"Madonna" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the old doctor, and later Kate's mother, become suddenly an old woman, broken by the terrible rumors which had penetrated her peaceful Bluegrass home. She was shocked beyond words to find her newly widowed daughter serene as some Madonna out of a painting, wrapped in a rose-colored dressing-gown that would better have ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... gallery of those other fair faces that were his before hers, in whom they are all summed up and surpassed, had dawned upon his life. We shall hardly be loyal to the present if we are coldly disloyal to the past. In the lover's calendar, while there is but one Madonna, there must still be minor saints, to whom it is meet, at certain times and seasons, to offer retrospective candles—saints that, after the manner of many saints, were once such charming sinners for our sakes, that utter forgetfulness ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... tell how as a little girl she gave her roses not to the spick and span Madonna of the Church, but to the poor, dilapidated Virgin, "at our street-corner in a lonely niche," with the babe that had sat upon her knees broken off: or that passage, with its exquisite naivete, where Pompilia ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... solid wall.... The exhausted mother is binding her boy's hands with a portion of her petticoat.... As she kneels there, with the faint flicker of a light falling on her finely chiseled profile, she resembles Botticelli's magnificent Madonna in the Uffizi Gallery at Florence.... The picture is completed by the dark background and the solicitous attitude of the girls as they cluster around the sufferer.... With a little imagination one can delineate ...
— Rescuing the Czar - Two authentic Diaries arranged and translated • James P. Smythe
... hardly know; but it is a very small and delicate copy (painted in oil on a gold ground) of some fine old Italian picture, Guido's or Raphael's, but I think Raphael's. Some say it is a Madonna; others call it a Magdalen, and say you may distinguish the tear upon the cheek, though no tear is there. But it seems to me more like Raphael's St. Cecilia, "with looks commercing with the skies," than anything else.—See, ...
— Liber Amoris, or, The New Pygmalion • William Hazlitt
... pure, Not for my husband's sake, but for the sake Of him, my first-born child, my little child, Mine for a few short weeks, whose touch, whose look Thrilled all my soul and thrills it to this day. I loved; but, hear me swear, I kept me pure! (Remember that, Madonna, when I come Before thy throne to-morrow. Be not stern, Or gaze upon me with reproachful look, Making my little angel hide his face And weep, while all the others turn glad ...
— Verses • Susan Coolidge
... I noticed that the wind had now arisen from the west and was driving heavy spume of cloud across the moon so that she was overwhelmed and sank from sight. Soon again, however, she emerged from her labours, and, clothed in white, paced serene as a Madonna faring to her churching. ...
— Border Ghost Stories • Howard Pease
... given in charge of one of the nurses, a gentle, madonna-faced woman. She was quickly put to bed, and everything done for her that skill and experience could suggest. Hubert Varrick begged permission to sit by her couch and watch the progress of ...
— Kidnapped at the Altar - or, The Romance of that Saucy Jessie Bain • Laura Jean Libbey
... Murillo's Madonnas," thought Truesdale. "This isn't really the most important thing that has ever happened in the universe, after all." Then he sighed lightly. "Still, I suppose she is a good deal nearer to a Madonna than I am ...
— With the Procession • Henry B. Fuller
... with a wild shriek. "Oh God, Clotel, do not say that"; and covering his face with his hands, he wept like a child. Recovering from his emotion, he found himself alone. The moon looked down upon him mild, but very sorrowfully; as the Madonna seems to gaze upon her worshipping children, bowed down with consciousness of sin. At that moment he would have given worlds to have disengaged himself from Gertrude, but he had gone so far, that blame, disgrace, and duels with angry relatives ...
— Clotel; or, The President's Daughter • William Wells Brown
... was a sunny conception. Any one who will take the trouble to compare an idyl of Theokritos with a modern pastoral, or the poem of Kleanthes with a modern hymn, or the Aphrodite of Melos with a modern Madonna, will realize most effectually ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... bas-relief in marble as belonging to this period, which, from its style, we may, I think, believe to have been designed earlier than the Centaurs. It is a seated Madonna with the Infant Jesus, conceived in the manner of Donatello, but without that master's force and power over the lines of drapery. Except for the interest attaching to it as an early work of Michelangelo, this piece would not attract much attention. Vasari praises it for ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... there burned a bright log fire, and on either side stood two deep leather arm-chairs. It was a room possessing the acme of cosiness and comfort. Over the fireplace was set a large circular painting of the Madonna and Child—evidently the work of some Italian master of the seventeenth century—while here and there stood several ...
— The Stretton Street Affair • William Le Queux
... to the subject he had chosen. In a word, he humanized the altar-pieces and the cloister frescoes upon which he worked. In this way the painters rose above the ancient symbols and brought heaven down to earth. By drawing Madonna and her son like living human beings, by dramatizing the Christian history, they silently substituted the love of beauty and the interests of actual life for the principles of the Church. The saint or angel became an occasion for the display of physical ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... displayed, and two conspicuous dimples, almost atoned for it. The brown hair was brushed and waved and its consequent state of new glossiness was a very distinct improvement on the former elf locks. In the sunshine it took tones of warm burnt sienna, like the hair of the Madonna in certain of Titian's great pictures. Lessons, alack! were uphill work. Rona was naturally bright, but some subjects she had never touched before, and in others she was hopelessly backward. The general feeling in the ...
— For the Sake of the School • Angela Brazil
... mountain taller than Himalayas; and man slept not, but climbed. His groping toward this sunrise of soul is the epic of history. Dante knew not a gentleman, and could not dream him therefore. Mediaevalism learned to paint the Madonna's face, but not manhood's look. Character is the last test of genius. Man saw gray streaks of dawn, rimming far, ragged peaks, and still he climbed; and, on a morning, beheld the sunrise! And if you will note, 't is Don Quixote ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... is an old convent, and it is a little startling to see the church facade, with a statue of the Madonna over the central porch. At the steps a number of women stood waiting with pots and jars and handkerchiefs full of food for their relatives within; and when the doctor appeared several rushed up to ask about a father or a son that lay sick. We went in and there ...
— The Land of The Blessed Virgin; Sketches and Impressions in Andalusia • William Somerset Maugham
... year. On Sunday, April 1, Fleeming and the captain went for a ramble beyond the walls, leaving Aunt Anna and Mrs. Jenkin to walk on the bastions with some friends. On the way back, this party turned aside to rest in the Church of the Madonna delle Grazie. 'We had remarked,' writes Mrs. Jenkin, 'the entire absence of sentinels on the ramparts, and how the cannons were left in solitary state; and I had just remarked "How quiet everything is!" when suddenly ...
— Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin • Robert Louis Stevenson
... "sweet" in the guest's opinion—the whole of the short service; conducted with such simple dignity and reverence by the Madonna-like ranch mistress; the music so well chosen, the few prayers so feelingly offered, and the brief exhortation read from the words of a famous divine who had the rare gift of touching men's hearts. And he so ...
— Jessica, the Heiress • Evelyn Raymond
... Madonna to Celia. Beyond the carelessly drooping braids and coils of hair which blazed between the candles, he could see the outline of her brow and cheek, the noble contour of her lifted chin and full, modelled throat, all pink as the most delicate rose leaf ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic
... Canada and old Mexico boast of more. So late as the prosaic year of 1889 the Virgin was seen to descend into the streets of Johnstown, Pennsylvania, to save her image on the Catholic church in that place, when it was swept by a deluge in which hundreds of persons perished. It was the wrath of the Madonna that caused just such a flood in New Mexico long years ago. There is in the old Church of Our Lady of Guadalupe, in Santa Fe, a picture that commemorates the appearance of the Virgin to Juan Diego, an Indian in Guadalupe, old Mexico, in the sixteenth century. ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... undertakings. The king believed the physician's statement, that the said termination to this accouchement was caused by the too chaste life the queen had led, and believing himself responsible for it, he founded the Church of the Madonna, which is one of the finest in the town of Palermo. The Sire de Monsoreau, who was a witness of the king's remorse, told him that when a king got his wife from Spain, he ought to know that this queen would require more attention than any other, because the Spanish ladies were so lively that they ...
— Droll Stories, Complete - Collected From The Abbeys Of Touraine • Honore de Balzac
... suddenly struck him as being of extraordinary beauty. He had never thought her beautiful before; very plain, of course. Every one knew that she was plain. But to-day her face and profile had the simplicity, the purity, the courage of a Madonna in one of the old pictures—or, rather, of one of those St. John the Baptist boys gazing up into the face of the Christ—child as it lay in its mother's arms. He finished the "Confession" hurriedly—Maggie's face faded from his view; he saw now only a garden of hats and heads, the bright ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... young woman, of gentle presence and with the simplest manners in the world. The dark, liquid eyes look at one with frankness and sincerity; the wide, low brow, from which the dark hair is softly drawn away, is the brow of a madonna. In repose the features might easily belong to one of Raphael's saints. However, they light up genially when ...
— Vocal Mastery - Talks with Master Singers and Teachers • Harriette Brower
... creature's name—"was as lovely a bit of mutton," her father said, "as ever a man would wish to stick a knife into." She had sat to the painter for all sorts of characters; and the curious who possess any of Gambouge's pictures will see her as Venus, Minerva, Madonna, and in numberless other characters: Portrait of a lady—Griskinissa; Sleeping Nymph—Griskinissa, without a rag of clothes, lying in a forest; Maternal Solicitude—Griskinissa again, with young Master Gambouge, who was by this time the ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... I must leave you, Ishmael, and go to little Lu; she is not well this evening." And the little Madonna-like maiden glided like ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... especially entrusted with these duties. The idol was covered with sumptuous raiment and ornamented with jewels and gems. An inscription furnishes us with an inventory of the jewels worn by an Isis of ancient Cadiz;[68] her ornaments were more brilliant than those of a Spanish madonna. ...
— The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism • Franz Cumont
... Elector of Saxony, was negotiating the purchase of Italian paintings for the royal gallery in Dresden, the "St. Cecilia" was offered to him for $18,000, but the price was thought too high, and a copy by Denis Calvaert sufficed. This still hangs in the Zwinger at Dresden, the home of the Sistine Madonna. According to Vasari, the organ and other musical instruments in this picture were painted by one of the master's pupils, Giovanni da Udine. Raphael again designed a St. Cecilia in the now ruined fresco of her martyrdom, which either the master or one of his pupils painted in the chapel ...
— Among the Great Masters of Music - Scenes in the Lives of Famous Musicians • Walter Rowlands
... of hailstones that fell at the time a certain number were found split in two. On the inner face of each of the halves, according to the local papers that appeared the next day, was the image of the Madonna venerated at Remiremont and known as Notre Dame du Tresor. The local Catholics regarded it as a reply to the municipal council's veto of the procession in honour of the Virgin. So many people testified to having seen the miraculous hailstones that ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... and canonical perfumes . . . were now set up as models, and Germany swarmed with fantastically pious, insanely profound poems, over which it was the fashion to work one's self into a mystic ecstasy of admiration, as in 'The Devotion to the Cross'; or to fight in honour of the Madonna, as in 'The Constant Prince.' . . . Our poetry, said the Schlegels, is superannuated. . . . Our emotions are withered; our imagination is dried up. . . . We must seek again the choked-up springs of the naive, simple poetry of the Middle Ages, where bubbles the elixir ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... offers to carry Madonna Oretta a horseback with a story, but tells it so ill that she prays him ...
— The Decameron, Vol. II. • Giovanni Boccaccio
... that the Italians, a race sprung out of ancient culture, mightily affected but not denatured by Christianity, repudiated the Barbarian ideals of Teutonism. Men whose ancestors had worshiped Jupiter and Apollo, and who were themselves worshipping the Christian God, Madonna and the great saints, had no spiritual affinity with men whose ancestors could conceive of no Deities higher than Thor, Odin and the other rough, crude, and unmannered denizens of the Northern Walhalla. So Italy stood ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... manner, bringing honour to his country by his name and by the works which he produced. The pictures which he executed in Florence bear testimony to this, such as the antipendium to the altar of St Cecilia, and a Madonna in S. Croce, which was then and still is fastened to a pillar on the right hand side of the choir. Subsequently he painted on a panel a St Francis, on a gold ground. He drew this from nature, to the best of his powers, although it was a novelty to do so in those days, and ...
— The Lives of the Painters, Sculptors & Architects, Volume 1 (of 8) • Giorgio Vasari
... particularly selected) had already made the most gratifying progress among the bric-a-brac, two intelligent Airdale puppies had chewed satisfactory holes in the Art Nouveau furniture, even the Sistine Madonna had wrenched loose from its supports and considerately annihilated the jewel-studded Oriental lamp in ...
— Murder in Any Degree • Owen Johnson
... as we had finished our coffee we went for a walk—not the two old ladies, who settled down at once to their embroidery frames; one of them showed me her work—really quite beautiful—a church ornament of some kind, a painted Madonna on a ground of white satin; she was covering the whole ground with heavy gold embroidery, so thick it ...
— Chateau and Country Life in France • Mary King Waddington
... individual genius; but greatness like theirs is never more than the highest degree of an excellence which prevails widely round it, and forms the environment in which it grows. No single mind in single contact with the facts of nature could have created out of itself a Pallas, a Madonna, or a Lear: such vast conceptions are the growth of ages, the creations of a nation's spirit; and artist and poet, filled full with the power of that spirit, have but given them form, and nothing more than form. Nor would the form ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... scientific works. It might have been the room of a business man who was at the same time a priest and a scholar. There were roller maps upon the walls, and two or three engravings, Bougereau's "Virgin of Consolation," the "Madonna dei Ansidei" of Raffaelle, and a "Crucifixion" over the chimneypiece, which had three little statuettes in tinted alabaster—a St. Ignatius at one end, a St. Anthony of Padua at the other; in the middle, the ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... just that, Malcom. But I must tell you something more about this same Greek Byzantine painting, for there is a school of it to-day. Should you go to Southern Italy or to Russia, you would find many booths for trading, in the back of which you would see a Madonna, or some saint, painted in just this style. These pictures have gained a superstitious value among the lower classes of the people, and are believed to possess a miraculous power. In Mt. Athos, Greece, is a school that still ...
— Barbara's Heritage - Young Americans Among the Old Italian Masters • Deristhe L. Hoyt
... was covered with mud and I didn't care to wet my feet, I asked a young rascal who was selling post-cards what that place was. I didn't quite understand his explanation, which I am sure was very amusing. He confused Emperors with the Madonna and the saints. I gave the lad a lira and had some trouble in escaping from there, because he followed me around everywhere ...
— Caesar or Nothing • Pio Baroja Baroja
... lady's bower, at that lonesome hour, unannounced, is Sir Ranulph gone; Through the dim corridor, through the hidden door, he glides—she is all alone! Full of holy zeal doth his young dame kneel at the meek Madonna's feet, Her hands are pressed on her gentle breast, and upturned ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... least I've got a lost old soul to call my own. That's why I want a gentleman of sorts about me. I've been too dependent on that chap. He won't even let me smoke, and he's been in the flat all day to see I didn't. You'll find the cigarettes behind the Madonna of the Chair." ...
— Raffles - Further Adventures of the Amateur Cracksman • E. W. Hornung
... him!) in the last scene of Macbeth. In an indistinct place, which was quite sublime in its indistinctness, I was visited by a Spirit. I could not make out the face, nor do I recollect that I desired to do so. It wore a blue drapery, as the Madonna might in a picture by Raphael; and bore no resemblance to any one I have known except in stature. I think (but I am not sure) that I recognized the voice. Anyway, I knew it was poor Mary's spirit. I was not at all afraid, but in a great ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... panel with side-shafts of Purbeck marble. This was found, in 1840, to contain a mural painting of the Crucifixion, with the Blessed Virgin and St. John at the foot of the cross. The principal face below had a gigantic representation of the Madonna and Child, more than 12 feet in height. At about the same time the elegant little doorway at the west end of the aisle was found. It could not be reopened, but its mouldings were uncovered. It is of the Early English period and has a dripstone ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Rochester - A Description of its Fabric and a Brief History of the Episcopal See • G. H. Palmer
... his road home. Yes, your excellence. You see it was the fete of the Madonna, and we danced and drank together—I and Peppino—all the night; and this morning about an hour ago says he to me, 'Gaetano, do you take your horses, and go find two travellers and a servant who are under a coach-house at the Croix d'Or; all is paid except the buona-mano.' ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various
... clean bit of earth made by God out of the same batch he used for our own world of the West. Oh, Yellow-hair, I mind the first day I ever saw Scotland. 'Twas across Princess Street—across acres of Madonna lilies in that lovely foreland behind which the Rock lifted skyward with Edinburgh Castle atop made out of grey silver slag! It was a brave sight, Yellow-hair. I never loved America more than at that moment when, in my heart, I married ...
— In Secret • Robert W. Chambers
... thing spoken of. If you speak of St. Paul's Church, Beckenham, as vast, grand, magnificent, you have no language left wherewith to describe St. Paul's, London. If you call Millais' Huguenots sublime or divine, what becomes of the Madonna St. Sisto of Raphael? If you describe Longfellow's poetry as the feeblest possible trash, the coarsest and most unparliamentary language could alone express your contempt ...
— Interludes - being Two Essays, a Story, and Some Verses • Horace Smith
... eyes, which were fixed upon their mother. "Isn't she like the Madonna? Father has so often painted ...
— Reels and Spindles - A Story of Mill Life • Evelyn Raymond
... characteristics are quite unmistakable. An Italian Picture-Gallery seems to me a pretty fair type of the Italian mind and character. The habitual commingling of the awful with the paltry—the sacred and the sensual—Madonna and Circe—Christ on the Cross and Venus in the Bath—which is exhibited in all the Italian galleries, seems an expression of the National genius. Am I wrong in the feeling that the perpetual (and often execrable) representation ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... rustic, undisciplined tastes, though marked by narrowness, and often by involuntary obedience to vulgar ideals (which, for instance, makes them insensible to all the deep sanctities of beauty that sleep amongst the Italian varieties of the Madonna face), is not without its appropriate truth. Servants and rustics all thrilled in sympathy with the sweet English loveliness of Miss Smith; but all alike acknowledged, with spontaneous looks of homage, the fine ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... a rosary, brought to me from the Holy Land. I have had it for a long time, and it has hung on the frame of a photograph of Bellini's lovely Madonna. This little girl has always liked that picture, and she has often spoken to me about it. But she had never mentioned the rosary, which not only is made of dark wood, but is darker still with its centuries of age. One day ...
— The American Child • Elizabeth McCracken
... (Maut), child (Khuns). Mr. Scott follows Ruskin in declaring that classic Greek art gives no real child-concept; nor does Gothic art up to the thirteenth century, when the influence of Christianity made itself felt, that influence which made art lavish its genius upon the Madonna and the Santo Bambino—the Virgin and ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... found another door. "Have you not found a cord and bucket?" "No!" That was the devil there. He answered her angrily because she was a good girl; he did not say: "My child." She knocked at another door. "Have you not found a cord and bucket?" It was the Madonna who replied: "Yes, my child. Listen. You could do me a pleasure to stay here while I am away. I have my little son here, to whom you will give his soup; you will sweep and put the house in order. When I come home I will give you your bucket." The Madonna went away, and the good girl put the house ...
— Italian Popular Tales • Thomas Frederick Crane
... were then Theirs who, stripping life bare, stand forth models for men. The reformer's?—a creed by posterity learnt A century after its author is burnt! The poet's?—a laurel that hides the bald brow It hath blighted! The painter's?—Ask Raphael now Which Madonna's authentic! The stateman's?—a name For parties to blacken, or boys to declaim! The soldier's?—three lines on the cold Abbey pavement! Were this all the life of the wise and the brave meant, All it ends in, thrice better, Neaera, it were Unregarded to sport with thine odorous hair, ...
— Lucile • Owen Meredith
... Italy! I am as mortified as an Italian ought to be. They have only the rhetoric of patriots and soldiers, I fear! Tuscany is to be spared forsooth, if she lies still, and here she lies, eating ices and keeping the feast of the Madonna. Perdoni! but she has a review in the Cascine besides, and a gallant show of some 'ten thousand men' they are said to have made of it—only don't think that I and Robert went out to see that sight. We should have sickened at it too much. An amiable, refined people, too, ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... spaces between the sides and centre of the window, and in the middle place hung a modern Madonna and Child. This Joyce could comprehend. Gaston knew the older, rarer ...
— Joyce of the North Woods • Harriet T. Comstock
... contrariety of claims between the Roman and Anglican religions, and the history of my conversion is simply the process of working it out to a solution. In 1838 I illustrated it by the contrast presented to us between the Madonna and Child, and a Calvary. I said that the peculiarity of the Anglican theology was this—that it "supposed the Truth to be entirely objective and detached, not" (as the Roman) "lying hid in the bosom of the Church as if one with her, clinging to and (as it were) ...
— Apologia pro Vita Sua • John Henry Newman
... called Benvenuto Cellini, son of Maestro Giovanni, son of Andrea, son of Cristofano Cellini; my mother was Madonna Elisabetta, daughter to Stefano Granacci; both parents citizens of Florence. It is found written in chronicles made by our ancestors of Florence, men of old time and of credibility, even as Giovanni Villani writes, that the city of Florence was evidently built in imitation of the fair ...
— The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini • Benvenuto Cellini
... soldiery came three wretched prisoners; they were led in ropes by their captors, and with blows from knotted cords were stimulated to beg. Two, as they passed, held out their hands, crying piteously, "For the love of God and the Holy Madonna, give us something towards ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IV. • Editors: Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... rudimentary light and shade, he makes his scheme of colour of the lightest that his contrasts may be of the strongest. In his compositions, he aims at clearness of grouping, so that each important figure may have its desired tactile value. Note in the "Madonna" we have been looking at, how the shadows compel us to realise every concavity, and the lights every convexity, and how, with the play of the two, under the guidance of line, we realise the significant parts of each figure, whether draped or undraped. Nothing here but has its ...
— The Florentine Painters of the Renaissance - With An Index To Their Works • Bernhard Berenson
... have already alluded. Such was the town in which the British Hercules was set to card wool. The Burtons occupied ten rooms at the top of a block of buildings situated near the railway station. The corridor was adorned with a picture of our Saviour, and statuettes of St. Joseph and the Madonna with votive lights burning before them. This, in Burton's facetious phrase, was "Mrs. Burton's joss house;" and occasionally, when they had differences, he threatened "to throw her joss house out of the window." ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... vividly, one of the best stories in the world. But this thing before him was not a book as he understood it. He puzzled out the titles of two adjacent cylinders. "The Heart of Darkness" he had never heard of before nor "The Madonna of the Future"—no doubt if they were indeed stories, they ...
— The Sleeper Awakes - A Revised Edition of When the Sleeper Wakes • H.G. Wells
... part in this effort. M. Armand Baschet, to whom we are indebted for several valuable publications in the field of diplomacy, announced in his work, Aldo Manuzio, Lettres et Documents, 1494-1515, Venice, 1867, that he had been engaged for years on a biography of Madonna Lucretia Borgia, and had collected for the purpose a large ...
— Lucretia Borgia - According to Original Documents and Correspondence of Her Day • Ferdinand Gregorovius
... mother before her, and she was the mother of all women to come after her. She was Sar, the corn-goddess. She was Isthar who conquered death. She was Sheba and Cleopatra; she was Esther and Herodias. She was Mary the Madonna, and Mary the Magdalene, and Mary the sister of Martha, also she was Martha. And she was Brunnhilde and Guinevere, Iseult and Juliet, Heloise and Nicolette. Yes, and she was Eve, she was Lilith, she was Astarte. She was eleven years old, and she ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... at the back of her head, while her elbows rested upon a small table in front of her. Her superb brown hair fell in a thick wave on either side over her white round arms, and the graceful curve of her beautiful neck might have furnished a sculptor with a study for a mourning Madonna. The doctor had just broken his sad tidings to her, and she was still in the first paroxysm of her grief—a grief too acute, as was evident even to the unsentimental mind of the merchant, to allow of any attempt at consolation. ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... will tell you of my greatest adventure. I was in the picture-gallery at Dresden, and in that small room where hangs Raphael's 'Madonna.' I was standing before this wonderful masterpiece of divine inspiration when I felt the room crowded. I discovered that the visitors were all Americans and all looking at me. I said to them: 'Ladies and gentlemen, you are here in the presence of the most wonderful ...
— My Memories of Eighty Years • Chauncey M. Depew
... lithographs from Raphael's immortal picture give you the results of a whole age of artistic culture, in a form within the compass of very humble means. There is now selling for five dollars at Williams and Everett's a photograph of Cheney's crayon drawing of the San Sisto Madonna and Child, which has the very spirit of the glorious original. Such a picture, hung against the wall of a child's room, would train its eye from infancy; and yet how many will freely spend five dollars in embroidery on its dress, that say they ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... Wallace. Tell me what she is like, I hear you say. Of graceful height, willowy and exquisitely molded, not over twenty-four, with the face of a Madonna; wondrous eyes of darkest blue, hair indescribable in its maze of tawny color—in a word, the perfection of womanhood. In half an hour I was her abject slave, and proud in my serfdom. When I returned to the hotel that evening I could not sleep. ...
— The Fifth String, The Conspirators • John Philip Sousa
... opposite lines,' Madonna; but we would both give and risk much to avoid what is before us. Let me ask your father whether it be not yet possible to return to my vessel, and leave a world so uncongenial to both ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... them to bear their terrible sufferings like men. They screamed and groaned, not like women, for few would have been so craven-hearted, but like children; calling, in the intervals of violent pain, upon Jesu, the Madonna, and all the saints of heaven whom their lives had scandalised. I stayed with them until midnight, and then got away for a little time. But I had not long been quiet, before the mule-master was after me again. The men were worse; would I return with him. The ...
— Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands • Mary Seacole
... Mons, a shadow like the cold melancholy blue which filled the valleys between the sun-smitten peaks? And did it ever occur to her, as the horses were changed in the little post-towns, that it was in honour of Holy Week that the savage-looking bearded men, the big, brawny, madonna-like women had got on their best clothes? Did it strike her that the unplastered church-fronts were draped with black, the streets strewn with laurel and box, as for a funeral, that the bells were silent in their towers? Perhaps not; and yet ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... gaily, at the same time bringing an album bound in pigskin, in which he asked Frederick and Schmidt to write their names. Then he opened a very practical closet reaching to the floor, one of Willy's contrivances, and took out a carved wooden figure, a German Madonna by Till Riemenschneider. The sweet oval of her lovely face was not so much that of a Madonna as of a ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... with the virgin grace, Heaven-born thy Jesus seemeth sure, And of a virgin pure. Lady most perfect, when thy sinless face Men look upon, they wish to be A Catholic, Madonna fair, to worship thee. ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb IV - Poems and Plays • Charles and Mary Lamb
... to fall off, his letters were less frequent, shorter and more reserved in tone, and the burden of it all was crushing the youth out of the girl and breaking her spirit. She had grown to look like some great sorrowful-eyed Madonna, and her beauty had in it more of the spiritual quality of an angel than of a woman. As the spring came on, and the days grew longer she looked like one on whom the hand of ...
— 'Way Down East - A Romance of New England Life • Joseph R. Grismer
... or affectation, and impossible except where the head, itself faultless, is complemented by a neck long, slender, yet round, pliant, always graceful, and set upon shoulders the despair of every one but the master who found perfection of form and finish in the lilies of the Madonna. Finally there is the correspondence, in action as well as repose, of body, limbs, head, and face, to which, under inspiration of the soul, the air and manner of lovely women ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace
... has established his studio in her villa; he is completely in her net. He has just begun a Madonna, a Madonna with red hair and green eyes! Only the idealism of a German would attempt to use this thorough-bred woman as a model for a picture of virginity. The poor fellow really is an almost bigger donkey than I am. Our misfortune is that our Titania has discovered ...
— Venus in Furs • Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
... soul; the pain seemed unbearable. What the outcome would be God only knew. With a quick movement, as if seeking relief, he rose to his feet and walked to the portrait. Then lifting his hands above his head with the movement of a despairing suppliant before the Madonna ...
— Colonel Carter's Christmas and The Romance of an Old-Fashioned Gentleman • F. Hopkinson Smith
... narrow, tortuous vicoletto, lighted only by a single lamp burning in the niche of a Madonna. The purity and transparency of the air gave a celestial softness and clearness to the very darkness itself; and one could find one's way without difficulty under such a limpid night. But in a little while we began to pass through a "venella," or, in Neopolitan parlance, a sottoportico, ...
— The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard • Anatole France
... of dark moss-green formed a perfect setting for the quaintly shaped furniture, which was all of sandal-wood inlaid with ivory. On a small table of carved ivory in the centre of the room lay a bunch of Madonna lilies tied with a finely twisted cord of gold. We murmured our admiration, and Santoris addressed himself directly to me for the first time since ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... a piece of perfect painting—three figures in a simple curve of rocks, lit as it were by an afterglow of sunset. In the centre was a little Madonna draped in blue and gold. Her elbows were tight to her sides and her upturned palms with their tender curving fingers were empty. It seemed almost as though they cradled some one who was not there. Her mouth was pulled down at ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Various
... sitting at this circular window. Ten Aprils had half ripened them. The boy had dark hair, and a touch of sunlight in his darker eyes. The girl was light and delicate—with a face of spiritual beauty, dream-like, heavenly, like the pictures of the Madonna which genius has hung on the chapel ...
— Daisy's Necklace - And What Came of It • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... light supple grace with which she moved. He thought he had never seen a more charming woman in appearance. She still somehow retained the slim figure and taking ways of a girl, in conjunction with the soft rounded curves of a present-day Madonna. ...
— A Texas Ranger • William MacLeod Raine
... corner stood my mahogany desk, above it a lovely picture of the Madonna and Child. Easy-chairs were standing around, and there were hassocks and ottomans in corners and beside the windows. My favorite engraving—a picture representing two children straying near a precipice, fearing ...
— Holiday Stories for Young People • Various
... a Madonna-like smile on her lips, and she put out the toe of her slender foot and appeared to study it for a moment—" I was intended to be ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... Sawyers had just come down to breakfast; Mrs. T. in her large dust-colored morning-dress and Madonna front (she looks rather scraggy of a morning, but I promise you her ringlets and figure will stun you of an evening); and having read the note, the following ...
— A Little Dinner at Timmins's • William Makepeace Thackeray
... the air of "liberte de moeurs" which prevailed throughout Germany. He liked Dresden, and enjoyed his visit to its picture gallery, where he especially admired a Madeleine and two Virgins by Correggio, as well as two by Raphael, one of them presumably the San Sisto Madonna. The gem of the whole collection, however, in his opinion, was Holbein's Madonna; and he longed to have Madame Hanska's hand in his while he gazed at it. As he was away from her, he was very restless, and soon tired of all he saw. He longed to be back in Paris, and to find ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... of Europe, I am told, the juniper, which is a very close relative of our red cedar, is held in great veneration. Tradition has it that it saved the life of the Madonna and the infant Jesus when they fled into Egypt. In order to screen her son from the assassins employed by Herod, Mary is said to have hidden him under certain plants and trees which received her blessing in return for the shelter they afforded. Among the plants thus blessed ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard
... went into reserves and for a couple of days we did nothing but lounge around. We took a walk through Albert to see the statue of the Madonna and the infant Jesus. It hung right over the road, and it is marvellous how long it stayed there without being hit. The French people used to say that when it fell the war would end, but it has been down some time and the war is not over yet. They put us on fatigues ...
— Into the Jaws of Death • Jack O'Brien
... not confined to the Continent. Spain spent at least one hundred and fifty thousand crowns annually among the leading courtiers of James while his wife, Anne of Denmark, a Papist at heart, whose private boudoir was filled with pictures and images of the Madonna and the saints, had already received one hundred thousand dollars in solid cash from the Spanish court, besides much jewelry, and other valuable things. To negotiate with Government in England was to bribe, even as at Paris or Madrid. Gold was ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... to show what wonder she could work under pressure. Her friend felt—how could she not?—as the truly pious priest might feel when confronted, behind the altar, before the festa, with his miraculous Madonna. Such an occasion would be grave, in general, with all the gravity of what he might look for. But the gravity to-night would be of the rarest; what he might look for would depend so ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James
... or T'ou-mu. Kuan-yin was also identified with an ancient Chinese heroine called Miao-shen.[37] This is parallel to the legend of Ti-tsang (Kshitigarbha) who, though a male Bodhisattva, was a virtuous maiden in two of his previous existences. Evidently Chinese religious sentiment required a Madonna and it is not unnatural if the god of mercy, who was reputed to assume many shapes and to give sons to the childless, came to be thought of chiefly in a feminine form. The artists of the T'ang dynasty ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... loveliness of the English girl shone resplendent as a snow-drop on a black ground. There were many beautiful women present; the Princess Ainla, whose dark beauty was the wonder of all who saw it; the famous American belle, Miss Sedmon, whose auburn hair resembled that given by the old masters to the Madonna; but there was not one in that vast assembly who could vie with ...
— A Mad Love • Bertha M. Clay
... Madonna. It's very fine. But it is a pity that here fine works are mixed up side by side with worthless things, that have been preserved and not flung away simply from the spirit of conservatism all-present in such creatures of habit as messieurs ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... tears with a murmured sound of somewhat enigmatic intonation. Her thin dark face settled into a repose that had a little grimness in it. She began putting the flowers into a vase that stood between the reproduction of a Giotto Madonna and a Japanese devil-hunt, both results of the study of art taken up during the past winter by her mother's favorite woman's club. Mrs. Emery watched the process in the contemplative relief which follows an emotional outbreak, and her eyes wandered to the objects on either ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... looking fixedly at one portion of the first page of The Times, holding the paper quite still, her eyes not moving. She was just staring; and her face, as usual, was the face of a patient and disappointed Madonna. ...
— The Enchanted April • Elizabeth von Arnim
... greatest artistic creation of the modern world—"The Sistine Madonna"—Raphael has with almost infinite pictorial power of genius tried to express in visible form this Birth of God. Behind curtains which hang suspended from nowhere and stretch across the universe, dividing the visible from ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... with a crowd of tears—her dark brows bent together, like Pain and Beauty meeting in one; and her glorious golden hair swept off her shoulders as she hung forward to my hands.—Could I lose such a prize.—If anything could have persuaded me, would not that?—I thought of Dante's Madonna—Guido's Magdalen.—Is there sin in it? I see none! And if there is, it's all mine! I swear she's spotless of a thought of sin. I see her very soul? Cease to love her? Who dares ask me? Cease to love her? Why, I live on ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... up on litters. These evidently were coming to Tenos as a last resource, when doctors were of no avail. Other pilgrims were ascending after their own fashion, according to vows they had made. One woman toiled laboriously along on her knees, kissing the stones of the way, and clasping a silver Madonna and Child. Last year her daughter had been seized with epilepsy, and she vowed to carry in this way this offering to the Madonna of Tenos if she would cure her daughter. The girl recovered and the other now with thankful heart was fulfilling her ...
— Three Thousand Years of Mental Healing • George Barton Cutten
... 122-214 days to count the eggs of a single turbot. After that, it would take a chartered accountant at least 122-214 days to check his figures. One can gather from this some idea of the enormous industry of men of science. For myself, I could more easily paint the Sistine Madonna or compose a Tenth Symphony than be content to loose myself into this universe of numbers. Pythagoras, I believe, discovered a sort of philosophy in numbers, but even he did not count ...
— The Pleasures of Ignorance • Robert Lynd
... said to himself, while he was talking something else to her;—but it is more than being not commonplace. She is very pure; but I have seen other pure faces. It is not that she is a Madonna; this is no creature ...
— Nobody • Susan Warner
... much to do with the revival in America of the art of miniature-painting, to which he turned in 1892, and was the first president of the Society of Painters in Miniature, New York. Among his miniatures are "The Golden Hour," "Daphne," "In Arcadia" and "Madonna with the Auburn Hair." ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... while Rosa was as winsome and gentle-featured, as sweet and placid in her consciousness of well being and doing, as a cathedral saint. In fact, it always seemed to me that she never looked so like a madonna as she did immediately after destroying the better part of a two-dollar roast and such other trifles as chanced to be within reach in the hour ...
— The Van Dwellers - A Strenuous Quest for a Home • Albert Bigelow Paine
... against pain and intolerant of toil, struggling in vain to hold their own among keen, restless Yankees; dreamy mystics, strayed from the shadows of some cloister, their vague eyes dazzled by the sun; artists of early Italy, worshiping the mediaeval Madonna; poets, belonging of right to the court of Elizabeth, or companions of the wandering and disastrous fortunes of "the fairest and crudest ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 12, No. 32, November, 1873 • Various
... Madonna was accordingly handed to him, and the skipper's nose wrinkled up, and twitched and jerked sideways, while his billy-goat beard bristled out like a porcupine's quills, as he sniffed and examined the figure, turning it over and over in his ...
— The Island Treasure • John Conroy Hutcheson
... which Ada Forcus generally accepted as a matter of course, she now produced for the benefit of Deleah, meekly counting the stitches of the Madonna lily, which when worked in beads, grounded in amber silk and framed in gold, would be converted into a screen, to hang on the marble mantelpiece in the ...
— Mrs. Day's Daughters • Mary E. Mann
... the street corner looked down a roughly hewn stone Madonna. The arms of the Holy Child were outstretched to bless. Lisa paused before it, crossing herself. A strange joy ...
— Frances Waldeaux • Rebecca Harding Davis
... had once thought her, but tonight in her plain white frock and sober conventional surroundings she seemed to show something of the quiet poise of a nurse or a nun. She seemed to exemplify the thought that the ideal woman is both wood-nymph and madonna. By contrast to the Nietzschian intriguer I had left that morning at Briar Hills, she was a paragon of all virtues. Nietzsche! The philosopher of the sty! Freud, ...
— Paradise Garden - The Satirical Narrative of a Great Experiment • George Gibbs
... license, but he gains it at the expense of a balanced and harmonious expression. If you do not believe it, compare the Venus de Milo with the Venus de Medici or a Rubens fleshy, spilling-out-of-her-clothes Magdalen with a Donatello Madonna. When ethical restraint disappears, art tends to caricature, it becomes depersonalized. The Venus de Milo is a living being, a great personage; indeed, a genuine and gracious goddess. The Venus de Medici has scarcely any personality at all; she is chiefly ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... of the letter flushed her face with expectation. She took it with smiles. She covered it with kisses. When she opened it, a curl from Jack's head fell on to her lap. She pressed it to her heart, and then rose and laid it at the feet of her Madonna. "She must share my joy," she said with a pathetic childishness; "she will understand it." Then, with her arm around Isabel, and the girl's head on his shoulder, they read ...
— Remember the Alamo • Amelia E. Barr
... simple, and therefore as powerful, as itself. I cannot even promise you to attempt it, but if ever I fall in with a suitable frame of mind for so bold an experiment, I will remember you and the rocks of St. Helena. "My lady" (an Italian portrait on which I had written some verses) "Mia Donna," or "Madonna," more properly to speak, was a most beautiful Italian portrait that I saw, not in Augustin's gallery, but in a small collection of pictures belonging to Mr. Day, and exhibited at the Egyptian Hall. Sir Thomas Lawrence told me when I described it to him, that he thought it was ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... Even in the traditional groups, as, for instance, the Holy Families, etc., the aim is more complete realization, in draperies, gestures, postures, rather than beauty of form. We miss in Giotto much that had been attained before him. What Madonna of his can rank with Giovanni Pisano's? The Northern cathedral-sculptures, even some of the Byzantine carvings, have a dignity that is at least uncommon in his pictures. Especially the faces are generally ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... Bazzi showed one of his paintings—a Madonna and Child—which I scarce regarded until Raphael praised its excellencies, boldly defending the painting from ...
— Romance of Roman Villas - (The Renaissance) • Elizabeth W. (Elizbeth Williams) Champney
... outside their port. If they will but come out, I am sure to capture them; and I promise to give you the value of one of their frigates to build a church with. I have only to ask you to pray to La Santissima Madonna that the French fleet may come out of Toulon. Do you pray to her for that, and as for capturing them, I will undertake to do all ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester
... for a moment. "Every man should be engaged, I think, to at least one woman. It is the homage we owe to womankind, and a duty to our souls. His fiancee is indeed the Madonna of a true-hearted man; the thought of her is a shrine at the wayside of one's meditations, and her presence a temple wherein we cleanse our souls. She is mysterious, worshipful, and inaccessible, something perhaps of the woman, possibly even propitious and helpful, and ...
— Select Conversations with an Uncle • H. G. Wells
... dreamers and students, who may be won to live among relics so dear, but who mostly return to stand as interpreters of the beauty they have seen. Therefore, Italy is a theme which cannot grow old, as love and beauty cannot. Every book should be a work of art, and Italy, like the Madonna, should have a fresh beauty in the hands of every new artist. It is no longer interesting, statistically, for the names and numbers have been told often enough; but the impression which it leaves upon the mind of men of character and taste ...
— Early Letters of George Wm. Curtis • G. W. Curtis, ed. George Willis Cooke
... appeals to the sense and understanding, the other to the will and the affections. The truly beautiful and grand attracts the mind to it by instinctive harmony, is absorbed in it, and nothing can ever part them afterwards. Look at a Madonna of Raphael's: what gives the ideal character to the expression,—the insatiable purpose of the soul, or its measureless content in the object of its contemplation? A portrait of Vandyke's is mere indifference and still-life in the comparison: it has not ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... pediment supported by two Corinthian columns. They are now converted into altars. In this temple are buried several artists, among whom are Raphael, Giovanni da Udine, Baldassare Peruzzi, and Annibale Carracci. Raphael is buried beneath the base of the statue called la Madonna del Sasso, sculptured by Lorenzetti. This church is, however, without paintings or sculptures of much interest. Victor Emmanuel was entombed here on the 20th of January, 1878, and King Umberto on the 9th of August, 1900." One of the imposing ceremonies ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting
... when accompanied, as it is sometimes, by a rich Italian or reedy German voice; for whose sake we can forgive the tuneless squalls that too often greet our ears from ambulatory minstrels, be they of the Madonna, or fishy, Dutch-swamp style of beauty. A sweet-toned street organ, heard in the distance, when all around is still, is not a thing to be despised, by those who have music enough in their souls to respond to the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... Bonaparte at Rome, deprived the late revered pontiff both of his sovereignty and liberty, Villetard was sent by the Jacobin and atheistical party of the Directory to Loretto, to seize and carry off the celebrated Madonna. In the execution of this commission he displayed a conduct worthy the littleness of his genius and the criminality of his mind. The wooden image of the Holy Virgin, a black gown said to have appertained to her, together with three broken china plates, which the Roman Catholic faithful have ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... graceful form of trees, or the varied tints of leaves and flowers; but you can represent the figure of a man or woman more beautiful than any one man or woman that has ever appeared. What mortal woman ever expressed the ethereal beauty depicted in a Madonna of Raphael or Murillo? And what man ever had such a sublimity of aspect and figure as the creations of Michael Angelo? Why, "a beggar," says one of his greatest critics, "arose from his hand the patriarch of poverty; the hump ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VI • John Lord
... congregation got suddenly rich, and, with wealth, self-conceit and pride entered his heart. He considered it necessary, to preserve his respectability, to separate himself from the humble society he hitherto frequented, and cease to be a member of the Congregation of the Madonna, composed of industrious and virtuous youths who labored honestly for their livelihood. St. Francis, on hearing of this slight on the congregation and insult to Mary, was fired with a holy indignation. He sought ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly
... firelight and allowed him to kneel beside her. Their bodies pressing close together, they wondered at and touched with a strange reverence the little weakly creature sprawling in her lap. It commenced to wail, and she bared to it her breasts. To Antoine watching her, she seemed the Madonna of Keewatin, with her stifled love, naked passions, and heroic fight for life—and to-morrow ...
— Murder Point - A Tale of Keewatin • Coningsby Dawson
... she has prepared herself," Rastignac said, turning to de Marsay. "What a virginal toilette; what swan's grace in that snow-white throat of hers! How white her gown is, and she is wearing a sash like a little girl; she looks round like a madonna inviolate. Who would think that you had ...
— The Jealousies of a Country Town • Honore de Balzac
... Flowers may blaze with colour in an open field—and who has not marvelled as he passes in the train the seed-ground of some great horticulturist?—but seen thus they have but little charm. In a college garden a border filled with delphiniums and madonna lilies is backed by sombre yews, while the thick foliage of elm or chestnut quiets harmoniously the farther distance. See how the spires of blue—now declaring themselves for Oxford, now for Cambridge—are twice as vivid for the contrast, and how the ...
— Oxford • Frederick Douglas How
... and bearing aloft the holy cross. "She was received," we are told, "as if she were a Queen, which quite overwhelmed her, as she was not prepared for such an honour." To such a pitch indeed did this popular idolatry reach that she was actually painted as a Madonna to grace the altar of the richest ...
— Love Romances of the Aristocracy • Thornton Hall
... hard to say which of the two was the more beautiful. Both were unusually lovely. Alma Trepka was queenly, her movements sedate, her disposition calm and unclouded—Carl Bloch could paint a Madonna, or even a Christ, from her face without making any essential alteration in the oval of its contours. Clara Rothe's beauty was that of the white hart in the legend; her eyes like a deer's, large and shy, timid, and unself-conscious, her movements rapid, ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... over the valley; it was not night, though above the clear outlines of the fell the stars were just twinkling in the pale blue. Far away under the crag on the farther side of High Fell a light was shining. As Catherine's eyes caught it there was a quick response in the fine Madonna-like face. ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... half length representations of the Saviour or the Madonna or some patron saint, finished in a very archaic Byzantine style on a yellow or gold background, and vary in size from a square inch to several square feet. Very often the whole picture is covered with various ornaments, ofttimes with precious stones. In respect to their religious significance ...
— The History of the American Expedition Fighting the Bolsheviki - Campaigning in North Russia 1918-1919 • Joel R. Moore
... at the door. How like a Saint or Goddess she appears; Diana or Madonna, which I know not! In attitude and aspect formed to be At once the artist's ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... exclaimed Minna with girlish eagerness. "I gave her the most beautiful name I could think of because"—she laid her hand caressingly on the child's head and a madonna-like radiance stole into her face—"because she might at least have a beautiful name when"—the dull blaze of a recollection now burning in her eyes—"when there wasn't much prospect of many beautiful things coming into her life; though I know, of course, ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... Beldover. They would represent culture. And as there was no one of higher social importance than the doctors, the colliery-managers, and the chemists, they would shine, with their Della Robbia beautiful Madonna, their lovely reliefs from Donatello, their reproductions from Botticelli. Nay, the large photographs of the Primavera and the Aphrodite and the Nativity in the dining-room, the ordinary reception-room, would make ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... was slowly turning over the plates. He stopped at one. "What will you do with that figure?" he said, pointing to a Madonna. ...
— Loss and Gain - The Story of a Convert • John Henry Newman
... which was used in this voyage set sail. Luke notices its 'sign' as being that of the Twin Brethren, the patrons of sailors, whose images were, no doubt, displayed on the bow, just as to-day boats in that region often have a Madonna nailed on the mast. Strange conjunction—Castor and Pollux on the prow, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... package, asked what it was; on which Bianconi, who was close behind the man carrying the glass, answered that it was "the Repeal of the Union!" The old woman's delight was unbounded! She knelt down on her knees in the middle of the road, as if it had been a picture of the Madonna, and thanked God for having preserved her in her old age to see the Repeal ...
— Men of Invention and Industry • Samuel Smiles
... Franciscan institution of the Mount of Pity failed before the lust of Lombardy, and the logic of Augsburg; and, to this day, the worship of the Immaculate Virginity of Money, mother of the Omnipotence of Money, is the Protestant form of Madonna worship. ...
— Val d'Arno • John Ruskin
... Tennyson Song, "Nay, but you, who do not love her" Robert Browning The Henchman John Green1eaf Whittier Lovely Mary Donnelly William Allingham Love in the Valley George Meredith Marian George Meredith Praise of My Lady William Morris Madonna Mia Algernon Charles Swinburne "Meet we no Angels, Pansie" Thomas Ashe To Daphne Walter Besant "Girl of the Red Mouth" Martin MacDermott The Daughter of Mendoza Mirabeau Bonaparte Lamar "If She ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various
... So I stood mighty alert, my eyes on this dagger, being minded to whip it into his rogue's heart as chance might offer. 'I wonder,' says he to this poor lady, 'I wonder how long I shall keep thee, madonna, a week—a month—a year? Venus knoweth, for you amuse me, sweet. Rise, rise, dear my lady, my Dolores of Joy, rise and aid me with thy counsel, for here hath this misfortunate clumsy Captain fool blundered into our amorous paradise, this tender Cyprian isle sacred to our passion. Yet here ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... exalting Madonna, laughed in spite of herself; at which her worshipper's blue eyes twinkled too, and under these favoring auspices he touched ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... the passage where, it seemed, there had once been a chapel; at least, there was a small table against the wall, like an altar, and above, the faded, almost entirely obliterated picture of a Catholic Madonna. A small silver lamp hanging before it barely illumined it. The Tatar stooped and picked up from the ground a copper candlestick which she had left there, a candlestick with a tall, slender stem, and snuffers, pin, and extinguisher hanging about it ...
— Taras Bulba and Other Tales • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... abject fear, And hollow prayer and praise from craven heart. Before a sculptured Venus I would kneel, Crown her with flowers, worship her, and cry, 'O large and noble type of our ideal, At least my heart and prayer return to thee, Amidst a faithless world of proselytes. Madonna Mary, with her virgin lips, And eyes that look perpetual reproach, Insults and is a blasphemy on youth. Is she to claim the worship of a man Hot with the first rich flush of ripened life?' Realities, like phantoms, glided by, Unnoted 'midst the torment and delights Of my ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... That madonna face, than which I have never seen a more beautiful, more enchanting—either before or ...
— Debts of Honor • Maurus Jokai
... work he showed his gifts as a composer, and some of the small pictures of his Florentine period are quite perfect in design. Nothing could be better composed within their restricted field than the "Madonna del Cardellino" or the "Belle Jardiniere." Nearly at the end of the period he made his greatest failure, the "Entombment" of the Borghese Gallery. It was his most ambitious effort up to this time and he wanted to put everything that he had learned into it, to draw like ...
— Artist and Public - And Other Essays On Art Subjects • Kenyon Cox
... village has been for many years the most frequented shrine in Austria. To-day it is said to be visited by something like 100,000 pilgrims every year. The object of adoration is the miraculous image of the Madonna and Child, twenty inches high, carved in lime-wood, which was presented to the Mother Church of Mariazell in 1157 by a Benedictine priest. Haydn was a devout Catholic, and not improbably knew all about Mariazell and its Madonna. At any rate, he joined a company of ...
— Haydn • J. Cuthbert Hadden |
