"Foreground" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... little friend's infirmity: with her he could give himself airs of superiority and even be a little patronizing. With a little swagger he would tell her about the things that happened in the street and always put himself in the foreground. Sometimes in gallant mood he would bring Rainette a little present, roast chestnuts in winter, a handful of cherries in summer. And she used to give him some of the multi-colored sweets that filled the two glass jars in the shop-window: and they ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... was arrested, he told the Marshal he regretted it, and that his sympathies were wholly with the slave. [Loud applause.] Fellow-citizens, remember that word. Hold your Mayor to it, and let it be seen that he has got a background and a foreground, which will authorize him to repeat that word in public, and act it out in Faneuil Hall. I say, so confident are the slave agents now, that they can carry off their slave in the daytime, that they do not ...
— The Trial of Theodore Parker • Theodore Parker
... same time, of great military value. The little town long ago forgot its role of fortress, but has been brutally reminded of it by the violence of the battles that have been fought in its neighborhood. In the foreground is the wide expanse of fields in the valley bottom; then a suburb of the town enclosed between two arms of the Marne. Across the river, scaling the slopes of a hill crowned by the ruins of a castle, the town rises, terrace-like, at the mouth of a narrow valley. The ...
— World's War Events, Volume III • Various
... familiar with the ground cover, but just judging from the general appearance it looks like a picture that came from our files. If that is true then I know the story. The tree in the background is a Calhoun tree and the tree in the foreground is a Millwood growing in Lespedeza sericea and I will bring out some points in a few minutes in the general discussion on the value of these two plants ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Incorporated 39th Annual Report - at Norris, Tenn. September 13-15 1948 • Various
... There was the red sun, on the low level of the shore, in a purple haze, fast deepening into black; and there was the solitary flat marsh; and far away there were the rising grounds, between which and us there seemed to be no life, save here and there in the foreground a melancholy gull. ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... Oakland pier and then take the cars on the Southern Pacific road." As I gazed northward, there, as a right arm of Oakland, was the classic town with its aristocratic name, nestling at the foot of the hills in the midst of trees and flowers. It was like a dainty picture with the Bay in the foreground. A nearer view or a visit to it brings the traveller into line with the Golden Gate, through which his eye wanders straight out into the Pacific ocean with all its mystery and grandeur. The University of California was organised by an act of the Legislature in 1868. ...
— By the Golden Gate • Joseph Carey
... some long strokes with a vigorous touch. He always drew the same landscape—large dishevelled trees in the foreground, in the middle distance a plain, and on the horizon an indented chain of hills. Liza looked over ...
— Liza - "A nest of nobles" • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... outlet,) when suddenly the mountains, of which I had lost sight for a time, rose up before me in sublime strength, no longer of translucent purple, but revealing, under the direct light, their rugged solidity. On my right, in the foreground, were lofty black cliffs, made darker by being seen lying in their own shadow. On my left, green hills, in varying forms, stretched almost an interminable distance, varying also in their color and depth of shade. At the foot of the cliffs, in full sight, but too distant to be distinctly ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... setting as she reached Warpington. All was gray, the church tower, the trees, the pointed gables of the Vicarage, set small together, as in a Christmas card, against the still red sky. It only needed "Peace and Good-will" and a robin in the foreground to be complete. The stream was the only thing that moved, with its shimmering mesh of fire-tipped ripples fleeing into the darkness of the reeds. The little bridge, so vulgar in every-day life, leaned a mystery of darkness over a mystery of light. The white frost held the meadows, and binding ...
— Red Pottage • Mary Cholmondeley
... return to the normal—his equilibrium made unstable by the tendency to revert to his older self? How would he adjust himself to the things done by Amidon? How would the change affect his relations with Miss Waldron and this bright-haired inamorata so balefully nearing the foreground, like an approaching comet? How would the professor and Judge Blodgett stand with this new factor in the problem? Would he continue to care for her, his rescuer? Owing to some things which had taken place in the Brassfield intervals, ...
— Double Trouble - Or, Every Hero His Own Villain • Herbert Quick
... keeps them before the world's eye. In every great war that has shaken the civilised world since the strife in the Crimea broke out, the ambulance, its patients, its attendants, have always been in the foreground of the picture. Never have the inseparable miseries of warfare been so well understood and so widely realised, thanks in part to that new literary force of the Victorian age, the war correspondent, and chiefly, perhaps, to the new position henceforth ...
— Great Britain and Her Queen • Anne E. Keeling
... the market-house shows the torn and dishevelled fragment of the keep of Helmsley Castle towering above the thatched roofs in the foreground. The ruin is surrounded by tall elms, and from this point of view, when backed by a cloudy sunset makes a wonderful picture. Like Scarborough, this stronghold was held for the King during the Civil War. After the Battle of Marston Moor and the fall of York, Fairfax came to Helmsley ...
— Yorkshire Painted And Described • Gordon Home
... would not, rather resign his position; and besides, he knew of one who had promised him her friendship, if all others should turn their backs on him. And now as the day went on, and the shadows of evening began to fall, and no dean appeared, she came more and more into the foreground of his thoughts. He imagined her by his side, battling with him against the whole world, and full of hope and courage he ...
— Garman and Worse - A Norwegian Novel • Alexander Lange Kielland
... inhabited, being blasted out of the solid rock. An impressive and, indeed, magnificent panorama extended itself in front. The valley of the Seven Communes, that curious little tongue of German-speaking territory projecting into pre-war Italy, ran across the foreground. Barren and almost treeless, it had been in the battle-line since the Austrian offensive of May, 1916, which had nearly broken successfully into the Venetian plain. Many villages and hamlets dotted the plain, especially towards the western end, the most imposing of which was ...
— The War Service of the 1/4 Royal Berkshire Regiment (T. F.) • Charles Robert Mowbray Fraser Cruttwell
... inspired by the same observations as their own. They find, finally, in Delacroix the frequent and very apparent application of their ideas. Notably in the famous Entry of the Crusaders into Constantinople, the fair woman kneeling in the foreground is painted in accordance with the principles of the division of tones: the nude back is furrowed with blue, green and yellow touches, the juxtaposition of which produces, at a ...
— The French Impressionists (1860-1900) • Camille Mauclair
... really so bad. Perhaps the things you mention are ugly in themselves, but a certain combination of them caught at a certain moment can well be worthy of a painting, and I think we have that moment now. Beauty makes a more pleasant model for the artist—that is why I would have liked you in the foreground—but beauty is not the only province of art. If it were, no painter, for example, would find anything to occupy him in the foul stream that washes the London wharves—as some critic has said. Yet a great many beautiful pictures have come from the London wharves, and one, at ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... for what? That, after dressing in the corner farthest from the looking-glass, in a dismal room you would scarcely use for your housemaid's brooms and dusters at home, you may stand for a few moments in the background of some scene, and watch the leading lady making the hit in the foreground. Will these few, well-dressed, well-lighted, music-thrilled moments repay you for the loss of home love, home ...
— Stage Confidences • Clara Morris
... away, I saw a great valley and mighty woods, and beyond these a broad expanse of water. In the nearer foreground I discerned a small, dark blob of color upon the ...
— Pellucidar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... scored between swelling wooded ridges. He had not met in all the journey a better locality for the study of glacial effects than here. The sides of the channel show these traces throughout their whole length. In this same neighborhood, as a conspicuous foreground on the shore of Indian Reach, to the south of Lackawanna Cove, is a large moraine resembling the "horse-backs," in the State of Maine, New England. The top was as level as a railroad embankment. The anchorage for the night was in Eden Harbor, and for that evening, at least, ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz
... Monteagle, he also had a high opinion; but no friendship nor influence was sufficient to retard what may be called his retrograde course: like his friend, Lord Stanley, he became less and less a Whig, and finally stood in the foreground of Conservatism. He was a warm supporter of the Irish Roman Catholics, but did not appear ever to have understood their political tactics. His sympathy for what is termed Pusey-ism may have accounted ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... was a glorious ride! I never had a better. The part of the country through which we passed was lovely. One can always gaze comfortably at the distant landscape from a railway carriage, however great the speed. As for the immediate foreground, it reminded me of a race—houses, trees, farms, towns, villages, hamlets, horses, sheep, cattle, poultry, hayricks, brickfields, were among the competitors in that race. They rushed in mad confusion to the rear. I exulted in the pace. Not so a stout ...
— My Doggie and I • R.M. Ballantyne
... he stood thus the woman leapt into the foreground of his mental picture. It was the tangible feature he needed upon which he could link the chain of recollection. Now everything became more clear. Now the meaning of his brother's dead body returned ...
— In the Brooding Wild • Ridgwell Cullum
... myself. Those who were most pliant to his touch loomed, of course, largest in his thoughts: and my mother's letter, giving him the proof of my affection, which, since it was less obtrusive than Doe's, had been probably less clear to him, brought me in the foreground of his view. Be it right or wrong, this man with the hard chin and kind eyes had his favourites; and I date from this moment my usurping of Doe's position as Radley's foremost favourite. The way in which ...
— Tell England - A Study in a Generation • Ernest Raymond
... traveling-dress and a hat and feather, who was engaged in picking up wild-flowers from the warm heath. There was a gentleman from the office of the Board of Trade, who was sitting on the grass, nursing his knees and whistling. From time to time the chief figure in the foreground was an elderly gentleman, who evidently expected that he was going to be put into the picture, and who was occasionally dropping a cautious hint that he did not always wear this rough-and-ready sailor's costume. Mackenzie ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Volume 11, No. 26, May, 1873 • Various
... every picture. Transparent yellow is very brilliant, and can be used with any other color. Yellow and red make orange, yellow and blue make bright green, yellow and black a dull green. In landscapes, yellow is used in the middle distance with blue and rose and magenta. In the foreground it is used with blue and black for green, and is especially adapted for brilliant touches of foliage, grasses, and light places in the ground. In portraits a very little can be used in the reflected lights on the faces, ...
— Crayon Portraiture • Jerome A. Barhydt
... "Standard Oil" history will note that, from its first deal until this day, whenever bricks, cabbages, or aged eggs were being presented to "Standard Oil," always were Henry H. Rogers' towering form and defiant eye to be seen in the foreground where ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson
... the external world was again in existence, and found lively expression in the minstrelsy of different nations, which gives evidence of the sympathy felt with all the simple phenomena of nature—spring with its flowers, the green fields, and the woods. But these pictures are all foreground, without perspective. Even the crusaders, who travelled so far and saw so much, are not recognizable as such in these poems. The epic poetry, which describes armor and costumes so fully, does not attempt more ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... cross, and disposed to grumble at the delay in his journey; and the general aspect of things—the bad supper, the sleepy waiter carrying a candle up flights of broad shallow wooden stairs, and down a long passage to a remote room barely furnished, the uncertain view of a foreground of rustling poplars, and close behind them a black silent mass of hill—all these had not tended to ...
— My Little Lady • Eleanor Frances Poynter
... watch, but by that time all the mutineers were secured. The remainder of the night passed slowly away. It was a time of great anxiety. When the morning broke we looked eagerly towards the east. There was the land not eight miles off—a rocky shore with a sandy beach—trees in the foreground, and then ridges of hills rising into mountains in the distance. There was not a breath of wind. The sea on every side was like a polished mirror; but every now and then it seemed to heave up as if a pulse beat beneath, ...
— My First Voyage to Southern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... Lelia, "and would like to be the least among them. But what will those shepherds bearing a star on their brows be able to do before the huge monster of the Apocalypse—before that immense and terrible figure outlined in the foreground of all the prophets' pictures? That woman, as pale and beautiful as vice—that great harlot of nations, decked with the wealth of the East, and bestriding a hydra belching forth rivers of poison on all human pathways—is Civilization; ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... dreams, his night reveries. He never took a step without keeping her memory in the foreground. When he closed his eyes, he saw scarlet. When he opened them, he felt her magnetic glance upon him, though she was far from the cafe. His one idea was to speak with her. His maddest wish assumed the shape of a couple walking slowly arm in arm through the Bois—she was the woman! But ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... instance, how effectually in the closing scenes of this tragedy the grim image of Alithea might have assumed the place assigned to it by history? All that we now see is the preparation made for its effective presentation in the foreground of such later scenes, by the chapter in the second volume describing the meeting between Lysander and the stern mother of his Spartan chief. In Lysander himself, moreover, we have the germ of a singularly dramatic situation. How would Lysander ...
— Pausanias, the Spartan - The Haunted and the Haunters, An Unfinished Historical Romance • Lord Lytton
... each other at exactly the same distance from the observer. Goethe, on the other hand, ascribed to the human spirit the power of seeing the phenomenal world in all its three-dimensional multiplicity; that is, of seeing it in perspective and distinguishing between foreground and background.4 Things in the foreground he called ur-phenomena. Here the idea creatively determining the relevant field of facts comes to its purest expression. The sole task of the investigator ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs
... to look at it, and then benefited his companions with a further assortment of curses. The picture, on examination, proved to be a large one that he had, some years previously, had painted of Isleworth, with the Bellamys and himself in the foreground. The frame was shattered, and all the centre of the canvass torn out by the weight of its fall on to a life-sized and beautiful statue of Andromeda chained to a rock, awaiting her fate with a staring look of agonized ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... France been brought to a close by the treaty of 1763, bringing such enormous advantages to the old British possessions in America, before it became apparent that among the fruits some were mingled that were neither sweet nor nourishing. The war had moved the colonies into a perilous foreground. Their interests had cost much in men and money, and had been worth all that they had cost, and more; the benefits conferred upon them had been immense, yet were recognized as not being in excess of their real importance, present and ...
— Benjamin Franklin • John Torrey Morse, Jr.
... to the summits, while others were robed in folds of glistening snow and looked like white curtains drawn part way up the sky. The whitey-gray of the alkali-patches, the brown of the dry earth and the rusty green of the sagebrush filled the foreground, melting in the distance into a purple-gray. The wondrous dryness and clearness of the air lent to these modest tints a tone and dazzling brilliance that surprised the eye with a revelation of possibilities never ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, November, 1878 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... In the foreground of this picture the Son of God stands conspicuous. His dress corresponds to that of the Jewish high priest, and the whole description of His person has obviously a reference, either to His own divine perfections, or to His offices as the Saviour of sinners. He himself is the expositor of ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... the idea of his father being left without companion or nurse. This uneasiness formed, as it were, the background of his thoughts, while a variety of less reasonable, but more vivid, anxieties held a complete revel in the foreground. He had not even his old refuge against troublesome fancies; for work, real absorbing work, of any kind was out of the question now. His attendance on his grandfather, though often fatiguing enough, was no occupation for his ...
— A Canadian Heroine, Volume 2 - A Novel • Mrs. Harry Coghill
... islands they surround. In the accompanying sketch, taken from the "Voyage of the 'Coquille'," the reef is seen from within, from one of the high peaks of the island of Bolabola. (I have taken the liberty of simplifying the foreground, and leaving out a mountainous island in the far distance.) Here, as in Whitsunday Island, the whole of that part of the reef which is visible is converted into land. This is a circumstance of rare occurrence; ...
— Coral Reefs • Charles Darwin
... no initiative: the stem of her being seems to be cut through. Her husband, physically the stronger, maddened by pangs he had foreseen, but still flaming with life, comes into the foreground, and she retires. Her will remains, and she does her best to help him; but he rarely needs her help. Her chief anxiety appears to be that he should not betray his misery. He plans the murder of Banquo without her knowledge (not in ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... just where the foothills of the Sierras with their groves of live oaks were sloping into the golden plains of the Sacramento. Nature had showered on it every wonderful gift in her lap. A foreground rich with flowers, luxuriant in fruit, shade and sun, dry pastures, rushing rivers, and murmuring rills, were here. Great trees were variants of the view, and the high Sierras to the east overtopped the wondrous plumy forests of their pines ...
— Monarch, The Big Bear of Tallac • Ernest Thompson Seton
... sun still below the horizon. But shafts of light, striking up from it, patterned the underside of a vast dapple of fleecy cloud—heliotrope upon the back-cloth of blue ether—with fringes and bosses of scarlet flame. Against this, occupying the foreground, the pine trees, which sheltered the terrace, showed up a deep greenish ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... while his trembling wife clung to the other. Close beside them knelt the terror-stricken maid, with her face buried in her hands, and a few paces in the rear were grouped the laborers, armed with various implements of toil. In the foreground, Truman Flagg, the hunter, white by birth, Indian by association and education, leaned on his rifle and gazed silently after the disappearing savages. As they vanished in the forest, he ...
— At War with Pontiac - The Totem of the Bear • Kirk Munroe and J. Finnemore
... knees before her and caught her hand in an evident outburst of passionate entreaty. And while they stood thus together, I saw the phantom-like figure of another woman moving towards them—she came directly into the foreground of the picture, her white garments clinging round her, her fair hair flung loosely over her shoulders, and her whole demeanour expressing eagerness and fear. As she approached, the man sprang up from his ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... The foreground of the castle is formed of green and level meadows washed by the river Eden; and, in modern days, two fine stone bridges add to the beauty of the scene. The hanging banks are crowned with the village and church of Stanwix, and the mountains of Bewcastle form the ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume III. • Mrs. Thomson
... other was in a noose around Gil Steele's neck. Mrs. Steele was being bound and gagged by other men. The action of the group came to an abrupt standstill as the vigilantes dismounted and crowded into the foreground. ...
— Injun and Whitey to the Rescue • William S. Hart
... distant view from the chapel terrace was exceedingly beautiful, whilst the immediate foreground was uncompromisingly ugly. A vegetable garden then covered the space where now the steps of the "Slopes" run down through lawns and shrubberies, and rows of utilitarian cabbages and potatoes extended right up to the terrace wall. But beyond this prosaic display of kitchen-stuff, in summer-time ...
— The Days Before Yesterday • Lord Frederick Hamilton
... Mr. Mangan went on, pushing his way once more into the foreground, "the butler whom I engaged ...
— The Great Impersonation • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... upon a garden door in the left-hand wall, and two in the right. In the middle of the room, a round table with chairs set about it, and books, magazines and newspapers upon it. In the foreground on the left, a window, by which is a small sofa with a work-table in front of it. At the back the room opens into a conservatory rather smaller than the room. From the right-hand side of this, a door leads to the garden. Through the large panes of glass that form the outer wall ...
— Ghosts - A Domestic Tragedy in Three Acts • Henrik Ibsen
... woman. Nor does it mean, I think, any lack of passion and the deepest instincts of womanhood. All these are present and can be wakened by the right man at the right time. Indeed, the very fact that marriage (with or without love) is not incessantly in the foreground of an American girl's consciousness probably makes the awakening all the more deep and tender ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... of consciousness, or we might call it a background. The foreground consists of what you are taking notice of or thinking about, or of what you are intending to do; that is to say, the foreground is cognitive or impulsive, or it may be both at once, as when we are intent on throwing ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth
... dry, and then through old Austrian trenches, elaborately blasted in the Carso rock and captured a year ago. The Nad Logem is part of the northern edge of the Carso, and from our O.P. a great panorama spread out north, east and west, with the sinuous Vippacco in the foreground, fringed with trees. From here I had pointed out to me the various features of the country. The play of light and shade in the distance was very wonderful. Our target that afternoon was a point in the Austrian front line on a long, low, brown hill lying right below us, known ...
— With British Guns in Italy - A Tribute to Italian Achievement • Hugh Dalton
... Moses was meant to have been raised considerably above the eye of the spectator," writes Mr. Hillard, "and to have been a single object in a colossal structure of architecture and sculpture, which would have had a foreground and a background, and been crowned with a mass at once dome-like and pyramidal. Torn, as it is, from its proper place; divorced from its proportionate companionship; stuck against the wall of a church; ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting
... holding forth, apparently with equal effect, to Mr. Oakhurst and Mother Shipton, who was actually relaxing into amiability. "Is this yer a d—-d picnic?" said Uncle Billy, with inward scorn, as he surveyed the sylvan group, the glancing firelight, and the tethered animals in the foreground. Suddenly an idea mingled with the alcoholic fumes that disturbed his brain. It was apparently of a jocular nature, for he felt impelled to slap his leg again and cram ...
— The Great English Short-Story Writers, Vol. 1 • Various
... wonderful after sunset in the early spring, when the little cold wind's like wine, and it runs white to the horizon with the smoky red on the rim of it melting into transcendental green. When the wheat rolls across the foreground in ochre and burnished copper waves, it's more wonderful still. One sees the fulfilment of the promise, ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss
... party, distrusted his soundness on the currency question. Yet if he abandoned free silver it was doubtful if he could hold the West. For months his friends, steered by Hanna, who spent his own money freely, endeavored to keep the tariff in the foreground, while the candidate preserved a discreet and exasperating silence upon the dominant issue of ...
— The New Nation • Frederic L. Paxson
... to this end that evolution is in every direction placing woman to-day in the foreground and quickening her to make new demands upon the resources ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... Mont Blanc in full view. Figures in the foreground; two of them standing apart; one of them a gentleman of- -oh,—ah,—yes! the other a lady in a white cashmere, leaning on his shoulder.—The ingenuous reader will understand that this was an internal, private, personal, subjective diorama, seen for one instant on the background ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... South Harniss and had taken photographs of the Snow place and some of its occupants. Captain Zelotes had refused to pose, but there was a view of the building and yards of "Z. Snow and Co." with the picturesque figure of Mr. Issachar Price tastefully draped against a pile of boards in the right foreground. Issy had been a find for the reporter; he supplied the latter with every fact concerning Albert which he could remember and some that he invented on the spur of the moment. According to Issy, Albert was "a fine, fust-class young feller. Him and me was like brothers, as you might say. ...
— The Portygee • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... attracted by the three altars in the foreground, with the three coloured statues behind them, of Buddha, seated, as emblematic of Past, Present, and Future. On the occasion of Madame Pfeiffer's visit a service was being performed,—a funeral ceremony in honour of a mandarin's deceased ...
— The Story of Ida Pfeiffer - and Her Travels in Many Lands • Anonymous
... scenic and mechanical, of the "Burning of Moscow." The view of the Russian capital, with its domes and minarets, was a real work of art. Then the great bell of the Kremlin began to toll, and the flames could be seen making their way from building to building. A bridge in the foreground was covered with figures, representing the flying citizens escaping with their household treasures. They were followed by a regiment of French infantry, headed by its band, and marching with the precision of veterans. Meanwhile ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... was dressed in very light grey, with a white waistcoat. His figure was curious, as it extended in parts so far in front of the rest that it gave the impression that you must pass your eyes over a great deal of substance in the foreground before you could see the face. Then again, the nose was so predominant that it checked any attempt to realise the eyes and forehead, while the cheeks were ...
— Great Possessions • Mrs. Wilfrid Ward
... KRAUSE'S face has taken on an expression of great astonishment. She has withdrawn. LOTH sits down on one of the chairs that stand around the table in the foreground. ...
— The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume I • Gerhart Hauptmann
... did not sound unlike that word. There was a garden, brilliantly lighted up with coloured lamps, and at one end there were scenic preparations, probably for a desperate sea-fight on a pond, for there was a lighthouse in the foreground and some ships in the distance; and the bills signified that this was to be followed by a superb display of fireworks. There was also a large music hall, where a number of people were collected, listening to a very good instrumental band. The object of the travellers, however, was to meet with ...
— Fred Markham in Russia - The Boy Travellers in the Land of the Czar • W. H. G. Kingston
... old lofty trees. In the foreground, to the right, an arbour with a seat. The KING is sitting, talking to BANG, who is a man ...
— Three Dramas - The Editor—The Bankrupt—The King • Bjornstjerne M. Bjornson
... about four square miles of water, studded with islands varying in size from one to twenty acres. I would describe a point of view which enchanted me. I was on one side of the lake, where it is about half a mile in width: about half-way across, for the foreground of my picture, is a small island, about two acres, covered with trees, looking as if they grew out of the lake, with a central one of at least eighty feet high, and of the purest orange colour. The opposite shore is of a ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal, No. 421, New Series, Jan. 24, 1852 • Various
... without a sign of unfriendliness. Their chief interest seems to be centred in two large black mounds that are visible in the foreground of the camp; what they are I am unable to make out — there is not light enough for that — but I am probably not far wrong in guessing that they are seals. They are rather hard eating, anyhow, for I can hear them ...
— The South Pole, Volumes 1 and 2 • Roald Amundsen
... charmingly pretty spot, is not one to fascinate a painter. The landscape is unvaryingly green, and that green is too monotonous in tone for effect in a picture. Moreover, it lies shut in by hills, and there is no distant horizon to give the value of foreground and middle distance. But less critical eyes find much to admire in Schlangenbad. The great wide road leading to it from Eltville testifies to its former popularity in the days of family coaches and postilions. Nowadays an ugly steam tram transports ...
— A War-time Journal, Germany 1914 and German Travel Notes • Harriet Julia Jephson
... whose taste for giblets had proved rather expensive; and who was most desirous of appearing in print: a favor merry Stephen Godson, the lawyer, requested might also be extended to him." "Ay," said John Portman, "and if you want a character for your foreground rich in colour, my phiz is much at your service; and here's George Brookes, the radical, to form a good dark object in the distance." In this way the evening passed off very pleasantly. Our friend had made the ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... morbid organizations for whom the present never does its wholesome, proper office of superseding the past, and your thoughts and feelings, your whole inner life, in short, is always out of perspective, because your background is forever your foreground, and with you, half the time, nothing is but what is not; not in consequence of looking forward, like Macbeth, but the reverse.... I am delighted that you are going to Scotland to know ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... declared, "has never been in the foreground of my programme, but I call myself an Imperialist. I have done what I could for the colonies. I have even abandoned on their behalf some of my pet principles ...
— The Double Traitor • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... dawn, I could compare it with nothing but the painting displayed in a theatre, and the quiet that reigned in that still hour, added greatly to the effect. The background of mountains piercing the clouds; the foreground being formed by the town itself with its houses of various hues, and picturesque styles of architecture, ascending the mountain's side, and villas, and country seats aiding the perspective, whilst the island of Cobras served as a ...
— Kathay: A Cruise in the China Seas • W. Hastings Macaulay
... entirely miscalculated his movements, that he had never been to his bedroom, but that he had been sitting up in some smoking or billiard room in the farther wing of the house, the windows of which we had not seen. His broad, grizzled head, with its shining patch of baldness, was in the immediate foreground of our vision. He was leaning far back in the red leather chair, his legs outstretched, a long, black cigar projecting at an angle from his mouth. He wore a semi-military smoking jacket, claret-coloured, with a black velvet collar. In his hand he held ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes • Arthur Conan Doyle
... others. But even the man who has made his own plans, when he comes to see things with his own eyes will often think he has done wrong. Firm reliance on self must make him proof against the seeming pressure of the moment; his first conviction will in the end prove true, when the foreground scenery which fate has pushed on to the stage of War, with its accompaniments of terrific objects, is drawn aside and the horizon extended. This is one of the great chasms which ...
— On War • Carl von Clausewitz
... that he naturally ignores pleasure and speaks of painful and not-painful. The universe is full of pain." But that would not be a true answer. In the first place the Hindu is not pessimistic. He is the most optimistic of men. He has not got one solitary school of philosophy that does not put in its foreground that the object of all philosophy is to put an end to pain. But he is profoundly reasonable. He knows that we need not go about seeking happiness. It is already ours, for it is the essence of our own nature. Do not the Upanishads say: "The Self is bliss"? Happiness exists ...
— An Introduction to Yoga • Annie Besant
... just the situation—how the Golden Belt Wheat Company's interest must be met by the bank under its guarantee, or Bob and his father would be worse than bankrupts, they would be criminals. He put Bob always in the foreground. Barclay unfolded to her all the plans for going ahead with the work, and he told her what they were doing for her father by giving him employment. He marched straight up to the matter ...
— A Certain Rich Man • William Allen White
... the Battle of Shiloh, Dick gets into three big fights. Antietam is the big battle described, with McClellan always in the foreground. ...
— The Riflemen of the Ohio - A Story of the Early Days along "The Beautiful River" • Joseph A. Altsheler
... silent, with no light showing in the garden in front. Mary felt pretty sure that she was in time. Then the front door of the house opened, there was a sight of the hall in a blaze of light, and in the foreground the figure of a woman standing on ...
— The Slave of Silence • Fred M. White
... fire a few shots, to apprise his enemies, and especially his big brother, of the honours paid him. No time was lost: I no sooner gave the order than bang, bang went every one of the escort's guns, and the excited crowd, immediately seeing a supposed antagonist in the foreground, rushed madly after him. Then spears were flourished, thrust, stabbed, and withdrawn; arrows were pointed, huge shields protected black bodies, sticks and stones flew like hail; then there was a slight retreat, then another advance—dancing to ...
— What Led To The Discovery of the Source Of The Nile • John Hanning Speke
... hid with God the Lord and preserved for believers by him. Consequently, we are following not only the indications of the succeeding history, but also the requirement of the thing itself, when, in the presentation of the Gospel, we place in the foreground, not that which unites it with the contemporary disposition of Judaism, but that which raises it above it. Instead of the hope of inheriting the kingdom, Jesus had also spoken simply of preserving the soul, or the life. In this one substitution ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 1 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... the spirit and weakness of the flesh seldom overtaking them till an hour or so later. It chanced to be a beautiful day, for Helen and I were both happy and well, our volunteer helpers were daily growing more zealous and efficient, and there was no tragedy in the immediate foreground. ...
— The Story of Patsy • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... the citadel. Though mannered in the extreme, his works obtained reputation; for the best drawings of the period were feeble both in color and execution, with commonplace light and shadow, a dark foreground being a rule absolute, as may be seen in several of Turner's first productions. But Turner was destined to annihilate such rules, breaking through and scattering them with an expansive force commensurate ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... forward to inspect more closely, contained an allegorical design representing, in the foreground, two female figures. One stern, yet noble-featured, crowned with stars—triumph and exultation flashing in the luminous eyes. Independence, crimson-mantled, grasping the Confederate Banner of the Cross, whose ...
— Macaria • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... was proud of its scenery, and justly so: circled with bluffs, with Holliday's Hill on the north, Lover's Leap on the south, the shining river in the foreground, there was little to be desired in the way ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... thing in the picture is the group in the foreground. An old lady with an iron coal-scuttle on her head is handing some black pills to a ballet-dancer dressed in pink tights, while another woman in a badly-fitting chemise stands by them brushing off the ...
— Elbow-Room - A Novel Without a Plot • Charles Heber Clark (AKA Max Adeler)
... he sat and peacefully and joyously smoked, he studied every feature of them—each rock and swamp and barren slope, every hill and corrie and misty mountain-top; and he knew that while life remained to him he would never forget this memorable scene—with the slain stag in the foreground. No, nor how could he ever forget that wan glare of sunlight that had come along the plateau where the deer were quietly feeding?—he seemed to see again each individual blade of grass close to his face, as well as the noble ...
— Prince Fortunatus • William Black
... by the process just described—a process constant in character, though moving faster or slower according to the variety of local conditions—we may now fill in the foreground of the scene with the few events of the last 34 years, which stand out above the general level of parochial or ...
— A History of the English Church in New Zealand • Henry Thomas Purchas
... spires and towers so well, and the river in the foreground. Look at that shadow of a cloud skimming over Christchurch Meadow. It's a splendid ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... everybody, schedule chapters might be provided by inferior novelists, good at painting say tiresome bourgeois fathers, gouty uncles and brothers in the army, as sometimes in great pictures we read that the sheep in the foreground have been painted by ...
— The Quest of the Golden Girl • Richard le Gallienne
... only loved to be painted as the goddess of mercy, but she clothed herself in the garments suitable to that deity, dressed certain ladies of the court as her attendants, with the head eunuch Li Lien-ying as their protector, ordered the court artists to paint appropriate foreground and background and then called young Yu, her court photographer, to snap his camera and allow Old Sol the great artist of the universe with a pencil of his light to ...
— Court Life in China • Isaac Taylor Headland
... requires either an extraordinary coup d'oeil in the spectator, or a long study, in order to master its relief, its plans, its salient and retreating angles. In summer, except of course in the bare mountains, the universal greenery confounds light and shade, distance and foreground; and though the impression upon a traveller, who journeys for the sake of "sensations," may be strengthened by the mysterious annihilation of all standards for the measurement of space, yet the superior intelligibility of the ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... nations threading their way through the Narrows and passing in procession up the glorious expanse of New York Bay, to which the incessant local traffic of tug-boats, river steamers and huge steam-ferries lent an ever-shifting animation. In the foreground lay Robbins Reef Lighthouse, in the middle distance the Statue of Liberty, in the background the giant curves of Brooklyn Bridge, and, range over range, the mountainous buildings of "down town" New York—not then as colossal as they are to-day, ...
— Poems • Alan Seeger
... psychophysical symptoms may often stand in the foreground of the disease, and in that case it may be left to the special needs whether we deal with them as psychical or as physical changes. Even the patient may be made to see them in one or the other way in accordance with his special needs. To tell ...
— Psychotherapy • Hugo Muensterberg
... house in Munster a hundred years ago. Men and women moving about and standing round the walls as if they had just finished a dance. HANRAHAN, in the foreground, talking to OONA. ...
— Poets and Dreamers - Studies and translations from the Irish • Lady Augusta Gregory and Others
... tremendous struggle that proceeded from the French Revolution, Austria was almost always in the foreground, and next to England showed greatest powers of endurance in combating the new order of things. Six times she made war on France, and though in four of these wars she was beaten, she had the fortune to decide the event ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 110, December, 1866 - A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics • Various
... arrangement gave it a very orderly aspect, however crowded its walls and shelves might be. Everything was in its place, and there was a place for everything. It was in this workroom that I first began to handle mechanical tools. It was my primary technical school—the very foreground of ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... foreground of the sketch, one of them with almost white hair and white skin, and freckles and blue eyes, he might be Irish or York shire. The two younger boys are, I think, his brothers—they have taken more after their mother. All three are nervous and excited watching for the Prince. They are ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch
... a rough plan of a river with an island and five bridges. On one side of the river is a monastery, and on the other side is seen a monk in the foreground. Now, the monk has decided that he will cross every bridge once, and only once, on his return to the monastery. This is, of course, quite easy to do, but on the way he thought to himself, "I wonder how many different routes there are from which ...
— Amusements in Mathematics • Henry Ernest Dudeney
... genius. I do not know whether the Arabian Nights are of Oriental origin or not:(641) I should think not, because I never saw any other Oriental composition that was not bombast without genius, and figurative without nature; like an Indian screen, where you see little men on the foreground, and larger men hunting tigers above in the air, which they take for perspective. I do not think the Sultaness's narratives very natural or very probable, but there is a wildness in them that captivates. However, if you could wade through ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... among the Indians, smashing, driving and kicking his way through the howling, rum-crazed horde. At every lashing blow of his fist, every kick of his high-laced boot, men went down. Others reeled drunkenly from his path screaming aloud in their fright; while across the open space in the foreground four or five men could be seen dashing frantically for the protection of the timber. MacNair ripped the gun from the hand of a reeling Indian and, throwing it to his shoulder, fired. Of those who ran, one dropped, rose to his knees, ...
— The Gun-Brand • James B. Hendryx
... and unlighted, outlined against a pale sunset: in front a large, but neglected, garden. To the right, in the foreground, the porch of a chapel, with coloured ...
— The Wild Knight and Other Poems • Gilbert Chesterton
... still, just as you are, men!" cried Bertram enthusiastically, flopping down on a stone and drawing forth his sketch-book, "you'll make such a capital foreground." ...
— The Wild Man of the West - A Tale of the Rocky Mountains • R.M. Ballantyne
... rather of attempts at many things—Burne-Jones' mystical colour—the rustic character of a Bastien-Lepage or a Millet—with the jewelled detail of a fourteenth-century Florentine, so wonderful were the harebells in the foreground, the lichened rocks, the dabbled fleece of the lamb: but they realised that it was a combination that only a remarkable talent ...
— Fenwick's Career • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... may have been in those times, that world died in a pretty tableau, after the manner of Watteau's paintings; it meant little and accomplished little, and though its bright colouring brings it for a moment to the foreground, it has really not much to do with the Rome we know nor with the Rome one thinks of in the past, always great, always sad, always tragic, as no other city in the ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 1 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... chairs of the middle window. An Empire commode in each space between the windows. In the centre of the two lateral walls, folding doors, the one at the left leading into another room, the one at the right into the vestibule. On the left, in the foreground, a sofa which is well preserved and gives evidence of former elegance, and similar chairs with stiff backs and light variegated covers, grouped around a large oval table. Opposite this in the foreground at the right, an old-fashioned fireplace, before which three similar ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various
... questioned; indeed, the only trait in his character that ever came up for general discussion was his extraordinary, unbelievable, colossal meanness. This so eclipsed every other passion in the man, and loomed so bulkily and insistently in the foreground, that had he cherished a second vice no one would have observed it, and if he really did possess a casual virtue, it could scarcely have reared its head ...
— The Story Of Waitstill Baxter • By Kate Douglas Wiggin
... these very questions. Surely they will also begin to feel a strong suspicion that the story told by Luke is one which has not lost in the telling. How natural was it that the angelic vision should find its way into the foreground of the picture, and receive those little circumstantial details of which it appeared most to stand in need; how desirable also that the testimony of Mary should be corroborated by that of others who were with her, and out of whom no devils had been cast. The first Christians would not have ...
— The Fair Haven • Samuel Butler
... foreground a family disposition to sleep walking and moon influence. The brother significantly always wants in his wanderings to get into the sister's bed, while our patient herself openly plays the part of mother, especially the mother ...
— Sleep Walking and Moon Walking - A Medico-Literary Study • Isidor Isaak Sadger
... other things being equal, it would be difficult to hazard a guess. The coming of Judith from the convent increased the perspective into which Kitty was retreating. With the vivid plainswoman in the foreground, the pale-haired writer of verse dwindled almost to reminiscence. But the reverence for the usual, that made up the underlying motive for so much of Hamilton's conduct, presented barriers alongside of which his previous quandary regarding Miss Colebrooke's seniority shrank ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... view shows a portion of the diggings; a workman is bringing up a barrow-load of soil from one of the deep store chambers which the Children of Israel built more than three thousand years ago. In the foreground lie the fragments of a fallen granite statue, the head and face of which are intact. The other illustration is taken from the temple end of the excavations. The sculptured group of Rameses the Great seated between divinities is one of a pair that ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 401, September 8, 1883 • Various
... out the way. The sun was sinking and they faced it, the young man's indicating finger moving back and forth across the vagaries of the route. The prairie was cut by long undulations, naked of verdure, save a spot in the foreground where, beside a round greenish pool, a single tree lifted thinly clad boughs. Something of bleakness had crept into the prospect, its gay greenness was giving place to an austere pallor of tint, a dry ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner
... Turk having been substituted for the child in the foreground of the front elevation of the hotel, the two men went up to Miss Butterworth's, and exhibited and talked over the plans. They received many valuable hints from the prospective mistress of the prospective mansion. The stoop was to be made broader for the accommodation of visitors; more ...
— Sevenoaks • J. G. Holland
... of pictorial representation as are still extant present us with an equally perfect series of developments. The splendid Graeco-Italian vessels, the richly ornamented Apulian vases, show flowers in the spirals of the ornaments, and even in the foreground of the pictorial representations, which correspond exactly to the above mentioned Greek relief representations. [The lecturer sent round, among other illustrations, a small photograph of a celebrated vase in Naples (representing the funeral rites of Patroclus), in which the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 460, October 25, 1884 • Various
... new phase. Even in the beginning it had differed from any other ever waged in America, and since the Philipsburg conference that difference, already great, increased. It was permeated throughout by the personal element, party platforms sank into the background, and in the foreground stood the titanic figure of Jimmy Grayson fighting single-handed ...
— The Candidate - A Political Romance • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... absolutely blackened with countless herds of buffaloes, which were browsing on the rich grass. They were still so far distant that their bellowing, and the trampling of their myriad hoofs, only reached the hunters like a faint murmur on the breeze. In the immediate foreground, however, there was a group of about half-a-dozen buffalo cows feeding quietly, and in the midst of them an enormous old bull was enjoying himself in his wallow. The animals, towards which our hunters now crept with murderous intent, are the fiercest and the most ponderous ...
— The Dog Crusoe and His Master - A Story of Adventure in the Western Prairies • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... and sit opposite to me, Frau Bertha, or here beside me, if you would care to look at the pictures with me? Now we come to a Falkenborg—wonderful, isn't it? In the extreme foreground, though, it seems so void, so cramped. Yes, nothing but a peasant lad dancing with a girl, and there's an old woman who is cross about it, and here is a house out of the door of which someone is coming with a pail of water. Yes, that is all—a mere nothing of course, but there in the background ...
— Bertha Garlan • Arthur Schnitzler
... know that the hypothesis which I am represented as putting forward as new, is much older than the hypothesis of natural selection—goes back at least as far as Dr. Erasmus Darwin. My purpose was to bring into the foreground again a factor which has, I think, been of late years improperly ignored; to show that Mr. Darwin recognized this factor in an increasing degree as he grew older (by showing which I should have thought I sufficiently excluded the supposition ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... a hoarding and placed her in front of a poster which depicted a most alluring seaside resort. The sea was of the royalest blue, the sands were a rich 22-carat; there was a cave in the left foreground, a gaily-striped tent on the right, and a tiny harbour with yacht attached in the middle distance; and, with the exception of a lady escaped from a lingerie advertisement whom vandal hands had ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, March 31, 1920 • Various
... In the foreground of the picture stood a man with a horn in his uplifted hand, which he had just taken from his mouth. He was minus a coat; and the rough-and-tumble disarray of his attire showed that he had been ...
— Camp and Trail - A Story of the Maine Woods • Isabel Hornibrook
... said I, "joking apart, they are very picturesque, ain't they, how well they look in a sketch, eh! nice feature in the foreground." ...
— Nature and Human Nature • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... to the inn, beneath the starlit heavens. The outline of the mountains was clearly marked in the distance, and in the foreground quaint gable-ends mixed themselves up with the shadows and the trees—a pretty picture, prettier than anything one can see by ...
— Round About the Carpathians • Andrew F. Crosse
... mile distant, having a long ditch and a broken-down fence as a foreground, there rose against the muddled-gray sky, a huge dust-heap of a dirty-black color—being, in fact, one of those immense mounds of cinders, ashes, and other emptyings from dust-holes and bins, which have conferred ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... quotation. I must admit it was wonderfully apt. She has a good eye for dress; it is not many girls that can stand those severely plain lines, but they suit her figure and face admirably. I must get her and her friend to sit on a rock and let me put them into the foreground of one of my sketches; funny meeting her here, however, it will ...
— A Girl of the Commune • George Alfred Henty
... "technical." They were "vocational." They were in the "middle ground" between general and technical training. They went beyond the general training of the elementary schools and furnished the girl with the background of her future vocation. But she often needed a little more of the foreground, a little more of actual ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... which were littered thickly down the bottom of the khor. It was hard walking over the shingly, slaggy stones, but they made their way to the summit at last. Beneath them lay the vast expanse of the rolling desert, and in the foreground such a scene as none of them are ever likely to forget. In that perfectly dry and clear light, with the unvarying brown tint of the hard desert as a background, every detail stood out as clearly as ...
— The Tragedy of The Korosko • Arthur Conan Doyle
... self-elected body of the professors of the beauties of nature. St. James's-park, within the enclosure, having been hinted as the nearest and most suitable spot for the royal essay, the Academicians were in active service at an early hour of the appointed day: some busied themselves in making foreground objects, by pulling down trees and heaping stones together from the neighbouring macadamized stores; others were most fancifully spotting the trees with whitewash and other mixtures, in imitation of moss and lichens. The classical Howard was awfully industrious ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari. Vol. 1, July 31, 1841 • Various
... Paris for the first time, and observed right off that the carriages of suburban trains had seats on the roof like a tramcar. He was so thrilled by the remarkable discovery that he observed almost nothing else. This enormous fact occupied the whole foreground of his perspective. He returned home and announced that Paris was a place where people rode on the tops of trains. A Frenchwoman came to London for the first time—and no English person would ever guess ...
— The Author's Craft • Arnold Bennett
... yard was aflame with brilliant flowers in their season. The orchard had been pruned and trimmed and grafted, and in the spring presented a foreground of wonderful pink and white splendor; and at all seasons of the year the grassy drive wound its way up to the old house, through a vista ...
— Lo, Michael! • Grace Livingston Hill
... Tate Gallery, full of suggestiveness and interest. We see a deep blue sky above the distant mountains, gloriously calm and everlasting; in the middle distance to the left is a nebulous haze of light, while in the foreground the rocks are bursting open and the flames rush through. Figures of men, possessed by the energy and agony of creation, are seen wrestling with the elements of fire and earth. One of these figures, having done his work, floats away from the ...
— Watts (1817-1904) • William Loftus Hare
... course, as the critics have not hesitated to do. That perspective, for instance, how good it is: almost as good as Verrocchio's work,—and those dancing angiolini; yes, Verrocchio might have thought of them himself. But the lady in the foreground, how unmoved she seems; it is as though the whole scene had been arranged for the sake of her portrait; and, indeed it is a portrait, for the richly dressed visitor is Ginevra de' Benci, who stands too in the fresco of the Birth ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... there is anything good, let them bring it to me and I will look at it. She said she preferred the picture to the real thing, it was so much more artistic. In the landscape itself, she complained, there was sure to be a chimney in the distance, or a restaurant in the foreground, that spoilt the whole effect. The artist left it out. If necessary, he could put in a cow or a pretty girl to help the thing. The actual cow, if it happened to be there at all, would probably be standing the wrong way round; the girl, ...
— Tea-table Talk • Jerome K. Jerome |
