelisk, which had escaped unscathed, a gas-pipe in its trench had been broken by the pick of a careless workman, and the escaping gas, fired by some accident, was flaring up in a great undulating jet, with ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... the navigator has no distant view of all this verdure and beauty. It lies so low that it continues beneath the horizon until the ship is close upon the shore. The first landmarks, in fact, which the seaman makes, are the tops of trees growing apparently out of the water, or the summit of an obelisk, or the capital of a pillar, marking the site of some ...
— Cleopatra • Jacob Abbott
... seat is Heliopolis or "On," where Joseph's master Potiphera, or "Priest of Ra," lived. Heliopolis is the "house of the obelisk," the obelisk being a representation of the sun. First a kindly old king, he is later a warrior; he has to contend with the serpent Apep, the dragon of darkness who appears pierced by the shafts of Ra. But as Ra sinks in the conflict ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies
... interesting of these remains is a ruin in the island of Bearnarey, in the Sound of Harris. It is evidently a chapel of the saint and is called Cill Aisaim. Near it once stood an obelisk about eight feet high, bearing sculptured symbols, and in comparatively recent years this was surrounded by heaps of coloured pebbles, coins, bone pins, and bronze needles, which were probably pilgrims offerings. The obelisk was broken up some years ago and its materials ...
— A Calendar of Scottish Saints • Michael Barrett
... nests, formerly, upon the leafless summit of a venerable chestnut-tree, on our farm, directly in front of the house, at the distance of less than half a mile. The withered trunk and boughs, surmounted by the coarse-wrought and capacious nest, was a more picturesque object than an obelisk; and the flights of the hawks, as they went forth to hunt, returned with their game, exercised themselves in wheeling round and round, and circling about it, were amusing to the beholder, almost from morning till night. The family of these hawks, old and young, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 486 - Vol. 17, No. 486., Saturday, April 23, 1831 • Various
... fire of London, exhibited to us, perhaps, chiefly on account of its immense height, apparently so disproportioned to its other dimensions (for it actually struck us as resembling rather a slender mast, towering up in immeasurable height into the clouds, than as that it really is, a stately obelisk) an unusual and singular appearance. Still we went on, and drew nearer and nearer with amazing velocity, and the surrounding objects became every moment more distinct. Westminster Abbey, the Tower, a steeple, one church, and then another, presented themselves to our view; and we could now plainly ...
— Travels in England in 1782 • Charles P. Moritz
... thread our way close inshore through innumerable islands. One of them stands up stiff and straight, pointing like an obelisk to the sky. It is called the Finger Rock. We notice, too, very frequently, the white lighthouses, kept very clean. Then we go through a pass, two miles wide, called "Steep Island Pass," and are into the mouth of the Yangtsekiang River. Up this we go for a hundred miles before ...
— Round the Wonderful World • G. E. Mitton
... club, who warned him sharply, and he only laughed.... But it's no rumor that he disappeared. He's gone, all right, and nobody knows where he went, and nobody seems to want to know. Officially they said he was drowned out swimming—or lost in a sandstorm riding in the desert—or spiked on top of an obelisk or something equally reasonable—but, privately, people say other things.... No international law intrudes into the ...
— The Palace of Darkened Windows • Mary Hastings Bradley
... An obelisk of gray Canadian granite now stands on this historic ground. Madame de la Peltrie did not remain more than two years in Ville-Marie, but returned to the convent at Quebec which she had left in a moment of caprice. Mdlle. Mance, who was Madame de Bullion's friend, remained ...
— Canada • J. G. Bourinot
... The Asterisk, the Obelisk, the Double Dagger, and sometimes other marks, [Footnote: For instance: the Section mark, [Section], and the Parallel, ||.] refer to ...
— Sanders' Union Fourth Reader • Charles W. Sanders
... and go, empires rise and fall, philosophies flourish and fail, and man seeks him out many inventions, but they stand silent under the bright Egyptian night, as fascinating as they are baffling. An obelisk is simply a pyramid, albeit the base has become a shaft, holding aloft the oldest emblems of solar faith—a Triangle mounted on a Square. When and why this figure became holy no one knows, save as we may conjecture that it was one of those sacred stones which gained its sanctity ...
— The Builders - A Story and Study of Masonry • Joseph Fort Newton
... Paris. The windows of the sitting-room of Claudine's mother looked over the palace and its gardens, its chestnut-trees and its fountains, the Seine and its quays, with a more distant view of the Place de la Concorde and its obelisk, the Chambers of the Legislature, and the gilded dome of the Tuileries. Every procession passed under Claudine's windows. No little girl, I think, who lives in rooms overlooking the Rue de Rivoli would wish to exchange them for any ...
— Harper's Young People, August 31, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... anchorage, or the like; but apart from this actual utility, and apart also from its acknowledged ornament as a sentinel on that flat strand, I take it to be an architectural absurdity to erect a regular-made column with little or nothing to support: an obelisk now, or a naval trophy, or a tower decorated with shields, or a huge stele or cippus, or a globe, or a pyramid, or a Waltham-cross sort of edifice, (of course all these supporting nothing on their apices,) in fact, any thing but a Corinthian ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... dome, and arch, column, and spire, and obelisk, and lofty terraces, and many-windowed palaces, rose in all directions from a mass of building which appeared to him each instant to grow more huge, till at length it seemed to occupy the whole horizon. The sun lent additional lustre to the dazzling quays of white ...
— The Voyage of Captain Popanilla • Benjamin Disraeli
... for a sketch, if possible, of this excellent purveyor. Pere Seguin was tall as an obelisk, strong as a Hercules, vif as gunpowder, thin and sinewy as any wolf in his beloved forests. His ear large, flat, and full of hair; his teeth long, white, regular, and sharp as those of his favourite and extraordinary dog; his eyes ...
— Le Morvan, [A District of France,] Its Wild Sports, Vineyards and Forests; with Legends, Antiquities, Rural and Local Sketches • Henri de Crignelle
... alight, and they cast reflections upon the still damp pavement about them. To either side, the trees of the Tuileries gardens and of the Cours la Reine and the Champs-Elysees lay in a solid black mass; in the middle, the obelisk rose slender and straight, its pointed top black against the sky; and beneath, the water of the Nereid fountains splashed and gurgled. Far beyond, the gay lights of the rue Royale shone in a yellow cluster; and beyond these still, the tall columns of the Madeleine ended the ...
— Jason • Justus Miles Forman
... thought to have seen you yesterday, or I should have written to thank you for your attentions in the Book way &c. Hone's address is, 22 Belvidere Place, Southwark. 'Tis near the Obelisk. I can only say we shall be most glad to see you, when weather suits, and that it will be a joyful surprisal to see the Hoods. I should write to them, but am poorly and nervous. Emma is very proud of her Valentine. Mary does not immediately want Books, having a damn'd consignment ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... forces of the understanding, very small would the matters have been which, even with their best efforts applied in conjunction, they could have attempted or accomplished. Now (to pause while upon this example and look in it as in a glass) let us suppose that some vast obelisk were (for the decoration of a triumph or some such magnificence) to be removed from its place, and that men should set to work upon it with their naked hands; would not any sober spectator think them mad? And if they should then send for more people, thinking ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... Greek and Roman buildings with which we are acquainted is the absence—save in a few and unimportant cases—of the pyramidal form. The Egyptians knew at least the worth of the obelisk: but the Greeks and Romans hardly knew even that: their buildings are flat- topped. Their builders were contented with the earth as it was. There was a great truth involved in that; which I am the last to deny. But religions which, like the Buddhist ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... nothing to do with the ancient world, but only with the old one. The church of Saint Trophimus, whose wonderful Romanesque porch is the principal ornament of the principal place, - a place otherwise distinguished by the presence of a slim and tapering obelisk in the middle, as well as by that of the Hotel de Ville and the museum - the interesting church of Saint Trophimus swears a little, as the French say, with the peculiar character of Arles. It is very remarkable, ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... the ancient world, until the time of the Greeks. They were called Aryans by Herodotus. They had spread over the highlands of Western Asia in the primeval ages, and formed various tribes. The first notice of this Aryan (or Arian) race, appears in the inscriptions on the black obelisk of Nimrod, B.C. 880, from which it would appear that this was about the period of the immigration into Media, and they were then exposed to the aggressions of the Assyrians. "The first king who menaced their independence was the monarch whose victories are recorded on ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... skill with which Addison imitated Virgil. His lines on the Barometer and the Bowling Green were applauded by hundreds, to whom the Dissertation on the Epistles of Phalaris was as unintelligible as the hieroglyphics on an obelisk. ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... view the monarch of Midianite mountains in the beauty and the majesty of his picturesque form. Seen from El-Muwaylah, he is equally magnificent in the flush of morning, in the still of noon, and in the evening glow. As the rays, which suggested the obelisk, are shooting over the southern crests, leaving the basement blue with a tint between the amethyst and the lapis lazuli, its northern third lies wrapped in a cloak of cold azure grey, and its central length already ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 2 • Richard Burton
... erected with inscriptions expressive of the gratitude of the people. The pyramid in the Rue d'Angiviller was supported on a base six feet high by twelve broad; it rose to the height of fifteen feet, and was terminated by a globe. Four blocks of stone, placed at the angles, corresponded with the obelisk, and gave it an elegant appearance. Several inscriptions, in honour of the King and Queen, were affixed to it. I went to see this singular monument, and recollect ...
— Memoirs Of The Court Of Marie Antoinette, Queen Of France, Complete • Madame Campan
... ascents, upon other summits; for by this time I was thousands of feet above Little Ararat, the next highest peak visible, and could scarcely guess how many thousands. From this tremendous height it looked more like a broken obelisk than an independent summit twelve thousand eight hundred feet in height. Clouds covered the farther side of the great snow basin, and were seething like waves about the savage pinnacles, the towers of the Jinn palace, which guard its lower margin, and past which my upward path ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... steeple, and pointed out the village of Ryswick, where in 1697 was signed the celebrated treaty of peace between France, England, Spain, Germany, and Holland. The castle of the Prince of Orange, where the treaty was signed, is no longer standing. An obelisk has ...
— Holland, v. 1 (of 2) • Edmondo de Amicis
... the night we dined on the Pylon at Karnak? After dinner you tried to show me the ruins by moonlight, and wherever we went a black-robed watchman followed us, or a black-robed watchman glided from behind a pillar, or an obelisk, or a crumbling wall, and faced us, and at last we took to flight. Well, that's what life is like to certain women; that's what life has been for a long time to me. Whenever I've tried to look at anything beautiful quietly, I've been followed or faced by a black-robed watchman, staring at ...
— Bella Donna - A Novel • Robert Hichens
... mound big with the monuments of three distinct ages. The tower is, therefore, the apex of a cone, from which the descent is equally steep on all sides, and which is only approached by a series of steps. To give in a few words an idea of the height of this tower, we may compare it to the obelisk of Luxor on its pedestal. The pedestal of the tower of Issoudun, which hid within its breast such archaeological treasures, was eighty feet high on the side towards the town. In an hour the cart was taken off its wheels and hoisted, piece by piece, ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... at any public ceremony on the Bosphorus as that which, on July 24, accompanied the remains of Hobart Pasha to their last resting place in the English cemetery at Scutari, not far from the spot where a tall granite obelisk records the brave deeds and glorious death of those heroes who perished in the ...
— Sketches From My Life - By The Late Admiral Hobart Pasha • Hobart Pasha
... grinning Gaul, a darkly-vested bishop with a gayly-attired child, a daintily-gloved belle with a mud-soiled drunkard; a little shoe-black and a blind fiddler ply their trades in the shadow of Emmet's obelisk, and a toy-merchant has Montgomery's mural tablet for a background; on the fence is a string of favorite ballads and popular songs; a mock auctioneer shouts from one door, and a silent wax effigy gazes from another. Pisani, who accompanied ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 110, December, 1866 - A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics • Various
... the opposite (north) bank of the Fishkill was old Fort Hardy, built during the French War, to cover the ford of the Hudson at this place. Within this fort, Burgoyne's army laid down its arms, October 17, 1777. On the heights back of the river a granite obelisk, one hundred and fifty-four feet high, has been built ...
— Burgoyne's Invasion of 1777 - With an outline sketch of the American Invasion of Canada, 1775-76. • Samuel Adams Drake
... one may be seen a double row of gigantic monsters in enamelled stone, painted in dazzling colours; finally, you pass into an enclosure with a gigantic tortoise in front of it, bearing on its back a marble obelisk covered with inscriptions. At the time of Madame de Bourboulon's visit the entrance was closed, and while the Ting-tchai went in search of the guardians, she and her companions dismounted, seated themselves on the greensward, in the shadow of some colossal larches, and enjoyed ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... in sight of the gray pinnacles of the Tuilleries, and the Gothic towers of Notre-Dame, and the Roman ones of St. Sulpice, and the dome of the Pantheon, under which lie the remains of so many of the great men of France, and the dark column of Place Vendome, wrought with figures in relief, and the obelisk brought from Egypt to ornament the Place Louis Quatorze, the associations with antiquity which the country presents, from being general, became particular and historical. They were recollections of power, and magnificence, and extended empire; of valor ...
— Letters of a Traveller - Notes of Things Seen in Europe and America • William Cullen Bryant
... who dart impatiently across the road when a practicable breach presents itself, equally so, it is found that too dense a population is less favourable to the brotherhood of the broom than one ever so sparse and thin. Had the negro of Waithman's obelisk survived the advent of Shillibeer, he would have had to shift his quarters, or to have drawn upon his three-and-a-half per cents. to maintain his position. The sweepers who work on the great lines of traffic from Oxford Street west to Aldgate, are consequently not nearly so numerous as they ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 437 - Volume 17, New Series, May 15, 1852 • Various
... expeditions were organised, as the Advance remained immovable. Some discoveries were made, but the expeditions ended in disaster. The Humboldt Glacier and Tennyson Monument—the latter a column of ice, like an obelisk four hundred and eighty feet high, on a pedestal—were visited. But nothing resulted from the excursions but blindness, privation, and suffering. An attempt was made to communicate with Sir E. Belcher on Beachey Island, but it failed, and another winter in the ice had to be faced. Some men ...
— Notable Voyagers - From Columbus to Nordenskiold • W.H.G. Kingston and Henry Frith
... did you do? You sat silent as the obelisk in the Place de la Concorde. It was I who made all the conversation. Monsieur ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... those of his two immediate predecessors at Abusir. As now laid bare by the excavations of 1900, it is seen to consist of an artificial mound, with a great court in front to the eastward. On the mound was erected a truncated obelisk, the stone emblem of the Sun-god. The worshippers in the court below looked towards the Sun's stone erected upon its mound in the west, the quarter of the sun's setting; for the Sun-god of Heliopolis ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, And Assyria In The Light Of Recent Discovery • L.W. King and H.R. Hall
... more neerer therevnto. And by how much the more I approximated the same, by so much the more the excellencie of the woorke shewed it selfe, increasing my desire to behould the same. For there appeared no longer a substance of vnknowne forme, but a rare Obelisk vpon a vast frame and stonie foundation, the heigth whereof without comparison did exceed the toppes of the sidelying mountaynes, although I thought that they had beene the renowmed Olympus[a], the famous Caucasus[b], ...
— Hypnerotomachia - The Strife of Loue in a Dreame • Francesco Colonna
... shapes formed not equally, as in existing fish, on each side the central vertebral column, but chiefly on the lower side—the column sending out its diminished vertebrae to the extreme termination of the fin. All the forms testify of a remote antiquity. The figures on a Chinese vase or an Egyptian obelisk are scarce more unlike what now exists in nature than are the fossils of the Lower Old ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... graves. Reared against the buttresses of the church was an old stone coffin, together with a fragment of a curious monumental effigy, likewise of stone; but the most striking objects in the place, and deservedly ranked amongst the wonders of Whalley, were three remarkable obelisk-shaped crosses, set in a line upon pedestals, covered with singular devices in fretwork, and all three differing in size and design. Evidently of remotest antiquity, these crosses were traditionally assigned to Paullinus, who, according ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... a "Descent from the Cross," by Perriss; (5) the window in the chancel to the memory of Colonel J.R.M. Chard, of Rorke's Drift fame, with a wreath preserved beneath it sent by Queen Victoria. The obelisk near the S. door is said to have once ...
— Somerset • G.W. Wade and J.H. Wade
... through a perfect cloud of dust now within a hundred yards of the game we shot through the thorny bushes. In another minute or two I was close up, and a splendid bull giraffe was crashing before me like a locomotive obelisk through the mimosas, bending the elastic boughs before him in his irresistible rush, which sprang back with a force that would have upset both horse and rider had I not carefully kept my distance. The jungle seemed alive with the ...
— The Albert N'Yanza, Great Basin of the Nile • Sir Samuel White Baker
... made." Dr. Eben sat down by her side, and they both waited in silence for the light. The whole western and southern sky glowed red; a high wind had been blowing all day, and the water was covered with foamy white caps; the tall, slender obelisk of the lighthouse stood out black against the red sky, and the shining waves leaped up and broke about its base. But all was quiet in the sheltered curve of the beach on which Hetty and Dr. Eben were sitting: the low surf rose ...
— Hetty's Strange History • Helen Jackson
... she will not say the same of me," replied Ligarius. "I am just as able to decipher an obelisk as to read a ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Contibutions to Knight's Quarterly Magazine] • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... erect in the Piazza di San Pietro the ponderous egyptian obelisk[27], which formerly adorned Nero's circus at the Vatican, he forbade on pain of death that any one should speak lest the attention of the workmen should be taken off from their arduous task. A naval officer of S. Remo, who happened to be present, foreseeing that the ropes would take fire, ...
— The Ceremonies of the Holy-Week at Rome • Charles Michael Baggs
... wide when the bullets were whistling across. Old people who dwell hereabouts will point out, the very spots on the western bank where our countrymen fell down and died; and on this side of the river an obelisk of granite has grown up from the soil that was fertilized with British blood. The monument, not more than twenty feet in height, is such as it befitted the inhabitants of a village to erect in illustration ...
— The Old Manse (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... which he preached. A bas-relief in white marble by the American sculptor, Story, commemorating the work of Wyclif, has been placed in the church at a cost of more than ten thousand dollars, and just outside a tall granite obelisk has been erected in his honor. In cleaning the walls recently, it was discovered that under several coats of paint there were some remarkable frescoes which, being slowly uncovered, were found to represent scenes in the life ...
— British Highways And Byways From A Motor Car - Being A Record Of A Five Thousand Mile Tour In England, - Wales And Scotland • Thomas D. Murphy
... Trieste, and about an hour's drive from it. This height showed Trieste and the Adriatic spread out like a map below, with hill and valley and dale waning faintly blue in the distance, and far away the Carnian Alps topped with snow. There was an old inn called Daneus's, close to an obelisk. They took partly furnished rooms, and brought up some of their own furniture to make up deficiencies and give the place a homelike air. It was their wont to come up to Opcina from Saturday to Monday, and get away from Trieste and worries. They always ...
— The Romance of Isabel Lady Burton Volume II • Isabel Lady Burton & W. H. Wilkins
... whenever the descendants of the Puritans are to show the spirit of their sires the old man appears again. When eighty years had passed, he walked once more in King street. Five years later, in the twilight of an April morning, he stood on the green beside the meeting-house at Lexington where now the obelisk of granite with a slab of slate inlaid commemorates the first-fallen of the Revolution. And when our fathers were toiling at the breastwork on Bunker's Hill, all through that night the old warrior walked his rounds. Long, long may it be ere he comes ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the son of Sir Andrew Moray, patriot and friend of Wallace, in whom the Morays of Abercairny find their origin. Such were the men; and over there on Tomachastel was their home—a place famous then, and very noticeable still, with its gleaming memorial obelisk to "oor Davie" of Ferntower, the hardy soldier who overcame the fierce Tippoo Sahib at Seringapatam. Beyond lie the Aberuchill Hills, with the flat pyramidal face of Ben Voirlich filling up a gap, and sending its roots, on one side, down into "lone Glenartney's hazel ...
— Chronicles of Strathearn • Various
... Zoe with her arm round nurse's neck, and her handkerchief to nurse's eyes, murmuring, "There—there—don't cry, nurse; everybody esteems you, and that lady did not mean to affront you; she did not say 'obelisk;' she said 'obstacle.' That only means that you stand in the way of her improvements; there was not much harm in that, you know. And, nurse, please give that lady her way, to oblige me; for it is by my brother's ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade
... forgot our womanhood in the dear, dead past," she confessed. "Me? Sure! Where's that photo album. Where did I put that album anyway? That's the way in this house. Get things straightened up once, you can't find a single one you want. Look where I put it now!" She demolished an obelisk of books on the table, one she had lately constructed with some pains, and brought the album that had been its pedestal. "Get ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... time attacking the mill; but it was not likely that they would be punctual—some of the hands would be sure to be late. There would be discussion and delay before starting. They might well be half an hour after the time named before they left the steeple, as the obelisk in Sir George Armitage's field was called by the country people. He might be in time yet, but it would be a close thing; and had his own life depended upon the result Ned could ...
— Through the Fray - A Tale of the Luddite Riots • G. A. Henty
... many trees that assume the shape of an obelisk, or a long spire; but Nature, who presents to our eyes an ever-charming variety of forms as well as hues, in the objects of her creation, has given us the figure of the obelisk in the Chinese Juniper, in the Balsam Fir, in the Arbor-Vitae, and lastly in the Lombardy ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... Field of Mollwitz, and so closing his old career. Subscriptions did not take, in that April, 1841, nor in the following months or twelve-months: the zealous Doctor, therefore, indignantly drew his own purse; got a big Obelisk of Granite hewn ready, with suitable Inscription on it; carted his big Obelisk from the quarries of Strehlen; assembled the Country round it, on Mollwitz Field; and passionately discoursed and pleaded, That at least the Country should bring block-and-tackle, with proper framework, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... who warned him sharply, and he only laughed.... But it's no rumor that he disappeared. He's gone, all right, and nobody knows where he went, and nobody seems to want to know. Officially they said he was drowned out swimming—or lost in a sandstorm riding in the desert—or spiked on top of an obelisk or something equally reasonable—but, privately, people say other things.... No international law intrudes into the ...
— The Palace of Darkened Windows • Mary Hastings Bradley
... us, and for several miles northward and eastward, the churches are small; yet several of them have features of considerable interest. Let us turn our steps northward. The road takes us in sight of a column, or obelisk, surmounted by a bust of the first Duke of Wellington. The history of this is told by the inscription on the pedestal: “Waterloo Wood was raised from acorns sown immediately after the memorable battle of Waterloo, when victory was achieved by the great Captain of the age, his Grace the Duke of ...
— Records of Woodhall Spa and Neighbourhood - Historical, Anecdotal, Physiographical, and Archaeological, with Other Matter • J. Conway Walter
... became apparent just then that the opening close ahead of them was too narrow for the sledge to pass. It was narrowed by a buttress, or projection, of the cathedral-berg, which jutted up close to a vast obelisk of ice about forty feet high, ...
— The Giant of the North - Pokings Round the Pole • R.M. Ballantyne
... first, that the letters are very bad; secondly, that they are spurious; and thirdly, that, whether they be bad or good, spurious or genuine, Temple could know nothing of the matter; inasmuch as he was no more able to construe a line of them than to decipher an Egyptian obelisk. ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... distant, and almost in the middle of the valley stood an immense obelisk of rock some three hundred feet high, dividing, some distance from the top into three sharp pinnacles. On the surface of the middle spire could be seen a small black dot. The Indians were dancing with excitement, and the boys ...
— The Boy Scouts on the Yukon • Ralph Victor
... horse to a wayside cross in the snow, and afterward saw it dangling from the church-spire of what had been a buried city. But here the cross does not stand as it does on the top of a spire; but as it does on the top of an Egyptian obelisk in Rome,— where the priests have put a cross on the top of the heathen monument; for fear it should walk. I entirely sympathise with their sentiment; and I shall try to suggest later why I think ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... with the magnificent array of the Rue de Rivoli, that enormous regiment of stone stretching for five miles and presenting arms before the Tuileries. Think of the late Fleet Prison and Waithman's Obelisk, and of the Place de la Concorde and the Luxor Stone! "The finest site in Europe," as Trafalgar Square has been called by some obstinate British optimist, is disfigured by trophies, fountains, columns, and statues so puerile, disorderly, and ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... columns and statues, executed after the design of Buonaroti. Within-side you find yourself in a noble piazza, from whence three of the principal streets of Rome are detached. It is adorned with the famous Aegyptian obelisk, brought hither from the Circus Maximus, and set up by the architect Dominico Fontana in the pontificate of Sixtus V. Here is likewise a beautiful fountain designed by the same artist; and at the beginning of the ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... were laid flat—wrecked. During a minute and a half the wind blew 123 miles an hour; no official record made after that, when it may have reached 150. It cut down an obelisk. It carried an American ship into the woods after breaking the chains of two anchors. They now use four-two forward, two astern. Common report says it killed 1,200 in Port Louis alone, in half an hour. Then came the lull of the central calm—people did not know the ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... of time most of their heavy stone buildings have sunk into the soft ground and become completely covered by deposits of mud. So, as at Memphis, all that now remains of ancient Heliopolis, or On, is one granite obelisk, standing alone in the fields; while at other places, such as Tamai or Bete-el-Haga near Mansurah, practically ...
— Peeps at Many Lands: Egypt • R. Talbot Kelly
... foreign touch, as in the blossoming vine, would have disturbed the flower-nuptials of their souls. They turned rather, and winded up into the churchyard to preserve their mood. Majestic on the groves and mountains stood the Night before man's heart, and made that also great. Over the white steeple-obelisk the sky rested bluer, and darker; and, behind it, wavered the withered summit of the May-pole with faded flag. The son noticed his father's grave, on which the wind was opening and shutting, with harsh noise, the little door of the metal cross, to let the year of ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... could have been admirably placed, either on the remarkable promontory of Howth or on the elevation of which Dunsink is the summit. On the south side of Dublin there are several eminences that would have been suitable: the breezy heaths at Foxrock combine all necessary conditions; the obelisk hill at Killiney would have given one of the most picturesque sites for an Observatory in the world; while near Delgany two or three other good situations could be mentioned. But the Board of those pre-railway days was naturally guided by the question of proximity. ...
— Great Astronomers • R. S. Ball
... The marble statue by Houdon in the Capitol at Richmond is considered the best figure of Washington; it was done from life in 1788. Other noble memorials are the Column at Baltimore, and the great obelisk at Washington City, called the Washington Monument, the latter designed by Robert Mills, of South Carolina, and intended originally to have a colonnade around the base containing the statues of the illustrious men of ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly
... nonsense, and it wasn't tight round like all that; only a symptom. And we didn't even know mamma was there because of Speke and Grant's obelisk. There wasn't a soul! Papa saw it quite as I did, and was most reasonable. So I thought I would feel my way to developing an idea we had been broaching, Julius and I, just that very time by the obelisk. I asked papa flatly what he would do if I married Julius straight off. 'I believe, ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... the monument is on the south side, the statue of Lincoln being on that side of the obelisk, over Memorial Hall. On the east side are three tablets, upon which are the letters U. S. A. To the right of that, and beginning with Virginia, we find the the abbreviations of the original thirteen States. Next comes Vermont, the first state admitted after the Union was perfected, ...
— Lincoln's Yarns and Stories • Alexander K. McClure
... count continued to descend the Corso. As they approached the Piazza del Popolo, the crowd became more dense, and above the heads of the multitude two objects were visible: the obelisk, surmounted by a cross, which marks the centre of the square, and in front of the obelisk, at the point where the three streets, del Babuino, del Corso, and di Ripetta, meet, the two uprights of ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... search of oblivion. I ascended the many terraces of the garden of the Colonna Palace, under whose roof I had been sleeping; and passing out from it at its summit, I found myself on Monte Cavallo. The fountain sparkled in the sun; the obelisk above pierced the clear dark-blue air. The statues on each side, the works, as they are inscribed, of Phidias and Praxiteles, stood in undiminished grandeur, representing Castor and Pollux, who with majestic power tamed the rearing ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... ascent to them is over one hundred and thirty-five steps, planned with considerable skill, so as to mask the steepness of the Pincian, and forming the chief feature of the Piazza. Various landings and dividing walls break up their monotony; and a red granite obelisk, found in the gardens of Sallust, crowns the upper terrace in front of the church. All day long, these steps are flooded with sunshine, in which, stretched at length, or gathered in picturesque groups, models of every age and both sexes bask away the hours when they are ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... was designed by Major Young of the 97th Regiment. To the top of the surbase is fourteen feet from the ground; on this rests a sarcophagus, seven feet three inches high, from which rises an obelisk forty-two feet eight inches in height, and the apex is two feet one inch. The dimensions of the obelisk at the base are six feet by four feet eight inches. A prize medal was adjudged to J.C. Fisher, LL.D. for the following ...
— The Backwoods of Canada • Catharine Parr Traill
... see the famous obelisk presented by Mehemet Ali to the British Government, who have not shown a particular alacrity to accept this ponderous present. The huge shaft lies on the ground, prostrate, and desecrated by all sorts of abominations. Children were sprawling about, attracted by the dirt there. Arabs, negroes, ...
— Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo • William Makepeace Thackeray
... represented a sort of small square temple, built of Arcueil stone and marble. Corinthian fluted pillars formed its general decoration, and enshrined the four fulminatory inscriptions. Independently of the obelisk, the cupola of this temple bore eight allegorical statues, of which the one was France in mourning; the second, Justice raising her sword, and the others the principal virtues of the King. On the principal side these words occurred: ...
— The Memoirs of Madame de Montespan, Complete • Madame La Marquise De Montespan
... that noble room, looking out across the Place de la Concorde, past the Obelisk to the House of Deputies beyond the Seine, it was evident that Henry was thinking hard. The spectacle of Major Murphy's young men in their habiliments of service, Red Cross military uniforms that made them ...
— The Martial Adventures of Henry and Me • William Allen White
... the work of a consulting engineer, the promotion of a shipyard, and the formation of a syndicate to carry on a cattle business in Dakota. He had gained international notice by his skill in bringing the obelisk known as "Cleopatra's Needle" from Alexandria to New York, and had six months previous flared before the public in front-page headlines by reason of a sharp controversy with the Secretary of the Navy, which had resulted in ...
— Roosevelt in the Bad Lands • Hermann Hagedorn
... driven by the lash to tortured effort, swarmed and sweated and groaned that some high priest or royal personage might in mummied grandeur await his soul's return to its foul, flinty, wrinkled and desolate home. Near, floating northward with the tide, was a great obelisk of granite weighing more than forty tons, held upon the surface by parallel rafts of buoyant logs ...
— Chit-Chat; Nirvana; The Searchlight • Mathew Joseph Holt
... simplest expression of phallic ideas. The simple upright for purposes of sex worship is universally found. An upright conical stone is frequently mentioned. Many of the stone idols or pillars, the worship of which was forbidden by the Bible, come under this group. Likewise, the obelisk, found not only in Egypt, but in modified forms in many other countries as well, embodies the same phallic principle. The usual explanation of the obelisk is that it represented the rays of the sun striking the earth: when we speak of sun worship later, we shall see that this substantiates rather ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... Cranbury, but happily the inhabitants of the city were more conservative than their corporation, and made such a demonstration that the bargain was annulled, and the Cross left in its proper place. He consoled himself with erecting a tall lath and plaster obelisk in its stead, which was regarded with admiration by the children of the parish for about sixty years, ...
— John Keble's Parishes • Charlotte M Yonge
... Asia's mountains! land that still retains rays of their lustre, which streams from the flowers in the name of "Linnaeus;" which beams for thy chivalrous men from Charles the Twelfth's banner; which sounds from the obelisk on the field of Lutzen! Sweden, thou land of deep feeling, of heart-felt songs! home of the limpid elvs, where the wild swans sing in the gleam of the Northern Lights! Thou land, on whose deep, still lakes ...
— Pictures of Sweden • Hans Christian Andersen
... opposite is Madison Square, extending from Fifth to Madison avenues. The block from Twenty-fourth to Twenty-fifth streets is occupied by the Albemarle and Hoffman Houses, in the order named, both of white marble. Just opposite, at the junction of Broadway and Fifth avenue, is a handsome granite obelisk, with appropriate ornaments in bronze, erected to the memory of General W. J. Worth. Immediately beyond this is the Worth House, fronting on Broadway and Fifth avenue. The vicinity of Madison Square is the brightest, prettiest, and liveliest portion of the great city. At the southwest corner ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... (1888). At the east end of Union Street is the bronze statue of Queen Victoria, erected in 1893 by the royal tradesmen of the city. Near the Cross stands the granite statue of the 5th duke of Gordon (d. 1836). Here may also be mentioned the obelisk of Peterhead granite, 70 ft. high, erected in the square of Marischal College to the memory of Sir James M'Grigor (1778-1851), the military surgeon and director-general of the Army Medical Department, who was thrice elected lord rector ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... such names as they who reared those walls had never heard, for it is in Peshawar, and Umballah, and Korti and Fort Pearson that the youngsters die, leaving only a precedent and a brass behind them. But if every man had his obelisk, even where he lay, then no frontier line need be drawn, for a cordon of British graves would ever show how high the ...
— The Last Galley Impressions and Tales - Impressions and Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... footways, and choked, in every obscure corner, by heaps of dung-hill-rubbish, contrast so strongly, in their cramped dimensions, and their filth and darkness, with the broad square before some haughty church; in the center of which, a hieroglyphic-covered obelisk, brought from Egypt in the days of the Emperors, looks strangely on the foreign scene about it; or perhaps an ancient pillar, with its honored statue overthrown, supports a Christian saint; Marcus Aurelius giving place to Paul, and Trajan ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 7 - Italy, Sicily, and Greece (Part One) • Various
... plats in some of these more recent portions. There are some pleasing public walks, after the English fashion; and a public garden, where a colossal sphinx, erected by the late philosopher Gleichen, has a very imposing appearance. Here is also an obelisk erected to the memory of Gleichen himself, the founder of these gardens; and a monument to the memory of Kepler, the astronomer; which latter was luckily spared in the assault of this town by the ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume V (of X) • Various
... art to visit, or any of those priceless collections which now form the glory of the Vatican. The spot of the apostles' execution was indicated "by immemorial tradition" as between the two goals (inter duas metas) of Nero's Circus, which spot Signor Lanciani tells us is exactly the site of the obelisk now standing in the piazza of St. Peter. A little chapel, called the Chapel of the Crucifixion, stood there in the early ages, before any great basilica ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 8 - The Later Renaissance: From Gutenberg To The Reformation • Editor-in-Chief: Rossiter Johnson
... and arch, column, and spire, and obelisk, and lofty terraces, and many-windowed palaces, rose in all directions from a mass of building which appeared to him each instant to grow more huge, till at length it seemed to occupy the whole horizon. The sun lent ...
— The Voyage of Captain Popanilla • Benjamin Disraeli
... there, and many of the Greek sculptures which had been carried to Rome were again borne off to decorate this new Capitol. The Emperor Constantine there erected a column a hundred feet high, and placed his statue on it; Theodosius also erected a column and an obelisk; but Justinian excelled all these, and about 543 A.D. set up a monument with a colossal equestrian statue of himself in bronze upon it. The column which supported this statue was of brick masonry covered with plates of bronze. From the accounts we have of it we conclude that this was a fine work ...
— A History of Art for Beginners and Students - Painting, Sculpture, Architecture • Clara Erskine Clement
... others the Do-darto, the Fagonne, the Bignonne, the Phelipee. These are compliments proper to be made by the botanists, not only to those of their own rank, but to the greatest persons; for a plant is a monument of a more durable nature than a medal or an obelisk; and yet, as a proof that even these vehicles are not always sufficient to transmit to futurity the name conjoined with them, the Nicotiana is now scarcely known by any other name than that ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 6 - Reviews, Political Tracts, and Lives of Eminent Persons • Samuel Johnson
... Englishmen. The road from the Gate to the Fort and the Jama Masjid is rich in memories of the Mutiny. It has on its left S. James' Church, with memorial tablets within and outside the shot-riddled globe which once surmounted its dome. Further on are the obelisk to the telegraph officers who stuck to their posts on the fatal 11th of May, and on a gateway of the Old Magazine a record of the heroism of the nine devoted men, who blew it up, losing five of their number in the explosion. Passing under the railway bridge one comes out on the open space in ...
— The Panjab, North-West Frontier Province, and Kashmir • Sir James McCrone Douie
... carriage, which, after crossing two ravines on fine bridges, plunges into the depths of a magnificent forest, and then by a long series of fine zigzags of easy gradients ascends the pass of Yadate, on the top of which, in a deep sandstone cutting, is a handsome obelisk marking the boundary between Akita and Aomori ken. This is a marvellous road for Japan, it is so well graded and built up, and logs for travellers' rests are placed at convenient distances. Some very heavy work in grading ...
— Unbeaten Tracks in Japan • Isabella L. Bird
... end there was an inner court, where the principal idol stood, surrounded by a number of inferior deities, for the Hawaiians had "gods many, and lords many." Here also was the anu, a lofty frame of wickerwork, shaped like an obelisk, hollow, and five feet square at its base. Within this, the priest, who was the oracle of the god, stood, and of him the king used to inquire concerning war or peace, or any affair of national importance. It appears that the tones of the ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... sidewalk. The Rue de Rivoli is the most beautiful street in Paris. The windows of the sitting-room of Claudine's mother looked over the palace and its gardens, its chestnut-trees and its fountains, the Seine and its quays, with a more distant view of the Place de la Concorde and its obelisk, the Chambers of the Legislature, and the gilded dome of the Tuileries. Every procession passed under Claudine's windows. No little girl, I think, who lives in rooms overlooking the Rue de Rivoli would wish to exchange them for any ...
— Harper's Young People, August 31, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... there was plenty to do and see before Mark was allowed to dine: Lassie, the colley, had to be unfastened for a run about the 'grounds,' of which a mechanical mouse might have made the tour in five minutes; there was a stone obelisk to be inspected that Uncle Solomon had bought a bargain at a sale and set up at a corner of the lawn inscribed with the names of his favourites living and dead—a remarkably scratch team, by the way; then he read out sonorous versions of the Latin names of most of his shrubs, which occupied a considerable ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey
... poles of the great magnet that draws in all the iron tracks through the grooves of all the mountains must be near at hand, for here are crossings, and sudden stops, and screams of alarmed engines heard all around. The tall granite obelisk comes into view far away on the left, its bevelled cap-stone sharp against the sky; the lofty chimneys of Charlestown and East Cambridge flaunt their smoky banners up in the thin air; and now one fair bosom ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... bibliotheque royale (Fr. gov.), iv. 483, etc. Compare the excellent narratives of the Duc d'Aumale and Prof. Soldan. The Bulletin de la Soc. de l'hist. du prot. fr., i. (1853) 429, gives a representation of a monument, in the form of an obelisk, about eleven feet in height, erected by the Department of the Charente, in 1818, on the spot where Conde fell. A somewhat similar monument, raised in 1770 by the Count de Jarnac, was destroyed ...
— History of the Rise of the Huguenots - Volume 2 • Henry Baird
... and in the trout-like pull of the ribands by the excited animal before us. Mark the color of the sand! White at high-water mark, and thence deepening to a silvery gray as the water has evaporated less, a slab of Egyptian granite in the obelisk of St. Peter's not more polished and unimpressible. Shell or rock, weed or quicksand, there is none; and, mar or deface its bright surface as you will, it is ever beaten down anew, and washed even of the dust of the foot of man by the returning sea. You may write ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... colossal temple of Luxor, looking as out of place now as the poor obelisk which Egypt gave us as a present, and which stands to-day in the ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... drafts at Alexandria remained in tantalising inactivity, in spite of the passage of the Gallipoli survivors southward through Alexandria. The East Lancashire details forgathered at Mustapha on the site of the famous victory of 1801, and near the pretty white obelisk that commemorates Sir Ralph Abercromby. The time was filled as best could be by route marches, history lectures and various competitions, until at last we had orders to rejoin the Division. We moved from Sidi Gaber station to Cairo, and thence by trams to ...
— With Manchesters in the East • Gerald B. Hurst
... there is in the north-western bay a pointed door, differing only from those of about a hundred years earlier in having twisted shafts. One curious feature is the parapet of the central aisle, which is like a row of small classical pedestals, each bearing a stumpy obelisk. By far the finest feature of the outside is the great west door. On each side are clusters of square pinnacles ending in square crocketed spirelets, and running up to a horizontal moulding which, as so often, gives the whole design a rectangular form. Within comes the doorway itself; ...
— Portuguese Architecture • Walter Crum Watson
... in the square, are two fountains, one on either side, casting up water in showers; between them, in the midst, is an obelisk, brought from Egypt, and covered with mysterious writing; on your right rises an edifice, not beautiful nor grand, but huge and bulky, where lives a strange kind of priest whom men call the Pope, a very horrible old individual, who would fain keep Christ in leading-strings, calls the Virgin ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... with always something new and original to say. As we wandered through the beautiful grounds, some of which are reclaimed from the wild heath which stretches for miles round the house, he pointed out to me the curious obelisk, grey and time-worn, which still perpetuates the memory of the historic mansion once known as "Fireproof." For it was here that George III. and Queen Charlotte once breakfasted in peace in the drawing room upstairs, whilst the dining-room below ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, March 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... fashionable ghosts could possibly have the entry. Dear, dear, what heart-burnings there must be among the more snobbish shadows of Montparnasse! My guide made me pause and admire, and he likewise insisted on the tribute of my tear before an obelisk to slaughtered soldiers and a ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... canvas; and this is no bad test, as I think the landscape painter is the gardener's best designer. The eye requires a sort of balance here; but not so as to encroach upon probable nature. A wood or hill may balance a house or obelisk; for exactness would be displeasing. . . It is not easy to account for the fondness of former times for straight-lined avenues to their houses; straight-lined walks through their woods; and, in short, every ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... again, and tried to forget. He read of the swallows that fly in and out of the little cafe at Smyrna where the Hadjis sit counting their amber beads and the turbaned merchants smoke their long tasselled pipes and talk gravely to each other; he read of the Obelisk in the Place de la Concorde that weeps tears of granite in its lonely sunless exile, and longs to be back by the hot lotus-covered Nile, where there are Sphinxes, and rose-red ibises, and white vultures ...
— The Picture of Dorian Gray • Oscar Wilde
... a very dirty pair of trousers, with a bald head, a face full of deep hollows, a wrinkled, callous skin, a beard that had a trick of twitching its long white bristles, a menacing pointed chin, a toothless mouth, eyes bright as the eyes of his dogs in the yard, and a nose like an obelisk—there he stood in his gallery smiling at the beauty called into being by genius. A Jew surrounded by his millions will always be one of the finest spectacles which humanity can give. Robert Medal, our great ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... of a city, broad avenues lined by negro shanties and patches of cultivation, great public buildings and an immense post office, a lifeless museum, an inert university, a splendid desert library, a street of souvenir shops, a certain industry of "seeing Washington," an idiotic colossal obelisk. It seems an ideal nest for the tariff manipulator, a festering corner of delegates and agents and secondary people. In the White House, in the time of President Roosevelt, the present writer found a transitory glow of intellectual activity, the spittoons ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... small obelisk in the garden, erected by Pope to the memory of his mother, he placed the following ...
— Flowers and Flower-Gardens • David Lester Richardson
... This devotion was not primitive, but began in the fourth dynasty, and was established by the fifth dynasty being called sons of Ra, and every later king having the title 'son of Ra' before his name. The obelisk was the emblem of Ra, and in the fifth dynasty a great obelisk temple was built in his honour at Abusir, followed also by others. Heliopolis was the centre of his worship, where Senusert I, in the twelfth dynasty, rebuilt the temple ...
— The Religion of Ancient Egypt • W. M. Flinders Petrie
... Florentinae, which was then printing at Florence. On his return he took orders, and settled at Rome, passing the whole of his time in the library of the Vatican, and in those of the cardinals Passionei and Corsini. The famous obelisk [v.03 p.0312] of Augustus, at that time disinterred from the ruins of the Campus Martius, was described by Bandini in a learned folio volume De Obelisco Augusti. Shortly after he was compelled to leave Rome on account of ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... built 1800 years ago as a mausoleum for himself. On the left is the piazza of St. Peter, which, with its surrounding buildings, its curved arcades, St. Peter's Church and the Vatican, is one of the grandest in the world. Between its constantly playing fountains has stood for 300 years an obelisk which the Emperor Caligula brought from Egypt to adorn Rome. It witnessed wonderful events long before the time of Moses. At its foot the children of Israel sang the melodies of their country during their servitude. It was ...
— From Pole to Pole - A Book for Young People • Sven Anders Hedin
... apocryphal books; (3) that the measure of the golden statue of Dura, sixty cubits by six, is irreconcileable with any theory of proportion suited to the human figure, and still more so with the canon of Assyrian art, as seen in their sculpture, and can apply only to an obelisk; (4) that Daniel has made honourable mention of himself; (5) that the position of the book in the third part of the Jewish canon, the Cethubim or Hagiographa, shows that it was ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... were other objects which could be readily converted into bronze, and the destruction of which was irreparable. The immense hippodrome was crowded with statues. Egypt had furnished an obelisk for the centre, Delphi had given its commemoratory bronze of the victory of Plataea. Later works of pagan sculptors were there in abundance, while Christian artists had continued the traditions of their ancestors. The cultured inhabitants of Constantinople appreciated these works of ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume VI. • Various
... at most two stories, in height and hidden [Page 37] behind high walls. So high and strong are the walls of the British Legation that in the Boxer War of 1900 it served the whole community for a fortress, wherein we sustained a siege of eight weeks. A marble obelisk near the Legation gate commemorates the siege, and a marble gateway on a neighbouring street marks the spot where Baron Ketteler was shot. Since that war a foreign quarter has been marked out, the approaches to which have been partially fortified. The streets are now greatly improved; ...
— The Awakening of China • W.A.P. Martin
... Travellers stopped to gaze, to moralize, and to pilfer; postilions and poets scraped off skulls and thigh-bones.... At last, in 1822, the vestiges were swept together and resepulchred, and a simple obelisk of marble was erected, to commemorate a victory well deserving of its fame as a military exploit, but all unworthy to be ranked with earlier triumphs, won by hands pure as well as strong, defending freedom and the right."—History ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... in the deep-scored valleys there were few signs of human life. Then, suddenly, in such a setting, we came upon the grandest of the Seven Marvels, the most wonderful lone rock in Europe, Mont Aiguille, more like an obelisk of incalculable immensity than a mountain. Once, it had been considered unscalable, and might have remained virgin until this century of hardy climbers, had not Charles the Eighth had a fancy to hear (not to see!) what was on top. Up went a few of his bravest ...
— The Princess Passes • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... two monuments besides this granite obelisk: One, the house I built on the hill, With its spires, bay windows, and roof of slate. The other, the lake-front in Chicago, Where the railroad keeps a switching yard, With whistling engines and ...
— Spoon River Anthology • Edgar Lee Masters
... governor of Plymouth. Here he died on May 9, 1657, "lamented by all the colonists of New England as a common blessing and father to them all," and the only special memorial that tangibly recalls his fame is the unpretentious obelisk on Burial Hill. ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 3 of 8 • Various
... can shake their Height profound, Ridotto sure will fell them to the Ground; Here Art to Nature join'd makes it compleat, And Pyramids and Trees together meet; Statues amidst the thickest Grove arise, And lofty Columns tow'ring to the Skies; Then next an Obelisk its Shade displays, And rustic Rockwork fills each empty Space; Each joins to make it noble, and excells Beaufets for Food, Grotto's ...
— The Ladies Delight • Anonymous
... subscription, a proper National Monument on the Field of Mollwitz, and so closing his old career. Subscriptions did not take, in that April, 1841, nor in the following months or twelve-months: the zealous Doctor, therefore, indignantly drew his own purse; got a big Obelisk of Granite hewn ready, with suitable Inscription on it; carted his big Obelisk from the quarries of Strehlen; assembled the Country round it, on Mollwitz Field; and passionately discoursed and pleaded, That at least the Country should bring block-and-tackle, with proper framework, and set ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... he telephoned Ellis to take his horse to the entrance to the park at once. The crisp autumn air was perfect for his ride, and Brewster found a number of smart people already riding and driving in the park. His horse was keen for a canter and he had reached the obelisk before he drew rein. As he was about to cross the carriage road he was nearly run down by Miss Drew in her new ...
— Brewster's Millions • George Barr McCutcheon
... on the other side of the Rhine, which are very much loftier—the first impression gives no idea of the extraordinary height of the spire. We continued to descend, slowly and cautiously, with Saverne before us in the bottom. To the left, close to the road side, stands an obelisk: on which is fixed, hi gilt letters, this ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Two • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... us, perhaps, chiefly on account of its immense height, apparently so disproportioned to its other dimensions (for it actually struck us as resembling rather a slender mast, towering up in immeasurable height into the clouds, than as that it really is, a stately obelisk) an unusual and singular appearance. Still we went on, and drew nearer and nearer with amazing velocity, and the surrounding objects became every moment more distinct. Westminster Abbey, the Tower, a steeple, one church, and then another, presented ...
— Travels in England in 1782 • Charles P. Moritz
... of Luxor temple does not face the river on the side we came in; to find it we have to scramble over heaps of rubbish to one end and there we see a great obelisk, a companion to the one which is now in the principal square of Paris, the Place de la Concorde, and we see also two huge buildings reared up on each side of the ancient entrance—these were called pylons and were always built in Egyptian temples. On ...
— Round the Wonderful World • G. E. Mitton
... as the Obelisk with the O'Kelly and the Signora, who were then living together in Lambeth. Till that morning I had not seen the O'Kelly since my departure from London, nearly two years before, so that we had much to tell each other. For the third time now ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... Forlong that Solomon's temple was like hundreds observed in the East, except that its walls were a little higher than those usually seen, and the phallic spire out of proportion to the size of the structure. "The Jewish porch is but the obelisk which the Egyptian placed beside his temple; the Boodhist pillars which stood all around their Dagobas; the pillars of Hercules, which stood near the Phoenician temple; and the spire which ...
— The God-Idea of the Ancients - or Sex in Religion • Eliza Burt Gamble
... all seasons and of every clime, abundantly over those green, central lawns; who scooped out hollows in fit places, and, setting great basins of marble in them, caused ever-gushing fountains to fill them to the brim; who reared up the immemorial obelisk out of the soil that had long hidden it; who placed pedestals along the borders of the avenues, and crowned them with busts of that multitude of worthies—statesmen, heroes, artists, men of letters and of song—whom the whole world claims as its chief ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume I. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... pamphlets and books, a man had cleared a space for himself where he was now seated, clutching his hair impatiently from time to time, as he endeavored to decipher a page of notes, compared to which the hieroglyphics on the obelisk of Luxor, would have been transparently intelligible. Just as the secretary's impatience was approaching desperation, the door opened and a young officer wearing an ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas
... within twenty or thirty feet of the floor, serves to give great effect to the large enclosed space of an antique hall. Against the walls are several marble monuments; one to the Earl of Chatham, a statue of white marble, with various allegorical contrivances, fronting an obelisk or pyramid of dark marble; and another to his son, William Pitt, of somewhat similar design and of equal size; each of them occupying the whole space, I believe, between pavement and ceiling. There is likewise a statue ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... ceremony on the Bosphorus as that which, on July 24, accompanied the remains of Hobart Pasha to their last resting place in the English cemetery at Scutari, not far from the spot where a tall granite obelisk records the brave deeds and glorious death of those heroes who perished in the ...
— Sketches From My Life - By The Late Admiral Hobart Pasha • Hobart Pasha
... mediaeval relics he was hardly less indifferent. The old buildings of the Lateran were thrown down to make room for the heavy modern palace. But, to atone in some measure for these acts of vandalism, Sixtus placed the cupola upon S. Peter's and raised the obelisk in the great piazza which was destined to be circled with Bernini's colonnades. This obelisk he tapped with a cross. Christian inscriptions, signalizing the triumph of the Pontiff over infidel emperors, the victory of Calvary over Olympus, ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... were not so full of one picture to which, if I can find it and acquire it, a special place of honour shall be given: a certain huge picture in which a life-sized gentleman, draped in a white mantle, sits on a fallen obelisk and surveys the ruined ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm
... the hunchback in a tone of lamentation; "I have been here since last night, I slept out of doors to keep my place, and here is this abominable giant comes to stick himself in front of me like an obelisk." ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - NISIDA—1825 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... intended to represent those of apes; for amongst the fragments were the remains of the body of a colossal ape, strongly resembling in outline and appearance one of the four monstrous animals which once stood in front of the obelisk of Luxor, and which, under the name of Cynocephali, were worshipped at Thebes. This fragment was about ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... the old gateway by which travelers entered the city before the railroad was built. It is on the Flammian Way and is said to have been built first in A.D. 402. Just inside the gate is a space occupied by an Egyptian obelisk surrounded by four Egyptian lions. The Corso is almost a mile in length and extends from the gate just mentioned to the edge of the Capitoline Hill, where a great monument to Victor Emmanuel was being built. The Fountain of Treves is said to be the most magnificent in ...
— A Trip Abroad • Don Carlos Janes
... a moon, That tongueless tower hath cleaved the Sabbath air, Mute as an obelisk of ice aglare Beneath an ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... in other words, portraying the meaning by significant emblems.' With Clement agrees the Arabian, Abenephi, who uses this language: (This Arabic writing is preserved in the Vatican library, but not as yet printed: it is often quoted by Athanasius Kircher, in his Treatise on the Pamphilian Obelisk, whence these and other matters stated by us have been taken.) 'But there were four kinds of writing among the Egyptians: First, that in use among the populace and the ignorant; secondly, that in vogue among the philosophers and the educated; thirdly, one compounded ...
— Mysticism and its Results - Being an Inquiry into the Uses and Abuses of Secrecy • John Delafield
... favorite retreat. This is my bower for meditation, and frequently for reading too. Let us take this seat. Observe how through these openings we catch some of the prominent points of the city. There is the obelisk of Cleopatra; there the tower of Antonine', there the Egyptian Pyramid; and there a column going up in honor of Aurelian; and in this direction, the whole outline of ...
— Zenobia - or, The Fall of Palmyra • William Ware
... youth, was as comely and symmetrical a cone as ever graced the galaxy of volcanic peaks. To-day, while still young as compared with the obelisk crags of the Alps, it has already taken on the venerable and deeply-scarred physiognomy of a veteran. It is no longer merely an overgrown boy among the hills, but, cut and torn by the ice of centuries, it is fast assuming the dignity and interest of ...
— The Mountain that was 'God' • John H. Williams
... and the tomb of Sir Isaac Brock. At the latter place he received an address from one hundred and sixty survivors of the War of 1812 at the hands of Chief Justice Sir J. Beverley Robinson and, on September 18th, laid the corner-stone of an obelisk in honour of the chief Canadian hero of that contest. A visit to Port Dalhousie and Hamilton followed, and at the latter place the reception was marked by splendid decorations ...
— The Life of King Edward VII - with a sketch of the career of King George V • J. Castell Hopkins
... Emperor's safe-conduct in his belt; or as a condemned heretic would have been in the old days, if he had gone and stood in that little dingy square outside the palace of the Inquisition at Rome, and there, below the obelisk, preached his heresies! Christ had been condemned in the council of the nation; but there were plenty of hiding-places among the Galilean hills, and the frontier was close at hand, and it needed a long arm to reach from Jerusalem all the way across Samaria to ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... public buildings and an immense post office, a lifeless museum, an inert university, a splendid desert library, a street of souvenir shops, a certain industry of "seeing Washington," an idiotic colossal obelisk. It seems an ideal nest for the tariff manipulator, a festering corner of delegates and agents and secondary people. In the White House, in the time of President Roosevelt, the present writer found a transitory glow of intellectual activity, the spittoons and glass screens ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... Boys" fought with distinction and maintained their reputation right up to the end of the siege. Visitors to Mafeking may now see near the obelisk in front of the pretty town hall of the famous siege town, a five-pounder gun "captured by the Cape Police during the siege". This gun was seized by the coloured Sergeant Bell and two other subalterns of the "Cape Boys" contingent; their contingent was then under the command of Lieutenant ...
— Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since • Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje
... piazza itself, it had not yet, as the reader will understand from the foregoing explanation, either the fine colonnade of Bernini, or the dancing fountains, or that Egyptian obelisk which, according to Pliny, was set up by the Pharaoh at Heliopolis, and transferred to Rome by Caligula, who set it up in Nero's Circus, where it remained till 1586. Now, as Nero's Circus was situate on the very ground where St. Peter's now ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... and down the cemetery which is superior in locality to Pere la Chaise at Paris, but has not the commanding view. In one part a great many beautiful flowers. The monuments have usually the family name and the Christian name on another side of the obelisk; a truly melancholy walk; a beautiful monument to the memory of Spurzheim[24]. I allowed the horse to have his own way back and he brought me at once near the hotel. At three I called upon Mr. Lee and we had a delightful ...
— A Journey to America in 1834 • Robert Heywood
... his express warning. She went so far as to conceive him subsequently saying: "I warned you." She conceived the state of marriage with him as that of a woman tied not to a man of heart, but to an obelisk lettered all over with hieroglyphics, and everlastingly hearing him expound them, relishing renewing his ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Southern man who would wish that monument less by one Northern name that constitutes the mass? Who, standing on the ground made sacred by the blood of Warren, could allow sectional feeling to curb his enthusiasm as he looks upon that obelisk which rises a monument to freedom's and his country's triumph, and stands a type of the time, the men and the event it commemorates; built of material that mocks the waves of time, without niche or molding for parasite or creeping thing to rest upon, pointing like a finger to the ...
— The Victim - A romance of the Real Jefferson Davis • Thomas Dixon
... blasphemies of this or that conquering king, all to the same tune—'I came, I saw, I conquered; I slew so many thousands of the people—I took so many thousands into captivity—I built this temple to the gods—I raised this obelisk or that pyramid'—and all by hand labour, with the miserable, belaboured slaves dying by their thousands upon thousands under their taskmasters' lashes, to be cast afterwards into the Nile, or left to the jackals and vultures. These and the crocodiles ...
— In the Mahdi's Grasp • George Manville Fenn
... give in and subside, or soar and rain, and the great minarets nod the head, and topple; and I saw the flames reach out and out across the empty breadth of the Etmeidan—three hundred yards—to the six minarets of the Mosque of Achmet, wrapping the red Egyptian-granite obelisk in the centre; and across the breadth of the Serai-Meidani it reached to the buildings of the Seraglio and the Sublime Porte; and across those vague barren stretches that lie between the houses and the great wall; and across the seventy or eighty great arcaded bazaars, all-enwrapping, ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... this grandfather of Sesostris, Ramestes the Great, who slew the Israelite infants, and of the inscription on his obelisk, containing, in my opinion, one of the oldest records of mankind, see Essay on the Old Test. Append. p. 139, ...
— The Antiquities of the Jews • Flavius Josephus
... the main pylon (three hundred and seventy feet wide and one hundred and forty-two and one-half feet high), the great hypostyle hall of Seti I and Rameses II, the festival temple of Thotmes III and the obelisk of Queen Hatasu. From the pylon a superb view may be gained of the ...
— The Critic in the Orient • George Hamlin Fitch
... that the stone which Doctor Franklin erected, as above, became so dilapidated that in 1827, the citizens of Boston replaced it by a granite obelisk. The bodies repose in the old Granary ...
— From Boyhood to Manhood • William M. Thayer
... centre of the "Place" is the monolith obelisk, 49 ft. high, hewn by the Romans from the quarries of Esterel. It stood originally in the Circus at the S.W. corner of the town; but of it no ...
— The South of France—East Half • Charles Bertram Black
... me. I couldn't slug her on the jaw and get away; I'd break my hand. The Bonanza .375 would probably stun her, but I have not the cold blooded viciousness to pull a gun on a woman and drill her. I grunted sourly, that weapon had been about as useful to me as a stuffed bear or an authentic Egyptian Obelisk. ...
— Highways in Hiding • George Oliver Smith
... of Strafford, July 28.-St. Swithin. The Duke of Queensberry's dinner to the Princess de Lamballe. Mrs. French's marble pavement. Lord Dudley's obelisk. Miss Boyle's carvings—394 ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... rough heap of granite, a cairn, gray with lichens, in the centre of which stood, or rather leaned, a tall square block of granite, like a dolmen. So great was the age of this strange obelisk that the lichens had encrusted it to the top. The stone had once stood upright; but it now leaned toward the marsh, the cairn having slowly yielded ...
— The King's Men - A Tale of To-morrow • Robert Grant, John Boyle O'Reilly, J. S. Dale, and John T.
... and the three men slowly paced the majestic colonnade. The swarming crowd had gradually disappeared, leaving the piazza empty, so that only the obelisk and the twin fountains now arose from the burning desert of symmetrical paving; whilst on the entablature of the porticus across the square a noble line of motionless statues stood out in the bright sunlight. And Pierre, with his eyes still raised to the Pope's windows, ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... understand all an Egyptian says and does is a harder task than deciphering the hieroglyphics on an obelisk. The language of the Egyptian gentleman is the most fulsome possible. If he should be in need of a little temporary loan he will pound the man (whom he hopes to confidence successfully) on the back until he can hardly breathe. Experts ...
— The Adventures of Uncle Jeremiah and Family at the Great Fair - Their Observations and Triumphs • Charles McCellan Stevens (AKA 'Quondam')
... Lord Dalhousie laid the first stone of the beautiful obelisk overlooking what is now known as Dufferin Terrace, to commemorate the heroism of Wolfe and Montcalm, and ...
— Old Quebec - The Fortress of New France • Sir Gilbert Parker and Claude Glennon Bryan
... Austin. "I'm sure he'll turn out a most courtly old personage, and perhaps he'll have an enormous fortune that he made by shaking pagoda-trees in India. How do pagodas grow on trees, I wonder? I always thought a pagoda was a sort of odalisque—isn't that right? Oh, I mean obelisk—with beautiful flounces all the way up to the top. It seems a funny way of making money, doesn't it. Where is India, by the bye? Anywhere ...
— Austin and His Friends • Frederic H. Balfour
... Winchester to set it up at Cranbury, but happily the inhabitants of the city were more conservative than their corporation, and made such a demonstration that the bargain was annulled, and the Cross left in its proper place. He consoled himself with erecting a tall lath and plaster obelisk in its stead, which was regarded with admiration by the children of the parish for about sixty years, ...
— John Keble's Parishes • Charlotte M Yonge
... families wandered pleasantly through the city gate toward the summer theatre and Fredericksberg. The evening sun shone upon the column of Liberty; the beautiful obelisk, around which stand Wiedewelt's statues, one of ...
— O. T. - A Danish Romance • Hans Christian Andersen
... breathings of affection, soft as a child's or a mother's, in this great wild heart of Luther;" and adds: "I will call this Luther a true Great Man; great in intellect, in courage, affection, and integrity; one of our most lovable and precious men. Great not as a hewn obelisk, but as an Alpine mountain, so simple, honest, spontaneous; not setting up to be great at all; there for quite another purpose than being great. Ah, yes, unsubduable granite, piercing far and wide into the Heavens; yet, in the clefts of it, fountains, ...
— Luther and the Reformation: - The Life-Springs of Our Liberties • Joseph A. Seiss
... Nile ran with such wine instead of with water," cried the soldier, "and that I were as big as the colossus of Atnenophis, and that the biggest obelisk of Hatasu were my drinking vessel, and that I might drink as much as I would! But now—what have you to say of this ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... regains the quiet state without damage. In the ordinary edifice the irregular disposition of the weight does not permit the uniform movement which may insure safety. Thus, if the city of Washington should ever be violently shaken, the great obelisk, notwithstanding that it is five hundred feet high, may survive a disturbance which would wreck the lower and more massive edifices which lie ...
— Outlines of the Earth's History - A Popular Study in Physiography • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... circumference, and in which were one hundred gates of brass, must have had considerable architectural splendor. This account of Babylon, however, is probably exaggerated, especially as to the height of the walls. The tower of Belus, the Palace of Nebuchadnezzar, and the Obelisk of Semiramis were probably wonderful structures, certainly in size, which is one of ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume III • John Lord
... dwelling. Now, however, the ice had been forced quite over the barrier by the irresistible pressure behind, and even while he gazed a great wedge of ice, nearly five feet thick and several yards in length, was being reared up like a glittering obelisk, and forced slowly but surely down upon ...
— The Red Man's Revenge - A Tale of The Red River Flood • R.M. Ballantyne
... be an attempt that day to make London a scene of barricades like Paris and Brussels. Troops will be disposed at intervals in bodies of half battalions, with provisions, and there will be 1,000 cavalry. Two guns will be ready with the marines at the obelisk, and two in the park. Hardinge observed to the Duke that he knew he had bolts inside to the doors of the carnage, and added, 'I shall take pocket pistols!' The Duke said, 'Oh! I shall have pistols in the carriage.' Hardinge asked the Duke to take him, which he does. Arbuthnot goes ...
— A Political Diary 1828-1830, Volume II • Edward Law (Lord Ellenborough)
... feeling our motion but in the resistance of the wind and in the trout-like pull of the ribands by the excited animal before us. Mark the color of the sand! White at high-water mark, and thence deepening to a silvery gray as the water has evaporated less, a slab of Egyptian granite in the obelisk of St. Peter's not more polished and unimpressible. Shell or rock, weed or quicksand, there is none; and, mar or deface its bright surface as you will, it is ever beaten down anew, and washed even of the dust of the foot of man by the returning ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... fertile valley, called the Queen's Girdle, because its revenues were appropriated to that costly article of the royal wardrobe. This pleasant city had once been the favourite residence of Cyrus the Great, and a plain obelisk in the royal gardens marked his burial-place. The adjacent promontory of Taoces afforded a convenient harbour for Tyrian merchants, and thus brought in the luxuries of Phoenicia, while it afforded opportunities for literary communication between the East and the West. Here were celebrated ...
— Philothea - A Grecian Romance • Lydia Maria Child
... church was an old stone coffin, together with a fragment of a curious monumental effigy, likewise of stone; but the most striking objects in the place, and deservedly ranked amongst the wonders of Whalley, were three remarkable obelisk-shaped crosses, set in a line upon pedestals, covered with singular devices in fretwork, and all three differing in size and design. Evidently of remotest antiquity, these crosses were traditionally assigned to Paullinus, who, according ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... and Rue de Rivoli. Numerous historical associations are connected with the place. The guillotine did much bloody work here during 1793-4-5; upwards of 2800 people perished by it. Foreign troops frequently bivouacked on the square when Paris was in their power. The Obelisk of Luxor, a Monolith or single block of reddish granite 76 feet high, was presented to Louis Phillipi by Mohamed Ali and erected in the centre of the Place. It adds very much to the ...
— Shepp's Photographs of the World • James W. Shepp
... the best-known bulls is that inscribed on the obelisk near Fort William in the Highlands of Scotland. In this inscription a very clumsy attempt is made to distinguish between ...
— Literary Blunders • Henry B. Wheatley
... The road from the Gate to the Fort and the Jama Masjid is rich in memories of the Mutiny. It has on its left S. James' Church, with memorial tablets within and outside the shot-riddled globe which once surmounted its dome. Further on are the obelisk to the telegraph officers who stuck to their posts on the fatal 11th of May, and on a gateway of the Old Magazine a record of the heroism of the nine devoted men, who blew it up, losing five of their number in the explosion. Passing under the railway bridge one comes out on the open space in ...
— The Panjab, North-West Frontier Province, and Kashmir • Sir James McCrone Douie
... given birth, as you know, to Trinco, the greatest genius of the universe, whose statue you see before you. That obelisk standing to your right commemorates Trinco's birth; the column that rises to your left has Trinco crowned with a diadem upon its summit. You see here the triumphal arch dedicated to the glory of Trinco and ...
— Penguin Island • Anatole France
... the square, are two fountains, one on either side, casting up water in showers; between them, in the midst, is an obelisk, brought from Egypt, and covered with mysterious writing; on your right rises an edifice, not beautiful nor grand, but huge and bulky, where lives a strange kind of priest whom men call the Pope, a very horrible old individual, who would fain keep Christ ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... surpassed. The largest buildings elsewhere erected by man are smaller than their pyramids; which are also the oldest human works still remaining, the beauty of whose masonry, says Wilkinson, has not been surpassed in any subsequent age. An obelisk of a single stone now standing in Egypt weighs three hundred tons, and a colossus of Ramses II. nearly nine hundred. But Herodotus describes a monolithic temple, which must have weighed five thousand tons, and which was carried the whole length ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... information concerning it, I was struck by the fact that, every time excavations were made on either side of the Via di S. Ignazio for building or restoring the houses which line it, remarkable specimens of Egyptian art had been brought to light. The annals of discoveries begin with 1374, when the obelisk now in the Piazza della Rotonda was found, under the apse of the church of S. Maria sopra Minerva, together with the one now in the Villa Mattei von Hoffman. In 1435, Eugenius IV. discovered the two lions of Nektaneb I. which are now ...
— Pagan and Christian Rome • Rodolfo Lanciani
... statue of Dura, sixty cubits by six, is irreconcileable with any theory of proportion suited to the human figure, and still more so with the canon of Assyrian art, as seen in their sculpture, and can apply only to an obelisk; (4) that Daniel has made honourable mention of himself; (5) that the position of the book in the third part of the Jewish canon, the Cethubim or Hagiographa, shows that it was written later ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... to me a most extraordinary thing that papers stolen from me in Australia thirty-two years ago should be returned to me in London! Yes, I walked down to the Speke Monument. I saw no one about there but a heavily veiled woman who walked about on one side of the obelisk while I patrolled the other. Eventually she approached me, and at once asked me if I had kept secret the receipt of the mysterious letter? I assured her that I had. She then told me that she was the ambassadress of the people ...
— The Middle of Things • J. S. Fletcher
... and this is no bad test, as I think the landscape painter is the gardener's best designer. The eye requires a sort of balance here; but not so as to encroach upon probable nature. A wood or hill may balance a house or obelisk; for exactness would be displeasing. . . It is not easy to account for the fondness of former times for straight-lined avenues to their houses; straight-lined walks through their woods; and, in short, every kind of straight line, where the foot has to travel over what the eye has done before. ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... deeper even in the once magnificent, now neglected Governor's Garden, where there was actually a rawness in the late afternoon air, and whither they were strolling for the view from its height, and to pay their duty to the obelisk raised there to the common fame of Wolfe and Montcalm. The sounding Latin inscription celebrates the royal governor-general who erected it almost as much as the heroes to whom it was raised; but these spectators did not begrudge the space ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... the more I approximated the same, by so much the more the excellencie of the woorke shewed it selfe, increasing my desire to behould the same. For there appeared no longer a substance of vnknowne forme, but a rare Obelisk vpon a vast frame and stonie foundation, the heigth whereof without comparison did exceed the toppes of the sidelying mountaynes, although I thought that they had beene the renowmed Olympus[a], the famous Caucasus[b], and not ...
— Hypnerotomachia - The Strife of Loue in a Dreame • Francesco Colonna
... however it may be admired in its day and held up as a model of purity, will in the course of years grow antiquated and obsolete, until it shall become almost as unintelligible in its native land as an Egyptian obelisk or one of those Runic inscriptions said to exist in the deserts of Tartary. "I declare," added I, with some emotion, "when I contemplate a modern library, filled with new works in all the bravery of rich gilding and binding, I feel disposed ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... it became apparent just then that the opening close ahead of them was too narrow for the sledge to pass. It was narrowed by a buttress, or projection, of the cathedral-berg, which jutted up close to a vast obelisk of ice about forty feet high, if ...
— The Giant of the North - Pokings Round the Pole • R.M. Ballantyne
... in a hole pierced by a cannonball in the middle of the church of the Ursulines; and there he still rests. In 1827, when all bad feeling had subsided, Lord Dalhousie, the then English governor of Canada, ordered the erection at Quebec of an obelisk in marble bearing the names and busts of Wolfe and Montcalm, with this inscription: Mortem virtus communem, famam historia, monumentum posteritas dedit [Valor, history, and posterity assigned fellowship in death, ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... the darkness which veiled the Great Sacrifice was observed by a heathen astronomer, Dionysius the Areopagite. We found nothing, however, on the site of this ancient city, except a small garden of orange-trees, with a magnificent obelisk in the centre. ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume 19 - Travel and Adventure • Various
... on our farm, directly in front of the house, at the distance of less than half a mile. The withered trunk and boughs, surmounted by the coarse-wrought and capacious nest, was a more picturesque object than an obelisk; and the flights of the hawks, as they went forth to hunt, returned with their game, exercised themselves in wheeling round and round, and circling about it, were amusing to the beholder, almost from morning till night. The family of these hawks, old and ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 486 - Vol. 17, No. 486., Saturday, April 23, 1831 • Various
... spacious little bay, or loch, penetrating for some distance into the land. Soon afterwards the big rock mentioned in O'Gorman's document separated itself from the background of bush and trees with which it had hitherto been merged, and proclaimed itself as an obelisk-like monolith of basalt rearing its apex to a height of some ninety feet above the water level. When fairly abreast of this the canvas was clewed up, and the brig slid into the loch with the way that she had on her. This loch, or channel, wound gradually round for a length of about a cable, ...
— The Castaways • Harry Collingwood
... went to see the famous obelisk presented by Mehemet Ali to the British Government, who have not shown a particular alacrity to accept this ponderous present. The huge shaft lies on the ground, prostrate, and desecrated by all sorts ...
— Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo • William Makepeace Thackeray
... monolithic monument, recording the tragic fate of a sailor who was there murdered and his dead body flung into the "Bowl." The inscription further states that justice overtook his murderers, who were hanged on the selfsame spot, the scene of their crime. The obelisk of stone, with its long record, occupying the place where stood ...
— The Land of Fire - A Tale of Adventure • Mayne Reid
... good-bye to the farmer and strode on through Harrington and Norton, and a little beyond this Robert took those that cared about it to see the obelisk on the site of the Battle of Evesham, at which Simon de Montfort was killed in 1265. And so they came through the orchards of plum-trees, on which the fruit was now forming, ...
— The Slowcoach • E. V. Lucas
... Maximus. It was erected here by Pope Sixtus V, and it is nearly a hundred feet in height. It is formed of red granite, and while it has been broken in three places, the hieroglyphics are still legible. This obelisk was first erected in Egypt as a part of the Temple of the Sun at Heliopolis, in a period preceding that of Rameses II. After the battle of Actium, Augustus transported it to Rome, and it was first placed in the Circus Maximus, but during the reign of Valentinian it fell ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting
... guards, entered the Garden of the Tuileries, and advanced to the gate of the Place de la Concorde, a general, accompanied by his aide-de-camp, and escorted by a few lancers, taking his station close to the obelisk. In the meantime, the quays adjoining the palace were lined with dragoons. The presence of these troops, which nobody could account for, created much uneasiness, though in some groups a report circulated that the assembly was about to proclaim the ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... side the central vertebral column, but chiefly on the lower side—the column sending out its diminished vertebrae to the extreme termination of the fin. All the forms testify of a remote antiquity. The figures on a Chinese vase or an Egyptian obelisk are scarce more unlike what now exists in nature than are the fossils of the ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... of the monument is on the south side, the statue of Lincoln being on that side of the obelisk, over Memorial Hall. On the east side are three tablets, upon which are the letters U. S. A. To the right of that, and beginning with Virginia, we find the the abbreviations of the original thirteen States. Next comes Vermont, the first state admitted after ...
— Lincoln's Yarns and Stories • Alexander K. McClure
... great public places in the city of Paris, moreover, commemorate, more or less openly, what might be called the great stains on the history of the nation. The Place de la Concorde is that of the Guillotine, and the Luxor obelisk is the monument of the more than twenty-eight hundred victims beheaded by that axe. The Place de l'Hotel de Ville was formerly the Place de Greve, famous in all hangmen's annals,—burnings alive, tearings asunder by horses, breakings on the ...
— Paris from the Earliest Period to the Present Day; Volume 1 • William Walton
... is everywhere to be found accompanying the triune God, called by the Hindoos, Trimourti or Trinity, and the significant form of the single obelisk or pillar called the Linga or Lingham;[3] and it should be observed, in justice to the Hindoos that it is some comparative and negative praise to them, that this emblem, under which they express the éléments and operations of nature is not externally indecorous. Unlike the abominable ...
— Aphrodisiacs and Anti-aphrodisiacs: Three Essays on the Powers of Reproduction • John Davenport
... cabin from which he issues; are the sights which a traveler may remark on coming on deck at Kingstown pier on a wet morning—let us say on an average morning; for according to the statement of well-informed natives, the Irish day is more often rainy than otherwise. A hideous obelisk, stuck upon four fat balls, and surmounted with a crown on a cushion (the latter were no bad emblems perhaps of the monarch in whose honor they were raised), commemorates the sacred spot at which George IV. quitted Ireland: you are landed here from the steamer; and a ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors - Vol. II Great Britain And Ireland, Part Two • Francis W. Halsey
... religion were worse in the eyes of Maieddine than the foolish faith of Christians, who, at least, were not backsliders. He would not even point out to Victoria the strange minaret of the Abadite mosque at Berryan, which tapered like a brown obelisk against the shimmering sky, for to him its very ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... since, for its name was changed in honor of the monarch's {25} visit to his Irish subjects. The tourist who has just arrived at Kingstown by the steamer from Holyhead, and who takes his seat in the train for Dublin, may see from the window of the railway carriage an obelisk, not very imposing either in its height or in its sculptured form, which seems a little out of place amid the ordinary accessories of a railway and steamboat station. This is the monument which the grateful authorities ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume IV (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... escutcheon of the Barberini family. Madame Gorka's instinct had at least served her in leading her upon a route on which she met no one. Now the sense of reality returned. She recognized the objects around her, and that framework, so familiar to her piety of fervent Catholicism, the enormous square, the obelisk of Sixte-Quint in the centre, the fountains, the circular portico crowned with bishops and martyrs, the palace of the Vatican at the corner, and yonder the facade of the large papal cathedral, with the Saviour and the apostles erect ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... alighted at a spot nearly opposite to Oldbridge, sate down on the turf to rest himself, and called for breakfast. The sumpter horses were unloaded: the canteens were opened; and a tablecloth was spread on the grass. The place is marked by an obelisk, built while many veterans who could well remember the events of that day ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... known ever after. This devotion was not primitive, but began in the fourth dynasty, and was established by the fifth dynasty being called sons of Ra, and every later king having the title 'son of Ra' before his name. The obelisk was the emblem of Ra, and in the fifth dynasty a great obelisk temple was built in his honour at Abusir, followed also by others. Heliopolis was the centre of his worship, where Senusert I, in the twelfth dynasty, rebuilt the temple and erected the obelisks, one of which is still standing. But ...
— The Religion of Ancient Egypt • W. M. Flinders Petrie
... especially those who wish to become mothers, resort, anointing them copiously with oil, and signalizing their respect and devotion to them in a very practical way. As to the lingam as representing the male organ, in some form or other—as upright stone or pillar or obelisk or slender round tower—it occurs all over the world, notably in Ireland, and forms such a memorial of the adoration paid by early folk to the great emblem and instrument of human fertility, as cannot be mistaken. The pillars set up by Solomon in ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... a very uncomely obelisk on his battle-field of Denain near by, and General de Dampierre by a column in the public square of Anzin itself. Why should not Anzin set up ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... the Obelisk, the Double Dagger, and sometimes other marks, [Footnote: For instance: the Section mark, [Section], and the Parallel, ||.] refer to notes ...
— Sanders' Union Fourth Reader • Charles W. Sanders
... streets nearly all day; and we saw nothing in the slightest degree interesting, except the tomb of Smollett, in the burial-place attached to the English Chapel. It is surrounded by an iron railing, and marked by a slender obelisk of white marble, the pattern of which is many times repeated over ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... saw a moment's interval divide The rose that blossomed from the rose that died. This with its cap of tufted moss looked green; That, tipped with reddening purple, peeped between; One reared its obelisk with opening swell, The bud unsheathed its crimson pinnacle; Another, gathering every purpled fold, Its foliage multiplied; its blooms unrolled, The teeming chives shot forth; the petals spread; The bow-pot's glory reared its smiling ...
— The Continental Monthly , Vol. 2 No. 5, November 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... which now form the glory of the Vatican. The spot of the apostles' execution was indicated "by immemorial tradition" as between the two goals (inter duas metas) of Nero's Circus, which spot Signor Lanciani tells us is exactly the site of the obelisk now standing in the piazza of St. Peter. A little chapel, called the Chapel of the Crucifixion, stood there in the early ages, before any great basilica or ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 8 - The Later Renaissance: From Gutenberg To The Reformation • Editor-in-Chief: Rossiter Johnson
... tocher to the son of Sir Andrew Moray, patriot and friend of Wallace, in whom the Morays of Abercairny find their origin. Such were the men; and over there on Tomachastel was their home—a place famous then, and very noticeable still, with its gleaming memorial obelisk to "oor Davie" of Ferntower, the hardy soldier who overcame the fierce Tippoo Sahib at Seringapatam. Beyond lie the Aberuchill Hills, with the flat pyramidal face of Ben Voirlich filling up a gap, and sending its roots, on one side, down ...
— Chronicles of Strathearn • Various
... she could do Christmas work charmingly; and at any rate it was delightful only to look at them. She tried to get her thoughts a little in order. For Norton, she would make the watch guard; that was one thing fixed. A delicate bronze paperweight, a beautiful obelisk, had greatly taken her fancy, and Norton had been describing to her the use of its originals in old Egypt; it was not very costly, and Matilda thought she would like to give that to Mrs. Laval. ...
— The House in Town • Susan Warner
... and women, when he obtained possession of Calcutta in 1756—confining them in a narrow and noisome cell, which poisoned them with its malarious atmosphere, so that by morning only a few remained alive—is now part of a warehouse. But an obelisk stands at the entrance, inscribed with the names of ...
— The Story of Ida Pfeiffer - and Her Travels in Many Lands • Anonymous
... trees and grass plats in some of these more recent portions. There are some pleasing public walks, after the English fashion; and a public garden, where a colossal sphinx, erected by the late philosopher Gleichen, has a very imposing appearance. Here is also an obelisk erected to the memory of Gleichen himself, the founder of these gardens; and a monument to the memory of Kepler, the astronomer; which latter was luckily spared in the assault of this town by ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume V (of X) • Various
... educated and intelligent. She was also intensely bored with her home where, as if packed in a tight box, her individuality—of which she was very conscious—had no play. She strode like a grenadier, was strong and upright like an obelisk, had a beautiful face, a candid brow, pure eyes, and not a thought of her own in her head. He surrendered quickly to all those charms, and she appeared to him so unquestionably of the right sort that he did not hesitate for a moment to declare ...
— Tales of Unrest • Joseph Conrad
... the main events of it, at the request of his friends; and his sketch has been filled out by commentators, if not always favourable, at least erudite. Born in 1506, at the Moss, in Killearn—where an obelisk to his memory, so one reads, has been erected in this century—of a family "rather ancient than rich," his father dead in the prime of manhood, his grandfather a spendthrift, he and his seven brothers and sisters were brought up by a widowed mother, Agnes Heriot—of whom one ...
— Historical Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... this show. To the left the North river with its far vista—nearer, three or four war-ships, anchor'd peacefully—the Jersey side, the banks of Weehawken, the Palisades, and the gradually receding blue, lost in the distance—to the right the East river—the mast-hemm'd shores—the grand obelisk-like towers of the bridge, one on either side, in haze, yet plainly defin'd, giant brothers twain, throwing free graceful interlinking loops high across the tumbled tumultuous current below—(the tide is just changing ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
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