"Amphitheatre" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... feeling; and when once it is irritated, it is not apt to confine itself within its proper limits. If it becomes, not difference in opinion upon law, but a trial of spirit between parties, our courts of law are no longer the temple of justice, but the amphitheatre for gladiators. No—God forbid! Juries ought to take their law from the bench only; but it is our business that they should hear nothing from the bench but what is agreeable to the principles of the Constitution. The jury are to hear ...
— Thoughts on the Present Discontents - and Speeches • Edmund Burke
... after which they plunged into another deep and winding gorge. This they followed until they reached a part where it was so narrow that the sides seemed almost to touch over their heads. Beyond, the cliffs fell apart, and then apparently curved towards each other again, thus forming an immense amphitheatre. At the entrance to this Ghamba stopped, and said in a whisper that they were ...
— Kafir Stories - Seven Short Stories • William Charles Scully
... handsome style as a court, and laid out into apartments for the senators, the House of Representatives, the managers, the accused and counsel, the members of the executive departments, besides a semicircular gallery constructed within the area of the chamber, which formed from its front an amphitheatre contiguous with the fixed gallery of the ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... flash he was up again, wild to close with his rival and get his fingers about his throat. There, in the little natural amphitheatre, with only the ancient trees as silent witnesses, was staged again the oft-fought fight between the boxer and the battler, but the decision was not to rest on points. No Marquis of Queensberry rules governed, no watchful referee ...
— 'Smiles' - A Rose of the Cumberlands • Eliot H. Robinson
... ALAR. I was an exile then. This stirring Burgos has revived my vein. Yea, as I glanced from off the Citadel This very morn, and at my feet outspread Its amphitheatre of solemn towers And groves of golden pinnacles, and marked Turrets of friends and foes; or traced the range, Spread since my exile, of our city's walls Washed by the swift Arlanzon: all around The flash of lances, blaze of banners, rush Of hurrying horsemen, ...
— Count Alarcos - A Tragedy • Benjamin Disraeli
... first Prussian gun the cry came to the civilised world, "Follow thou me," just as truly as it did in Palestine. Men went to their Calvary singing Tipperary, rubbish, rhymed doggerel, but their spirit was equal to that of any Christian martyr in a Roman amphitheatre. "Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friend." Our chaps are doing that consciously, willingly, almost without bitterness towards their enemies; for the rest it doesn't matter whether they sing hymns or ragtime. ...
— Carry On • Coningsby Dawson
... the fierce heat of the sun. The church, the gift of a Spanish family, looks down upon the town and crowns it. Its bold yet elegant facade gives a noble aspect to the little maritime city. Is it not a picture of terrestrial sublimity? See the tiny town with clustering roofs, rising like an amphitheatre from the picturesque port upward to the noble Gothic frontal of the church, from which spring the slender shafts of the bell-towers with their pointed finials: religion dominating life: offering to man the end and the way of living,—image ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... four hundred and more by the river. Here, about lat. 26 deg., the usually narrow valley of the Nile opens into a sort of plain or basin. The mountains on either side of the river recede, as though by common consent, and leave between themselves and the river's bank a broad amphitheatre, which in each case is a rich green plain—an alluvium of the most productive character—dotted with dom and date palms, sometimes growing single, sometimes collected into clumps or groves. On the western side the ...
— Ancient Egypt • George Rawlinson
... creeping for many years toward the Gap. The head of it was just protruding from the Natural Tunnel twenty miles away. There he sent his horse back, slept in a shanty till morning, and then the train crawled through a towering bench of rock. The mouth of it on the other side opened into a mighty amphitheatre with solid rock walls shooting vertically hundreds of feet upward. Vertically, he thought—with the back of his head between his shoulders as he looked up—they were more than vertical—they were actually concave. The Almighty had not ...
— The Trail of the Lonesome Pine • John Fox, Jr.
... smawl-closes, and stuck up behind Master Ahghustusses cab. In the heavening he gives up the tigger, and comes out as the paige, in a fansy jackit, with too rose of guilt buttings, wich makes him the perfeck immidge of Mr. Widdycomb, that ice sea in the serkul at Hashley's Amphitheatre. The paige's bisiness is to weight on the ladies, wich is naterally light work; and being such a small chap, you may suppose they can never make enuff of him. These are all the upper servants, of coarse, I shan't lower myself by notusing ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, July 24, 1841 • Various
... to the Porta del Sempione, which is at a short distance from the amphitheatre, and which, were it finished, would be the finest thing of the kind in Europe; it was designed, and would have been completed by Napoleon, had he remained on the throne. Figures representing France, Italy, Fortitude and Wisdom adorn the facade and there are several bas-reliefs, ...
— After Waterloo: Reminiscences of European Travel 1815-1819 • Major W. E Frye
... for its unique collection of fish and marine animals; it is one of the finest in the world. Near by is the race course and amphitheatre. What is still better is the winding road through ferns and flowers that leads to the ...
— Wealth of the World's Waste Places and Oceania • Jewett Castello Gilson
... is presumably quite a young woman; probably, when at home, a graceful figure in drawing-rooms. I should like to hear her talk, to exchange thoughts with her. She would give one a very good idea of the matron of old Rome who had her seat in the amphitheatre. Many of those ladies, in private life, must have been bright and gracious, high-bred and full of agreeable sentiment; they talked of art and of letters; they could drop a tear over Lesbia's sparrow; at the same time, they were connoisseurs in torn windpipes, ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... favourite spot, a spur of rock overhanging a green nook in the broken ugliness of the cliffs, sheltered from the sea by an encircling arm of rock, and reached by a steep path down the cliff. Around her towered an amphitheatre of vast cliffs in which the sea sang loud music to the spirit of solitude. In the moaning waters in front of the cove a jagged rock rose from the incomparable green, tilted backward and fantastically shaped, ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees
... and death. The ones we call fathers and mothers are but ambassadors to us—delegates from a million graves—appointed for our birth. Every boy is a summed-up multitude. The infinite crowd of his fathers beckons for him. As in some vast amphitheatre he lives his life, before the innumerable audience of the dead—each from its circle of centuries—calls to him, contends for ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee
... seated on a log by the wayside, his quick eye scanning the scene: the close file of the ranges about the horizon, one showing above another, and one more faintly blue than another, for thus the distance was defined; then the amphitheatre of the Cove, the heavy bronze-green slopes of the mountains, all with ripple marks of clear chrome-green ruffling in the wake of the wind; in the middle distance the still depths of the valley below, with shadows all a-slumber and silent, and ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... the extreme left was just visible the bold rocky point of Porto Fino; to the right extended westward a grand line of picturesque coast, including the headlands of Capo di Noli and Capo delle Mele; and near at hand lay the harbor of Genoa, with its shipping, its amphitheatre of palaces, surmounted by the high ground above, and crowned by ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 107, September, 1866 • Various
... directly to the spot, hardly a step astray. It was all below the surface of the earth, so that hardly any sound rose above; and there was no sign of any path to it, not a tree, nor shrub, nor blade of grass near, but an amphitheatre of rock, and the beautiful white river, in its leap into the canyon falling a hundred and ninety feet. The cliffs and jagged pinnacles of basaltic rock around it were several hundred feet high. It looked like a great white bridal veil. It was made up of myriads of snowy sheaves, sometimes ...
— Life at Puget Sound: With Sketches of Travel in Washington Territory, British Columbia, Oregon and California • Caroline C. Leighton
... the use of the town; but which, Crony very promptly assured him, was the grand action of the improved roasting apparatus at the York hotel. We now bade farewell to our amusing companion, and proceeded to view the new plunging bath at the bottom of East-street, built in the form of an amphitheatre, and surrounded by dressing-rooms, with a fountain in the centre, from which a continued supply of salt-water is obtained. The advantages may be great in bad weather; but to my mind there is nothing like the open sea, particularly ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... me to effect an exchange between him and a mule, getting five dollars to the bargain, which made me one of the happiest and, I believe, also, one of the richest men in the army. I expended the first dollar next day, in getting admission to a bullfight, in their national amphitheatre, where the first thing that met my astonished eyes was a mad bull giving the finishing prode to my ...
— Adventures in the Rifle Brigade, in the Peninsula, France, and the Netherlands - from 1809 to 1815 • Captain J. Kincaid
... the Viceroys, bull-fights frequently took place on the Plaza Mayor. Now there is a place expressly built for these entertainments, called the Plaza firme del Acho. It is a spacious amphitheatre without a roof, and is erected at the end of the new avenue of the Alameda. The preparations for the sport commence at an early hour in the morning. Along the Alameda are placed rows of tables covered with ...
— Travels in Peru, on the Coast, in the Sierra, Across the Cordilleras and the Andes, into the Primeval Forests • J. J. von Tschudi
... on the shores of the Lynn Canal, in an amphitheatre formed by precipitous cliffs, the granite peaks of which almost overhang the little town. A curious effect is produced here by rudely coloured advertisements of some one's chewing gum, or somebody's ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... colony. Sulla captured it in 89 B.C. by setting on fire the wooden breastwork by which it was defended, and new fortifications were erected. Hadrian, who repaired the Via Appia from Beneventum to this point, made it a colony; it has ruins of the city walls, of an aqueduct, baths and an amphitheatre; nearly 400 inscriptions have also been discovered. Two different routes to Apulia diverged at this point, one (Via Aurelia Aeclanensis) leading through the modern Ariano to Herdoniae, the other (the Via Appia of the Empire) passing the Lacus Ampsanctus and going on to Aquilonia and Venusia; ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... Yet, there are times when it looks to me more like a series of combats, hand-to-hand fights for life, and fierce struggles between men and strange powers. You buy your newspaper and that's your ticket to the amphitheatre. But the distance is hazy and far; there are clouds of dust and you can't see clearly. To make out just what is going on you ought to get down in the arena yourself. Once you're in it, the view you'll have and the fighting that will come your way will more than repay you. ...
— In the Arena - Stories of Political Life • Booth Tarkington
... line of tall, well-built houses, not in the least rural in their aspect, but that seem rather as if they had been transported from the centre of some stately city entire and at once, sweeps round its inner inflection, like a bent bow; and an amphitheatre of mingled rock and wood rises behind. With all its beauty, however, there hangs about the village an air of melancholy. Like some of the other western coast villages, it seems not to have grown, piece-meal, ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... moistened with regret amongst the multitude that stretched away in compact bodies from the foot of the gallows; the ribald laugh and the blasphemous oath united with their dying breath; and, callously as the Roman mob from the blood-stained amphitheatre, the English masses turned homewards from the fatal spot. But they did not fall unhonoured or unwept. In the churches of the faithful in that same city, the sobs of mournful lamentation were mingled with the solemn prayers for their eternal rest, and, from thousands of wailing women ...
— The Dock and the Scaffold • Unknown
... a blue, and the other a red ribbon, on the arm. The contests, generally, were fiercely disputed,—the spectators betting heavily, and shouting, as good or bad strokes were made. Sometimes a line was extended across the amphitheatre, from wall to wall, over which it was necessary to strike the ball, a point being lost in case it passed below. But this is a variation from the game as ordinarily played, and can be ventured on only when the players ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 5, No. 28, February, 1860 • Various
... The Flavian Amphitheatre's gaping wounds, The Baths of Caracalla's roofless walls, The Forum's multitude of ruined mounds, ...
— Poems • John L. Stoddard
... majority drinks; sleep, when the majority sleeps; pray, when the majority prays. So far from burying ourselves in deep wells of pews, with curtains round their edges, we have raised the floors, amphitheatre fashion, so that every body can see every body; have taken away the sides of the pews, which we have converted into free and equal seats, and have cut down the side of the pulpit so that we can look at the clergyman; but I ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... of this crescent, directly opposite the anchoring ground, lie the mission and town of Santa Barbara, on a low, flat plain, but little above the level of the sea, covered with grass, though entirely without trees, and surrounded on three sides by an amphitheatre of mountains, which slant off to the distance of fifteen or twenty miles. The mission stands a little back of the town, and is a large building, or rather a collection of buildings, in the centre of which is a high tower, with a belfry ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... demonstrator, from that to demonstrator, up again to quiz-master, to substitute-lecturer, until now I'm at the head of my department. That looks small to you, I know; but to me it means a lot. Two hundred men, bright fellows too, fill up the amphitheatre every day and listen to me for an hour. They respect me, have confidence in my ability—and I try to merit it. That means I must study and keep up with the procession in my line. It's an incentive that a man can't have any other way, ...
— The Dominant Dollar • Will Lillibridge
... night succeeded in calming the pit by administering in his prologue a double dose of incense to their vanity. "Half-an-hour before the play was to begin the spectators gave notice of their dispositions by frightful hisses and outcries, equal, perhaps, to what were ever heard at a Roman amphitheatre." The author, however, having in part tamed this wild audience by his flattery, secured ultimately its absolute favour by humouring its prejudices after the grossest fashion. He brought upon the stage a figure "with black eyebrows, a ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... understand it, but Dicky declared that no explanation would induce him to take a season ticket for the Arena, it was too destitute of modern improvements. It was something, though, to sit there watching, with the ranged multitude, a show in a Roman Amphitheatre—one could imagine things, lictors and aediles, senators and centurions. It only required the substitution of togas and girdled robes for trousers and petticoats, and a purple awning for the emperor, and a brass-plated body-guard with long spears and hairy arms and legs, and a few ...
— A Voyage of Consolation - (being in the nature of a sequel to the experiences of 'An - American girl in London') • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... country. Then we went to the Convocation Hall, and afterwards to the theatre, where S——- sat down in the Chancellor's chair, which is very broad, and ponderously wrought of oak. I remember little here, except the amphitheatre of benches, and the roof, which seems to be supported by golden ropes, and on the wall, opposite the door, some full-length portraits, among which one of that ridiculous coxcomb, George IV., was the most ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... festivals of the Revolution, the Act of Federation, had been celebrated by King Louis XVI. and his people. Deputations from each of the constituencies of France, from the army, and from every public body, surrounded the Emperor in a great amphitheatre enclosed at the southern end of the plain: outside there were ranged twenty thousand soldiers of the Guard and other regiments; and behind them spread the dense crowd of Paris. When the total of the votes ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... inglorious occupation of growing turnips and potatoes, and could talk of nothing meaner than hypocausts and thermae. So we, like the farmer, slight the really beautiful Early Gothic "Liebfrauenkirche" and roam and muse for hours about the ruins of the Amphitheatre, the Roman Baths, the Roman Palace ...
— A War-time Journal, Germany 1914 and German Travel Notes • Harriet Julia Jephson
... artillery. The whole city was in commotion, making arrangements to demonstrate their attachment to our beloved President. The Masonic, Cincinnati, and military orders united in doing him honor." In describing the hall, she says: "The seats were arranged like those of an amphitheatre, and cords were stretched on each side of the room, about three feet from the floor, to preserve sufficient space for the dances. We were not long seated when General Washington entered and bowed to the ladies as he passed round the room.... ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... course is different. Then, you wander along the summits of the cliffs; and looking down, through the hedges of tamarisk and myrtle that skirt the ends of the fields, see the rocks suddenly broken away beneath you into an immense shelving amphitheatre, on the floor of which the sea boils in fury, rushing through natural archways and narrow rifts. Beyond them, at intervals as the waves fall, you catch glimpses of the brilliant blue main ocean, and the outer reefs stretching into it. Often, ...
— Rambles Beyond Railways; - or, Notes in Cornwall taken A-foot • Wilkie Collins
... appeared in the midst of the other deputies of Crespy, there arose from the amphitheatre, where the spectators sat, a gentle sound of applause, which increased in volume, and was repeated by some of the commoners, when it was noticed that the duke made a clergyman, who had gone behind him in the delegation from this district, go in front of him, ...
— Marie Antoinette And Her Son • Louise Muhlbach
... village, in a sort of Rasselas-looking valley. We were four hours on the road, winding along the side of a mountain ridge, which we finally crossed, with a splendid view of the sea at the far-distant end of a huge amphitheatre formed by two ridges of mountains, and on the other side the descent into Filjeesdorp. The whole way we saw no human being or habitation, except one shepherd, from the time we passed Buntje's kraal, about two miles out of Caledon. ...
— Letters from the Cape • Lady Duff Gordon
... residences surrounded by flowers, fill the mind with ideas of comfort and of rest. If weary of constant contact with his fellow men, he seeks a deeper seclusion, there, in the back ground of this grand amphitheatre, lie the eternal mountains, frowning with brow of rock and cap of snow upon the smiling fields beneath, and there in its recesses may be found as much of wildness, and as much of solitude, as the pilgrim weary of the cares of life ...
— Speeches of the Honorable Jefferson Davis 1858 • Hon. Jefferson Davis
... some public edifice, it did not "work well," as Commissary Passauf expressed it. On 'change, at the town-hall, in the amphitheatre of the academy, at the sessions of the council, as well as at the reunions of the savants, a strange excitement seized the assembled citizens. Their relations with each other became embarrassing before they had been together an hour. In two hours the discussion degenerated into an angry dispute. ...
— A Winter Amid the Ice - and Other Thrilling Stories • Jules Verne
... given over to the burial of the American dead. As he spoke of the purposes for which those departed American soldiers had given their lives, a great wave of emotion, such as I have never witnessed at a public meeting, swept through the whole amphitheatre. As he continued his speech, I looked at Mrs. Wilson and saw tears in her eyes. I then turned to see the effect upon some of the "hard-boiled" newspaper men, to whom great speeches were ordinary things, and they were alike deeply moved. Down in the amphitheatre I saw men sneak ...
— Woodrow Wilson as I Know Him • Joseph P. Tumulty
... figure passed over the great waste. He took his way northward and moved across Scorhill, leaving Wattern Tor to the left. Beneath its ragged ridges, in a vast granite amphitheatre, twinkled the cool birth-springs of the little Wallabrook, and the water here looked leaden under shade, here sparkled with silver at the margin of a cloud shadow, here shone golden bright amid the dancing heads of the cotton-grass under unclouded sunlight. The mist wreaths had wholly ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... "Why, once at the amphitheatre. You were walking ahead, and I sat down to rest, and he came and joined me. He left before ...
— The American Baron • James De Mille
... retire to from the Court in summer time, for contemplation. Digby, when he became its owner, added four wings with a tower to each. Pope visited Lord Bristol there, and has sketched the place in one of his graceful letters to Miss Blount. He dwells particularly on the lofty woods clothing the amphitheatre of hills, the irregular lovely gardens, the masses of honeysuckle, the ruins of the old fortress, the sequestered bowling-green, and the grove Ralegh planted, with the stone seat from which he overlooked the ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing
... the ridge which I had now gained forms one end of a horse-shoe or amphitheatre; the other extremity is formed by a high mountain exactly opposite at about two miles' distance. The bend of the horse-shoe forms a circuit of about six miles, the rim of which is a wall of precipices and steep patina mountains, which ...
— Eight Years' Wandering in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker
... the Fair of Beaucaire. As we passed Les Arenes, that famous Roman amphitheatre in the centre of our city, I heard my father and his old friend allude to its former uses, without paying much heed to them. I believe they reminded one another that not only wild beasts but Christians had formerly been put to death there, for the recreation ...
— Jacques Bonneval • Anne Manning
... delightful evening, and we thought we were pleasing ourselves sufficiently by the airing, so we came home thinking of nothing at all, when, as we drove round, our ears were suddenly struck with the sound of music, and as if by enchantment, a fairy festival appeared upon the green. In the midst of an amphitheatre of verdant festoons suspended from white staffs, on which the scarlet streamers of the yeomen were flying, appeared a company of youths and maidens in white, their heads adorned with flowers, dancing; while their mothers and their little children were seated on benches round the amphitheatre. ...
— The Life And Letters Of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 1 • Maria Edgeworth
... passing under the bridge which he had viewed with so much terror, the path ascended rapidly from the edge of the brook, and the glen widened into a sylvan amphitheatre, waving with birch, young oaks, and hazels, with here and there a scattered yew-tree. The rocks now receded, but still showed their grey and shaggy crests rising among the copse-wood. Still higher, rose eminences and peaks, some bare, some clothed with wood, some round and purple with ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott
... spite of the laws of Constantine and Constans, gladiatorial shows survived the old established religion more than seventy years; but they owed their final extinction to the courage of a Christian. In the year 404, on the kalends of January, they were exhibiting the shows in the Flavian amphitheatre before the usual immense concourse of people. Almachius, or Telemachus, an Eastern monk, who had travelled to Rome intent on his holy purpose, rushed into the midst of the arena, and endeavoured to separate the combatants. The Praetor Alypius, a person incredibly attached to ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... this plain of Sebaiyeh is bounded by mountains having long, sloping bases, and covered with wild thyme and other herbs, affording a good tenting-ground immediately fronting Sinai, which forms, as it were, a grand pyramidal pulpit to the magnificent amphitheatre below. The width of the plain immediately in front of Sinai is about 1600 feet, but further south the width is much increased, so that on an average the plain may be considered as being nearly one-third of a mile wide, and its ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... not bear to leave a town where I had two or three very agreeable acquaintance, and one (Mons. Seguier) whose house was filled as full of natural and artificial curiosities, as his head is with learning and knowledge. Here too I had an opportunity of often visiting the Amphitheatre, the Maison Carree, (so Mons. Seguier writes it) and the many remains of Roman monuments so common in and about Nismes. I measured some of the stones under which I passed to make the tout au tour of the Amphitheatre, they were seventeen feet in length, and two in thickness; ...
— A Year's Journey through France and Part of Spain, Volume II (of 2) • Philip Thicknesse
... of the fiercest kind, which has been caught and exasperated in the same manner, is now produced; and both animals are turned loose in the arena of a small amphitheatre. The mortal fight begins instantly; and always, at first, to the disadvantage of Bruin; fatigued, as he is, by his previous rough riding. Roused, at length, by the repeated goring of the bull, he seizes his muzzle with his sharp claws, and clinging to this most sensitive ...
— The Adventures of Captain Bonneville - Digested From His Journal • Washington Irving
... can see again the sea, bluer even than the blue sky overhead; and as it tumbles languidly in from the horizon, fringing the amphitheatre of the bay with its edge of sparkling white, my ears can catch the murmur of its solemn music as they heard it in those ...
— Parkhurst Boys - And Other Stories of School Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... proceeded up the canyon it grew narrower, and soon we entered a veritable gorge. It was short, but the floor was exceedingly rough, and made hard going for the horses. Suddenly I was amazed to see the gorge open out into a kind of amphitheatre several hundred feet across. The walls were steep, and one side shelved out, making a long, shallow cave, In the center of this amphitheatre was a deep hole from which the mountain ...
— The Young Forester • Zane Grey
... 23: Fight for their places)—Ver. 41. This was in consequence of their sitting indiscriminately at the Amphitheatre, where the gladiators were exhibited; whereas at the Theatres there were distinct places appropriated to each "ordo" ...
— The Comedies of Terence - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Notes • Publius Terentius Afer, (AKA) Terence
... political decline. Where was the spirit of religion, as it was even in India and Egypt, when women were debased; when every man and woman held a human being in cruel bondage; when home was abandoned for the circus and the amphitheatre; when the cry of the mourner was unheard in shouts of victory; when women sold themselves as wives to those who would pay the highest price, and men abstained from marriage unless they could fatten on rich dowries; when ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... and, in view of St. Paul's declaration that the ancient gods were devils, and of the theory that the ancient gods of Rome were the devils who had the most reason to punish that city for their dethronement, and that the great amphitheatre was the chosen haunt of these demon gods, an ox decorated with garlands, after the ancient heathen manner, was taken in procession to the Colosseum and solemnly sacrificed. Even this proved vain, and the Church authorities then ordered expiatory processions ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... could not succeed in becoming one himself. The Faubourg Saint-Germain and the pavilion de Marsan wished to have M. Delaveau for prefect of police, on account of his piety. Dupuytren and Recamier entered into a quarrel in the amphitheatre of the School of Medicine, and threatened each other with their fists on the subject of the divinity of Jesus Christ. Cuvier, with one eye on Genesis and the other on nature, tried to please bigoted reaction by reconciling fossils with texts and by making ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... like the seats of an amphitheatre, each terrace being irrigated from the one below it by a small stream of water, drawn up an inclined plain by a continuous chain bucket, worked with a windlass by either hand or foot. The poppy is everywhere abundant ...
— An Australian in China - Being the Narrative of a Quiet Journey Across China to Burma • George Ernest Morrison
... denomination, the venerable Polycarp and Ignatius, after they had both attained the age of eighty years, sealed their faith in the blood of martyrdom. The former was burned at the stake in Smyrna, and the latter devoured by lions in the amphitheatre of Rome, In the second and third centuries, Christianity numbered among its advocates many distinguished scholars and philosophers, particularly among the Greeks. Their productions may be classed under the heads of biblical, ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... the Valmontone road[130] coincide nearly enough with the provenience of the inscription to settle an amphitheatre here of late imperial date. The tradition of the death of the martyr S. Agapito in an amphitheatre, and the discovery of a Christian church on the Valmontone road, have helped to make pretty sure the identification of ...
— A Study Of The Topography And Municipal History Of Praeneste • Ralph Van Deman Magoffin
... custom. Libraries were formed. Eminent physicians and scientists were encouraged to settle in Rome. The harbor of Ostia was improved, and a road constructed from the Adriatic to the Tyrrhenian Sea, over the Apennines. A temple to Mars was built, and an immense amphitheatre was erected at the foot of ...
— History of Rome from the Earliest times down to 476 AD • Robert F. Pennell
... went, and I was at the exit of the chasm, staring out upon an enormous amphitheatre of mountains. Yet, of the mountains, and the terrible grandeur of the place, I recked nothing; for I was confounded with amazement to behold, at a distance of several miles and occupying the center of the arena, a stupendous structure ...
— The House on the Borderland • William Hope Hodgson
... Funchal, said to contain about 25,000 inhabitants, is situated upon the slope of an amphitheatre of hills, behind the only anchorage of the island. The finest view is obtained from the balcony of a church dedicated to Nossa Senhora de Monte, situated at a considerable elevation above the town. Here one looks down upon the numerous quintas and cottages of ...
— Narrative Of The Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Commanded By The Late Captain Owen Stanley, R.N., F.R.S. Etc. During The Years 1846-1850. Including Discoveries And Surveys In New Guinea, The Louisiade • John MacGillivray
... walked along a path which practically followed the course of the stream that passed under the brig, and after a fine walk of about three-quarters of a mile through the grass patches, occasionally relieved by bushes and trees, we reached the famous cove. Here our farther way was barred by an amphitheatre of precipitous limestone rocks of a light grey colour, rising perpendicularly to the height of about 200 feet, which formed the cove itself. From the base of these rocks, along a horizontal bedding plane and at one particular spot, issued ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... dip-net and gunnysack, and Bellona trotting at his heels. I knew where he was bound, and cut out by the back pasture and climbed through the underbrush to the top of the mountain. Keeping carefully out of sight, I followed the crest along for a couple of miles to a natural amphitheatre in the hills, where the little river raced down out of a gorge and stopped for breath in a large and placid rock-bound pool. That was the spot! I sat down on the croup of the mountain, where I could see all that ...
— Moon-Face and Other Stories • Jack London
... crowned with the scrub the camels feed on were fewer, so that the flatness of the ground was more definite. Here and there large dunes of golden-coloured sand rose, some straight as city walls, some curved like seats in an amphitheatre, others indented, crenellated like battlements, undulating in beastlike shapes. The distant panorama of desert was unbroken by any visible oasis and powerfully suggested ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... were unloading cargo, some officers and their wives went on shore in one of the ship's boats, and found it a most interesting place. It was garrisoned by Mexican troops, uniformed in white cotton shirts and trousers. They visited the old hotel, the amphitheatre where the bull-fights were held, and the old fort. They told also about the cock-pits—and about ...
— Vanished Arizona - Recollections of the Army Life by a New England Woman • Martha Summerhayes
... stretched on like two rows of white dwellings way off into the green of the woods. Josiah and I are well thought on in Jonesville, and as fur out as Loontown and Piller Pint, and a man soon advanced and gin us an advantageous position, and Josiah hitched the mair and we advanced into the amphitheatre. ...
— Samantha at Coney Island - and a Thousand Other Islands • Marietta Holley
... friend after his departure, but he made anxious and continual inquiries respecting him and informed himself of the day when he was to reappear among his playmates. On a pleasant summer afternoon the children of the neighborhood had assembled in the little forest-crowned amphitheatre behind the meeting-house, and the recovering invalid was there, leaning on a staff. The glee of a score of untainted bosoms was heard in light and airy voices, which danced among the trees like sunshine become audible; the ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... pleasing kind. Such was the interior! Without, the pure and transparent lake spread its broad mirror, or rolled its voluminous windings, by banks richly covered with olives and laurels; and in the distance, towns, promontories, hills rising in an amphitheatre blushing with vines, and the elevations of the Alps covered with woods and pasturage, and sprinkled ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... while he consented; but in a very short time he returned to his original opinion, and, smiling scornfully, assured us that he had seen and heard enough to strengthen him in his verdict. Heine told us that shortly after he and Spontini had taken their seats in the almost empty amphitheatre, and as soon as the Bacchus chorus had started, Spontini had said to him: 'C'est de la Berliner Sing-Academie, allons-nous-en.' Through an open door a streak of light had fallen on a lonely figure behind one of the columns; Heine had recognised Mendelssohn, and ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... independence restored. And she could not go lest Bertie's grave should be forgotten. In common with Edith Cavell, Gabrielle Petit, Philippe Bauck, and the other forty or fifty victims of von Bissing's "Terror," he had been buried in the grassy slopes of the amphitheatre of the Rifle range, near where he had been executed. Every Sunday, wet or fine, Vivien went there with fresh flowers. She had marked the actual grave with a small wooden cross bearing his name, till the time should come when she ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... to win them, win all classes of them, within so short a term, is a toss above extraordinary. She is named Carinthia—suitable name for the Welsh pantomimic procession. Or cry out the word in an amphitheatre of ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... in the county of Nottingham, is situated in the midst of an amphitheatre of well-wooded hills; the soil is rich, and the air, from the vicinity of the River Trent, is remarkably pure. It is fourteen miles north-east of Nottingham, about as many south-east of Mansfield, and eight south-west from Newark; the River Greet, famous for red ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 14, - Issue 389, September 12, 1829 • Various
... and my room so pleasant, commanding a view of the sea, confined by an amphitheatre of hanging woods, that I wished to remain there, though no one in the house could speak English or French. The mayor, my friend, however, sent a young woman to me who spoke a little English, and she agreed to call on me twice ...
— Letters written during a short residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark • Mary Wollstonecraft
... by a silver sea, near a Golden Gate. For ages the water has washed from an almost land-locked bay against this hill-crowned city, and on its northern side has created of the shore an amphitheatre stretching for some three miles to the ...
— Palaces and Courts of the Exposition • Juliet James
... Crispinilla, Scribonia, Veleria, Solina, and other women of high society. After he had greeted her and returned thanks, he began to complain that he saw her so rarely, that it was not possible to meet her either in the Circus or the Amphitheatre; to which she answered calmly, laying her hand on the ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... Augustin used to bathe there with his father. And again, it is probable that, like the neighbouring Thubursicum and other free-cities of the same level, it had its theatre, its forum, its nymph-fountains, perhaps even its amphitheatre. Of all that nothing has been found. Certain inscribed stone tablets, capitals and shafts of columns, a stone with an inscription which belonged to a Catholic church—that is all which has been discovered up to this ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... came the great day, and among the pennons of the challenging knights, which made gay the ancient amphitheatre of Arles where the lists were staked, there fluttered one bearing the device of a golden cup from which ran a stream of silver water. Also when Richard, with visor drawn and all in mail of shining steel, caracoled in the field, he was hailed Knight of the Spilling Cup, and Sancie's ...
— Romance of Roman Villas - (The Renaissance) • Elizabeth W. (Elizbeth Williams) Champney
... very largest vessels of our navy, while but six miles above they float nothing larger than a Bladensburg goose. To the left flows the Potomac, a mile wide. Between the rivers lies Washington. A vast amphitheatre, its green or gray walls cloven only by the two rivers, appears to surround the city. "Amphitheatre" is the word, for within the great circle, proportioned to it in size and magnificence, dwarfing all other objects, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 11, No. 24, March, 1873 • Various
... and thus had a most decided influence on the development of Grecian thought and enterprise. The exhibition of sculpture and painting alone made them attractive and intellectual, while the athletic exercises amused ordinary minds. They were not demoralizing, like the sports of the amphitheatre, or a modern bull-fight, or even fashionable races. They were more like tournaments in the martial ages of Europe, but superior to them vastly, since no woman was allowed to be present at the Olympic games under ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... rounding the promontory which forms the southern boundary of the Gulf of Sidon, we rode for an hour or two over a plain near the sea, and then came down to a valley which ran up among the hills, terminating in a natural amphitheatre. An ancient barrow, or tumulus, nobody knows of whom, stands near the sea. During the day I noticed two charming little pictures. One, a fountain gushing into a broad square basin of masonry, shaded by three branching cypresses. Two Turks sat on its ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor
... sarcophagus, with withered leaves in it, in a wild and desolate conventual garden—once a cemetery, now ruined, to the very graves! The situation struck me as very appropriate to the legend, being blighted as their love." He might have added, that when Verona itself, with its amphitheatre and its Paladian structures, lies level with the earth, the very spot on which it stood will be consecrated by ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... appreciates and honors courage: the courage of Christianity, which sustained martyrs in the amphitheatre, at the stake, and on the rack; the courage of Patriotism, which inspired millions in our own land to realize the historic fable of Curtius, and to fill up with their own bodies, if need be, the yawning chasm which ...
— Oration on the Life and Character of Henry Winter Davis • John A. J. Creswell
... seat of one of the most ancient and celebrated universities in Europe, is situated amid picturesque environs at the confluence of the Cherwell and the Thames (often called in its upper course the Isis). It is surrounded by an amphitheatre of gentle hills, the tops of which command a fine view of the city with its domes and towers."—BAEDEKER'S Great Britain, in his Handbooks for Travellers. In writing of Oxford, Hawthorne says: "The world, surely, has not another place like Oxford; ...
— Matthew Arnold's Sohrab and Rustum and Other Poems • Matthew Arnold
... Roman or Gallo-Roman architecture stand with others that belong to the dawn of mediaeval art, and others, again, that are marked by the florid and graceful fancy of the Renaissance. The ruins of the amphitheatre are insignificant compared to those at Nimes and Arles, and there is no beautiful example of Roman art like the Maison Carre at Nimes; but there is an exceedingly curious monument of antiquity, which was long a puzzle ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... Pyrenees,—expanding the grand Republic into crowning provinces of i. France (Gallia), 2. Belgium, 3. Holland (Batavia), 4. England (Britannia), 5. Savoy (Allobroges), 6. Switzerland (Helvetia), 7. Spain (Hispania),—than to decorate a street or to found an amphitheatre. Dr. Beattie once observed that, if that question as to the greatest man in action upon the rolls of History were left to be collected from the suffrages already expressed in books and scattered throughout the literature ...
— "De Bello Gallico" and Other Commentaries • Caius Julius Caesar
... here written was spoken many months ago in the Amphitheatre Richelieu of the Sorbonne, in Paris, and some of it in Lille, Nancy, Dijon, Lyons, Grenoble, Montpellier, Toulouse, Bordeaux, Poitiers, Rennes, and Caen; and all of it was in the American publisher's hands before the ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley
... against which he leaned; in front a drop of several hundred feet through space. He lay upon a platform, therefore, invisible from the Desert at his back. Below, the curving Wadi formed a natural amphitheatre in which each separate boulder fallen from the cliffs, and even the little silla shrubs the camels eat, were plainly visible. He noted all the bigger ones among them. He ...
— Four Weird Tales • Algernon Blackwood
... amphitheatre, where stood Spell-bound the mighty multitude, Rested its long and gilded walls Upon two pillars' capitals: His brawny arms, with labor spent, He threw around the pillars there, And to the deep blue firmament Lifted his sightless ...
— The Poets and Poetry of Cecil County, Maryland • Various
... nearing London. Far away on either side was an amphitheatre of lights. She leaned forward and gazed thoughtfully out of ...
— The Survivor • E.Phillips Oppenheim
... come to what seemed a vast semicircle of ice and snow, a huge amphitheatre in the plains. It was wonderful: a great round wall on which the northern lights played, into which the stars peered. It was open towards the north, and in one side was a fissure shaped like a Gothic arch. Pierre pointed to it, and they did not speak till they had passed through ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... tangled briers, over what once were paths where beauty lingered and listened to the vow of love; or to wander through the streets of a disentombed city, or seated on a fallen column, or the stone steps of the disinterred amphitheatre, to think of the human hearts that here, a thousand years agone, beat emulously with the hopes and fears, the loves and hates, the joys and sorrows, the aspiration and despair that animate or depress our own, and to reflect that they have ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams
... or would or could cure, or had cured any disease. My venerated instructor, Dr. James Jackson, taught me never to use that expression. Curo means, I take care of, he used to say, and in that sense, if you mean nothing more, it is properly employed. So, in the amphitheatre of the Ecole de Medecine, I used to read the words of Ambroise Pare, "Je le pansay, Dieu le guarist." (I dressed his wound, and God cured him.) Next, I am not in the habit of talking about "the diseases to which flesh is heir." The expression has become rather ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... camping-place was a lovely spot, being an open amphitheatre of about ten acres in extent surrounded on all sides by the forest, and having a tiny rivulet of pure sparkling fresh water flowing through it. Daphne of course at once took the lead in the arrangements necessary for what threatened to be a somewhat protracted ...
— The Congo Rovers - A Story of the Slave Squadron • Harry Collingwood
... capital formerly of Old Castile, and since 1833 of the Spanish province of Burgos, on the river Arlanzon, and on the Northern railways from Madrid to the French frontier. Pop. (1900) 30,167. Burgos, in the form of an amphitheatre, occupies the lower slopes of a hill crowned by the ruins of an ancient citadel. It faces the Arlanzon, a broad and swift stream, with several islands in mid-channel. Three stone bridges lead to ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... foreseen, the seats obtainable were none too advantageous; only on one of the highest rows of the amphitheatre could ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... about the city that three of the most celebrated fighters of Mexico would have an exhibition in the evening, and combat with animals. As my friend and myself never had seen one we thought we would go. It was an amphitheatre, with circular seats about the pit, with thick planks around it, the seats commencing about twenty feet from the bottom of the pit. There was a door at the side of the pit, which was raised by ...
— The Adventures of a Forty-niner • Daniel Knower
... how to enter the great city, for he was more or less the worse for liquor the whole time, with wondrous stuff which they called wine? Or did no captive, escaped by miracle from the butcheries of the amphitheatre, return to tell his countrymen how all the rest had died like German men; and call on them to rise and avenge their brothers' blood? Yes, surely the Teutons knew well, even in the time of Tacitus, of the 'micklegard,' the great city and all its ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley
... have indicated the extent of the evil with the reckless audacity of those surgeons, who boldly induce the formation of false tissues under which a shameful wound is concealed. Public virtue, transferred to the table of our amphitheatre, has lost even its carcass under the strokes of the scalpel. Lover or husband, have you smiled, or have you trembled at this evil? Well, it is with malicious delight that we lay this huge social burden on the conscience of the predestined. Harlequin, when ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part I. • Honore de Balzac
... one night, at the Colosseum. We had been musing about that vast and solemn pile by the moonlight, which silvered it over with indescribable beauty, and at last, accompanied by our guides, bearing torches, we ascended through dark and broken passages to the upper benches of the amphitheatre. As we were passing along one side, we saw picturesquely moving through the shadows of the opposite walls, with the immense arena between, the red-flaring torches and half-illuminated figures of another party of visitors. I don't know whether ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... other matter to the manuscript which I was preparing for the press. There was much in the book * about early Christianity and ecclesiastical antiquities. I imagined that this parish was, in British and Druidic times, a populous place, and somewhat important. There was a "Round," or amphitheatre, for public games, and four British castles; also a great many sepulchral mounds on the hills, the burial-place of chieftains. I supposed that St. Piran came here among these rude natives (perhaps painted ...
— From Death into Life - or, twenty years of my ministry • William Haslam
... resemblance of Mr. Hamilton to some picture I had seen. All at once I remembered the subject. It was the picture of a young Christian sleeping peacefully just before he was called to his combat with wild beasts in the amphitheatre: the keeper was even then opening the door: the lions were waiting for their prey. The face was boyish, but still Mr. Hamilton reminded me of him. And there was a picture of St. Augustine sitting with his mother Monica, that reminded me of Mr. Hamilton too. I had called him plain, and Jill ...
— Uncle Max • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... was. It was an aerodrome, and a secret one. The place had been most cunningly chosen. For suppose anyone were watching an aeroplane descending here, he would think it had gone over the hill beyond the trees. As the place was on the top of a rise in the midst of a big amphitheatre, any observer from any direction would conclude it had passed out of view behind the hill. Only a man very close at hand would realize that the aeroplane had not gone over but had descended in the midst of the wood. An observer with a telescope on one of the higher hills might have discovered ...
— The Thirty-nine Steps • John Buchan
... centuries, when the civilization of the Romans had not entirely disappeared, until the siege of Paris by the Normans in the ninth century. On this (southern) side of the river have also been discovered the ruins of an amphitheatre, traces of a quarter or barracks for soldiers, another establishment of baths, the aqueduct of Arcueil, a great cemetery on the southern slopes of Mount Lucotitius, secondary roads, and a port on the smaller arm of the Seine. In the Luxembourg garden have been unearthed at various periods ...
— Paris from the Earliest Period to the Present Day; Volume 1 • William Walton
... advantage in being encamped on a height, so that the whole panorama of rugged kopjes, deep ravines where spruits or rivers sing, silent camp, and sleeping town stretches round one, bounded only by an amphitheatre of ...
— Four Months Besieged - The Story of Ladysmith • H. H. S. Pearse
... a jolly place," cried Adela, who seemed to have left all her primness at Brighton. "You have never seen the spring woods, nor the amphitheatre, nor the waterfall!" ...
— Bluebell - A Novel • Mrs. George Croft Huddleston
... immigrated from British Columbia to secure, it is said, greater religious liberty, and at Ketchikan, a thriving town, the boys here gained their first real impressions of Alaskan conditions. They found Skagway a town of about fifteen hundred people, set in a great natural amphitheatre surrounded by mountains capped with perpetual snow. It is connected with the outside world by a cable to Seattle, and by other parts of Alaska by telegraph, and has electric lights and a telephone system. A fine school building and several churches that reminded the young Scouts of many ...
— The Boy Scouts on the Yukon • Ralph Victor
... the opening prayer or by the transaction of business, might easily catch sight of him, and as he passed down the long aisle, moving steadily on with graceful stride and immobile face, a flush of pride tinged his cheeks as cheer after cheer, rolling from one end of the amphitheatre to the other, rent the air. He sat in the front row on the centre aisle, and about him clustered Chester A. Arthur, Levi P. Morton, Benjamin F. Tracy, Edwards Pierrepont, George H. Sharpe, and the boyish figure of Charles E. Cornell, a pale, sandy, undersized ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... instant, but supposing it to be the muttering of one of those transient thunder-showers which often take place in mountain heights, he proceeded. Passing through the ravine, they came to a hollow, like a small amphitheatre, surrounded by perpendicular precipices, over the brinks of which impending trees shot their branches, so that you only caught glimpses of the azure sky and the bright evening cloud. During the whole time Rip and his companion had labored on in silence; ...
— The Short-story • William Patterson Atkinson
... diameter, and opens into the shell of a large bedchamber. Its large croisees, which look out in three directions, command an extensive bird's eye view of the Comtat Grignan, surmounted by the long Alpine ridge of Mont Ventou, and an amphitheatre of other smaller mountains: and enough remained of both apartments to give a full idea of the lightness and airiness of their situation, and ...
— Itinerary of Provence and the Rhone - Made During the Year 1819 • John Hughes
... the rope-dancing attitudes favored by statues of heavenly persons in the decline of the Renaissance. The choir is peculiarly built, in the form of a half-circle, with seats rising one above another, as in an amphitheatre, and a flight of steps ascending to the bishop's seat above all,—after the manner of the earliest Christian churches. The partition parapet before the high altar is of almost transparent marble, delicately and ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... stronghold overlooking the narrow sea. Then the earthquakes, ever menacing between Vesuvius and Etna; that of 1783, which wrought destruction throughout Calabria, laid Reggio in ruins, so that to-day it has the aspect of a newly-built city, curving its regular streets, amphitheatre-wise, upon the slope that rises between shore and mountain. Of Rhegium little is discernible above ground; of the ages that followed scarce anything remains but the Norman fortress, so shaken by that century-old disaster that huge ...
— By the Ionian Sea - Notes of a Ramble in Southern Italy • George Gissing
... specimen of the original type invented by Memnon the Egyptian, and a manuscript of the first play acted by Thespis. These had not exhausted the stock of the dealer: he possessed the skin of a giraffe killed in the Roman amphitheatre; the head of King Arthur's spear; and the breech of the first cannon fired at the siege of Constantinople. The jury, however, thought that the virtuoso having ordered those curiosities, ought to pay for them, and brought in a verdict for ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 366, April, 1846 • Various
... all the places In our amphitheatre, 'Midst a sea of swarming faces I can yet distinguish her; Dost thou triumph, dark-brow'd Nina? Is my secret known to thee? On the sands of yon arena I shall yet my vengeance see. Now through portals fast careering Picadors are disappearing; Now the barriers nimbly clearing Has the ...
— Poems • Adam Lindsay Gordon
... charms. When Benedict encountered this temptation, he fled from the scene and retired to a picturesque mountain—the renowned Monte Cassino. Let Montalembert describe this celebrated spot among the western Apennines: "At the foot of this rock Benedict found an amphitheatre of the time of the Caesars, amidst the ruins of the town of Casinum, which the most learned and pious of Romans, Varro, that pagan Benedictine, whose memory and knowledge the sons of Benedict took pleasure in honoring, had rendered illustrious. From the summit the prospect ...
— A Short History of Monks and Monasteries • Alfred Wesley Wishart
... call the high plains, for we have to cross a creek and climb a high hill before we get on to them. Then for an invigorating gallop over the green turf, the breeze freshening as we pace along. These plains are really wonderful. They look like a large natural amphitheatre, being level for about fifteen miles in every direction and encircled all round by high hills. There is very little timber ...
— A Boy's Voyage Round the World • The Son of Samuel Smiles
... kingdom. When his position was firmly established, Herod devoted himself to magnificent building enterprises. In Antioch, Athens, and Rhodes, he reared great public buildings. Jerusalem, his capital, was provided with a theatre and amphitheatre, and other buildings that characterize the Graeco-Roman cities of the period. The two crowning achievements of Herod's reign were the rebuilding of Samaria and Caesarea, as its port on the Mediterranean coast. ...
— The Makers and Teachers of Judaism • Charles Foster Kent
... entirely land-locked, buried in woods, the trees coming right down to high-water mark, the shores mostly flat, and the hilltops standing round at a distance in a sort of amphitheatre, one here, one there. Two little rivers, or rather two swamps, emptied out into this pond, as you might call it; and the foliage round that part of the shore had a kind of poisonous brightness. From the ship we could see nothing of the house or stockade, for they were ...
— Treasure Island • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the observer is choked with observations. Only to prevent us from being submerged by chaos, nature and society between them have arranged a system of classification which is simplicity itself; stalls, boxes, amphitheatre, gallery. The moulds are filled nightly. There is no need to distinguish details. But the difficulty remains—one has to choose. For though I have no wish to be Queen of England or only for a moment—I would willingly sit beside her; I would hear the Prime Minister's gossip; the countess ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... is of the Southern kind which, with satisfaction, we show to strangers as something peculiarly of our country. It is ancient and luminous in an amphitheatre of hills, and schooners and barques come right among its gables. It is wealthy, but it is not of the common sort, for it never shows haste. It knows, of course, that wealth is cheap, until it has matured and has attained that dignity ...
— Waiting for Daylight • Henry Major Tomlinson
... eyes from this and looked out eastward where the road fell away below us. The sunset sky was a vault of rich velvet, fading away into mauve and silver round the edges of the dark mountain amphitheatre; and between us and the ravine below rose up out of the deeps and went up into the heights the straight solitary rock we call Green Finger. Of a queer volcanic colour, and wrinkled all over with what looks undecipherable writing, it hung there ...
— Manalive • G. K. Chesterton
... of pearls and precious stones, also the streets were paved with gold; so that by reason of the natural glory of the city, and the reflection of the sunbeams upon it, Christian with desire fell sick." It was a momentary vision of a vast amphitheatre of splendor, mostly hidden by the trees and the edge ...
— Our Italy • Charles Dudley Warner
... trying to scale the sides of our highest peaks. I thus examined in succession all the glaciers descending from the majestic summits of Monte Rosa and the Matterhorn, whose numerous crests form a most gigantic amphitheatre, which lifts itself above the everlasting snow. Afterward I visited the sea of ice which, under the name of the glacier of Aletsch, flows from the Jungfrau, the Monch, and the Eiger toward Brieg; thence I went to the ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz
... basis isn't changed. There are tender natures and hard natures, irremediably so. And then the same sight, the same lesson can produce opposite effects. Could anything have hardened me more than having been brought up in a hospital and having played, as a child, in a dissecting amphitheatre? But no one is more sensitive than I am to physical suffering. It is true that I am the son of an extremely humane man, sensitive in the true meaning of the word. The sight of a suffering dog made tears come to his eyes. He did his surgical operations none the less well, and he ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... the Romans to pathos appears a priori in their amphitheatre, and its tendency to put out the theatre; secondly, a posteriori, in the fact that their theatre was put out; and also, a posteriori, in the coarseness of their sensibilities to real distresses unless costumed and made sensible as well as intelligible. The grossness of this demand, which ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... pamphlets on the musical dispute of 1752; Lettre a une dame d'un certain age sur l'etat present de l'Opera, (8vo, pp. 11) and Arret rendu a l'amphitheatre de l'Opera, (8vo, pp. 16,) both directed against French music and in line with Grimm's Petit Prophete and Rousseau's Lettre sur la ...
— Baron d'Holbach • Max Pearson Cushing
... Amerikano. Amiability amindeco. Amiable afabla, aminda. Amicably pace. Amid meze. Amidst meze. Amity amikeco. Ammonia amoniako. Among inter. Amongst inter. Amorous amema. Amount sumo. Amphibious amfibia. Amphitheatre amfiteatro. Amphora amforo. Ample suficxa. Amplify grandigi. Amplitude amplekso. Amputate detrancxi. Amulet talismano. Amuse amuzi. Anagram anagramo. Analogy analogio. Analysis analizo. Analyze analizi. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... itself and to me so new, could not fail to awaken a train of reflections in a mind which had early been accustomed to contemplate with delight the eventful histories and agreeable fictions of this Eastern world. It gave me inexpressible pleasure to find myself in the midst of so noble an amphitheatre, almost encircled by the vast regions of Asia, which has ever been esteemed the nurse of sciences, the inventress of delightful and useful arts, the scene of glorious actions, fertile in the productions of human ...
— India: What can it teach us? - A Course of Lectures Delivered before the University Of Cambridge • F. Max Mueller
... Fortunately for the real enjoyments of mankind, even under the sway of a Roman despot, "the novelty and invention" had very narrow limits when applied to matters so utterly unworthy and unintellectual as the cruel sports of the amphitheatre. Probus indeed, transplanted trees to the arena, so that it had the appearance of a verdant grove; and Severus introduced four hundred ferocious animals in one ship sailing in the little lake which the arena ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects, and Curiosities of Art, (Vol. 2 of 3) • Shearjashub Spooner
... Colorow is enclosed by a colossal amphitheatre of dove-gray stone, in whose niches wind-warped pines stand like spectators silent and waiting. Six thousand feet above the valley floor green and orange slopes run to the edges of perennial ice-fields, while farther away, and peering above these almost inaccessible ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... to the door). I know I shall find her here. Lucky I know that Torcello chapter in "The Stones" very nearly by heart! (Reaches threshold. A Voice within. "Well, I guess I'm going to climb up and sit in that old amphitheatre there, and see how it feels!") Good heavens,—MAUD! and I was as nearly as possible—I think I'll go up to the top of the Campanile and see if I ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 102, February 6, 1892 • Various
... city. This water, in the time of the Romans, had been brought first to the theatre, whereof the remains are still there, and from that theatre, which was on the hill where to-day there is the fortress, to the amphitheatre of the same city, on the plain; but these edifices and conduits were wholly ruined and spoilt by the Goths. Jacopo, then, as it has been said, having brought this water below the walls, made the fountain which was ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol 2, Berna to Michelozzo Michelozzi • Giorgio Vasari
... the latter end of October, when Mr Lawson was preaching and dispensing the Sacrament to upwards of a hundred followers, in the hollow where stood the King's Chair. This locality was wonderfully well suited for the purpose—it was, in fact, a kind of amphitheatre, surrounded on all sides by rising ground, and in the centre of which three large stones constituted a chair, and several seats of the same material were ranged in a circular form around. The stones ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland Volume 17 • Alexander Leighton
... conspicuous among which, and indeed eminent over all, are the Baths of Titus. Then, as you will conjecture, the eye takes in the Palatine and Capitol hills, catching, just beyond the last, the swelling dome of the Pantheon, which seems rather to rise out of, and crown, the Flavian Amphitheatre, than its own massy walls. Then, far in the horizon, we just discern the distant summits of the Appenines, broken by Soracte and ...
— Aurelian - or, Rome in the Third Century • William Ware
... more afraid of the Devil and of witches than they are now, they liked to have a priest or a minister somewhere near to scare 'em off; but nowadays, if you could find an old woman that would ride round the room on a broomstick, Barnum would build an amphitheatre to exhibit her in; and if he could come across a young imp, with hoofs, tail, and budding horns, a lineal descendant of one of those "daemons" which the good people of Gloucester fired at, and were fired at by "for the best part of a month together" ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... Combine all these circumstances and elements of the case, and you may faintly enter into the situation of my poor Agnes. Perhaps the best way to express it at once is by recurring to the case of a young female Christian martyr, in the early ages of Christianity, exposed in the bloody amphitheatre of Rome or Verona, to 'fight with wild beasts,' as it was expressed in mockery— she to fight the lamb to fight with lions! But in reality the young martyr had a fight to maintain, and a fight (in contempt of that cruel mockery) fiercer than the fiercest of her persecutors could have ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... sight of land is always welcome to weary mariners, after the perils and annoyances of a voyage of three days, or whether the place is in itself extraordinarily beautiful, need not be argued; but I have seldom seen anything more charming than the amphitheatre of noble hills into which the ship now came— all the features of the landscape being lighted up with a wonderful clearness of air, which rarely adorns a view in our country. The sun had not yet set, but over the town and lofty rocky castle of Vigo a great ghost of a moon ...
— Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo • William Makepeace Thackeray
... of Mexico has been more read in England than most historical works; and the Mexico of Montezuma has a well-defined idea attached to it. The amphitheatre of dark hills surrounding the level plain, the two snowy mountain-peaks, the five lakes covering nearly half the valley, the city rising out of the midst of the waters, miles from the shore, with which it was connected by its four causeways, ...
— Anahuac • Edward Burnett Tylor
... itself, strong contrasts in appearance and culture are observable among the inhabitants; they are all negroes, but in different social conditions, more or less liable to injury from the presence of the slaver, and yielding different temperaments and qualities to colonial life. The beautiful and fertile amphitheatre called Whidah, in North latitude 6 deg., with Dahomey just behind it, is populous with a superior race. Where did it come from? The area which it occupies has only about fifty miles of coast and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... hand. Her father Kuntibhoja seeing this, invited, O best of monarchs, the princes and kings of other countries and desired his daughter to select her husband from among her guests. The intelligent Kunti, entering the amphitheatre, beheld Pandu—the foremost of the Bharatas—that tiger among kings—in that concourse of crowned heads. Proud as the lion, broad-chested, bull-eyed, endued with great strength, and outshining all other monarchs in splendour, he looked like another Indra in that royal assemblage. ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa - Translated into English Prose - Adi Parva (First Parva, or First Book) • Kisari Mohan Ganguli (Translator)
... wrecker after wrecker. There was no emotion, no animation, it scarce seemed any interest; not a hand was raised; but all callously awaited the harvest of the sea, and their children stood by their side and waited also. To the end of his life, my father remembered that amphitheatre of placid spectators on the beach, and with a special and natural animosity, the boys of his own age. But presently a light air sprang up, and filled the sails, and fainted, and filled them again; and little ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... which it had its sources. The hill on the other side of the little vale, which was of an oval figure, narrowest at its outlet, was rough and precipitous, like that on which they lay; but the two uniting above, bounded the head of the vale with a long, bushy, sweeping slope—a fragment of a natural amphitheatre—which was evidently of an easy ascent, though abrupt and steep. The valley thus circumscribed, though broken, and here and there deeply furrowed by the water-course, was nearly destitute of trees, except at its head, where a few young beeches flung their silver boughs and ...
— Nick of the Woods • Robert M. Bird
... amphitheatre of sward, whose walls banked out the narrow sky above. And here, in the focus of the huge ring, an object appeared which stirred strange melancholy in Lancelot,—a little chapel, ivy-grown, girded with a few yews, and elders, and grassy graves. A climbing rose ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... or injury. This may seem a small detail, but it is really an important auxiliary in the teaching by demonstration with specimens for which this room was peculiarly intended. The ordinary lectures of Professor Virchow were held in a neighboring amphitheatre ...
— A History of Science, Volume 5(of 5) - Aspects Of Recent Science • Henry Smith Williams
... descended to the deep bed of another stream, crossed it by a series of stepping-stones, ascended to some height on the opposite side, and followed upwards the line of the stream, till the banks opened into a spacious amphitheatre, where stood, in its fields and meadows, the ...
— Crotchet Castle • Thomas Love Peacock
... stage, or, perhaps, the whole chorus advanced to the front of the orchestra, and thus put themselves in ideal connection, as it were, with the dramatis personae there acting. This thymele was in the centre of the whole edifice, all the measurements were calculated, and the semi-circle of the amphitheatre was drawn from this point. It had a double use, a twofold purpose; it constantly reminded the spectators of the origin of tragedy as a religious service, and declared itself as the ideal representative ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... feculent-smelling flowerets of the Smyrnum olusatrum, and the stinking Geranium robertianum, mingle with the sweets of Calendula, Narcissus, and Jonquil; not to mention the Orchis tribe, which flourishes in profusion. Traversing the green arena of the amphitheatre,—where annual festas are held, and occasional cricket matches played—to the left, and leaving the Temple of Diana to the right, we come upon a deep descent just in front of the villa, and enter it for a minute to cast a hasty coup-d'oeil ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various
... strolled out to see the sun set from Lady Judith's grounds. The wind had dropped. The clouds had rolled from the zenith, and ranged in amphitheatre with distant flushed bodies over sea and land: Titanic crimson head and chest rising from the wave faced Hyperion falling. There hung Briareus with deep-indented trunk and ravined brows, stretching ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... in imagination transported myself. A few hours ago the green hills of England yet swam imperfectly before our eyes, scarcely perceptible in the distant horizon: they now unfold themselves on either side, forming as it were a double amphitheatre. The sun bursts through the clouds, and gilds alternately the shrubs and meadows on the distant shores, and we now espy the tops of two masts of ships just peeping above the surface of the deep. What an awful ...
— Travels in England in 1782 • Charles P. Moritz
... into the mountains, growing more and more gloomy, and then all at once displaying the bright glow of sunshine right in front, as if it came round an elbow of the way. A few minutes later Griggs led the party into a vast amphitheatre walled in by towering walls that were on the whole perpendicular, but seamed with rifts running up to natural terraces or breaks in the strata of which ...
— The Peril Finders • George Manville Fenn
... were to die in the amphitheatre of Carthage. At the gate of the amphitheatre, the guards offered the men among the Christians the red mantle of the priests of Saturn, and offered the women the fillet worn by the priestesses of Ceres. But the Christians refused. 'We have come here,' they said, 'of ...
— Out of the Triangle • Mary E. Bamford
... says Captain Grey, "along, under the pleasant shade, I saw in fancy busy crowds throng the scenes I was then amongst. I pictured to myself the bleating sheep and lowing herds wandering over these fertile hills; and I chose the very spot on which my house should stand, surrounded with as fine an amphitheatre of verdant land as the eye of man had ever gazed on. The view was backed by the Victoria Range, whilst seaward you looked out through a romantic glen upon the great Indian ocean. I knew that within four or five years civilization would ...
— Australia, its history and present condition • William Pridden
... under its guns, all gazed with eager eyes over the open waters of the bay, their interest in the coming contest as intense as Roman audience ever displayed for the life and death struggle in the gladiatorial arena. Before them lay a mightier amphitheatre than that of the Coliseum, and before them was to be fought more notable struggle for life and death than ever took place within the ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 1 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... partnership, and as, including the women and boys, they numbered fifteen, and could take up the five claims which, by mining law, the discoverer of a new place was entitled to, they had in all twenty claims, which gave them the whole of the little amphitheatre at the foot of the fall for a distance of ...
— Captain Bayley's Heir: - A Tale of the Gold Fields of California • G. A. Henty |
