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Carven   Listen
adjective
Carven  adj.  Wrought by carving; ornamented by carvings; carved. (Poetic) "A carven bowl well wrought of beechen tree." "The carven cedarn doors." "A screen of carven ivory."






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Carven" Quotes from Famous Books



... almost inconceivably numerous. The river front is nine hundred feet in length, with an elaborately decorated facade with carven statues and emblems. By 1860 the cost had exceeded by ...
— Dickens' London • Francis Miltoun

... was a tall, commodious, plastered mansion, framed in carven oak, and covered by a low-pitched roof of thatch. To the back there stretched a garden, full of fruit-trees, alleys, and thick arbours, and over-looked from the far end by the tower of ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 8 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... now—the tread of shuffling feet was gone—no man moved—it seemed as though no man breathed—they stood as carven things, inanimate, men, women and children strained forward, their faces drawn, tense and rigid. In the very air, around them, everywhere, imprisoning them, clutching like an icy hand at the heart, something unseen, a ...
— The Miracle Man • Frank L. Packard

... divine The art that reared thy costly shrine! Thy carven columns must have grown By magic, like ...
— Songs Out of Doors • Henry Van Dyke

... of her thoughts would roll across her heart like a crushing weight, and she knew that no thirst for tea, no hunger for flour-bread, no shivering in thin garments, would ever drive her to part with it. For the grotesque, carven thing was the very birthright of her boy. Every figure, hewn with infinite patience by his sire's, his grandsire's, his great-grandsire's, hands meant the very history from which sprang the source of red blood in his young veins, the birth of each generation, its deeds of valor, its achievements, ...
— The Shagganappi • E. Pauline Johnson

... and still; For in their houses all the people stayed, Of that most mournful music sore afraid. But on the way a marvel did they see, For, passing by, where wrought of ivory, There stood the Goddess of the flowery isle, All folk could see the carven image smile. But when anigh the hill's bare top they came, Where Psyche must be left to meet her shame, They set the litter down, and drew aside The golden curtains from the wretched bride, Who at their bidding rose and with them went Afoot amidst her maids with head down-bent, ...
— The Earthly Paradise - A Poem • William Morris

... looks he on a land Whereon his labour is a carven page; And forth from heritage to heritage ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... little minute, I did see it again; but whether it did be the shape of some utter monster of eternity—even as the Watchers about the Mighty Pyramid—or whether it did be no more than a carven mountain of rock, shaped unto the dire picturing of a Monster, I did have no knowing. But I made that I should get hence very quick, and I did turn me about in the bushes, and went upon my hands and knees; and so came at ...
— The Night Land • William Hope Hodgson

... sinking, emerged again by means of the powerful beat of his legs and hoofs, did Graham realize that it was a woman who rode him—a woman as white as the white silken slip of a bathing suit that molded to her form like a marble-carven veiling of drapery. As marble was her back, save that the fine delicate muscles moved and crept under the silken suit as she strove to keep her head above water. Her slim round arms were twined in yards of half-drowned stallion-mane, while her ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London

... seas were like waves of ice, which froze every living thing they touched. The interior of the immense vault of stone in which they were was even more bitterly chill than the snow-covered plains without. Now and then a bat moved in the shadows—now and then a gleam of light came on the ranks of carven figures. Under the Rubens they lay together quite still, and soothed almost into a dreaming slumber by the numbing narcotic of the cold. Together they dreamed of the old glad days when they had chased each other through the flowering grasses of the summer meadows, or sat hidden in the tall ...
— A Dog of Flanders • Louisa de la Rame)

... hand to gather the rose that blossomed in his path, a golden flower scentless and stiff was all he grasped. When he called to him the carrier-dove that sped with a scroll of love words across the mountains, the bird sank on his breast a carven piece of metal. When he was athirst and shouted to his cupbearer for drink, the red wine ran a stream of molten gold. When he would fain have eaten, the pulse and the pomegranate grew alike to gold between his teeth. And lo! at eventide, when he sought the silent chambers of his ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida

... by their aiding us to understand better and to feel more the truth as it is in Jesus, and to cleave closer to Him who is the truth. Do they enlighten the understanding? Do they engrave deeper the loved face carven on the tablets of memory, which the attrition of worldly cares is ever obliterating, and the lichens of worldly thoughts ever filling up? Do they clear out the rubbish from the channels of the heart, that the cleansing stream may flow through them? Do ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... dim. But the return, every day, was even pleasanter than the going forth; the return into the wide, monumental court of the great house in which Mrs. Touchett, many years before, had established herself, and into the high, cool rooms where the carven rafters and pompous frescoes of the sixteenth century looked down on the familiar commodities of the age of advertisement. Mrs. Touchett inhabited an historic building in a narrow street whose very name recalled ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 1 (of 2) • Henry James

... Pallas Athene followed. And when they were now within the lofty house, he set her spear that he bore against a tall pillar, within the polished spear-stand, where stood many spears besides, even those of Odysseus of the hardy heart; and he led the goddess and seated her on a goodly carven chair, and spread a linen cloth thereunder, and beneath was a footstool for the feet. For himself he placed an inlaid seat hard by, apart from the company of the wooers, lest the stranger should be disquieted by the noise and should have a loathing ...
— DONE INTO ENGLISH PROSE • S. H. BUTCHER, M.A.

... singers will yet sing on to him that hath ears to hear. When he returns to seek them, the shadowy door will open to his touch, the long-drawn aisles receding will guide his eye to the carven choir, and there they still stand, the sweet singers, content to repeat ancient psalm and new song to the prayer of the humblest whose heart would join in ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald

... interest and moment. Indeed, this was hardly to be wondered at; for the priest, so far as I could understand his gabble, took the larger portion for read, after muttering the first words of the rubric. A little carven image of an acolyte—a weird boy who seemed to move by springs, whose hair had all the semblance of painted wood, and whose complexion was white and red like a clown's—did not make matters more intelligible by spasmodically ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds

... of trumpets and bugles and silver flutes and hautboys! Wouldn't you like to have seen the heralds marching by, two by two, in cloth of gold, with an escort of the queen's guard following? All of England's best and bravest were there, and they sat in the carven stalls in St. George's Chapel, with their gorgeous banners drooping over them. I saw that chapel, Jonesy, when we were in England, and I saw where the knights kept the 'vigil of arms' in the holy places, the ...
— Two Little Knights of Kentucky • Annie Fellows Johnston

... of rocks, and thatched cottages, and ragged newsboys with faces like Daniel Webster, all of them in large gilt frames protected by shadow-boxes. In a corner was a cabinet of gilt and glass, filled with Dresden-china figurines and toy tables and a carven Swiss musical powder-box. The fireplace was of smooth, chilly white marble, with an ormolu clock on the mantelpiece, and a fire-screen painted with Watteau shepherds and shepherdesses, making silken unreal love and ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis

... within the carven door Of some cathedral at the close of the day, And seen its softened splendors fade away From lucent pane and tessellated floor, As if a parting guest who comes no more,— Till over all silence and blackness lay, Then rose sweet murmurings of ...
— Songs of Two • Arthur Sherburne Hardy

... Stanhope's own deserted bed, Varney lay at his ease, as quiet as a statued man. Over the bed, industriously at work, hung the keen-faced town doctor, whom Hare had gotten with a speed which passed all understanding. At the foot of the bed stood Peter Maginnis, his face like the face of a carven image. ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison

... and rings and carven gems, And the wise crawling sea; But most of all the crowns of kings, The rule they ...
— Young Adventure - A Book of Poems • Stephen Vincent Benet

... by two faces which struggled ceaselessly to crowd each other from his mind. One was the young and passionate countenance of the gypsy, and the other was that of his beautiful mother with her pale, carven features, her snow-white hair, her pensive and unearthly expression. They both looked at him, and then gazed at each other. Now one set below the horizon like a wan, white moon, and the other rose above it like the glowing star of love. Now the moon passed over the glowing star in a long eclipse ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss

... the ear-trumpet, and afterwards wipes it very carefully with his handkerchief. MANSON stands, as though carven in marble, waiting for him ...
— The Servant in the House • Charles Rann Kennedy

... Alfred Austin, "it must seem a reproach never to have had a pope in the family, and you will with difficulty find a villa of any pretension, certainly not in Frascati, where memorial tassels and tiara carven in stone over porch and doorway ...
— Romance of Roman Villas - (The Renaissance) • Elizabeth W. (Elizbeth Williams) Champney

... walls, over which one might spy only a few roofs, weird and ominous, yet adorned with rich friezes and alluring sculptures. I yearned mightily to enter this fascinating yet repellent city, and beseeched the bearded man to land me at the stone pier by the huge carven gate Akariel; but he gently denied my wish, saying, "Into Thalarion, the City of a Thousand Wonders, many have passed but none returned. Therein walk only daemons and mad things that are no longer men, and the streets ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft

... something in the carven box which the shrieking oracle commended to me. "Take this," it said, "take this, and it will turn the blackness of exile ...
— Hypolympia - Or, The Gods in the Island, an Ironic Fantasy • Edmund Gosse

... Hall of Odin they sit by their father's side. Woe's me for the boughs of the Branstock and the hawks that cried on the fight! Woe's me for the tireless hearthstones and the hangings of delight, That the women dare not look on lest they see them sweat with blood! Woe's me for the carven pillars where the spears of the Volsungs stood! And who next shall shake the locks, or the silver door-rings meet? Who shall pace the floor beloved, worn down by the Volsung feet? Who shall fill the gold with the wine, or cry for the triumphing? ...
— The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs • William Morris

... carle led him into the house; and if it were goodly without, within it was better. For there was a fair chamber panelled with wainscot well carven, and a cupboard of no sorry vessels of silver and latten: the chairs and stools as fair as might be; no king's might be better: the windows were glazed, and there were flowers and knots and posies in them; and the bed was hung with goodly web from over sea ...
— The Well at the World's End • William Morris

... now ensued. Under the chaplain's guidance they selected many hideous presents and mementoes—florid little picture-frames that seemed fashioned in gilded pastry; other little frames, more severe, that stood on little easels, and were carven out of oak; a blotting book of vellum; a Dante of the same material; cheap mosaic brooches, which the maids, next Christmas, would never tell from real; pins, pots, heraldic saucers, brown art-photographs; Eros and Psyche in alabaster; St. Peter to match—all ...
— A Room With A View • E. M. Forster

... the way from Calvary down The carven pavement shows Their graves who won the martyr's crown And safe in God repose; The saints of many a warring creed Who now in heaven have learned That all paths to the Father lead Where Self the feet ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell

... for as he spoke he had lain back in a tall carven chair by the east window. She was past speech. But now, for a moment, her lips clung to his, and her warm tears fell upon his face. What better death for ...
— The Line of Love - Dizain des Mariages • James Branch Cabell

... in Atli's feast-hall on the side that joined the house Were many carven doorways whose work was glorious With marble stones and gold-work, and their doors of beaten brass: Lo now, in the merry morning how the story cometh to pass! —While the echoes of the trumpet yet fill the people's ears, And Hogni casts by the war-horn, and his Dwarf-wrought sword uprears, ...
— Lyra Heroica - A Book of Verse for Boys • Various

... quick as the spring of death, but they can also be as slow as the wrath of Heaven. And that bird there, the great, grand, haughty, unbending Aquila chrysoetus, that golden eagle, sat. I say, he sat. And there, so far as he was concerned, appeared to be an end of it. He might have been a carven copestone of the very granite fang he sat upon, for all the appearance of life he gave, except that occasionally—say at fifteen-minute intervals—he winked a yellow-lidded wink. And the wink was almost as unlifelike ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars

... shone over her winding-sheet, There stark she lay on her carven bed: Seven burning tapers about her feet, And seven ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various

... churches. Everything portable has been removed to a place of safety, but the famous mosaics, the ancient windows, and the splendid carvings it is impossible to remove, and they are the most precious of all. The two pulpits of colored marbles and the celebrated screen with its carven figures are now hidden beneath pyramids of sand-bags. The spiral columns of translucent alabaster which support the altar, are padded with excelsior and wrapped with canvas. Swinging curtains of quilted burlap protect the walls of the chapels and transepts from flying shell fragments. ...
— Italy at War and the Allies in the West • E. Alexander Powell

... shoes had once been the shoes of one who lay here, a princess, dead thousands of years, and once very beautiful, as these carven symbols told. They were small and dainty and threaded with fine gold, and laced across with care about the feet of her who was once a woman and a princess and owner of much beauty, and who was in her life beloved, and ...
— The Singing Mouse Stories • Emerson Hough

... PIPER, alone, stands spell-bound, breathing hard, and looking after her. Then he turns his head and comes down, doggedly. Again he pauses. With a sudden sharp effort he turns, and crosses with passionate appeal to the shrine, his arm uplifted towards the carven Christ as if he warded off some accusation. His speech comes ...
— The Piper • Josephine Preston Peabody

... spoke the expression on the young man's face became more and more hopeless, and when he had ceased he dropped his head into his open palms, sitting quiet and motionless as a carven statue. No sob shook his great frame, there was no outward indication of the terrible grief that racked him inwardly—only in the pose ...
— The Monster Men • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... eventual heir of the entire property, no matter if the Major did turn over to Sydney a third of it now. And George had a fragmentary vision of himself, in mourning, arriving to take possession of a historic Florentine villa—he saw himself walking up a cypress-bordered path, with ancient carven stone balustrades in the distance, and servants in mourning livery greeting the new signore. "Well, I suppose it's grandfather's own affair. He can do it or not, just as he likes. I don't see ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington

... the Geatish men in the banquet-hall on bench assigned, sturdy-spirited, sat them down, hardy-hearted. A henchman attended, carried the carven cup in hand, served the clear mead. Oft minstrels sang blithe in Heorot. Heroes revelled, no dearth of warriors, Weder ...
— Beowulf • Anonymous

... I felt that the children had only just hurried away—to hide themselves, most like—in the many turns of the great adzed staircase that climbed statelily out of the hall, or to crouch at gaze behind the lions and roses of the carven gallery above. Then I heard her voice above me, singing as the ...
— Traffics and Discoveries • Rudyard Kipling

... in the church of St. Rest was filled in and completed. Maryllia had found all the remaining ancient stained glass that had been needed to give the finishing touch to its beauty, and the loveliest deep gem-like hues shone through the carven apertures like rare jewels in a perfect setting. The rays of light filtering through them were wonderful and mystical,—such as might fall from the pausing wings of some great ministering angel,—and under the blaze of splendid colour, ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli

... courtyard of a ruined temple. In the centre lies a square pool, with wide rows of steps leading down to the water, now overgrown with lotus plants. Around the court rise long colonnades of pillars with grotesquely carven bases and capitals of luxuriant design. Beyond these appear green masses of dense tropical foliage, in which an ...
— Mr. Faust • Arthur Davison Ficke

... food for furry friends She pass'd, her lamp and she, Till eaves and gable-ends Hid all that saffron sheen from me: Around my rosy tree Once more the silver-starry night was shining, With depths of heaven, dewy and free, And crystals of a carven moon declining. ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy

... as firmly planted by time as the avenue of live-oaks they headed, showed clearly in the afternoon light. And from the nearest, deep carven in the stone, a jagged-toothed skull, crowned and grinning, stared blankly at the three in the shabby car. Beneath it ran the insolent motto of an ancient and disreputable clan, "What I ...
— Ralestone Luck • Andre Norton

... sung shines as a picture wrought, The painted mouths sing that on earth say nought, The carven limbs have sense of blood and growth And large-eyed life that ...
— Poems & Ballads (Second Series) - Swinburne's Poems Volume III • Algernon Charles Swinburne

... And covered under arms and hair, and wept, And feared to touch him with my tears, and laughed; So light a thing was this man, grown so great Men cast their heads back, seeing against the sun Blaze the armed man carven on his shield, and hear The laughter of little bells along the brace Ring, as birds singing or flutes blown, and watch, High up, the cloven shadow of either plume Divide the bright light of the brass, and make His helmet as a windy and wintering moon Seen through blown cloud and plume-like ...
— Atalanta in Calydon • Algernon Charles Swinburne

... cowered, alarmed by what a quick glimpse of his face had shown her. She had never seen a human face so—not whitened by his fear, but greyed—greyed as if seared with fire and turned to carven ashes. She could tell, by that, that he would never, really, forgive her. Too firmly had his hopes been fixed upon the plans which he had built in many long hours of reflections going back along the years, no doubt, to that far time when ...
— The Old Flute-Player - A Romance of To-day • Edward Marshall and Charles T. Dazey

... orchard, near the dusty highway, under a huge misshapen olive tree sat a boy, still as a carven Buddha save that his eyes stood wide, full of dreams. His was a sensitive face, thoughtful beyond his childish years, full of weariness when from time to time he closed his eyes, full of dark brooding when the lids lifted again. Presently ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various

... are shiftings of the sails. And he hath hope that when he shall have endured to the end his grievous plague he shall see once more his home, and at Apollo's fountain[19] joining in the feast give his soul to rejoice in her youth, and amid citizens who love his art, playing on his carven lute, shall enter upon peace, hurting and hurt of none. Then shall he tell how fair a fountain of immortal verse he made to flow for Arkesilas, when of late he ...
— The Extant Odes of Pindar • Pindar

... or a sister or any of those inconvenient things with a restless religion, that wakes you up about 3 A.M. on a wintry dawn to pray shiveringly to a piece of wood, to the tune of a thumping drum. Some morning when the frost was on the cypress that carven ...
— The Lady and Sada San - A Sequel to The Lady of the Decoration • Frances Little

... fronts and quaintly carven balconies were noisy with shrill voices. Every self-respecting house was plastered with fresh mud; every window and doorway garlanded with marigold and jasmine buds; every brain, absorbed in the paramount speculation, as to how the sacrificial ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver

... heart. Putting a shawl over her head, she rolled the flowers in her apron from the frost, and stepped out into the brilliant day. The little cross-track between her house and the other was snowed up; but she took the road and, hurrying between banks of carven whiteness, went up Solon's path to the side door. She walked in upon him where he was standing over the kitchen stove, warming his hands at the first blaze. Susan's cheeks were red with the challenge of the stinging air, but she had the look of one who, living by a larger law, has banished ...
— Tiverton Tales • Alice Brown

... white with moonlight streaming through curtainless open windows, seemed to Max like a mausoleum. He could see the still, flat forms, uncovered and prone on their narrow beds, like carven figures of soldiers on tombs. He alone was alive among a company of statues. The men could not be human to sleep so soon and so soundly after the ...
— A Soldier of the Legion • C. N. Williamson

... his hands away. Sound died, the room was normal again. The milky, white eyes surveyed him, the hands remained locked securely over those of the mother. The thin carven features of the ...
— Now We Are Three • Joe L. Hensley

... "What finely carven features! Yes, but carved From some clear stuff, not like a woman's flesh, And colored like half-faded, white-rose leaves. 'Tis all too thin, and wan, and wanting blood, To take my taste. No fulness, and no flush! A watery half-moon in a wintry ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson

... love of me. There was no struggle between them at all, or but little; of such dimensions was your hatred and of such monstrous growth. You did not realise that there was no room for both passions in the same soul: they cannot live together in that fair carven house. Love is fed by the imagination, by which we become wiser than we know, better than we feel, nobler than we are; by which we can see life as a whole; by which and by which alone, we can understand others in their real as in their ideal relations. Only what is fine, and finely conceived, can ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 2 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris

... one. There was a curtained doorway that gave access to the chapel itself; pushing aside the hangings, we could see the dim interior, empty except for the high altar set with tall candles, and a carven ...
— Margaret Tudor - A Romance of Old St. Augustine • Annie T. Colcock

... voice, though tongueless!—KO-NGAI! All the little dragons on the high-tilted eaves of the green roofs shiver to the tips of their gilded tails under that deep wave of sound; all the porcelain gargoyles tremble on their carven perches; all the hundred little bells of the pagodas quiver with desire to speak. KO-NGAI!—all the green-and-gold tiles of the temple are vibrating; the wooden goldfish above them are writhing against the sky; the uplifted finger of Fo shakes high over the heads of the worshippers ...
— Some Chinese Ghosts • Lafcadio Hearn

... face, carven in on a ground Of that shadowy hair where the roses are wound; And the gleam of a smile O as fair and as faint And as sweet as the masters of old used to paint Round the ...
— Riley Love-Lyrics • James Whitcomb Riley

... and Amsterdam; and some few to the private houses of rich collectors. At last, in the shop of an old watchmaker and jeweller at Hoorn, I found what he considered his chiefest treasure; a great ruby, carven like a scarab, with seven stars, and engraven with hieroglyphics. The old man did not know hieroglyphic character, and in his old-world, sleepy life, the philological discoveries of recent years had not reached him. He did not know anything of Van Huyn, except that such a person ...
— The Jewel of Seven Stars • Bram Stoker

... on Raleigh's arm, threaded numerous corridors, sumptuously curtained and carpeted, and came at last to a spacious room where, on a huge sideboard of carven oak, constant provision was maintained for bodily refreshment. Servants in royal livery stood about, and several gentlemen of the household, who had just been relieved from duty, or come in from running some royal errand, ...
— Sea-Dogs All! - A Tale of Forest and Sea • Tom Bevan

... Or do they come to earth, their birth Rupturing the memory of previous being? Answer! The field of unexplored intuition is yours. But in any case why not plant willows for them, As well as for us? Marie Bateson You observe the carven hand With the index finger pointing heavenward. That is the direction, no doubt. But how shall one follow it? It is well to abstain from murder and lust, To forgive, do good to others, worship God Without graven images. But these ...
— Spoon River Anthology • Edgar Lee Masters

... age-worn, in Rome the eternal Stands the arch of Titus' triumph, With its carven Jewish captives Stooped ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various

... vain, to recoup themselves amply for the toils and dangers which they had survived. Beneath these booths were spread their goods; silks from Cos, bronze weapons and copper rods, or ingots from the rich mines of Cyprus, linens and muslins from Egypt; beads, idols, carven bowls, knives, glass ware, pottery in all shapes, and charms made of glazed faience or Egyptian stone; bales of the famous purple cloth of Tyre; surgical instruments, jewellery, and objects of toilet; scents, pots of rouge, and other unguents for the use of ladies ...
— Elissa • H. Rider Haggard

... cigarette from the carven box, and walked back to the window. The tune had mesmerized him, and there came into his view Irene, her sunshade furled, hastening homewards down the Square, in a soft, rose-coloured blouse with drooping sleeves, that he ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... recently; but these latter had been enemies who killed and robbed. And, too, these legends always held forth the hope that some day that nameless continent from which their race had sprung, would rise once more out of the sea and with slaves at the long sweeps would send her carven, gold-picked galleys forth to ...
— Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... the unusual form of the sermon, remained silent and motionless, waiting. In his stall sat the rector with downcast eyes. Malling could not at that moment discern his expression. His large figure and important powerful head and face showed almost like those of a carven effigy in the lowered light of the chancel. The choirboys did not stir, and the small, fair man in the pulpit, raising his thin hands, and resting them on the marble ledge, continued quietly, taking up his sermon with a repetition of the last words uttered, "whose footprints ...
— The Dweller on the Threshold • Robert Smythe Hichens

... in my garth a goodly olive grew; Thick was the noble leafage of its prime, And like a carven column rose the trunk. This tree about I built my chamber walls, Laying great stone on stone, and roofed them well, And in the portal set a comely door, Stout-hinged and tightly closing. Then with axe I lopped the leafy olive's branching head, And hewed the ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing

... affection of all those who dwell beneath its shadow, but also their glory and their pride. Some believe it was built by King David of Scotland: others by one Robert de Rede, since his name may still be seen carven upon the stone by him who has skill to look. But in truth the architect hath carried both his name and his secret with him, and the craftsmen of many another larger and more famous city have sought in vain to build ...
— A Book of Quaker Saints • Lucy Violet Hodgkin

... these affairs. In a mediaeval town every house was different, in a mediaeval cathedral no two pillars were alike, and in the dress of a mediaeval crowd was captured the colours of the rainbow. With an odd result. Men laughed at the devil in the freedom of their souls. They tweaked his tail on carven misericords, and in the mystery play he was invariably cast for ...
— Nonsenseorship • G. G. Putnam

... years ago, starting from the other rim of Time; the green leaves repeat the beauty that gladdened man in ancient days. But for themselves they are, and not for us. Their glory fills the mind with rapture but for a while, and it learns that they are, like carven idols, wholly careless and indifferent to our fate. Then is the valley incomplete, and the void sad! Its hills speak of death as well as of life, and we know that for man there is nothing on earth really but man; the human species owns and possesses nothing ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies

... thousand years ago, and Lo Lang Ho is but a reproach among travelers and the story of that great river is forgotten, and what became of the maiden no tale saith though all men think she became a goddess of jade to sit and smile at a lotus on a lotus carven of stone by the side of the green jade god far under the marshes upon the peaks of the mountains, but women know that her ghost still haunts the lotus marshes on glittering evenings, singing ...
— Tales of Three Hemispheres • Lord Dunsany

... nodosities of pine, Mixed with old alphabets, and faded lore Fallen from ecstatic mouths before the Flood, Or gathered by the daughters when they walked Eastward in Eden with the Sons of God Whom love and the deep moon made garrulous. Between the carven tusks his trunk hung dead; Blind as the eyes of pearl in Buddha's brow His beaded eyes stared thwart upon the road; And feebler than the doting knees of eld, His joints, of size to swing the builder's crane Across the war-walls of the Anakim, Made vain and shaken haste. Good need ...
— Gloucester Moors and Other Poems • William Vaughn Moody

... carven tranquillity, heart and spirit were deeply stirred. For all Nevil's skill in editing the tale of Roy's championship, she had read his hidden thoughts as unerringly as she had divined Mrs Bradley's curiosity and faint hostility beneath the veneer of good manners, ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver

... place he lay as he were dead. His breast to-bursten with his saddle-bow. As black he lay as any coal or crow, So was the blood y-run into his face. Anon he was y-borne out of the place With hearte sore, to Theseus' palace. Then was he carven* out of his harness. *cut And in a bed y-brought full fair and blive* *quickly For he was yet in mem'ry and alive, And ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer

... you buy your sunrise from my heart, and you find your love carven into the image ...
— Fruit-Gathering • Rabindranath Tagore

... wear two," says Patteson, "one at your girdle, and one that nobody sees. We alle wear the unseen one, you know. Some have theirs of gold, alle carven and shaped, soe as you hardlie tell it for a cross ... like my lord cardinall, for instance ... but it is one, for alle that. And others, of iron, that eateth into their hearts ... methinketh Master Roper's ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various

... rectangular at the base, dwindling to a smaller polygon, which is flanked with corner belfries and pierced by a tall lancet in the central structure, showing a wonderful lightness and open effect. A curious and unique feature of these towers is the addition of four oxen in carven stone perched high aloft in the belfries. These sculptured animals may be merely another expression of symbols of superstition, and if so are far more pleasing than some of the hideous and monstrous gargoyles ofttimes seen. Two other towers, each 190 feet in height, ...
— The Cathedrals of Northern France • Francis Miltoun

... the etherization of excitement and the magnetism of crowds what is possible only in the solitary exaltations of the soul. This is the high moral of Dante's poem. We have likened it to a Christian basilica; and as in that so there is here also, painted or carven, every image of beauty and holiness the artist's mind could conceive for the adornment of the holy place. We may linger to enjoy these if we will, but if we follow the central thought that runs like the nave from entrance to choir, it leads us to an image ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell

... making busts and friezes in butter had been adopted at an earlier period, the public places in our great cities and our national Walhallas would seem less like repositories of comic art, since the first critical rays of a warm sun would have reduced the carven atrocities therein to a spot on the pavement. The butter school of sculpture has its advantages, my boy, and you should be crowning the inventor of the system with laurel, and not heaping coals of fire ...
— A House-Boat on the Styx • John Kendrick Bangs

... en Touraine. Tours: 1869.) speaks of it as, "perhaps the purest expres- sion of the belle Renaissance francaise." "Its height," he goes on, "is divided between two stories, terminat- ing under the roof in a projecting entablature which imitates a row of machicolations. Carven chimneys and tall dormer windows, covered with imagery, rise from the roofs; turrets on brackets, of elegant shape, hang with the greatest lightness from the angles of the building. The soberness of the main lines, the harmony of the ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James

... not at all equal, save in our Basilica of San Marco;—the precious altars inlaid with gold and jewels,—like our Pala d'Oro that cometh not forth of our treasury save on days of festa; finest statues of ivory and silver; great carven columns wrought like our columns of Acre—but vaster and of that same fineness of workmanship: and such broideries of golden thread and great pearls for draperies and altar-cloths, as one may scarce dream of! And in their market-places, strewn ...
— The Royal Pawn of Venice - A Romance of Cyprus • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull

... jewelled shrine flew open, and from the crystal of the many-rayed monstrance shone a marvellous and mystical light. He stood there in a king's raiment, and the Glory of God filled the place, and the saints in their carven niches seemed to move. In the fair raiment of a king he stood before them, and the organ pealed out its music, and the trumpeters blew upon their trumpets, ...
— A House of Pomegranates • Oscar Wilde

... Northern, or Western, nothing betrayed; on the surface at least, the provincial, as far as the ironworker could see, was wholly bred out of her. He noted also the unimpaired excellence of her erect and girlish slightness and, under her pretty hat and early whitened hair, the carven fineness of her features. Her whole attire pleasantly befitted her years, which might have been anything short of fifty; and yet, if Scipion was right, she ...
— The Flower of the Chapdelaines • George W. Cable

... her little scarlet cloak from out the carven chest, and as Ezra came past the door, leading the little gray donkey, she flung it across ...
— Christmas Light • Ethel Calvert Phillips

... walks to the balustrade, Idly notes how the blossoms fade In the sun's caress; then crosses where The shadow shelters a carven chair. Within its curve, supine she lies, And wearily closes her tired eyes. The minstrel beseeches his silver strings, And holding the lady spellbound, sings: — Down the road to Avignon, The long, long road to Avignon, Across the bridge to Avignon, One morning ...
— A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass • Amy Lowell

... often. One held her gaze an instant, with its well-known marble hand, pointing the place in a marble book in which was carved one text. How often she had spelled the words, pointing out the deeply carven letters to Davy: "Be ye ...
— The Little Colonel's House Party • Annie Fellows Johnston

... a mile in circuit, and walled with stone. Eastward and westward were marble gates, whereon were built temples of Venus and Mars, while in a turret on the north wall was a shrine of Diana goddess of chastity. And each temple was nobly carven and wrought with statues ...
— The Sources and Analogues of 'A Midsummer-night's Dream' • Compiled by Frank Sidgwick

... a rigid carven statue in the midst of a barren sandy waste in the vast cup of a towering volcano top—sand that was in reality coarse pumice and ash. This was a place of death, a place where raging fires had left nothing for plant or animal life. And, over all, the desert stars ...
— Two Thousand Miles Below • Charles Willard Diffin

... with purple metal— Cut in your naked contentment there shows On the curve of your breast one carven petal From ...
— Spectra - A Book of Poetic Experiments • Arthur Ficke

... dream, but so impressed was I by the old lady's story that all the rest of the week I searched for further light upon it. Into old carven chests I dived, opening package after package of mouldy papers. In the attic trunks and boxes were rifled, until at last, about to give up in despair, I found in an old desk a letter. It was in French with the Benneville crest and seal, brown with ...
— The Statesmen Snowbound • Robert Fitzgerald

... "Carven cedarn doors, Flung inward over spangled floors, Broad based flights of marble stairs, Run up with ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams

... seemed like a rare flower blossoming in the dark. A single light, in a silver lamp hung by a silver chain, burnt before the altar; all else was dim; but they could see the dark stalls of the choir, with their carven canopies, over which hung the banners of old knights, that moved softly to and fro; beyond were the pillars of the aisles, glimmering faintly in a row. The roof and windows were dark, save where here and there a rib of stone or a tracery stood out very ...
— Paul the Minstrel and Other Stories - Reprinted from The Hill of Trouble and The Isles of Sunset • Arthur Christopher Benson

... platform, nor catch the flash of his brown eyes as he held the audience in his power while he told the simple story of his Western work; but she could hear the voice, and it went straight to her lonely, sorrowful heart. Straightway the church with its mass of packed humanity, its arched and carven ceiling, its magnificent stained-glass windows, its wonderful organ and costly fittings, faded from her sight, and overhead there arched a dome of dark blue pierced with stars, and mountains in the distance with a canyon opening, and a flickering fire. She heard the voice speak ...
— The Man of the Desert • Grace Livingston Hill

... which are with thee as full of thine heart and thy soul and as wise and deft as be thy wrists and thine hands, and their very fellows. Now as to thy face: under that smooth forehead is thy nose, which is of measure, neither small nor great, straight, and lovely carven at the nostrils: thine eyen are as grey as a hawk's, but kind and serious, and nothing fierce nor shifting. Nay, now thou lettest thine eyelids fall, it is as fair with thy face as if they were open, so smooth ...
— The Water of the Wondrous Isles • William Morris

... geranium leaf Is one sign of a bitter grief Whose symbols are a myriad more; They cluster round a carven stone Where she who sleeps is never alone For ...
— Lundy's Lane and Other Poems • Duncan Campbell Scott

... lamps at noonday, and wire themselves even with wires when the wind bloweth. And the place where the mummy dwelleth is beneath the Three Balls of Gold. And one will lead thee thither who abides hard by the great tree carven like the head of an Ethiopian. And thou shalt come to the people who slate strangers, and to the place of the Rolling of Logs, ...
— HE • Andrew Lang

... with me and from a carven arch filled with marble tracery rained radiance that revealed and hid. Pillars stood about me, wonderful with horses ramping forward as in the Siva Temple at Vellore. They appeared to spring from the pillars into the gloom urged by invisible riders, the effect barbarously rich and strange—motion ...
— The Ninth Vibration And Other Stories • L. Adams Beck

... made the world." He held up his carven obscenity. "He made the World out of himself. This is a ...
— Oomphel in the Sky • Henry Beam Piper

... dim and rich, Dim as a dream, rich as a reverie, I knew it all of old, surely I knew This floating twilight tinged with rose and blue, This moon-soft carven niche Whence the calm marble, wan as memory, Slopes to the wine-brimmed bath of cold dark fire Perfumed with ...
— Collected Poems - Volume One (of 2) • Alfred Noyes

... beauty.... Even in your room everything interests you, because of its queerness or quaintness: you become fond of the objects about you,—the great noiseless rocking-chairs that lull to sleep;—the immense bed (lit—bateau) of heavy polished wood, with its richly carven sides reaching down to the very floor;— and its invariable companion, the little couch or sopha, similarly shaped but much narrower, used only for the siesta;— and the thick red earthen vessels (dobannes) ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn

... kris, with its carven handle of bone, and it was indeed a trophy worth carrying home. At mess that evening Bob's father announced his desire to take Joe Swanson with him on his initial hunting-trip, at which the burly mate was ...
— The Pirate Shark • Elliott Whitney

... beauty: its cunningly wrought iron and wood; and columned halls and stairways; and wide-throated fireplaces, each a picture in tile, wood, and metalwork; and vistas like little fairylands through silken portieres; and carven chairs and couches, reminiscent of royal palaces; and chambers where lovely color-schemes were worked out in rug, and bed, and canopy. There were decorations made by men whose names were known in London and Paris. From out-of-the-way places Mr. Elkins had brought collections of ...
— Aladdin & Co. - A Romance of Yankee Magic • Herbert Quick

... her, his speed accelerating with each moment. David a few paces in advance followed them. The Indians watched in a tranced intentness of observation. At the top of the slope the three squaws sat as motionless as carven images. The ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner

... what great amount of labor must have been expended on these old high-ways of the time when this territory was occupied by the Romans! And where Rome walked she left her path well made, and she left the impress of her thought in rock-paved road, or in the lasting marble of her pillared temples and carven tombs. ...
— My Three Days in Gilead • Elmer Ulysses Hoenshal

... nigh run out, when one morrow Dame Joan de Vaux brought word that the Queen, being a-cold, commanded her velvet mantle taken to her cabinet: and I, as the dame in waiting then on duty, took the same to her. I found her sat of a chair of carven wood, beside the brasier, and two gentlemen of the other side of the hearth. Behind her chair Dame Elizabeth waited, and I gave the mantle to her to cast over the Queen's shoulders. The gentlemen stood with their backs to the light, and I paid little note to them at first, ...
— In Convent Walls - The Story of the Despensers • Emily Sarah Holt

... might have been carven for all the truth that Jenny got from it then. There darted across her mind the chauffeur's certainty that she was to be his passenger. She ...
— Nocturne • Frank Swinnerton

... fear while she darted through smoke and over charred floors in pursuit of Atlantic—no fear, nothing but joy when she dragged him out from under bench and climbed to the window-sill with him,—but now that he was saved she seemed paralysed. So still she was, she might have been a carven statue save for the fluttering of the garments about her thin childish legs. The distance to the ground looked impassable, and she could not collect her thoughts for the hissing of the flame as it ate up the floor in the room behind ...
— Marm Lisa • Kate Douglas Wiggin

... you know, Millicent, I believe I don't care. That carven block of stone has had a curious effect upon me. It has made me think as I have never done before. I want to take the clearest picture ...
— His Hour • Elinor Glyn

... the carved stalls of Westminster Abbey, listening to the polished sweetness of Dean Stanley's exquisite eloquence; or to the thunder of the organ mingled with the voices of the white-robed choristers, as the music rose and fell, as it pealed up to the arched roof and lost itself in the carven fretwork, or died away softly among the echoes of the chapels in which kings and saints and sages lay sleeping, enshrining in themselves the glories and the ...
— Autobiographical Sketches • Annie Besant

... that they join me for a great feast in honor of my two daughters.' And when the northern tribes got this invitation they flocked down the coast to this feast of a Great Peace. They brought their women and their children: they brought game and fish, gold and white stone beads, baskets and carven ladles, and wonderful woven blankets to lay at the feet of their now acknowledged ruler, the great Tyee. And he, in turn, gave such a potlatch that nothing but tradition can vie with it. There were long, glad days of joyousness, long pleasurable nights of ...
— Legends of Vancouver • E. Pauline Johnson

... Abd-el-Latif saw it in its decline, and notes the beauty of its remains: "the great monolithic shrine of breccia verde, nine cubits high, eight long, and seven broad, the doors which swung on hinges of stone, the well-carven statues, and the lions terrific in their aspect."[7] At the present day scarcely a trace remains. One broken colossus of the Great Ramesses, till very recently prostrate, and a few nondescript fragments, alone ...
— Ancient Egypt • George Rawlinson

... her hand, and her fingers looked carven white in the moonlight, though by daylight they were brown. "Monsieur, you watched the star. It went into the unknown,—a way so wide and terrible that we may not follow it even in thought. We live alone with majestic forces,—forests ...
— Montlivet • Alice Prescott Smith

... this sanded arena westwardly still, there is a pedestal of marble supporting three low conical pillars of gray stone, much carven. Many an eye will hunt for those pillars before the day is done, for they are the first goal, and mark the beginning and end of the race-course. Behind the pedestal, leaving a passage-way and space for an altar, commences a wall ten or twelve feet in breadth and five or six in ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace

... for feasting, went to the pigskin trunk in the corner, fitted the key from her belt into the carven brass wings of the butterfly, and lifted out the kitchen gods. One in each hand, she held them, green and gold. She put them back in their niche, and lifted up a bowl of rice to their feet, and beat her head on the ground ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various

... had been sacrificed on the yesterday. These chambers, moreover, were encrusted with every sort of filth. In front of the temples stood the altar whereon the fire burned eternally, and before it were a hog-backed block of black marble of the size of an inn drinking table, and a great carven stone shaped like a wheel, measuring some ten feet across with a copper ring ...
— Montezuma's Daughter • H. Rider Haggard

... galley from her carven steering-wheel To her figurehead of silver and her beak of hammered steel; The leg-bar chafed the ankle, and we gasped for cooler air, But no galley on the water with our ...
— Kipling Stories and Poems Every Child Should Know, Book II • Rudyard Kipling

... the old gray walls, Soon the last stone will be gone, The olden church of the Recollects, We shall look no more upon; And though, perchance, some stately pile May rise its place to fill, With carven piers and lofty towers, Old Church, we shall ...
— The Poetical Works of Mrs. Leprohon (Mrs. R.E. Mullins) • Rosanna Eleanor Leprohon

... says so, but I have always imagined that even that carven image of an old aborigine must, have smiled a ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield

... her old home. Inside the spacious Roman portico, with its columns of African marble and its wonderful images of beasts and mortals and gods, and in front of the gleaming temple, with its doors of carven ivory and the sun's chariot poised above its gable peak, she had been conscious chiefly of a longing to see once more the homely market-place of Assisi, to climb the high steps to the exquisite temple-porch which faced southward toward ...
— Roads from Rome • Anne C. E. Allinson

... good or too costly or too wondrous for this House of God and Home of Man. The sculptors, who since the destruction of the Roman Empire have been out of employment, haltingly return to their noble art. Portals and pillars and buttresses and cornices are all covered with carven images of Our Lord and the blessed Saints. The embroiderers too are set to work to make tapestries for the walls. The jewellers offer their highest art that the shrine of the altar may be worthy of complete adoration. Even the painter does his best. Poor man, he is greatly handicapped ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon

... of their dying kind To clasp with arms afraid to loose their hold; Some to a church-yard falling on a grave To kiss the carven name with lips as cold. Some watched from break of day into the night. The flash of birds, the bloom of flower and tree, The whirling worlds that glimmer in the dark, All said: "God help us if ...
— The Fairy Changeling and Other Poems • Dora Sigerson

... chain, and a small golden cylinder was revealed, curiously carven. Its lightness ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England

... same place like a carven woman. She waited for him with wide, harassed eyes. As he came to her she ...
— The Woman from Outside - [on Swan River] • Hulbert Footner

... at him, the leaded windows stared at him through a blind film of unrecognition, the carven ...
— The Silver Horde • Rex Beach

... brokenly Upon the shore of life. I see A girl in costly furs, who cries Against her muff; I see her rise And hurry out. Two tourists pause Beside the grated chancel doors, To wonder and to speculate; To stoop and read a carven date. ...
— Cross Roads • Margaret E. Sangster

... Founder! In that ample brow, What brooding weight of genius! In his eye, How strangely was the pathos edged with light! How oft, his churches roaming, flashed its beam From pillar on to pillar, resting long On carven imagery of flower or fruit, Or deep-dyed window whence the heavenly choirs Gave joy to men below! With what a zeal He drew the cunningest craftsmen from all climes To express his thoughts in form; while ...
— Legends of the Saxon Saints • Aubrey de Vere

... by huge cedar-trees, The layered branches horizontal stretched, like Japanese Dark-banded prints. Carven cathedrals, on a sky Of faintest colour, where the gothic spires fly And sway like ...
— Sword Blades and Poppy Seed • Amy Lowell

... casement high and triple-arch'd there was, All garlanded with carven imageries Of fruits, and flowers, and bunches of knot grass, And diamonded with panes of quaint device, Innumerable of stains and splendid dyes, As are the tiger-moth's deep-damask'd wings; And in the midst, 'mong thousand heraldries, ...
— A Day with Keats • May (Clarissa Gillington) Byron

... cried Lena. "Oh—oh, I should like to see them!" He rose, made her a salaam of grace, parted the hedge once more and disappeared only to return bringing in his hands a curious box of carven ivory, which he set on the table between them and proceeded to unlock with ...
— Jewel Weed • Alice Ames Winter

... the hall again, and stood for a moment like a carven statue looking at the maidens who wrought at packing what they might. She had not wept, but in her face was written sorrow beyond weeping. Yet almost did she weep, when I stood beside her and spoke, putting my hand on ...
— King Olaf's Kinsman - A Story of the Last Saxon Struggle against the Danes in - the Days of Ironside and Cnut • Charles Whistler

... to him Robin found new and gay clothes laid out upon a fair, white bed, with a little rush mat beside it. A high latticed window looked out upon the court, and there was a bench in the nook, curiously carven and filled with stuffs and naperies the like of which Robin ...
— Robin Hood • Paul Creswick

... this "humble student of philosophy and science generally," for he bent himself to and fro with laughter, and his small eyes almost disappeared behind his shelving brows in the excess of his mirth. And two crosslines formed themselves near his thin mouth—such lines as are carven on the ancient Greek masks ...
— Ziska - The Problem of a Wicked Soul • Marie Corelli

... into the room. It was a very large and splendid room, with massive carven furniture in it, and shelves upon shelves of books; the furniture was so dark, and the draperies so heavy, the diamond-paned windows were so deep, and it seemed such a distance from one end of it to the other, that, since the sun had gone down, the effect of it all was rather gloomy. For ...
— Little Lord Fauntleroy • Frances Hodgson Burnett

... took our weapons from us, bound us afresh but not very tightly, and set us with our backs against the gunwale of the fore deck of the ship they had us on board, which was that with the raven flag. Over us towered a wonderful carven dragon's head, painted green and gilded, and at the stern of the ship rose what was meant for its carven tail. The other ships had somewhat the same adornment to their stems and stern posts, but they were not so high or so handsome. Plainly ...
— A King's Comrade - A Story of Old Hereford • Charles Whistler

... sisters. Pharaohs of the old time coming conquering from Araby first saw her, a solitary mountain in the desert, and cut the mountain into towers and terraces. They destroyed one of the hills of God, but they made Babbulkund. She is carven, not built; her palaces are one with her terraces, there is neither join nor cleft. Hers is the beauty of the youth of the world. She deemeth herself to be the middle of Earth, and hath four gates facing outward to the Nations. There sits ...
— The Sword of Welleran and Other Stories • Lord Dunsany

... But as fragrant bark was tossed on the sacred fire below him,—and a flame awoke for a moment, the eyes reflected the light in a startling way—as though alive! Then the strangers saw that the eyes were of iridescent shell set in the carven stone,—and more strange than all was the fact that the god of the altar was a weeping god, and the tear under each eye was also of the strange shell mosaic. It was the Earth-Born God who had been driven out by the proud hearts of the Lost Others. Weeping, he waited the Sign in the ...
— The Flute of the Gods • Marah Ellis Ryan

... crafts in this young earth I am true master, unto her whose worth So much deserves, I bear this marble sphere, Whose hollowed husk, well polished, gleaming clear, Hides rarest fruit." Therewith the globe he showed, The half whereof smooth-sparkling was: Half glowed With carven work; embossed with pale leaves light, And delicately sculptured birds in flight, And clustered flowers frail. Lilith drew near With beaming eyes, and laid the graven sphere Against her smiling lips; o'ertraced the vine That circled it with fingers slim. "Mine, mine Is it, O prince?" ...
— Lilith - The Legend of the First Woman • Ada Langworthy Collier

... and his brow grew all furrowed, As a grim tale was told there of the griefs of the lowly; Till he took up the word, mid the trembling of tyrants, As his calm voice and cold wrought death on ill doers— —E'en so might King Minos in marble there carven Mid old dreaming of Crete give doom on the dead, When the world and its deeds are dead too and buried.— But lo, as I looked, his clenched hands were loosened, His lips grew all soft, and his eyes were beholding Strange things we beheld not about and above him. ...
— Poems By The Way & Love Is Enough • William Morris

... artist, within it is a dream and a delight. A Norman nave of round, red stone piers and arches, a delicate choir of the richest flamboyant, a High Altar of the time of Francis I., form only the mellow background and frame for carven tombs and dark old pictures, hanging lamps of iron and brass, and black, heavily carved choir-stalls of ...
— Black Spirits and White - A Book of Ghost Stories • Ralph Adams Cram

... flowers, seemed at once to deride and to invite the young outcast plodding along the dusty road. "This is your birthright," whispered the clambering rose-trees by the gate; and the closed portals of carven bronze said: "You have sold ...
— The Blue Flower, and Others • Henry van Dyke

... the white flame That was her soul once, whither has it flown? Above her brow gray lichens blot her name Upon the carven stone. ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner

... Like statues carven and niched in the front of some old cathedral, Four angels stood each in his turret, immovable warders, The first with reverend locks snow-white, and a silver volume Of beard that twinkled with frost, and hung to the icicled borders That fringed ...
— The Coming of the Princess and Other Poems • Kate Seymour Maclean

... impossible to describe the refinements of modulated shading and the precision of predetermined outlines by means of which these incomparable drawings have been produced. They seem to melt and to escape inspection, yet they remain fixed on the memory as firmly as forms in carven basalt. ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds

... man your face proclaims you to be, you would live long and make your peace with God. Hearken to me; I am a scholar, a Bachelor. To-day the holy relics will be borne through the streets and crossways of the city. You will find great solace in touching the carven shrines which enclose the cornelian cup wherefrom the child Jesus drank, one of the wine-jars of the Marriage at Cana, the cloth of the Last Supper, and the holy foreskin. If you take my advice, we will go wait for them, under cover, at a cookshop I wot ...
— The Merrie Tales Of Jacques Tournebroche - 1909 • Anatole France

... maddening of masters ... a deity which sometimes, under circumstances apparently propitious, would not speak when questioned, would not hear when appealed to, would not, when sought, be found; but would stand, all cold, all indurated, all granite, a dark Baal with carven lips and blank eyeballs, and breast like the stone face of a tomb; and again, suddenly, at some turn, some sound, some long-trembling sob of the wind, at some rushing past of an unseen stream of electricity, ...
— The Three Brontes • May Sinclair

... opened the front door, the square hall looked very splendid to Selden. It was full of light, and of rich furniture, which was like the stuff he had seen in one or two special shop windows in Fifth Avenue—places where they sold magnificent gilded or carven coffers and vases, pieces of tapestry and marvellous embroideries, antiquities from foreign palaces. Though it was quite different, it was as swell in its way as the house at Mount Dunstan, and there were gleams of pictures on the walls that looked ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett

... here where morning-glories cling Round carven forms of carefullest artifice, They made a bower where every outward thing Should comment on the cause of their own bliss; With flowers of liveliest hue encompassing That flower that the beloved body is — That rose that for the banquet of Love's bee Has budded all the ...
— Poems • Alan Seeger



Words linked to "Carven" :   etched, incised, literature, sculpted, uncarved, graven, carved, engraved



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