"Basso" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... well as of those in the harbor of Bombay, to a period prior to the Christian era. However strange and historically interesting these excavated temples may be to the observant traveler, he will look in vain among the carvings and basso-relievi for any just proportions of form or expression of features. There is a lack of anything like artistic genius evinced, no correctness of anatomical proportions even attempted. The figures doubtless were sufficiently typical to answer their ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... most numerous assemblage of beauties in stone which the world contains. Impossible it were to enumerate the elegances that cover it from top to bottom,—its carved portals, its flying buttresses, its arabesque pilasters, its richly mullioned windows, its basso-reliefs, its beautiful tracery, and its forest of snow-white pinnacles soaring in the sunlight, so calm and moveless, and yet so airy and light, that you fear the nest breeze will scatter them. You can compare it only to some Alpine group, whose flashing peaks shoot ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... weeks brought more trouble, and most of it came through the organ. Some of the rattling panels, in spite of every effort to make them fast, rattled the more. One night when the servants were alone in the house, of its own volition the organ sent forth, to break the still hours, a blood-curdling basso-profundo groan that suggested ghosts to their superstitious minds. The housemaid came to regard the instrument as something uncanny, and, even as the cook had done before her, shook the dust of the house of Carson ...
— The Booming of Acre Hill - And Other Reminiscences of Urban and Suburban Life • John Kendrick Bangs
... rugs, toasted a thousand times in all brandies and red wines that the stores would yield, sung of in improvised odes that were chanted by voices which might have won European fame as tenor or as basso, caressed and sued with all the rapid, fiery, lightly-come and lightly-go love of the camp, with twice a hundred flashing, darkling eyes bent on her in the hot admiration that her vain, coquette spirit found delight in, ruling ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... The cafe, Basso and Bregaillon, has a "vue splendide" (in the daytime), so the bill says. What you see at night is a well lit quay with the cafe lights shining out across the dark water in the dock on to some white steam yachts. ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch
... operatic stars have given very interesting accounts of their experiences. Signor Caruso, the famous tenor and one of the principals of the company, had one of the most thrilling experiences. He and Signor Rossi, a favorite basso, and his inseparable companion, had a suite on the seventh floor and were awakened by the terrific shaking of the building. The shock nearly threw Caruso out of bed. ...
— The San Francisco Calamity • Various
... streets were also full, and the bayonets glittering in the sun filled the Place with brilliant flashes like miniature lightning. In the centre of the facade of the building a platform was erected, over which presided a statue of the Republic, wearing a Phrygian cap. The bronze basso-relievo of Henry IV. had been carefully hidden with clusters of flags. Each window was alive with faces. I saw several women on the roof, and the gamins were everywhere, hanging on to the sculptured ornaments, or riding fearlessly ...
— Paris under the Commune • John Leighton
... crookedness in driving, and his voice would ring out over the track like the trump of doom, conveying fines and penalties to the luckless trickster who was trying to get some unfair advantage in the start. His voice, a deep basso, rarely was heard, in fact, anywhere else. Though excessively social, he was also extremely silent. He gave delightful dinner-parties and a great many of them, but rarely spoke, except to recommend an especially desirable wine to a favored guest. When ...
— The Bread-winners - A Social Study • John Hay
... all the music of fairy bands and the whirr of fairy machinery were the incessant voices of frogs. Especially if it had rained or were going to rain, the little frogs in trees and ponds sang their love songs in chorus, silenced, at times, by the deep basso of a bull frog. And often, as our heads ached and throbbed with fever at night, we felt a very lively sympathy for the French noblesse of the eighteenth century, who are said to have kept their ...
— Sketches of the East Africa Campaign • Robert Valentine Dolbey
... great engineer? G.C.M. A great poet? received with acclamation G.C.M. A great painter? oh! certainly, G.C.M. If a great painter, why not a great novelist? Well, pass, great novelist, G.C.M. But if a poetic, a pictorial, a story-telling or music-composing artist, why not a singing artist? Why not a basso-profondo? Why not a primo tenore? And if a singer, why should not a ballet-dancer come bounding on the stage with his cordon, and cut capers to the music of a row of decorated fiddlers? A chemist puts in his claim ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Basso's terrible "Ode to a Dead Body," in fifteenth-century Italian; which utters, with extraordinary power, the ascetic thought of the Middle Age, dwelling with a kind of gloomy exultation on the foulness of the ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... kings and heroes, and others, which stand leaning on their swords between the columns of the church, as if guarding the tomb of the dead. These statues reminded Flemming of the bronze giants, which strike the hours on the belfry of San Basso, in Venice, and of the flail-armed monsters, that guarded the gateway of Angulaffer's castle in Oberon. After gazing awhile at these motionless sentinels, they went forth, and strolled throughthe public gardens, with the jagged mountains right ...
— Hyperion • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... absolutely undeveloped skulls. But the curious external resemblance, I take it the Germans were not the first men to perceive. A foreign friend once pointed it out to me, in the skeleton of a foe he had slain, and with the vertebrae of which he was inlaying, in a sort of basso-relievo, the beaked prow of his canoe. Now, I consider that the phrenologists have omitted an important thing in not pushing their investigations from the cerebellum through the spinal canal. For I believe that much of a man's character will ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... a descendant, possibly, of Thomas Ravenscroft, published at Rome, sonatas for "violini, e violine, o arciliuto, col basso per l'organo" Opera prima, but they were mere imitations of Corelli.[109] In 1728 a certain John Humphries published by subscription "Twelve Sonatas for two violins and a bass"; and Hawkins, in ...
— The Pianoforte Sonata - Its Origin and Development • J.S. Shedlock
... their imagination with the contents of a charnel-house. The sarcophagi of the ancients rather recall to us the remembrance of the activity of life; for they are sculptured with battles or games, in basso relievo; a sort of tender homage paid to the dead, observes Mad. de Stael, with her peculiar ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... Christendom, phenomena of art pour in, heralded by the utmost possible amount of puffing, and equally anxious to secure English gold and a London reputation. It is strange to observe how universally the musical tribute is paid. A tenor turns up from some Russian provincial town; a basso works himself to London from a theatre in Constantinople; rumours arrive of a peerless prima donna, with a voice which is to outstrip everything ever heard of, who has been dug out, by some travelling amateur, from her native obscurity in a Spanish ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 436 - Volume 17, New Series, May 8, 1852 • Various
... had been laid on yesterday. Again, an apartment was discovered among the stupendous ruins at Carnac, on the site of ancient Thebes, one hundred paces wide and sixty deep, completely crowded with pillars, which, together with the ceiling, roof, and walls, were decorated with figures in basso-relievo, and hieroglyphics—all marvellously beautiful and finely painted, and as fresh, splendid and glorious, after so many ages, as if they had ...
— Field's Chromatography - or Treatise on Colours and Pigments as Used by Artists • George Field
... Tressan translated the words "capo basso'' (low headland) in a passage from Ariosto by "Cap de Capo Basso,'' on account of which translation the wits insisted upon calling him "Comte de ...
— Literary Blunders • Henry B. Wheatley
... has obtained letters patent. The royal series of medals, and various others, are exclusively of his manufacture. Persons of rank who are curious may there see the art of chasing, or sculpturing in basso and alto relievo, together with various operations in the art ...
— A Description of Modern Birmingham • Charles Pye
... Labocetta, and another named Maccaferri, and a fresh, universally admired baritone, Gassier; and there is our old buffo friend, Rocco, and many more. Besides whom are two famous announcements, yet to come from Europe: the French tenor, Roger, and the German basso, Formes. The orchestra and chorus are, we suppose, as usual; the conductor better; he is Herr Anschtz, who has had experience in London, and who subdues his orchestra to sympathetic support of the singers. With ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... took us to the whizbangs concert party last night. It was A1—one chap makes his fiddle absolutely speak. He played that Volunteer Organist and parts of Henry VIII., the basso sang 'Will o' the Wisp,' and most of the other songs were old 'uns. I tell you, you wouldn't believe we had such things a couple of miles behind ...
— One Young Man • Sir John Ernest Hodder-Williams
... moving very fast; for all the boys are running;—the pattering of bare feet upon the pavement sounds like a heavy shower.... Then the chanting grows fainter in distance; the Devil's immense basso becomes inaudible;—one only distinguishes at regular intervals the crescendo of the burden,— a wild swelling of many hundred boy-voices all rising together,— a retreating storm of rhythmic song, wafted to the ear in gusts, ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... its marble pavement was heaped high with immense fragments of masonry, some of which were evidently portions of a boldly moulded cornice that had once adorned the inner walls of the structure, while others bore upon their faces signs of having been exquisitely sculptured in alto or basso rilievo. It was a melancholy sight, even to the unimpressionable Dick, this irreparable ruin of a once noble and surpassingly beautiful building; but Phil, as he gazed round him in silence, was so deeply moved that, for the ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... of the action, Wagner is above all an actor. The first thing that occurs to him is a scene which is certain to produce a strong effect, a real actio,(10) with a basso-relievo of attitudes; an overwhelming scene, this he now proceeds to elaborate more deeply, and out of it he draws his characters. The whole of what remains to be done follows of itself, fully in keeping with a technical ...
— The Case Of Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, and Selected Aphorisms. • Friedrich Nietzsche.
... become acquainted with himself, and in moments like the present, when both his mental and physical spirits overflowed, he even went so far as to attempt poor Radisson's "La Belle Marie" in the Frenchman's heavy basso, something between a dog's sullen growl and the low rumble of distant thunder. It made him cough. And then he laughed again, scanning the narrowing sweep of the ...
— God's Country—And the Woman • James Oliver Curwood
... known as the East African trough or rift-valley, contains much smaller lakes, many of them brackish and without outlet, the only one comparable to those of the western trough being Lake Rudolf or Basso Norok. At no great distance east of this rift-valley are Kilimanjaro—with its two peaks Kibo and Mawenzi, the former 19,321 ft., and the culminating point of the whole continent—and Kenya (17,007 ft.). ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... reconstruct the entire litter and the entire chariot. The latter is very specially interesting. The plates of embossed and chiseled bronze which encased the body of the chariot are figured with admirably-worked subjects in basso-rilievo, many of them relating to the "wondrous tale of Troy." This invaluable specimen was the gift to the museum of that eminent and liberal archaeologist, Signor A. Castellani, of whose matchless collection of Etruscan jewelry I wrote in a former ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XVII, No. 102. June, 1876. • Various
... lingering in the doorway, hand in hand. The muddy James took up his murmuring song again; the locusts chanted in the hot, brown woods to the basso growl of the big, black guns far ...
— The Littlest Rebel • Edward Peple
... voice was deep, melodious and far-reaching, and it was not an acquired "bishop's voice"—it was his own. The biggest basso I ever heard was just five feet high and weighed one hundred twenty in his stockings; Brignoli, the tenor, weighed two hundred forty. Avoirdupois as a rule lessens the volume of the voice and heightens the register—you can't have both adipose ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... seconded by Mr. Hubber the tenor, and Miss Knapp the organist, and there was some earnestness displayed at first by the ladies of the choir; but Mr. Little, the bass, proved a hopeless case, and John, wholly against his intentions, and his inclinations as well, had eventually to take over the basso's duty altogether, as being the easiest way—in fact, the only way—to save his efforts from ...
— David Harum - A Story of American Life • Edward Noyes Westcott
... T. Haviland Hicks, Jr., had gayly pursued the even tenor (or basso, since he possessed a foghorn, subterranean voice) of his Bannister career. He absolutely refused to take life seriously, and he was forever arousing the wrath—mostly pretended, for no one could be really angry with the genial youth—of his comrades, ...
— T. Haviland Hicks Senior • J. Raymond Elderdice
... Squintelle, Prima Donna Soprano, from Grand Opera House, Paris. Signor Bombastani, Basso Buffo, from Royal Italian Opera. Carl Schneiderine, First Baritone, ...
— Around The Tea-Table • T. De Witt Talmage
... eternity without lighting on any fresh discovery of importance in that extensive field—Fan not infrequently found herself taking part in a somewhat monotonous trio, with the Captain, baritone, or basso rather, for he was rather depressed in mind, and Tom, tenor, an artist who sang with feeling, but with insufficient control over ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... become the bride, then, of the Count of Campo-basso, the unworthy favourite of Charles?" said Quentin, who had been told the reason why refuge had ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VIII • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds. |
