"Beholder" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Coleridge is made to say, "You are wrong in resolving beauty into expression or interest; it is quite distinct; indeed, it is opposite, although not contrary. Beauty is an immediate presence, between which and the beholder nihil est. It is always one and tranquil; whereas the interesting always disturbs and is disturbed." Hegel, in his "AEsthetic," defines natural beauty to be "the idea as immediate unity, in so far as this unity is visible in sensuous reality." And a few pages earlier he ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... removed lest it contaminate all with whom it came in contact. Yet did there live any being uncontaminated already? Were not all vile, even as she was vile? My brain reeled. Surely to the eyes of any beholder, she was the incarnation of purity! That which animated me was not a personal sense of grievance so much as the inborn, natural desire one feels to exterminate a pest, to crush a reptile, the more dangerous that it crawls through flowers to kill. As I have said, I felt ...
— A Village Ophelia and Other Stories • Anne Reeve Aldrich
... may," said his partner, "from a cock's egg is hatched the cockatrice, or basilisk, the glance of whose eye turns the beholder to stone. Therefore they tried the cock, found him guilty and burned him and his egg together at the stake. That is why cocks don't ...
— Tutt and Mr. Tutt • Arthur Train
... excitement was intense. The London Times next morning said: "The 'Novelty' was the lightest and most elegant carriage on the road yesterday, and the velocity with which it moved surprised and amazed every beholder. It shot along the line at the amazing rate of thirty miles an hour! It seemed, indeed, to fly; presenting one of the most sublime spectacles of human ingenuity and human daring the ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 6 of 8 • Various
... out all the beautiful tints of the rainbow. She was white, perhaps too much so, and whenever she raised her downcast eyes there shone forth a spotless soul. When she smiled so as to show her small white teeth the beholder realized that the rose is only a flower and ivory but the elephant's tusk. From out the filmy pina draperies around her white and shapely neck there blinked, as the Tagalogs say, the bright eyes of a collar of diamonds. One man ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... some sort of mystic meaning no doubt, although I did not understand it; but what I did understand was that the whole arrangement was designed to produce a sort of mesmerism in the beholder. ...
— Caves of Terror • Talbot Mundy
... developed a fine comradeship, and, on the part of the son, a loyalty equal to any strain. The hired man, Jim, was lighter and finer of feature, and his white teeth gleamed against the nut-brown of his face in a quiet smile that refused to be displaced in any emergency, and at times left the beholder in considerable doubt as to the ...
— The Homesteaders - A Novel of the Canadian West • Robert J. C. Stead
... radicalness of these differences, which was excessive; the dirt; the soiled and torn condition of the paper, so inconsistent with the true methodical habits of D——, and so consistent of a design to delude the beholder into an idea of the worthlessness of the document—these things, together with the hyperobtrusive situation of this document, full in the view of every visitor, and thus exactly in accordance with the conclusions to ...
— The Great English Short-Story Writers, Vol. 1 • Various
... the mother's. Two rather striking blemishes on the older woman's beauty, a wandering eye and a scar on the soft cheek, she took her own peculiar method of ignoring, thus completely and effectively discounting any unfavorable opinion in the mind of the beholder. Consequently, she frequently referred to them, never as blemishes, but as slight but significant evidences of ...
— The Silver Butterfly • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... and landscape which the stranger in Hellas would have remembered long. The haven of Troezene, noblest in Peloponnesus, girt by its two mountain promontories, Methana and the holy hill Calauria, opened its bright blue into the deeper blue of the Saronic bay. Under the eye of the beholder AEgina and the coasts of Attica stood forth, a fit frame to the far horizon. Sun, sea, hills, and shore wrought together to make one glorious harmony, endless variety, yet ordered and fashioned into a divine whole. "Euopis," ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... so gently shines to make romantic a lover's smile! But the reality of the Lunar night is cold beyond human belief. Cold and darkly silent. Grim desolation. Awesome. Majestic. A frowning majesty that even to the most intrepid human beholder is inconceivably forbidding. ...
— Brigands of the Moon • Ray Cummings
... no right to use that kind of dress which does not answer well the purpose of a COVERING, ad long as we can lawfully obtain that which would do it better. All fashions, moreover, which tend to remind the beholder that our dress is designed as a covering, are nearly as improper as those which do not effectually ...
— The Young Woman's Guide • William A. Alcott
... courage? When he is falling with his wound, the features are at the same time very terrible and languishing; and there is such a stern faintness diffused through his look, as is apt to move a kind of horror, as well as pity, in the beholder. This, I say, is an effect wrought by mere lights and shades; consider also a representation made by words only, as in an account given by a good writer: Catiline in Sallust makes just such a figure as Porus by Le Brun. It is said of him, 'Catilina ...
— The Tatler, Volume 1, 1899 • George A. Aitken
... worth seeing, that of the Lycosa dragging her treasure after her, never leaving it, day or night, sleeping or waking, and defending it with a courage that strikes the beholder with awe. If I try to take the bag from her, she presses it to her breast in despair, hangs on to my pincers, bites them with her poison-fangs. I can hear the daggers grating on the steel. No, she would not allow herself to be robbed of the wallet with ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... resistance of veterans. Everywhere the earth was cumbered with gigantic trunks, stripped of their leaves and branches, pierced and mangled, even as mortals might have been, and this wholesale destruction, the sight of the poor limbs, maimed, slaughtered and weeping tears of sap, inspired the beholder with the sickening horror of a human battlefield. There were corpses of men there, too; soldiers, who had stood fraternally by the trees and fallen with them. A lieutenant, from whose mouth exuded a bloody froth, had been tearing up the grass by handfuls in his agony, and his ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... tradition that when Buddha came to North India, he came at once to this country, and that here he left a print of his foot, which is long or short according to the ideas of the beholder (on the subject). It exists, and the same thing is true about it, at the present day. Here also are still to be seen the rock on which he dried his clothes, and the place where he converted the wicked dragon.(3) The rock ...
— Record of Buddhistic Kingdoms • Fa-Hien
... At my feet lay the great and profound valley of the Ratong, a dark gulf of vegetation. Looking northward, the eye followed that river to the summit of Kinchinjunga (distant eighteen miles), which fronts the beholder as Mont Blanc does when seen from the mountains on the opposite side of the valley of Chamouni. To the east are the immense precipices and glaciers of Pundim, and on the west those of Kubra, forming great supporters to the stupendous mountain between them. Mon Lepcha itself is a spur ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... grace is to prepossess the beholder. First impressions are received through the eye. Before a word is spoken, the pose and carriage convey a significant announcement of character ...
— Etiquette • Agnes H. Morton
... and a conspicuous place in the catalogue of extraordinary persons. Yet it would be a pity to pass you from the world in state, and consign you to magnificent oblivion among the tombs, without telling the future beholder why. Judas is as much known as John, yet history ascribes their fame to very ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... winter day. Denver, standing on her high plateau under a thrilling green-blue sky, is masked in snow and glittering with sunlight. The Capitol building is actually in armor, and throws off the shafts of the sun until the beholder is dazzled and the outlines of the building are lost in a blaze of reflected light. The stone terrace is a white field over which fiery reflections dance, and the trees and bushes are faithfully repeated in snow—on every black twig a soft, blurred ...
— Song of the Lark • Willa Cather
... passed a huge flat-boat loaded with grain; but no one on board of them seemed to take any particular notice of us. Every kind of a craft is seen on the great western rivers, and none is so strange as to excite a sensation in the mind of the beholder. At six o'clock we had been afloat about twenty hours; and, according to my estimate, it was nearly time for us to see the Mississippi. The Wisconsin had widened as we advanced, and I was sure that we should be in the great ...
— Down The River - Buck Bradford and His Tyrants • Oliver Optic
... excitable Randolph, that the dispute was transferred to the newspapers, and narrowly escaped degenerating from a war of "cards" to a conflict with pistols. But the Speaker triumphed; the House and the country sustained him. On occasions of ceremony the Speaker enchanted every beholder by the superb dignity of his bearing, the fitness of his words, and the tranquil depth of his tones. What could be more eloquent, more appropriate, than the Speaker's address of welcome to Lafayette, when the guest of the nation was ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... rain coming before it "like showers of steel," and at last, down upon the shore and by the surf among the turmoil of the blinding wind, the flying stones and sand, "the tremendous sea itself," that came rolling in with an awful noise absolutely confounding to the beholder! In all fiction there is no grander description than that of one of the sublimest spectacles in nature. The merest fragments of it conjured up the entire scene—aided as those fragments were by the look, the tones, the whole manner of the Reader. The listener was there with him in imagination ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... a gallery of handsome people here, (10) Cleiton, runners, and wrestlers, and boxers, and pancratiasts—that I see and know; but how do you give the magic touch of life to your creations, which most of all allures the soul of the beholder through his ...
— The Memorabilia - Recollections of Socrates • Xenophon
... interest. To the apiarian the prospect of an increase of stocks is sufficient to create some interest, even when the phenomenon of swarming would fail to awaken it. But to the naturalist this season has charms that the indifferent beholder can never realize. ...
— Mysteries of Bee-keeping Explained • M. Quinby
... lives, and to allay or divert the violent passions and perturbations of the greatest and the busiest men. And both these effects are of equal use to human life; for the mind of man is like the sea, which is neither agreeable to the beholder nor the voyager in a calm or in a storm, but is so to both when a little agitated by gentle gales; and so the mind, when moved by soft and easy passions and affections. I know very well that many, who pretend to be wise by ...
— A Book of English Prose - Part II, Arranged for Secondary and High Schools • Percy Lubbock
... pass the last of the rapids two immense rocks appear, which look like two ancient stately towers of some Gothic potentate, rearing their heads above the surrounding trees. From their situation and their shape, they strike the beholder with an idea of antiquated grandeur, which he will never forget. He may travel far and wide and see nothing like them. The Indians have it that they are the abode of an evil genius, and they pass in the river below, ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume 19 - Travel and Adventure • Various
... Not that it is exclusively an Old Folks' entertainment; for, as the critics say of portentously dull juvenile books, "it will be found as interesting to the young as to the old." Though the dullest of dramas, it is so brightened by brilliant legs that it dazzles every beholder. Why, then, should the stern advocate of the legitimate drama refuse to acknowledge that the Twelve Temptations has its redeeming legs? How runs the ancient proverb, "Singed milk is better than it looks;" or that equally ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 6, May 7, 1870 • Various
... rockers, and an elaborate business table; spirits and soda-water (with the mark of Schweppe, no less) stood ready on a butler's tray, and in one corner, behind a half-drawn curtain, I spied a camp-bed and a capacious tub. Such a room in Barbizon astonished the beholder, like the glories of ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... young, had that peculiar stamp of old-fashionedness in his face which makes it impossible for a beholder to predicate any particular age in the object. You can scarce make a guess between seventeen and seven-and-thirty. This antique cast always seems to promise ill-luck and penury. Yet it seems he was not always the abject thing he came to. My sister, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... of Eton College" suggests nothing to Gray which every beholder does not equally think and feel. His supplication to Father Thames to tell him who drives the hoop or tosses the ball is useless and puerile. Father Thames has no better means of knowing than himself. His epithet "buxom health" is not elegant; he seems not ...
— Lives of the Poets: Gay, Thomson, Young, and Others • Samuel Johnson
... fearless traveller. He was clad in a knickerbocker suit, but as at the same time he wore short socks under his laced boots, for reasons which, whether hygienic or conscientious, were surely imaginative, his calves, exposed to the public gaze and to the tonic air of high altitudes, dazzled the beholder by the splendour of their marble-like condition and their rich tone of young ivory. He was the leader of a small caravan. The light of a headlong, exalted satisfaction with the world of men and the scenery of mountains illumined ...
— A Personal Record • Joseph Conrad
... a tale of Athos would make out, Cut from the continent and sailed about; Seas bid with navies, chariots passing o'er The channel on a bridge from shore to shore; Rivers, whose depths no sharp beholder sees, Drunk, at an army's dinner, to the lees; With a long legend of romantic things, Which, in his cups, the browsy poet sings. ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... slightly withered but still sappy. It should be mentioned that he had a dimple in his cheek which flashed unexpectedly when he smiled. It gave him a roguish—almost boyish—effect most appealing to the beholder. Especially the feminine beholder. Much of his spoiling at the hands of Ma Minick had doubtless been due to this ...
— Gigolo • Edna Ferber
... very sight could make one's hair stand on its end. The blazing flames that emanated from his body rendered him exceedingly awful to behold. His arms were many in number and in each was a weapon that struck the beholder with fear. That Being, thus created, stood before the great god, with joined hands, and said, "What commands shall I have to accomplish?" Maheswara answered him, saying, "Go and destroy the Sacrifice of Daksha." Thus ordered, that Being of leonine ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... principle of bad taste to put in its place only a poor copy of the same contour. If you cover the head, cover it with something that forms lines not curving like the skull, nor yet so angular as to create too striking an opposition of ideas in the mind of the beholder. A close-fitting untasseled skull-cap does not improve the form of the head, for it is not half so graceful as the hair; but a square hat or pyramidal cap is truly detestable. This is the reason why the common nightcap is ugly; it fits the head ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... fair share of pretty country-houses and attractive parsonages. Still, the beauty of the southern and midland counties is altogether a beauty of detail and cultivation, of historical association and architectural contrast; not that which in the north and east depends much upon the beholder's sympathy with Nature unadorned—wild stretches of seashore and pathless moors, mountain-defiles and wooded tarns. Wales and Cornwall, again, have the stamp of a race whose surroundings have taught them shrewdness and perseverance, and their scenery is ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various
... the entrance we beheld the splendid monument erected in memory of Francis Scott Key. This, aside from its significance, is one of the finest statues our country affords. The grace and beauty of that figure, as if still pointing toward his country's glorious emblem, causes the heart of the beholder to swell with emotion. We seemed to catch from those lips the grave question: "O! Say, does the Star Spangled Banner yet wave, o'er the land of the free, and the home of the brave?" Something in this monument made us think of the fine statue erected ...
— See America First • Orville O. Hiestand
... is of fossiferous limestone formation. Elevated a few feet only above the sea, on the coasts, it gradually raises toward the interior, to a maximum height of above 70 feet. A bird's-eye view, from a lofty building, impresses the beholder with the idea that he is looking on an immense sea of verdure, having the horizon for boundary; without a hill, not even a hillock, to break the monotony of the landscape. Here and there clusters of palm trees, or artificial mounds, covered with shrubs, loom ...
— Vestiges of the Mayas • Augustus Le Plongeon
... particular color, of little elegance in flight or movement, with a disagreeable flirt of the tail, always quarreling with their neighbors and with one another, no birds are so little calculated to excite pleasurable emotions in the beholder, or to become objects of human interest and affection. The kingbird is the best dressed member of the family, but he is a braggart; and, though always snubbing his neighbors, is an arrant coward, and shows the white feather at the slightest display of pluck in his antagonist. ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... part of the amusement with which she rejoiced to supply her friends. These friends were in the game that of playing with the disparity between her aspect and her character. Her character was attested by the second movement of her face, which convinced the beholder that her vision of the humours of the world was not supine, not passive. She enjoyed, she needed the warm air of friendship, but the eyes of the American city looked out, somehow, for the opportunity ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James
... that it is really loaded almost to the top! Like Injun-slaying youngsters in America, the doughty Afghan warriors seem to delight in having their weapons loaded, their sidearms sharp, and their bayonets fixed, and seem anxious to impress the beholder with the fact that they are real warriors, and not mere make-believe soldiers. The colonel wears a dark-brown uniform profusely trimmed with braid, a Kashgarian military hat, and English army shoes. In matters ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... the top of a brilliant are purposely made so flat that the up coming light fails to be totally reflected again and is allowed to emerge to dazzle the beholder. In the better made brilliants the angle that the back slope makes with the plane of the girdle is very nearly 41 deg. and the top angle, or angle of the front slope to the plane of the girdle is about 35 deg.. Such well made brilliants when held up to a bright light appear almost ...
— A Text-Book of Precious Stones for Jewelers and the Gem-Loving Public • Frank Bertram Wade
... over all, and a caldron on a tripod holds fortunes tied in nut-shells. The prevailing colors are yellow and black: a deep yellow is the color of most ripe grain and fruit; black stands for black magic and demoniac influence. Ghosts and skulls and cross-bones, symbols of death, startle the beholder. Since Hallowe'en is a time for lovers to learn their fate, hearts and other sentimental tokens are used to good effect, as the Scotch lads of Burns's ...
— The Book of Hallowe'en • Ruth Edna Kelley
... and concealed, each of the tiny vermilion flames performing its part in the aerial mazy dance, the spectacle is singularly beautiful. In the marshy districts is seen the large elater, which displays both red and green lights; the red glare, like that of a lamp, alternately flashing on the beholder, then concealed as the insect turns his body in flight, but the ruddy reflection on the grass beneath being constantly visible as it leisurely pursues its course. Now and then a green light is ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... most glorious are, Rejecteth no beholder, And your sweet beauty past compare, Made my poor eyes the bolder. Where beauty moves, and wit delights And signs of kindness bind me, There, oh! there, where'er I go I leave my ...
— Tudor and Stuart Love Songs • Various
... itself a moral quality; but the taste for good pictures is. A beautiful painting by one of the great artists, a Grecian statue, or a rare coin, or magnificent building, is a good and perfect thing; for it gives constant delight to the beholder. ...
— The True Citizen, How To Become One • W. F. Markwick, D. D. and W. A. Smith, A. B.
... wrought in polished granite, with wonderful beauty of ornamentation, with architraves and roofs vast in size and exquisite in adjustment, which by their proportions tax the imagination, and lead the beholder to ask whether all ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... immense, and, if I may so call it, hostile ocean, is rarely navigated by ships from our world. [14] Then, besides the danger of a boisterous and unknown sea, who would relinquish Asia, Africa, or Italy, for Germany, a land rude in its surface, rigorous in its climate, cheerless to every beholder and cultivator, except a native? In their ancient songs, [15] which are their only records or annals, they celebrate the god Tuisto, [16] sprung from the earth, and his son Mannus, as the fathers and founders of their race. To Mannus they ascribe three sons, from whose names ...
— The Germany and the Agricola of Tacitus • Tacitus
... the artist. The one fine attribute conspicuously lacking in the work is its illumination, generally too yellow; the fine quality of light, naturally directing the hearts with the intelligences of the beholder to the central fact of the subject theme, "I am the Light of the World." The broad use and disposition of whitish pigment; I mean whitish, snowy light flecked, pimpled, dimpled with tints of orange and purple, like snow about to thaw, here and there, honeycombed or stippled to ...
— Original Letters and Biographic Epitomes • J. Atwood.Slater
... tempest, the "red rain," the rainbow, enveloping mist, cloud shapes, sweet odors of plants, so rare in Hawaii, at least, or the notes of birds—he reads an augury of divine indwelling. The romances glow with delight in the startling effect of personal beauty upon the beholder—a beauty seldom described in detail save occasionally by similes from nature. In the Laieikawai the sight of the heroine's beauty creates such an ecstasy in the heart of a mere countryman that he ...
— The Hawaiian Romance Of Laieikawai • Anonymous
... a very large temple, yet such is its grace, its exquisite proportions, its unapproachable charm—it never occurs to the beholder that it is of such great size. It is neither big nor little, nor heavy nor light—it is simply perfect. You can't tell why it is perfect, and you don't want to. You stand and look at the gem through the great gateway which serves as a frame for the picture, for the Taj ...
— Round the World • Andrew Carnegie
... aright that rush of waters as it is to paint it well. But I doubt whether it is not quite as difficult to write a description that shall interest the reader as it is to paint a picture of them that shall be pleasant to the beholder. My friend the artist was at any rate not afraid to make the attempt, and I ...
— Volume 1 • Anthony Trollope
... Add to this, the half-dirty attire—the unshaven beard of the men, and the unkempt locks of the women—produce further revolting sensations. It is not till past mid-day that the noise of labour ceases, and that the toilette is put into a complete state for the captivation of the beholder. By four or five o'clock the streets become half thinned. On a Sunday, every body rushes into the country. The tradesman has his little villa, and the gentleman and man of fortune his more capacious ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Two • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... much, if at all, above the middle size, but admirably proportioned, whether for feats of agility and strength, or for the lighter graces of society. But it was his face more especially, and the magnificent expression of his features, that first struck the beholder—the broad imaginative brow, the keen large lustrous eye, pervading, clear, undazzled as the eagle's, the bold Roman nose, the resolute curve of the clean-cut mouth, full of indomitable pride and matchless energy—all these bespoke at once the versatile and various genius of the great statesman, ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 1 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... opening our eyes in the situation above described, the objects we chance to view amid these changing spectra in the eye, must seem to move in a contrary direction; as the moon sometimes appears to move retrograde, when swift-gliding clouds are passing forwards so much nearer the eye of the beholder. ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. I - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... nondescript shapes. The magnitude of these buildings forms their sole claim to admiration; they are profusely decorated with sculpture, but of so rude a description as to afford no satisfaction to the beholder. The great temple of Juggernaut was erected in the twelfth century. The idols are of huge size and hideous shape. Krishna, the chief, in intended as a mystic representation of the supreme power; for ...
— Mark Seaworth • William H.G. Kingston
... also in cooking, cleaning, and washing for and in waiting upon the older clerks. Thereafter he advanced to the position of journeyman, his inauguration being attended by festive, highly suggestive, and, to the beholder, amusing ceremonies. These ceremonies began with a great drinking bout arranged at the youth's expense. The next feature of the programme was entitled Das Staupenspiel im Paradies ("the Walloping in Paradise"), a procedure to which every apprentice was exposed annually and ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume VI. • Various
... shades of expression. Gifted weavers rose to the task, became almost inspired in the use of their medium, and produced such works of their art as have never been equalled in any age. These are the tapestries that grip the heart, that cause a frisson of joy to the beholder. And these are the tapestries we buy, if kind chance allows. If they cannot be ours to live with, then away to the museum in all haste and often, to ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... now be distinctly seen that Ercildoun lay directly in its pathway, and I was almost horrified to think of such a destructive power moving through a village, for it seemed to a beholder as though no structure erected by human hands could, for a moment, stand before it, and it seems marvellous, considering the destruction done at this place, that not a single human life was lost, and only ...
— A Full Description of the Great Tornado in Chester County, Pa. • Richard Darlington
... music is successive in its mode of manifestation, and in time alone everything would occur successively, one thing following another; while architecture, on the other hand, impresses itself upon the beholder all at once, and in space alone all things would exist simultaneously. Music, which is in time alone, without any relation to space; and architecture, which is in space alone, without any relation to time, are thus seen to stand at opposite ends of the art spectrum, and to be, in a sense, ...
— The Beautiful Necessity • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... long ceased to be either; had but sparingly recognised the fact, yet had recognised it, and felt aggrieved. Hence in part it was that her mouth had gathered that peevish and wronged expression which tends to produce a moral nausea in the beholder. If she had but known how much uglier in the eyes of her fellow-mortals her own discontent made her, than the severest operation of the laws of mortal decay could have done, she might have tried to think less of her wrongs and more ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald
... blossoms, and nothing soon remains but the bare twigs, while the dark forest, on which no art or care was ever bestowed, and which towered up towards heaven long before human remembrance, bears every blast unshaken, and fills the solitary beholder with ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... on to full height behind. Every feature—brow, nose, lips, chin, even the eyes themselves, and their very pupils, seemed to be pervaded and permeated by this lurid flame; and it was impossible for the beholder to avoid asking himself whether there were indeed spirits of flame—salamandrines—who sometimes existed out of their own element and lived and moved ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... light step of the highborn maidens who, in primal times, pressed the flowers as they passed without crushing them. But all her true grace seemed to be concentrated in her eyes, which were deep and of a dark blue. The impression she made upon a beholder was very complex. And it would have been difficult to say whether the calm which pervaded every manifestation of her beauty was the result of conscious control or the most ...
— The Secret of the Night • Gaston Leroux
... corbels,—in short the due opulence of ornament being introduced, and only the due. Genuine sculptors, genuine painters, artists have been busy; and in fact all the suitable fine arts, and all the necessary solid ones, have worked together, with a noticeable fidelity, comfortable to the very beholder to this day. General height is about forty feet; two stories of ample proportions: the Towers overlooking them are sixty feet in height. Extent of outer frontage, if you go all round, and omit the Colonnade, will be five hundred feet and more: this, with the rearward ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. X. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—At Reinsberg—1736-1740 • Thomas Carlyle
... obtain but unequal results as to their respective origins. The bridge, built by human hands, is, indeed, a triumph of the perfection of skilful contrivance; the strength and beauty of the arch are among the most simple yet exquisite results of science, wonderful as they may appear to the untaught beholder: but how shall we explain the formation of stupendous rock-arches across deep ravines and rolling torrents, in countries where none but the wild and picturesque forms of nature rise to gladden the eye and heart of the inquiring ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 583 - Volume 20, Number 583, Saturday, December 29, 1832 • Various
... not the plan of this tomb, but the size, that compels the admiration of the beholder. He stands, as it were, within a vast cave lighted only from its narrow end, the roof far above his head. The rough surface of the blocks lends colour to the feeling that this is the work of Nature and not of man. Here, even if not in Stonehenge, he will pause to marvel at the ...
— Rough Stone Monuments and Their Builders • T. Eric Peet
... the little hooded head Sank on the other's shoulder. The little weeper sought the arms That opened to enfold her. Against the young heart, kind and true, She nestled close, and neither knew That I was a beholder. ...
— Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56: No. 1, January 5, 1884. - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various
... Thebes he had a splendid edifice constructed-which to this day delights the beholder by the symmetry of its proportions in memory of the hour when he escaped death as by a miracle; on its pylon he caused the battle of Kadesh to be represented in beautiful pictures in relief, and there, as well as on the architrave of the ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... neither devoid of beauty of form nor of color, but which make neither the pulse quiver nor the eye wet; and then such a sweeping judgment is arrested by a work like the 'St. Jerome' in the Vatican, from which a spirit comes forth so strong and so exalted, that the beholder, however trained to examine, and compare, and collect, finds himself raised above all recollections of manner by the sudden ascent of talent into the higher world of genius. Essentially a second-rate composer,* Donizetti struck ...
— Great Italian and French Composers • George T. Ferris
... was, as we have said, an elegant mansion—one of those imposing edifices, with fresh paint outside, and splendid furniture within, which impress the beholder with the idea of a family in ...
— Life in the Red Brigade - London Fire Brigade • R.M. Ballantyne
... its flat top, which gives it quite a unique appearance. Seen from the east, it stretches for about three miles and a half or even four at its base, is 900 feet high, and about three miles on top of the plateau. The summit, even when the beholder is only half a mile away from it, appears like a flat straight line against the sky-line, a great boulder that stands up higher on the south-west being the only interruption to this uniformity. The black rocky sides of the mountain are very ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... the comely forms of those before them. Among these smiling countenances might have been seen three individuals—a father, mother and daughter—who smiled, indeed, but whose smiles would never have convinced the beholder that they were an index to ...
— The Young Captives - A Story of Judah and Babylon • Erasmus W. Jones
... refinement, and a noble bearing are the characteristics which strike one in all portraits of Chopin, [FOOTNOTE: See Appendix IV.] and which struck the beholder still more strongly in the real Chopin, where they were reinforced by the gracefulness of his movements, and by manners that made people involuntarily treat him as a prince...[FOOTNOTE: See my description of Chopin, based ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... free, open sinuses, and on the long, sharp, bristle-pointed lobes. A simple oval outline would include it all, if you connected the points of the leaf; but how much richer is it than that, with its half-dozen deep scollops, in which the eye and thought of the beholder are embayed! If I were a drawing-master, I would set my pupils to copying these leaves, that they might learn to ...
— Excursions • Henry D. Thoreau
... on which the sea breaks, with a thunderous roar, in curling sheets of foam; while inside the reef stretches the lagoon, a calm lake of blue crystalline water revealing in its translucent depths beautiful gardens of seaweed and coral which fill the beholder with delighted wonder. Great and sudden is the contrast experienced by the mariner when he passes in a moment from the tossing, heaving, roaring billows without into the unbroken calm of the quiet ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... freshened, and brought us within ten miles of the island, by the close of day. St. Thomas is high, and possesses strong features. One landmark is so singular as to strike every beholder most forcibly. It is a rock, apparently not less than five hundred feet high, and shaped like a light-house, towering into the air, about a third of the distance from the southern extremity of the island. We are now within a few miles of ...
— Journal of an African Cruiser • Horatio Bridge
... gathering round as the Commander of the Faithful mounted. I had the indescribable happiness of seeing him at a very short distance. The Padishah, or Father of all the Sovereigns on earth, has not that majestic air which some sovereigns possess, and which makes the beholder's eyes wink, and his knees tremble under him: he has a black beard, and a handsome well-bred face, of a French cast; he looks like a young French roue worn out by debauch; his eyes bright, with black rings round them; his cheeks pale and hollow. ...
— Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo • William Makepeace Thackeray
... pantaloons flow forth from the hips, and contract narrowly at the boot, which is square-toed and made too long. The whole effect is something not to be seen elsewhere, and is well calculated to move the beholder to desperation. [Footnote: These exaggerations of the fashions of 1862 have been succeeded by equal travesties of the present modes.] The Venetian fine lady, also, is prone to be superfine. Her dress is as full of color ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... 23d of June we arrived in Madras roads; from the deck the view of the land has a magnificent appearance; the different offices have, to the beholder, the appearance of stone, and they are formed along the beach in a beautiful manner; they are built with piazzas and verandahs, and they extend about one mile along a sandy beach, while the natives parading along the shore, and the surf spraying upon the beach, gave the scene ...
— Narrative of a Voyage to India; of a Shipwreck on board the Lady Castlereagh; and a Description of New South Wales • W. B. Cramp
... fireplace, beside a table on which were fruit and wine; the room was a small one, and in its furniture exhibited nothing remarkable. Over the mantelpiece, however, hung a small picture with naked figures in the foreground, and with much foliage behind. It might not have struck every beholder, for it looked old and smoke-dried; but a connoisseur, on inspecting it closely, would have pronounced it to be a judgment of Paris, and a masterpiece of the ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... conflicts of war I will not decide; but I can assure the reader, so far as my experience goes, that these parts of the work are not the most difficult to write. They are scenes that exhibit those vigorous traits of human character which strike the beholder most forcibly and leave the deepest impression. They delight in violent attitudes; and, painting themselves in the strongest colors on the poet's fancy, they are easy at any time to recal. He varies them at ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow
... imparted to it a pathos in which one's mere brute wonder was lost. But it was a purely adventitious pathos, and it must be owned here, at the end, that none of the relics of ancient Rome stir a soft emotion in the beholder, and, as for beauty, there is more of it in some ivy-netted fragment of some English abbey which Henry's Cromwell "hammered down" than in the ruin of all the palaces and temples and theatres and circuses and baths of that imperial Rome which the world ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... cases of their eyes; there was speech in their dumbness, language in their very gesture; they looked as they had heard of a world ransomed, or one destroyed: a notable passion of wonder appeared in them; but the wisest beholder, that knew no more but seeing could not say if the importance were joy or sorrow;—but in the extremity of the one, it must needs be. Here comes a ...
— The Winter's Tale - [Collins Edition] • William Shakespeare
... crook-necked winter-squash, which I always delight to look at, when it turns up its big rotundity to ripen in the autumn sun. Except a pumpkin, there is no vegetable production that imparts such an idea of warmth and comfort to the beholder. Our own crop, however, does not promise to be very abundant; for the leaves formed such a superfluous shade over the young blossoms, that most of them dropped off without producing the germ of fruit. ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 2. • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... for the eye to rest upon: the ten thousand wax-candles, for instance, in their numberless twinkling chandeliers, the raw tranchant colors of the new banners, wreaths, bees, N's, and other emblems dotting the place all over, and incessantly puzzling, or rather BOTHERING the beholder. ...
— The Second Funeral of Napoleon • William Makepeace Thackeray (AKA "Michael Angelo Titmarch")
... Athenian orators, Roman tribunes, Knights of the Round Table, Scandinavian Vikings and Peruvian Incas jostled one another against the rich velvet and tapestry which hung from ceiling to floor. Truly, a motley assemblage, and one well calculated to impress the beholder with the transitoriness of mortal fame. In this miscellaneous concourse the occupants of the picture frames of all the public and private galleries of Europe seemed to have been restored to life, and personally brought into contact for the first time. And though, artistically speaking, ...
— Canadian Notabilities, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... lost; Thy nobler streams shall visit Jove's abodes, To shine among the stars,[5] and bathe the gods. Here Nature, whether more intent to please Us or herself with strange varieties, (For things of wonder give no less delight To the wise maker's, than beholder's sight; 200 Though these delights from sev'ral causes move; For so our children, thus our friends, we love), Wisely she knew the harmony of things, As well as that of sounds, from discord springs. Such was the discord, which did first disperse Form, order, ...
— Poetical Works of Edmund Waller and Sir John Denham • Edmund Waller; John Denham
... of all. But then it is known of them, and momentarily seen, that their grace is peculiar. They have studied their graces, and the result is there only too evident. But Florence seemed to have studied nothing. The beholder felt that she must have been as graceful when playing with her doll in the nursery. And it was the same with her beauty. There was no peculiarity of chiselled features. Had you taken her face and measured it by certain rules, you would have found that her mouth was too large and her ...
— Mr. Scarborough's Family • Anthony Trollope
... could not be otherwise obtainable—and that thus the value of the ideal was indefinitely enhanced, and DESIGNEDLY ENHANCED, alike by the waste of time and by its incrustations; that all ideals gain by a certain amount of vagueness, which allows the beholder to fill in the details according to his own spiritual needs, and that no ideal can be truly universal and permanents unless it have an elasticity which will allow of this process in the minds of those who contemplate it; that ...
— The Fair Haven • Samuel Butler
... existing, art;—a manifold change, not definable in brief terms, but most clearly characterized, and easily remembered, as the change of conscientious and didactic art, into that which proposes to itself no duty beyond technical skill, and no object but the pleasure of the beholder. Of that momentous change itself I do not purpose to speak in the present course of lectures; but my endeavor will be to lay before you a rough chart of the course of the arts in Florence up to the time when it took place; a chart indicating for ...
— Ariadne Florentina - Six Lectures on Wood and Metal Engraving • John Ruskin
... been said, personally, as to our hero himself, and perhaps it may not be necessary to say much. Let us hope that by degrees he may come forth upon the canvas, showing to the beholder the nature of the man inwardly and outwardly. Here it may suffice to say that he was no born heaven's cherub, neither was he a born fallen devil's spirit. Such as his training made him, such he was. He had large capabilities for good—and aptitudes also for evil, quite enough: quite enough to make ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope
... glades and hollows, they looked spectral and awful, with a sort of churchyard loneliness; and even when the blush of the morning kissed its broad woodlands, there was a melancholy in the salute that saddened rather than cheered the heart of the beholder. ...
— The Evil Guest • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... salubrious; The neighborhood of Vesuvius lends it An odor volcanic, that rather mends it, And the buildings have an aspect lugubrious, That inspires a feeling of awe and terror Into the heart of the beholder, And befits such an ancient homestead of error, Where the old falsehoods moulder and smoulder, And yearly by many hundred hands Are carried away, in the zeal of youth, And sown like tares in the field of truth, ...
— The Golden Legend • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... to hang from its exact centre. Imperfect composition inflicts upon the beholder the duty of accommodating his head to the false angle of the picture. Pictures that stand the test of time do not demand astigmatic glasses. We view them balanced, and they repeat ...
— Pictorial Composition and the Critical Judgment of Pictures • Henry Rankin Poore
... de Oliver y Fullano, of Majorca. One of her contemporaries, Daniel de Barrios, says that "she was an accomplished linguist, wrote delightful letters, composed exquisite verses, played the lute like a maestro, and sang like an angel. Her sparkling black eyes sent piercing darts into every beholder's heart, and she was famed for beauty as well as intellect." She made a noble Spanish translation of Pastor Fido, the most popular Italian drama of the day, and published a volume of poems, also in Spanish. Antonio dos ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... the air. They are not many, but one, turning and flashing in the sun with a unity and a precision that it would be hard to imitate. One may see a flock of shore-birds that behave as one body: now they turn to the sun a sheet of silver; then, as their dark backs are presented to the beholder, they almost disappear against the shore or the clouds. It would seem as if they shared in a communal mind or spirit, and that what one felt they all felt at the ...
— Ways of Nature • John Burroughs
... two hundred years ago, yet it conveys the whole stock in trade of the fortune teller. Countless numbers of men and women have gazed at that picture, a multitude that must have covered the whole range of human virtues and vices; but it has never failed to carry the same message to every beholder. Do you think that my ...
— A Son of the Immortals • Louis Tracy
... a priest carrying a Bon Dieu in a silver vase every one called out, "Aux genoux!" and then the beholder had to kneel, even if the mud were ankle deep. So on a wet day one's knees were apt to be as muddy as ...
— In the Days of Poor Richard • Irving Bacheller
... VI. Immediately before the steps in the square above us rose the cathedral, which we came upon unawares; and, exactly in front of us, in an angle, partly concealed by the broad shadow, we perceived a figure so mysterious, so remarkable, that it was impossible not to create in the mind of a beholder the most interesting speculations. This extraordinary figure deserves particular description, and I hope it may be viewed by some person more able than myself to explain it, or one more fortunate than I was in obtaining information respecting it. To all the questions I asked of ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello
... on a moderately large, dust-smothered room. Dust, that is to say, was the first thing to strike the eye of the beholder. The windows were thick in dust, it lay on tables and chairs and on the two typewriters standing unused in a corner of the room. The room gave one the impression of being singularly uninhabited. Then the door opened and shut again, and Joan ...
— To Love • Margaret Peterson
... of our interior nature is in itself the crown of regal power, of which earthly rulers are symbolical. The spiritual body through this union becomes radiant; luminous; and shines with such splendor that it dazzles the eyes of the beholder. What constitutes the beauty and the value of gems—diamonds; rubies; sapphires; emeralds; ...
— Sex=The Unknown Quantity - The Spiritual Function of Sex • Ali Nomad
... chords of sound. Not always, however, does he need even this excuse; his "conversation-pieces" are often merely composed of persons placed with indescribable grace in exquisite surroundings, governed by a mood which communicates itself to the beholder. ...
— The Venetian School of Painting • Evelyn March Phillipps
... suppose you were to abstain from further abuse, and hear what I have to say of the merits of Pantomime; of the manner in which it combines profit with amusement; instructing, informing, perfecting the intelligence of the beholder; training his eyes to lovely sights, filling his ears with noble sounds, revealing a beauty in which body and soul alike have their share. For that music and dancing are employed to produce these results is no disparagement of the art; it is ...
— Works, V2 • Lucian of Samosata
... now, a thin delicately-coloured woman not far from forty, with a nervous mouth and anxious blue eyes. Possibly she had been quite pretty in youth, if ever peace and the quiet mind had been hers. But the unrest and worry of her look left rather a disturbed impression on the beholder. ...
— In the Mist of the Mountains • Ethel Turner
... series of lakes, each presenting its own peculiar loveliness and majesty. The sides of the mountains were occasionally bare and rugged, but for the most part they were clothed with forests of fir; while above, pointed summits and fantastic crags everywhere met the eye, and filled the beholder with admiration and awe. ...
— Scenes in Switzerland • American Tract Society
... speaker. He stands quite erect, and does not bend forward like some orators, to give emphasis to a sentence. His posture and appearance in repose are imposing, not only from their essential grace and dignity, but from a sense of power they impress upon the beholder. This sense of unused power, this certainty that he is not making an effort and doing his utmost, but that behind all this strength of fascination there are other treasures of strength, other stores of ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... vineyard. But the hardships of his life had not quenched his jovial spirits, which were, indeed, irrepressible. A laughing greeting for every one he met, Mexican or Indian, was his habit, one that might have begotten a measure of contempt in the beholder, had the Father not possessed a sternness, latent for the most part, it is true, but which could, on occasion, be evoked to prop up the apparently tottering respect due him. Father Uria was fond, too, of ...
— Old Mission Stories of California • Charles Franklin Carter
... permanently settled or inhabited by man. Its surface is agreeably diversified with high hills and low beautiful valleys, whilst its circumference is almost wholly surrounded by a chain of dark, rocky cliffs, which gives to this remote island a somewhat fantastic appearance to the eye of the beholder, as he approaches it from the sea. On this circumscribed but favored spot of earth, nature seems to have reveled in almost boundless profusion, scattering here and there throughout its valleys her choicest favors, in the shape of delicious tropical fruits, and ever green luxuriant herbage, ...
— Blackbeard - Or, The Pirate of Roanoke. • B. Barker
... advice. He admitted on the voyage to St. Helena that "he had not exactly reconnoitred Wellington's position."[506] And, indeed, there seemed to be nothing much to reconnoitre. The Mont St. Jean, or Waterloo, position does not impress the beholder with any sense of strength. The so-called valley, separating the two arrays, is a very shallow depression, nowhere more than fifty feet below the top of the northern slope. It is divided about halfway across by an undulation that affords good cover to assailants about to ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... curtains of a delicate pattern; and, since that time, he has sought in many cities for curtains that will fill the measure of the ideal he absorbed in that hotel. Beauty is not in the thing itself, but in the eye of the beholder, and the eye is but the interpreter of the ideal. One person rhapsodizes over a picture that another turns away from, because the latter has absorbed an ideal that ...
— The Vitalized School • Francis B. Pearson
... or what it represents. Were this not true, all statues of Apollo or Venus would have the same art-value; and you or I, if we could find a tree and a hill that Corot had painted, would be able to produce a picture as charming to the beholder as his. ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick
... pieces in the ship. Which performed, he appointed the Bustangi-Bassa or captaine of the great and spacious garden or parke, to giue our men thankes, with request that some other day they would shew him the like sporte when hee would have the Sultana or Empresse a beholder thereof, which few dayes after at the shippes going ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, - and Discoveries of The English Nation, Volume 9 - Asia, Part 2 • Richard Hakluyt
... Wherever, in the sensible and natural world, he perceives any thing which bears a resemblance to the attributes of the God-head, which can serve as a symbol of a high perfection, the old recollections of his soul are awakened and refreshed. The love of the beautiful fills and animates the soul of the beholder with an awe and reverence which belong not to the beautiful itself—at least not to any sensible manifestation of it—but to that unseen original of which material beauty is the type. From this admiration, this new-awakened recollection, and this instantaneous ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various |
