"Foreground" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... snakes gliding forward, Wylackie Bob and the Arizona stranger were suddenly in the foreground, hands hanging apparently loose and careless, in reality tense as strung wires, ready to ...
— Tharon of Lost Valley • Vingie E. Roe
... masses, giving to the dark vapours below a deeper blackness. Above all this, the sky was intensely blue, and the stars shone down with a sharp, diamond-like lustre. Beneath the bank of clouds, yet far enough in the foreground of this picture to partly emerge from obscurity, stood, on an eminence, a white marble building, with columns of porticos, like a Grecian temple. Projected against the dark background were its classic outlines, looking more like ...
— The Good Time Coming • T. S. Arthur
... same gorgeous and degrading livery with his retinue, and obtains only his share of the indifferent stare which we bestow upon them in common. The poems have no strong lights and shades, no background, no foreground;—they are like the illuminated figures in an oriental manuscript,—plenty of rich tints and no perspective. Such are the faults of the most celebrated of these compositions. Of those which are universally ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Contibutions to Knight's Quarterly Magazine] • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... swaying and bobbing of hundreds of umbrellas and parasols of various colors; in the vibration of thousands of fans in playful mediation, while the death-struggle of a man upon the gallows was eagerly awaited. In the foreground, on the bank of the Susquehanna, the gibbet, with the solemn group about it, relieved only by flashes of color in the military uniforms, and by the gleam of swords and ...
— The Story of Cooperstown • Ralph Birdsall
... after Rantoul's marriage to little Tina Glover, Herkimer returned to America. The last years had placed him in the foreground of the sculptors of the world. He had that strangely excited consciousness that he was a figure in the public eye. Reporters rushed to meet him on his arrival, societies organized dinners to him, magazines sought the details of ...
— Murder in Any Degree • Owen Johnson
... geometric shapes, there were, whirling off into the vastness of space; as Bert had seen them in Tom Parker's instrument. A gigantic arc of rushing light-forms spanning the black gulf of an unknown cosmos. And in the foreground directly under the sphere was a blue-white disk, horizontally fixed—a substantial and familiar object, with hazy surroundings ...
— Wanderer of Infinity • Harl Vincent
... attention to a full half of any school text that possesses literary merit, he will probably not be far in the wrong. For perspective is essential in all presentation of thought, and there are usually as many things in the background, necessary and yet to be ignored, as there are in the foreground. ...
— How To Study and Teaching How To Study • F. M. McMurry
... a glorious day of sweltering sun; but she was bewildered now, and did not open the umbrella with which she had shielded her head yesterday. In the foreground was always the same white road, on both sides the same pine wood laughing with wild flowers, the same roaring white stream. From somewhere near came the tinkle of cow-bells. Far away on heights, if she looked ...
— Tommy and Grizel • J.M. Barrie
... own average experience,—that besides these gloomy associations, the name of Venice will conjure up scenes of brilliant and wanton gayety, and that in the foreground of the brightest picture will be the Carnival of Venice, full of antic delight, romantic adventure, and lawless prank. But the carnival, with all the old merry- making life of the city, is now utterly obsolete, ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... politics today?", with the word "politics" used in its ancient meaning. Any question of general interest might easily be regarded as a national issue to be treated on a political basis. Thus it happened that when the question of language was brought to the foreground by Pallis' vernacular translation of the New Testament, the students took ...
— Life Immovable - First Part • Kostes Palamas
... Marmaduke Bradley. The house is said to have been sold by Edward VI. to the Earl of Cumberland, and to have subsequently sheltered Mary Queen of Scots, James I, and Charles I. It is best seen from the adjoining bridge, whence its plastered walls, irregular gables, and stone roof form a picturesque foreground to the Cathedral. Of the dwellings into which it is now divided, the third from the bridge contains the grand staircase, ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Ripon - A Short History of the Church and a Description of Its Fabric • Cecil Walter Charles Hallett
... concreteness; and I suppose there never was a poet in the world who used less concreteness of speech than Mr. Swinburne. Mr. Palgrave once noted that the landscape of Keats falls short of the landscape of Shelley in its comparative lack of the larger features of sky and earth; Keats's was "foreground work" for the most part. But what shall be said of Shelley's universe after the immense vague regions inhabited by Mr. Swinburne's muse? She sings of the sea; but we never behold a sail, never a harbor: ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... forth into the Rue Dauphine, and turned towards the Pont-Neuf. It was quickly reached, and when they had taken a few steps upon it a magnificent view suddenly burst upon them, which held the young baron enthralled. In the immediate foreground, on the bridge itself, which was not encumbered with a double row of houses, like the Pont au Change and the Pont Saint Michel, was the fine equestrian statue of that great and good king, Henri IV, rivalling in its calm majesty the famous one of Marcus Aurelius, on the Capitoline ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... training for schoolmaster, was walking to Chapeltown with several rolls of wall paper and a big wall paste-brush, when he was met by "Ould K." (a cynical old beggar, and vainer than any girl, who has been affronted because I put Master D. into my foreground, and not him), who said to him—"Well, lad! I see thou's going out mapping, like t' rest on 'em." This evening Mr. S—— tells me his landlord told him that some men who work for a very clever file-cutter here, who is facile ...
— Juliana Horatia Ewing And Her Books • Horatia K. F. Eden
... when they had reached a coign of vantage below the curve. A string of use-worn bunk cars; a "dinkey" caboose serving as the home on wheels of the chief of construction and his assistant; a crooked siding with a gang of dark-skinned laborers at work unloading a car of steel. These in the immediate foreground; and a little way apart, perched high enough on the steep slope of the mountain side to be out of the camp turmoil, a small structure, half plank and half canvas—to wit, the ...
— A Fool For Love • Francis Lynde
... the relation between them being perfectly apparent. These three masses of related colour are the groundwork upon which one can play infinite variations, and is really the same law upon which a picture is composed. There are foreground, middle-distance, and sky—and in a properly coloured room, the floors, walls, and ceiling bear the same relation to each other as the grades of colour in a picture, or in ...
— Principles of Home Decoration - With Practical Examples • Candace Wheeler
... Eastward of Portland Pond we see the crags and rocks of the future city of the Loyalists, the natural ruggedness in some measure hidden by the growth of dark spruce and graceful cedar, while in the foreground lies the graceful curve of the "Upper Cove" where the forest fringes the waters edge. We may easily cross in the canoe of some friendly Indian and land where, ten years later, the Loyalists landed, but we shall find ...
— Glimpses of the Past - History of the River St. John, A.D. 1604-1784 • W. O. Raymond
... whose folds clung to the form and thence swung down from the edge of the rocky battlement, the mouldering ruins leaning against the quiet sky in the rear, and the glassy stretch of topaz-tinted sea in the foreground, were all painted with pre-Raphaelite exactness and verisimilitude, and every detail attested the careful, tender study, with which ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... large particulars, then, were these: the foreground, the middle distance and the background made a synthetic whole, logically consistent, rational even—when you allow for the artist's make-up. That he will leave a full statement before the end, I venture to prophecy. His egregious vanity demands it. Nothing that he writes is likely to be sincere ...
— The Red Redmaynes • Eden Phillpotts
... Beryl had so successfully organized among a few of the female convicts, was the fifteenth chapter of Luke; and at the top of the blackboard was written in large letters: "Rejoice with Me, for I have found My sheep which was lost." She had drawn in the foreground the flock couched in security, rounded up by the collie guard in a grassy meadow; in the distance, overhanging a gorge, was a bald, precipitous crag, behind which a wolf crouched, watching the Shepherd ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... modern thought. Its starting point is a re-emphasis of the Christian belief in the divine immanence in the universe and in mankind. This doctrine is certainly not new, but it requires to be placed effectively in the foreground of Christian preaching. In the immediate past the doctrine of the divine transcendence—that is, the obvious truth that the infinite being of God must transcend the infinite universe—has been presented in such a way as to amount to a practical dualism, and to lead men to think of God as ...
— The New Theology • R. J. Campbell
... approached, and to the respectable amateurs of that day they were puzzles. In one of them, a study of a wood scene with a spring of water overshadowed by a beech-tree, all painted at close quarters, I had transplanted a violet which I wanted in the near foreground, so as to be sure that it was in correct light and proportion. This was in the spirit of the Ruskinian doctrine, of which I made myself the apostle. On that study I spent such hours of the day as the light served, for three months, and then the coming of autumn stopped me. Any difficulty ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... diffuse, and the sociologic background gets obstinately into the foreground. As I sat there last night I saw that the interest was too abstract, too impersonal for the ordinary play-goer. I can better that. The fourth act must be entirely rewritten. I will do that ...
— The Light of the Star - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... that, among these myriad arbitrary creations of His will, hardly one in a million could escape temporary misery or eternal damnation, was not the best possible background for a Church, as the Virgin and the Saviour frankly admitted by taking the foreground; but the Church was not responsible for it. Mankind could not admit an anarchical—a dual or a multiple—universe. The world was there, staring them in the face, with all its chaotic conditions, and society insisted on its unity in self-defence. Society still insists on ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... patterns, though all different, yet combined in some subtle fashion impossible of analysis to form a complete and well-proportioned Whole—a design—a picture. The patterns of the clergyman and the housekeeper provided the base and foreground, those of Miriam and the secretary the delicate superstructure. The girl's pattern, he noted with a subtle pleasure, was curiously similar to his own, but far more delicate and waving. Yet, whereas his was floral, hers was stellar in character; that of the housekeeper ...
— The Human Chord • Algernon Blackwood
... seemed talking for her own pleasure, without effort. Anthony, sitting at one end of the sofa, examined her profile against the foreground of the lamp: the exquisite regularity of nose and upper lip, the chin, faintly decided, balanced beautifully on a rather short neck. On a photograph she must have been completely classical, almost cold—but the glow of her hair and ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... the voluminous works of Sismondi and the "Biographie Universelle," in fifty-two closely printed volumes, the most valuable body of biography that any modern literature can boast. Since 1830, historians and literary critics have occupied the foreground in French literature. The historians have divided themselves into two schools, the descriptive and the philosophical. With the one class history consists of a narration of facts in connection with a picture of manners, bringing scenes of the past vividly before the mind of the reader, ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... Geoffrey watched them with straining eyes, and it was a wonderful picture that he looked upon—black gorge, darkening forest, drifting haze in the hollows, and unearthly splendors above; but he regarded it only as a fit setting for the slight figure in the foreground that swayed to the stride of a galloping horse. He was not surprised—it seemed perfectly appropriate that Helen should bring him the news—though his fingers ...
— Thurston of Orchard Valley • Harold Bindloss
... Shipton, who was actually relaxing into amiability. "Is this yer a d——d picnic?" said Uncle Billy, with inward scorn, as he surveyed the sylvan group, the glancing firelight, and the tethered animals in the foreground. Suddenly an idea mingled with the alcoholic fumes that disturbed his brain. It was apparently of a jocular nature, for he felt impelled to slap his leg again and cram ...
— Short Stories Old and New • Selected and Edited by C. Alphonso Smith
... which he was riding was a wretched enough place. Nor could Nature, here in her most luxuriant mood, relieve it from its sordid aspect. A few of the huts were sheltered at the fringe of the dark woods, but most were set out upon the foreground of grass, which ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum
... fresh and raw to bear the gentlest handling, so she only pours upon them the balm of her tender silence. There is none of the recognized and allowed selfishness of a betrothed pair about Barbara. Sometimes I almost forget that she is engaged, so little does she ever bring herself into the foreground; and yet, if it were not for us, I think that to-day she could well find in her heart ...
— Nancy - A Novel • Rhoda Broughton
... to wait for the return of him and Jarvo; he took it for granted that Jarvo had grasped that Olivia must be taken back to her aunt and her friends at the palace; and afterward he knew only, for an indeterminate space, that the car was moving across some dim, heavenly foreground to some dim, ultimate destination in which he found ...
— Romance Island • Zona Gale
... look at it. She said she preferred the picture to the real thing, it was so much more artistic. In the landscape itself, she complained, there was sure to be a chimney in the distance, or a restaurant in the foreground, that spoilt the whole effect. The artist left it out. If necessary, he could put in a cow or a pretty girl to help the thing. The actual cow, if it happened to be there at all, would probably be standing the wrong way round; the girl, in all likelihood, would be fat and plain, or be wearing ...
— Tea-table Talk • Jerome K. Jerome
... reason; all the evidence shows that it was the Rose. For further discussion see the chapters dealing with the Bear Garden, the Globe, and the Hope. In the Merian View, issued in Frankfort in 1638, the Bear Garden and the Globe, each named, are shown conspicuously in the foreground; in the background is vaguely represented an unnamed playhouse polygonal in shape. This could not possibly be the Rose. Merian's View was a compilation from Visscher's View of 1616 and some other view of London not yet identified; it has no independent authority, and no value whatever so ...
— Shakespearean Playhouses - A History of English Theatres from the Beginnings to the Restoration • Joseph Quincy Adams
... about his rapid on-and-off engagement, for which mercy he was duly grateful. And of her, who dwelt in the foreground and background of their ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... Harry declared that the place was called Waxhauloff. Certainly the name did not sound unlike that word. There was a garden, brilliantly lighted up with coloured lamps, and at one end there were scenic preparations, probably for a desperate sea-fight on a pond, for there was a lighthouse in the foreground and some ships in the distance; and the bills signified that this was to be followed by a superb display of fireworks. There was also a large music hall, where a number of people were collected, listening ...
— Fred Markham in Russia - The Boy Travellers in the Land of the Czar • W. H. G. Kingston
... over the scene, as the sky takes on a pearly softness, and the shadows creep through the trees in the Park, and the lights in half the windows up that white cliff wall begin to gleam in golden squares, the great building becomes curiously ethereal, the pine limb flung into the foreground of the design catches the eye, the reflection in the water is as real as the reality. The Plaza, monstrous tons of steel and stone, floats between two elements. Then darkness gathers, the reflected lights in the blackening water grow more golden, and suddenly, ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... latter, and it is very certain that this preference arises not from any supposition of there being greater truth in this than the other, for the same preference is unhesitatingly accorded to the same effect in nature herself. Whatever beauty there may result from effects of light on foreground objects, from the dew of the grass, the flash of the cascade, the glitter of the birch trunk, or the fair daylight hues of darker things, (and joyfulness there is in all of them), there is yet a light which the eye invariably ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin
... was a fine specimen of Georgian architecture, of the type so much used throughout the South in antebellum times. The adaptation of the colonial features to the purpose for which the building was used was most admirable. The location, with its foreground of grass and forest trees, produced an effect suggesting age and permanency that few buildings on the ground possessed. In fact, on coming upon the building unexpectedly, one would presume that it had occupied its site for two generations at least. The building ...
— Final Report of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission • Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission
... subjects a large perception of space, and excessive clearness and decision in the arrangement of masses. Gradually and cautiously the blues became mingled with delicate green, and then with gold; the browns in the foreground became first more positive, and then were slightly mingled with other local colors; while the touch, which had at first been heavy and broken, like that of the ordinary drawing masters of the time, grew more and more refined and expressive, until it lost itself in ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... clear that he had committed himself to no mere form of words. She received the admiration of every man in the Neighborhood. Patton McRae's elastic heart added another to its list of occupants, and John Wendell fell seriously in love with her. But always in the foreground she placed von Rittenheim. It was not alone that she looked for his coming, and monopolized him when he arrived; that she deferred to him, and did half a hundred tell-tale things; but in some way, by a hint here and a phrase there, she made every one understand ...
— A Tar-Heel Baron • Mabell Shippie Clarke Pelton
... stopped the straining mule, a feat not at all difficult of accomplishment, the animal's sides rising and falling as he wheezed for breath, and came back to where I stood, staring about at the dimly perceived objects in the foreground. ...
— The Devil's Own - A Romance of the Black Hawk War • Randall Parrish
... determined to push herself into the foreground. My idea is that what artists call middle distance is better suited to her colouring. Seriously, I resent her putting you up to appeal to me—over Anita's head. I'm ...
— The Second Latchkey • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... ghostly lithograph by Calame. It was a mere black spot on the white wall, but my inner vision scrutinized every detail of the picture. A wild, desolate, midnight heath, with a spectral oak-tree in the centre of the foreground. The wind blows fiercely, and the jagged branches, clothed scantily with ill-grown leaves, are swept to the left ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery - Riddle Stories • Various
... answer—Miltiades. And yet his name is not inscribed. How? Did he not petition for such an honor? He did petition; but the people refused to grant it. Instead of inscribing his name, they consented that he should be drawn in the foreground, encouraging his soldiers. In like manner, in the temple of the great Mother adjoining the senate-house, you may see the honors paid to those who brought our exiles back from Phyle; nor were even these granted precipitately, but after an exact ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... pictures that were standing around to the wizened feebleness of corpses on end. The shadowy parts of the room behind the different easels were veiled in a brown vapour, precluding all estimate of the extent of the studio, and only subdued in the foreground by the ruddy glare from an open stove of Dutch tiles. Somerset's footsteps had been so noiseless over the carpeting of the stairs and landing, that his father was unaware of his presence; he continued at his work as before, which he performed by the help of a complicated apparatus ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... individuals, with individual temperaments and problems, exactly like people in the world of the sunlight. Mary Burke and Tim Rafferty, Cho the Korean and Madvik the Croatian—one by one these individualities etched themselves into the foreground of Hal's picture, making it a thing of life, moving him to sympathy and fellowship. Some of these people, to be sure, were stunted and dulled to a sordid ugliness of soul and body—but on the other hand, some of them were young, and had the light of ...
— King Coal - A Novel • Upton Sinclair
... additional disadvantage to children in their troubles that they can never estimate the relations of things. They have no perspective. All things are at equal distances from the point of sight. Life presents to them neither foreground nor background, principal figure nor subordinates, but only a plain spread of canvas on which one thing stands out just as big and just as black as another. You classify your desagrements. This is a mere temporary annoyance, and receives but a passing thought. This is a life-long ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... a poet, though the needs of his family at Eureka South kept the bread and butter question in the foreground. He must see "old man Palmer" to talk over the death of Cummins. He was comforted a little when the old man's small black dog, Bruce, came frisking down the trail to meet him; and when Sammy, the cat, tail in air and purring a thousand welcomes, rubbed ...
— Forty-one Thieves - A Tale of California • Angelo Hall
... single additional glimpse would be afforded of Swithin in his relations with old emotions. In these experiments with tubes and glasses, important as they were to human intellect, there was little food for the sympathetic instincts which create the changes in a life. That which is the foreground and measuring base of one perspective draught may be the vanishing-point of another perspective draught, while yet they are both draughts of the same thing. Swithin's doings and discoveries in the southern ...
— Two on a Tower • Thomas Hardy
... 1806, all of which are repudiated"—dead. It is useless to go further into details. Science has been as much abused as religion. What benefit would accrue to the human family from an effort upon our part to bring to the foreground all the blunders made in scientific researches which are to-day numbered with the old effete errors in religion? And where is the propriety of infidels making a set of asses of themselves by playing upon the little irregularities of language and character in religion, ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume I, No. 7, July, 1880 • Various
... Perry viewed the immediate foreground with misgiving. The beach looked more abrupt than he recalled it. "What beach is ...
— The Adventure Club Afloat • Ralph Henry Barbour
... picture, salt-sea waves rushing in upon a sandy beach can hardly be considered complete without throwing a little life into the foreground; but when that life is composed of a flock of old straw hats, and a lot of staggery, blinded, dripping people under them, I can't say that I hanker after this ...
— Phemie Frost's Experiences • Ann S. Stephens
... before-grounds. But men wot studies human natur' an' langwidges, d'ye see, comes for to know that words is always gittin' onnecessary bits chopped off 'em—sometimes at one end, sometimes at t'other. So they tuck off the B, d'ye see, an' made it foreground, and that's how we come to ...
— The Wild Man of the West - A Tale of the Rocky Mountains • R.M. Ballantyne
... the religious experience. Like all concepts the meaning of religious terms is changed with a changing experience and a changing world-view. Transplanted into the Greek world-view, inevitably the Christian teaching was modified—indeed transformed. Questions which had never been asked came into the foreground, and the Jewish presuppositions tended to disappear. Especially were the Messianic hopes forgotten or transferred to a transcendent sphere beyond death. When the empire became Christian in the 4th century, the notion of a kingdom of Christ on earth to be introduced by a great struggle all but disappeared, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... them—one after another. It was true. Each had, in her own way, occupied the centre of the stage. And the Gay Lady, than whom nobody has a better right to keep fast hold of her position in the foreground of all our thoughts, had allowed each one to do it. And somehow, in every case, after all, the real focus for all our eyes, quite without her being able to help it, had been wherever the Gay Lady had happened ...
— A Court of Inquiry • Grace S. Richmond
... above there is a distant and tranquil sky. Had Velazquez not done such vastly greater things, his few landscapes would alone have won him fame enough. He has in this room a large number of royal portraits,—one especially worth attention, of Philip III. The scene is by the shore,—a cool foreground of sandy beach,—a blue-gray stretch of rippled water, and beyond, a low promontory between the curling waves and the cirrus clouds. The king mounts a magnificent gray horse, with a mane and tail like the broken ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... working in changes here and there, then she picked up her pencil and across the top of her sheet indicated an open sky with scarcely a hint of cloud. Across the bottom she outlined a bit of Sunland Desert she well remembered, in the foreground a bed of flat-leaved nopal, flowering red and yellow, the dark red prickly pears, edible, being a near relative of the fruits she had used in her salad. After giving the prickly pear the place of honor to the left, in higher growth she worked in the slender, cylindrical, jointed stems ...
— Her Father's Daughter • Gene Stratton-Porter
... Trees in the foreground. At the back of the stage a cap upon a pole. The prospect is bounded by the Bannberg, which is surmounted by a ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. III • Kuno Francke (Editor-in-Chief)
... adspectu tristis," as Rumphius describes it. It is notable for the number of plants that find a footing in the joints of its stem. On one tree in Java I have counted thirteen species of such parasites, nearly all ferns. The tree appears in the foreground of the cut at ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... some of the ranges a most delicate blue or pink, some opalescent, some gloriously gilded, while behind the farthest and tallest range, at what seemed an inconceivably remote distance, but in a perspective entirely harmonious with the foreground, appeared the sky itself, a soft luminous straw-yellow in color, flecked thickly over with tiny snow-white cloudlets. It was like a glimpse into another and more beautiful world than ours—the ...
— The Red-Blooded Heroes of the Frontier • Edgar Beecher Bronson
... who illustrate those times. You all desire to comprehend the sequence and significance of events. You feel the intellectual pleasure of appreciating rightly the character and motive of the men and women who stand in the foreground of our country's annals, and also of those who are famous in other countries, to know how and why they rose or fell, whether they deserved the success that they won, or won it without deserving it. Moreover, for us English folk, who live at the centre of an empire containing races and communities ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... good tree. The principal one in Cheyenne was not larger than a lilac-bush, and had to be kept wrapped in wet towels. The light vivid tints of the box-elder contrasted well with the silvery willows and cottonwoods, and still better with the long rows of sage-brush in the foreground and the yellowish cliffs behind. A high, singular butte called Chimney Rock was conspicuous for many miles; also a long one called the Table. There were several ranches in the valley, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... have observed at close range the Balkan Wars of 1912-1913 without perceiving, always in the background and occasionally in the foreground, the colossal rival figures of Russia and Austria-Hungary. Attention was called to the phenomenon at various points in this volume and especially ...
— The Balkan Wars: 1912-1913 - Third Edition • Jacob Gould Schurman
... begins with wide flutings between the tops of which are shells and seaweed. These are surrounded by a ring of marine cable. On the front, a scene represents the lifesavers at work. In perspective some distance out, where the sea rises in mountainous waves, there is a wrecked vessel, and in the foreground lifesavers are carrying the rescued to the beach. The ornamentation that covers the top of the body of the vase consists of a cable net in which are starfish, seaweed, and other marine flora and fauna. A ledge formed by a ship's chain surmounts the net, and above this is a profile ...
— Presentation Pieces in the Museum of History and Technology • Margaret Brown Klapthor
... surrounds the entrance trap door and its ladder (see Pl. LXXXVII). Frequently in such cases the surface of the ground shows no evidence of the outlines or dimensions of the underlying room. Examples of such subterranean kivas may be seen in the foreground of the general view of a court in Oraibi (Pl. XXXVIII), and in the view of the dance rock at Walpi (Pl. XXIV). But such wholly subterranean arrangement of the ceremonial chamber is by no means universal even at Tusayan. Even when the kiva was placed within the village courts or ...
— A Study of Pueblo Architecture: Tusayan and Cibola • Victor Mindeleff and Cosmos Mindeleff
... says he, "those English fellows have no more idea of genius than a Dutch skipper has of dancing a cotillion. The dog has spoiled a fine piece of canvas; he is worse than a Harp Alley signpost dauber. There's no keeping, no perspective, no foreground. Why, there now, the fellow has actually attempted to paint a fly upon that rosebud. Why, it is no more like a fly than I am like—;" but, as he approached his finger to the picture, the fly ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... hear that Bedlam is nothing to it; there is a canvas there twenty feet square and in three tints: pale yellow for the sunlight, brown for the shadows, and all the rest is sky-blue. There is, I am told, a lady walking in the foreground with a ring-tailed monkey, and the tail is said to be three ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... a mass of shadow below and to one side of it. Immediately there is something which you can take hold of and make your picture around. The field and hill alone will make a study of distance and middle distance and foreground, but it would not make an effective sketch. The two effects I have supposed give the possibility for a sketch at once, and what suggests ...
— The Painter in Oil - A complete treatise on the principles and technique - necessary to the painting of pictures in oil colors • Daniel Burleigh Parkhurst
... glance. In front of us at a distance of twenty miles, in sullen magnificence, rose the picturesque range of the Madison, with the insulated rock, Mount Washington, and the sharp pinnacle of Ward's Peak prominently in the foreground. Following the range to the right for the distance of twenty-five miles, the eye rests upon that singular depression where, formed by the confluent streams of the Madison, Jefferson and Gallatin, the mighty Missouri ...
— The Discovery of Yellowstone Park • Nathaniel Pitt Langford
... characteristically a Greek limitation. "Man is the measure of all things," said the old Greek sophist, but modern science has taught us another lesson. Man may be in the foreground, but the drama of man's life is acted out for us against a tremendous background of natural happenings: a background that preceded man and will outlast him; and this background profoundly affects our imagination, and hence ...
— Ancient Art and Ritual • Jane Ellen Harrison
... symptoms may often stand in the foreground of the disease, and in that case it may be left to the special needs whether we deal with them as psychical or as physical changes. Even the patient may be made to see them in one or the other way in accordance with his special needs. To tell him ...
— Psychotherapy • Hugo Muensterberg
... if on wings. The groves, meadows, fern-flats and reaches of the river gain new interest, as if never seen before; all the views changing in a most striking manner as we go higher from point to point. The foreground also changes every few rods in the most surprising manner, although the earthquake talus and the level bench on the face of the wall over which the trail passes seem monotonous and commonplace as seen from the bottom of the Valley. Up we climb with glad ...
— The Yosemite • John Muir
... white coral sand around the island; back of it a graceful fringe of leaning palms, with native huts nestling cosily among the shrubbery at their bases; back of these a stretch of level land clothed in tropic vegetation; back of that, rugged and picturesque mountains. A detail of the immediate foreground: a mouldering ship perched high up on a reef-bench. This completes the composition, and ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... Carthew, Recorder of the city of London; Major-General John Carthew in uniform, commanding some military operations; the Right Honourable Bailley Carthew, Member of Parliament for Stallbridge, standing by a table and brandishing a document; Singleton Carthew, Esquire, represented in the foreground of a herd of cattle—doubtless at the desire of his tenantry, who had made him a compliment of this work of art; and the Venerable Archdeacon Carthew, D.D., LL.D., A.M., laying his hand on the head of a little child ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... the foreground yawned dark mouths that were the entrances of the discovered tombs, and within one of these tombs was another white man. He was conducting his own siftings in high solitude, a lean, bronzed young man, with dark hair and eyes and, at the ...
— The Fortieth Door • Mary Hastings Bradley
... was threatened. The capability of the vessels in their harbors was calculated; and they were found sufficient to transport two hundred thousand families to the Indian settlements. We must hasten from this sublime picture of national desperation. The glorious hero who stands in its foreground was inaccessible to every overture of corruption. Buckingham, the English ambassador, offered him, on the part of England and France, the independent sovereignty of Holland, if he would abandon the other provinces ...
— Holland - The History of the Netherlands • Thomas Colley Grattan
... among the lower classes in the interest of the state and of society. The state religion was thus a matter of expediency and of usefulness. But once this idea of its usefulness was put into the foreground, it was natural that the question should immediately be asked: Was this state religion as useful after all as it might be? Could it not be put to greater uses? If religion existed in general for its political effects, why should ...
— The Religion of Numa - And Other Essays on the Religion of Ancient Rome • Jesse Benedict Carter
... impression. But it is, in truth, nearly as conspicuous in the greater part of her productions; where we scarcely meet with any striking sentiment that is not ushered in by some such symphony of external nature—and scarcely a lovely picture that does not serve as an appropriate foreground to some deep or lofty emotion. We may illustrate this proposition, we think, by the following exquisite lines, on a ...
— The Young Lady's Mentor - A Guide to the Formation of Character. In a Series of Letters to Her Unknown Friends • A Lady
... the Entrance Gate leads to the Main Temple; that to the right to the Founder's Hall. To the right of the plan are the Drum-tower and Pagoda. Behind the Main Temple is the Rinzo or Revolving Library; and in the lower left-hand corner of the picture is the Reliquary. The two small buildings in the foreground are the Belfry and the Emado. In the background are the ...
— Religion in Japan • George A. Cobbold, B.A.
... foreground of his dream (rich parqueterie) three figures went to and fro, one adorable in plum color and point lace; one, the one with the red hair, still beautiful in green; and one, not beautiful, but—well—elegant in pink. Now ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... Administration that he believed the exemption was in violation of the treaty, but not until October did he make formal announcement that he intended to ask Congress to repeal it. The question did not come into the foreground, however, until March 5, 1914, when the President addressed this request to Congress in ominous language, which to this day remains unexplained. "No communication I addressed to Congress," he said, ...
— Woodrow Wilson's Administration and Achievements • Frank B. Lord and James William Bryan
... a "long foreground" we find after studying the man. Sailing a ship is no sinecure, and for Conrad a ship is something with human attributes. Like a woman, it must be lived with to be understood, and it has its ways and whims and ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... splendid prospect, unbroken by fences, dwellings, or fields, as if intended primevally to be a place for the shock of columns, with redoubts to the left and right, and fragments of stockades, dry rifle pits, unfinished or fallen breastworks, and, close in the foreground, a medley of log huts for the winter quartering of troops. The woods to the north mark the course of Bull Run; a line of telegraph poles going westward points to Manassas Gap; while the Junction proper is simply a point where two single track railways ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... critical habit of mind. My judgments, one or all, might be erroneous; but, right or wrong, what I brought before myself was no mere portrayal, accurate as I could achieve, but a rational whole, of composite cause and effect, with its background and foreground, its centre of interest and argument, its greater and smaller details, its decisive culmination; for even to a drawn battle or a neutral issue there is something which definitely prevented success. It was the same with questions of naval ...
— From Sail to Steam, Recollections of Naval Life • Captain A. T. Mahan
... rather resign his position; and besides, he knew of one who had promised him her friendship, if all others should turn their backs on him. And now as the day went on, and the shadows of evening began to fall, and no dean appeared, she came more and more into the foreground of his thoughts. He imagined her by his side, battling with him against the whole world, and full of hope and courage he laid ...
— Garman and Worse - A Norwegian Novel • Alexander Lange Kielland
... cloud passing over the sky? There seems to be a shuddering in the branches—the light fades upon yonder sunny woodlands—the foreground darkens apace. The whole scene is moving, but so slowly that it seems to change like a dissolving view. I see the two figures of Gurnemanz and Parsifal moving through the trees—they are lost behind yonder rock. They emerge farther off—higher up. The air ...
— Parsifal - Story and Analysis of Wagner's Great Opera • H. R. Haweis
... there was a touch of bloodthirsty and hungry life. Up away from the sea arose a stretch of dreary sand, and in the far distance were hills covered with snow and dotted with stunted pine, and bleak and forbidding, though not tenantless. In the foreground, close to the turbid waters which washed this frozen almost solitude, a great, gaunt wolf sat with his head uplifted to the lowering skies, and so well had the artist caught the creature's attitude, that looking upon it one could almost seem to hear the ...
— The Wolf's Long Howl • Stanley Waterloo
... not wish to put myself in any way in the foreground," Beric said. "I am still but a boy, and have no wish to raise my voice in the council of chiefs; but what I have learned of Roman history and Roman laws I would gladly explain to those who, like yourself, speak with the voice of authority, ...
— Beric the Briton - A Story of the Roman Invasion • G. A. Henty
... the right, and Satan, entering from the left, meet in the foreground. Satan is dressed in the ...
— Mr. Faust • Arthur Davison Ficke
... are wrong for once: that army was found, and was all cut to pieces in the desert. Heavens, gentlemen, what a sublime picture! The Roman legions—the wilderness—Jerusalem in the distance—an army of murderers in the foreground!" ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... conspirator. No. 52. is "The Martyrdom of King Charles I." No. 53. "The Restoration of Monarchy and King Charles II." A number of cavaliers on horseback, with their conical hats and long tresses, occupy the foreground of this picture; the army appears in the background. This is the last, though the scroll ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 210, November 5, 1853 • Various
... Austrian trenches, elaborately blasted in the Carso rock and captured a year ago. The Nad Logem is part of the northern edge of the Carso, and from our O.P. a great panorama spread out north, east and west, with the sinuous Vippacco in the foreground, fringed with trees. From here I had pointed out to me the various features of the country. The play of light and shade in the distance was very wonderful. Our target that afternoon was a point in the Austrian front line ...
— With British Guns in Italy - A Tribute to Italian Achievement • Hugh Dalton
... were no real failures at all, no tears, no parents ashamed of their offspring. Miss Dearborn heard many admiring remarks passed upon her ability, and wondered whether they belonged to her or partly, at least, to Rebecca. The child had no more to do than several others, but she was somehow in the foreground. It transpired afterwards at various village entertainments that Rebecca couldn't be kept in the background; it positively refused to hold her. Her worst enemy could not have called her pushing. She ...
— Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... In the foreground of this picture the Son of God stands conspicuous. His dress corresponds to that of the Jewish high priest, and the whole description of His person has obviously a reference, either to His own divine perfections, or to His offices as the Saviour ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... the hill and gazed at the well-known landscape beneath him, where in the foreground lay the great ...
— 'Jena' or 'Sedan'? • Franz Beyerlein
... very far to the house; there it stood dark and silent, with no light showing in the garden in front. Mary felt pretty sure that she was in time. Then the front door of the house opened, there was a sight of the hall in a blaze of light, and in the foreground the figure of a woman standing ...
— The Slave of Silence • Fred M. White
... Gondoliers," floated down-wind to us quite clearly. I remember it well, for as we dismounted to look at the dead beast the cornet solo, "Take a pair of sparkling eyes," began. There was such a startling incongruity between an almost untrodden virgin jungle in Assam, with a dead leopard lying in the foreground, and that familiar strain of Sullivan's, so beloved of amateur tenors, that it gave a curious sense of ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... folds, and resting on a piece of grotesque sculpture. There is a powerful sun; the somewhat rigid folds in the dress of coarse stuff are well marked; one half the face is in deep shade, the other in strong light; the churchyard wall throws a broad shadow behind, while in the foreground there is a gracefully chequered breadth of intermingled dark and light in the form of a mass of rank grass and foliage. Had an old thin man of striking figure and features been selected, and some study-worn scholar introduced in ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... more remarkable, modify the lie. So far back as the autumn of 1860 I heard him discuss the trickery which he believed himself to have witnessed, as dispassionately as any other non-credulous person might have done so. The experience must even before that have passed out of the foreground of his conjugal life. He remained, nevertheless, subject, for many years, to gusts of uncontrollable emotion which would sweep over him whenever the question of 'spirits' or 'spiritualism' was revived; and we can only understand ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... show her now," snapped Burns, with some sarcasm and a good deal of exasperation. "You seem determined to get into the foreground somehow; get up and go through that scene and show us how a girl gets ...
— Jean of the Lazy A • B. M. Bower
... that this is a rolling prairie in the foreground?" asked a deep voice, which Tiffles at once recognized as emanating from C. ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... forest, with still pools of water lying between the Fern-trees, which, much as they affect damp, swampy grounds, seem scarcely able to find foothold on the dripping earth. Their trunks, as well as those of the Club-Moss trees which make the foreground of the picture, stand up free from any branches for many feet above the ground, giving one a glimpse between them into the dim recesses of this quiet, watery wood, where the silence was unbroken by the song of birds or the hum of insects. We shall find, it is true, when ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... Lucretia, who inhabits the monastery in the guise of the Father Confessor (not an unknown historical fact) thus in its very inception lending an intense dramatic effect to the story. Now, at the ringing of the bell, the villagers enter the public loft, Maria—his lost love—in the foreground unrecognized either by Francesco or Lucretia, singing ...
— The Dead Men's Song - Being the Story of a Poem and a Reminiscent Sketch of its - Author Young Ewing Allison • Champion Ingraham Hitchcock
... directly in front a door leading to a vestibule; to the right a window and a bed with chintz curtains; to the left a stove-couch and a door into the kitchen; in the foreground a plain board table and several chairs; along the back wall and window benches; along the left wall a cupboard with cups, a small ...
— Plays • Alexander Ostrovsky
... to faint," he announced, and did. When he returned to his love-story Johnnie's head was in Kitty's lap and a mounted policeman was in the foreground of the scene. His face was wet from the mist ...
— The Big-Town Round-Up • William MacLeod Raine
... would stop to examine it. There was one view that seemed to attract her more than the others; it was a certain spot in the canton of Vaud, some distance from Brigues; some trees with cows grazing in the shade; in the distance a village consisting of some dozen houses, scattered here and there. In the foreground a young girl with a large straw hat, seated under a tree, and a farmer's boy standing before her, apparently pointing out, with his iron-tipped stick, the route over which he had come; he was directing her attention to a winding path that ...
— Child of a Century, Complete • Alfred de Musset
... words, but her conviction was that her friend's methods of work would seem strangely antiquated when contrasted with the vivid strength of the new regime. She recalled Rhoda's mild copies of village scenes, with cottages in the foreground, trees to the rear, and a well-regulated flight of swallows on the sky line, and mentally placed them beside her cousin's vigorous sketches on the Slade system, where two or three lines seemed to do the work of a dozen, and prettiness was ...
— Tom and Some Other Girls - A Public School Story • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... closer to examine the texture of a stone in the immediate foreground, and in the act espied, hopping toward me with solemnity, a large and ancient raven, whose purply black was here and there softened with gray. He seemed looking for worms as he came. Nowise astonished at the appearance of a live ...
— Lilith • George MacDonald
... of the "Union." Doors in the centre and on both sides. On the left, in the foreground, a desk with newspapers and documents. On the right, ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various
... been in the foreground of my programme, but I call myself an Imperialist. I have done what I could for the colonies. I have even abandoned on their behalf some of my pet principles ...
— The Double Traitor • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... and braying for the violence. Everything was full of expression for Mark Ambient's visitor—from the big bandy-legged geese whose whiteness was a "note" amid all the tones of green as they wandered beside a neat little oval pool, the foreground of a thatched and whitewashed inn, with a grassy approach and a pictorial sign—from these humble wayside animals to the crests of high woods which let a gable or a pinnacle peep here and there and looked even ...
— The Author of Beltraffio • Henry James
... and wild-looking assemblage we are, I make no doubt, yet fitting well into the foreground of the scene, with its rude and incipient civilization insulting the dominant wildness of Nature all around. Long before the sun has had time to climb above the ranges our muster is complete, and a ...
— Brighter Britain! (Volume 1 of 2) - or Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand • William Delisle Hay
... worshipped; and the beauties of pastoral Thames, the temple of peace, hardly noticed in the passing of the day—taken as air to the breather; until some chip of the scene, round which an emotion had curled, was vivid foreground and gateway to shrouded romance: it might be the stream's white face browning into willow-droopers, or a wagtail on a water-lily leaf, or the fore-horse of an up-river barge at strain of legs, a red-finned perch hung a foot above the pebbles ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Matanzas to Oratava the road is wretched but the scenery compensates for this. Upon arriving at the brow of the hill above Oratava, a beautiful prospect bursts upon the sight; directly in front rises the lordly Peak, whilst in the foreground are vineyards, cottages, and palm-trees; in the centre stands La Villa, the upper town of Oratava, encircled with gardens; on the right lies a rich slope running down to the sea which bounds the prospect on that side; and on the left rise rocky mountains, ...
— Journals Of Two Expeditions Of Discovery In North-West And Western Australia, Vol. 1 (of 2) • George Grey
... delight in physical beauty were interrupted at intervals by inexplicable interludes of repentance, Bible-reading, psalm-singing, and visions. To delineate Cellini will be the business of a distant chapter. The form of the greatest of Italian preachers must occupy the foreground of the next. ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... five-and-twenty miles, and so the entire journey of sixty miles was to be made by the post road—the pleasantest travelling, if the mind were free. The grander and more distant features of the landscape we may see well enough from the window of the railway-carriage; but it is the foreground that interests and instructs us, like a pleasant gossiping history; and that we had, in old days, from the post-chaise window. It was more than travelling picquet. Something of all conditions of life—luxury and misery—high spirits and low;—all sorts ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu
... fashion that their heads looked as though they were growing out of their rumps; and their horns seemed to protrude from their backs; the smoking fire with just a blaze in the heart of the smoke; Jim-Jim in the foreground, where the oxen had thrown him in their wild rush, stretched out there in terror, and then as a centre to the picture the great gaunt lioness glaring round with hungry yellow eyes, roaring and whining as she made up her mind ...
— A Tale of Three Lions • H. Rider Haggard
... as towers and covered with hieroglyphics. On the left the Sanctuary; in the foreground in a little nook, invisible to the faithful, but visible to the audience is installed the machinery for the miracle, a lever, and ropes. Against the central pillar two thrones, one magnificent, that of the Pharaoh; the other simple, that of ...
— Woman on Her Own, False Gods & The Red Robe - Three Plays By Brieux • Eugene Brieux
... man and of apes, and by the identity of their embryonic development, as I have fully shown in my "Evolution of Man" (chaps. xix. and xxvi.) The mode and manner in which he here puts palaeontology in the foreground, and throws on the theory of descent the task of producing an unbroken gradation of fossil transitional forms between the apes and man, is very indicative of Virchow's ignorance of this zoological question—in which I, ...
— Freedom in Science and Teaching. - from the German of Ernst Haeckel • Ernst Haeckel
... there were some fine paintings, especially a large one by Landseer of the Duke of Wellington on the field of Waterloo, and a grand, wonderful picture of Martin's from Campbell's poem of the "Last Man," showing the red sun fading out of the sky, and all the soil of the foreground made up of bones and skulls. The secretary of the Zoological Society also sent me an honorary ticket of admission to their gardens, which I wish you could see. There are animals from all parts of the world inclosed in great cages in the open air amongst trees and shrubs—lions, ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... lately built two small sick-rooms, used oftener as overflow nurseries. These little rooms have names meaning "peace" and "tranquillity"; and those of us who have lived in them with our babies, sick or well, find the names appropriate. In the foreground there is a garden, in the background the mountain; and to give purpose to it all, the foreground is full of life. A new nursery now being built is a welcome gift from Australia; and a new field with a noble tree, in whose shade a hundred children could play, ...
— Lotus Buds • Amy Carmichael
... the bank. There was the red sun, on the low level of the shore, in a purple haze, fast deepening into black; and there was the solitary flat marsh; and far away there were the rising grounds, between which and us there seemed to be no life, save here and there in the foreground a melancholy gull. ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... directly to the essay on "The later school of St. John," it is curious to find Dr. Lightfoot setting in the very foreground the account of Polycarp's martyrdom, without a single word regarding the more than suspicious character of the document, except the remark in a note that "the objections which have been urged against this narrative are not serious." [135:1] They have been ...
— A Reply to Dr. Lightfoot's Essays • Walter R. Cassels
... opposite side, a grove. In the middle of the glade, an altar in the form of a low marble table as long as a man, set parallel to the temple steps and pointing to the hill. Curved marble benches radiate from it into the foreground; but they are not joined to it: there is plenty of space to pass between the ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... side, lay the equally unmeasured expanse of snow-whitened land. Far in the distance stretched the endless chain of mountains, which to-day seemed to smoke with the snow blown a quarter mile above their summits. In the foreground, not a hundred yards away, was a group of perhaps fifty people. These were Chukches, natives, very like the Eskimos of Alaska. They had come to witness from afar the strange scene of the "alongmeet's" (white ...
— Panther Eye • Roy J. Snell
... through alders so rank and reaching that they meet overhead and form a shade of golden green; and again it widens out into reedy lakes, the summer home of countless Ducks, Geese, Tattlers Terns, Peetweets, Gulls, Rails, Blackbirds, and half a hundred of the lesser tribes. Sometimes the foreground is rounded masses of kinnikinnik in snowy flower, or again a far-strung growth of the needle bloom, richest and reddest of its tribe—the Athabaska rose. At times it is skirted by tall poplar woods where the claw-marks on the trunks are witness ...
— The Arctic Prairies • Ernest Thompson Seton
... gray in the foreground, purple in the distance, sloped to the west. Eyes keen as those of hawks searched the waste, and followed the red mountain rampart, which, sheer in bold height and processional in its craggy sweep, shut out the north. Far away little puffs of dust rose above the white sage, and ...
— The Heritage of the Desert • Zane Grey
... hardly visible. They wished to have a more concise, and, for that reason, perhaps, a more satisfactory account, such as may exhibit a just picture of the man, and keep him the principal figure in the foreground of his own picture. To comply with that request is the design of this essay, which the writer undertakes with a trembling hand. He has no discoveries, no secret anecdotes, no occasional controversy, no sudden flashes of wit and humour, no private ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... to an unlearned reader, who examines the text for personal profit, but will not seem at all improbable to one who, to learn its historic meaning, reads the text in the lighted foreground of a mind over whose background lies a fitly arranged knowledge of all the materials requisite for an adequate criticism. For such a man was ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... up we were travelling in a region of marshes and pools in the lowest point of depressions, then along a magnificent lake with green and brown fantastically-shaped mountains and hills in the foreground, and a high snowy range in the background. The effects of light when the storm was raging over the lake, with its conical and semi-spherical islands dotting ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... Presentation in the Temple, by G.A. Razzi. The principal scene is placed in the background, and the little Madonna, as she ascends the steps, is received by the High Priest and Anna the prophetess. Her father and mother and groups of spectators fill the foreground; here, too, is a very noble female figure on the right; but the whole composition is mannered, and wants repose ...
— Legends of the Madonna • Mrs. Jameson
... shoulder, and went downstairs. On the way he laughed out loud. The past half-hour tossed itself into the foreground of his mind, clad in the skirts of high comedy. Tragedy fled. The burden in his breast went with it. Far be it from him to cherish a grudge against the sex that so often reduced the trials of public life to insignificance. Women were delicious irresponsible beings; man ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... deforestation in the mountains. Only some scrub wood is left, which will disappear within a half century. Yet another shows the effect of one of the washouts, destroying an arable mountain side, these washouts being due to the removal of all vegetation; yet in this photograph the foreground shows that reforestation is still ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... flowers must go toward the back of the garden, for if they were placed in the foreground they would screen the others. The plants of medium height make up the main part of the garden; while the low plants are in the ...
— The Library of Work and Play: Gardening and Farming. • Ellen Eddy Shaw
... KRAUSE'S face has taken on an expression of great astonishment. She has withdrawn. LOTH sits down on one of the chairs that stand around the table in the foreground. ...
— The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume I • Gerhart Hauptmann
... might, majesty and strength, in Trade, Commerce, and Enterprise. The man of 1801 can scarcely believe his eyes in 1862. The distant view is still there, from the top of Everton church tower, but how wonderfully is all the foreground changed. ...
— Recollections of Old Liverpool • A Nonagenarian
... altogether spoiled by the telegraph wires, giant posts, and advertisement signs. These emphasized the contrast between the raw and aggressive civilization that is typical of Western towns and the austerity of the surrounding wilds. In the foreground were steamers, saw-mills, and street-cars; in the distance ...
— Partners of the Out-Trail • Harold Bindloss
... they surround. In the accompanying sketch, taken from the "Voyage of the 'Coquille'," the reef is seen from within, from one of the high peaks of the island of Bolabola. (I have taken the liberty of simplifying the foreground, and leaving out a mountainous island in the far distance.) Here, as in Whitsunday Island, the whole of that part of the reef which is visible is converted into land. This is a circumstance of rare occurrence; more usually ...
— Coral Reefs • Charles Darwin
... unlike any as yet inhabited, being blasted out of the solid rock. An impressive and, indeed, magnificent panorama extended itself in front. The valley of the Seven Communes, that curious little tongue of German-speaking territory projecting into pre-war Italy, ran across the foreground. Barren and almost treeless, it had been in the battle-line since the Austrian offensive of May, 1916, which had nearly broken successfully into the Venetian plain. Many villages and hamlets dotted the plain, especially towards the western end, the most imposing of which was Asiago. ...
— The War Service of the 1/4 Royal Berkshire Regiment (T. F.) • Charles Robert Mowbray Fraser Cruttwell
... now preserved at the Bodleian Library, Oxford (MS. no. 264, f. 218). The artist gives an admirable view of medieval Venice, with the Piazetta to the left, and the Polos embarking on a rowing boat to go on board their ship. In the foreground are depicted (after the medieval fashion of showing several scenes of a story in the same picture) some of the strange lands through which they passed. Note ...
— Medieval People • Eileen Edna Power
... But, in such climates, man is naturally temperate. He is so by physical coercion, and for the necessities of rest and coolness. The Spaniard, the Moor, or the Arab, has no merit in his temperance. The effort, for him, would be to form the taste for alcohol. He has a vast foreground of disgust to traverse before he can reach a taste so remote and alien. No need for resistance in his will where nature resists on his behalf. Sherbet, shaddocks, grapes, these were innocent applications ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... feast in honour of a wedding was being held in one of these places, and the scene was a lively one. The head and skin of a buffalo, and the pools of blood, which showed where its carcase had been dismembered, were a prominent feature in the foreground, lying displayed in a very unappetising manner on a little piece of open ground. In one part of the village two men were posturing in one of the inane sword-dances which are so dear to all Malays, each performance being a subject of keen criticism or hearty admiration ...
— In Court and Kampong - Being Tales and Sketches of Native Life in the Malay Peninsula • Hugh Clifford
... Llanberris, having fine views as we looked back of C. Castle, the sea, and Anglesey. A little before sunset we came in sight of Llanberris Lake, Snowdon, and all the craggy hills and mountains surrounding it; the foreground a beautiful contrast to this grandeur and desolation—a green sloping hollow, furnishing a shelter for one of the most beautiful collections of lowly Welsh cottages, with thatched roofs, overgrown with plants, anywhere ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... say much on the Revised Version of the Book of Psalms, as Coverdale's Version, as we have it in our Prayer Book, so completely occupies the foreground of memory and devotional interest, that I fear comparatively few study the Bible Version or the careful and conservative work of the Revisers. This Revision, however, of the version of the Book of Psalms deserves more ...
— Addresses on the Revised Version of Holy Scripture • C. J. Ellicott
... mind. Throb, throb, throb—beat; suppose some trivial screw went wrong in that supporting engine! Suppose—! He made a grim effort to dismiss all such suppositions. After a while they did at least abandon the foreground of his thoughts. And up he went steadily, higher and higher ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells
... the diners themselves do. It's a banquet, given by a certain number of my man's friends, in honor of his fiftieth birthday, and you see the men gathering in the hotel parlor—well, you can imagine it in almost any hotel—and Haxard is in the foreground. Haxard is the hero's name, ...
— The Story of a Play - A Novel • W. D. Howells
... house, somewhat more pretentious than the others, in which the priests lodged. The whole aspect of the place was peculiarly desolate and depressing, facing that vast waste of water, the black forest shadows behind, and those rotting stumps in the foreground. ...
— Beyond the Frontier • Randall Parrish
... to make arrangements to preside. When the man was arrested, he told the Marshal he regretted it, and that his sympathies were wholly with the slave. [Loud applause.] Fellow-citizens, remember that word. Hold your Mayor to it, and let it be seen that he has got a background and a foreground, which will authorize him to repeat that word in public, and act it out in Faneuil Hall. I say, so confident are the slave agents now, that they can carry off their slave in the daytime, that they do not put chains round the Court House; ...
— The Trial of Theodore Parker • Theodore Parker
... scene of intense excitement—a scene which only wanted a few prominent features in its foreground of a more intellectual and higher cast than composed the mob, to make it a fit theme for a painter of ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... Wallingford and Goring, and come to Pangbourne and Whitchurch, where the little river Pang flows in between green hills. Each village has the virtue that Dr. Johnson extolled when he said that "the finest landscape in the world is improved by a good inn in the foreground." Then we come to Mapledurham and Purley, where Warren Hastings lived, and finally halt at Caversham, known as the port of Reading. Here the Thames widens, and here in the olden time was the little chapel with a statue of the Virgin known as the "Lady of Caversham," which was ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... background of sunless northern sea. When the music was over some one with a kodak suggested "a group": we struck a collective attitude on one of the hotel terraces, and just as the camera was being aimed at us the Colonel turned and drew into the foreground a little grinning pock-marked soldier. "He's just been decorated—he's got to be in the group." A general exclamation of assent from the other officers, and a protest from the hero: "Me? Why, my ugly mug will smash ...
— Fighting France - From Dunkerque to Belport • Edith Wharton |
