"Middle distance" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... cloak of warm security. Tulips in long beds—brilliant mosaics in a floor of green marble—were let into the lawn that stretched down the drive. Away on the horizon, the rising ground about Wycombe showed blue through the soft spring atmosphere, and in the middle distance, the ploughed fields—freshly turned—glowed with the rich, red blood of the earth's fulness. So it presented itself to the eyes of Mrs. Durlacher, when, one morning late in April, she drove up in her motor to the old iron-barred ...
— Sally Bishop - A Romance • E. Temple Thurston
... Lieutenant Abercrombie, as he hurried up and Captain Nakasura vanished beyond middle distance. "Benson, dear old fellow, I want just a word with you before dinner is served," continued the Briton, thrusting his arm through Jack's and drawing him away after a nod of apology to Hal and Eph. "Benson, I've had something on my mind all day; something I ...
— The Submarine Boys for the Flag - Deeding Their Lives to Uncle Sam • Victor G. Durham
... the pretty chintz drawing-room, which opened by French windows on the trim garden, with its croquet lawn, its tennis-net in the middle distance, and its remote rose alley lined with smart dahlias and flaming sunflowers. Her eye met Miss Stanley's understandingly, and she was if anything a trifle more affectionate in her greeting to Ann Veronica. Then Ann Veronica ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... an heiress, probably a peeress in her own right, with perhaps a vicious baronet, an amiable duke, and an irresistible younger son of a marquis as lovers in the foreground, a clergyman and a poet sighing for her in the middle distance, and a crowd of undefined adorers dimly indicated beyond. Her eyes and her wit are both dazzling; her nose and her morals are alike free from any tendency to irregularity; she has a superb contralto and a superb intellect; she is perfectly well dressed and ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... of this stamp in large cities. No writer has felt and expressed this complex temperament with more justice than De Maupassant, and, as he was an infinitely careful observer of milieu and landscape and all that constitutes a precise middle distance, his novels can be considered an irrefutable record of the social classes which he studied at a certain time and along certain lines. The Norman peasant and the Provencal peasant, for example; also the small officeholder, the gentleman of the provinces, ...
— Selected Writings of Guy de Maupassant • Guy de Maupassant
... push herself into the foreground. My idea is that what artists call middle distance is better suited to her colouring. Seriously, I resent her putting you up to appeal to me—over Anita's head. I'm ...
— The Second Latchkey • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... beat him. As he complained about Samuel Johnson, he runs into "big words about little things." Charles's mistress, her pug-dog, the page-boy who tended the dog, nay, the boy's putative father, occupy the foreground: and the poet, the statesman, and the hero retire into the middle distance or the background. What would we not have given to have had Macaulay's History of England continued down to his own time, the wars of Marlborough, the reign of Anne, the poets, wits, romancers, inventors, reformers, and heroes of the eighteenth century, the careers ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... the exact balance between generous praise and critical discrimination, expressing their opinions in the mild technicalities of the Art Books and painting classes. They spoke of atmospheric effects, of middle distance, of "chiaro-oscuro," of fore-shortening, of the decomposition of light, of the subordination of individuality to fidelity ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... nearly one-half of the picture on the right, her bows towards the spectator, seen in sharp perspective from stem to stern, with all her port-holes, guns, anchors, and lower rigging elaborately detailed; there are two other ships of the line in the middle distance, drawn with equal precision; a noble breezy sea dancing against their broad bows, full of delicate drawing in its waves; a store-ship beneath the hull of the larger vessel, and several other boats, and a complicated ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... softly and stole across the floor, very gently drew back one of the curtains and looked out. It was dark and she could see nothing— only the Cathedral like a grey web against a sky black as ink. A lamp, across the Green, threw a splash of orange in the middle distance—no other light. The Cathedral seemed to be very close to ...
— The Cathedral • Hugh Walpole
... particularly striking, a skirmish of horse, accompanied by all the scenery in which he so peculiarly delighted. In the foreground is the ruins of an old temple, with its lofty pillars finely displayed in shadow above the summits of the horizon;—in the middle distance the battle is dimly discerned through the driving rain, which obscures the view; while the back ground is closed by a vast ridge of gloomy rocks, rising into a dark and tempestuous sky. The character of the whole is that of sullen magnificence; ...
— Travels in France during the years 1814-1815 • Archibald Alison
... thoroughly satisfied this household critic, then is the time to show some handy brother-craftsman your amended work, and listen gratefully when he suggests that you should put a tone on this wall, and a tree, or something, in the left middle distance to balance the composition, and raise or depress the horizon-line to get a better effect ...
— Social Pictorial Satire • George du Maurier
... from Weymouth is to Portland, and of course every one must take it, but there are other and finer ways out of the town, most of which show the "island" at its best—as an imposing mass of rock in the middle distance. ...
— Wanderings in Wessex - An Exploration of the Southern Realm from Itchen to Otter • Edric Holmes
... fit for Francia and the early Umbrian painters. Low hills to right and left; suavely modelled heights in the far distance; a very quiet width of plain, with slender trees ascending into the pellucid air; and down in the mystery of the middle distance a glimpse of heaven-reflecting water. The magic of the moon and stars lends enchantment to this scene. No painting could convey their influences. Sometimes both luminaries tremble, all dispersed ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... scarecrow, his arms dangling absurdly in front of him. Through the window we could dimly discern that a young man was seated inside. The door was swinging open and his hand was grasping the handle, as if he had attempted to leap forth at the last instant. In the middle distance lay the golf links, dotted as they had been in the morning with the dark figures of the golfers, lying motionless upon the grass of the course or among the heather which skirted it. On one particular green ...
— The Poison Belt • Arthur Conan Doyle
... points of the "Dean" the distances are dreamy and wide, with high horizon-lines touching wooded hills and shutting the Thames into a middle distance toward which a hundred little hills either descend abruptly or decline gently upon broad green meadows. Nature here smiles, not with pure pagan blitheness, but with a tenderer grace, as of a soul grown human and fraught with countless memories of man's ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various
... turned on. A drop-scene fell; the stage was transformed, for, in the middle distance, swelling green hills rose against a soft blue sky seen between trees in the foreground. Sunshine lay on the landscape, enhancing the haze in the distance and throwing up the hills more prominently against it. The ...
— Flamsted quarries • Mary E. Waller
... few miles of the offing beyond, while stretching away to the left of that point, toward the southward and eastward, could be traced the entire course of the river as far as the native town of Olomba, and thence onward to the Camma Lagoon, while the near and middle distance was occupied by the waters of the N'Chongo Chine Lagoon, with—in the present instance—the boat flotilla carrying on under a heavy press of canvas to fetch the passage giving access to ...
— A Middy of the Slave Squadron - A West African Story • Harry Collingwood
... door with one hand, and the frame with the other, swinging back and forth on the threshold, with abnormally large iron shoes flying up and down in the wet green foreground, and the whole North Sea towering over me in the middle distance—oh, but a very ...
— The Chauffeur and the Chaperon • C. N. Williamson
... screen of popples definitely into the clear. A two-storied house of squared logs crested a knoll in the middle distance. Ten acres of grass marsh, perhaps twenty of ploughed land, and then the ash-white-green of popples. We dodged the grass marsh and gained the house. Dick ...
— The Forest • Stewart Edward White
... in the foreground should be greener, to throw back the middle distance. That is the peak of South Moor exactly, if it ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... fireflies. Out on San Francisco Bay the lights flashed from the mastheads of ships at anchor or from brightly lighted ferryboats plying from mole to mole, while far to the left, Lake Merritt lay like a gray sheet amid the shadows. In the middle distance off Yerba Buena Island two United States gunboats were at anchor, one of them sending the rays of its powerful searchlight here and there across the water, and making a veritable path of silver far out across ...
— Byways Around San Francisco Bay • William E. Hutchinson
... South-Americans, and loudly harangued them in South-American Spanish; she flared out in a picture which nowhere lacked strong effects; and in her background lurked a mysterious black face and figure, ironically subservient to the old man, the mild boy, and the pretty young girl in the middle distance ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... crept thus, to the very entrance of the arroyo, then rose to my feet. In the middle distance the fire leaped red. Its glow fell intermittently on the surges rolling in. The men staggered or lay prone, either as gigantic silhouettes or as tatterdemalions painted by the light. The keg stood solid and substantial, ...
— The Mystery • Stewart Edward White and Samuel Hopkins Adams
... he is able to show us Carthage indeed. He has an Italian patriotism that amounts to frenzy. So Rome emerges body and soul from the past, in this spectacle. He gives us the cruelty of Baal, the intrepidity of the Roman legions. Everything Punic or Italian in the middle distance or massed background speaks of the very genius of the people concerned and actively generates ...
— The Art Of The Moving Picture • Vachel Lindsay
... "I came up here to forget forever the world's giddy melodrama, the wild chase for money through deserted rooms, shots in the night, cupid in the middle distance. I came here to do—literature—if it's ...
— Seven Keys to Baldpate • Earl Derr Biggers
... succession of screens of luminous vapour that parcelled out the landscape, taking away all colour save that bestowed by the transparent golden grey of the mist. The roofs of Cluhir made a dark profile in the middle distance, the lower part of the houses hidden in the steaming mist, and the beautiful outline of the twin crests of Carrigaholt was like a golden shadow in the sky above them. The spire and the tower of the two churches ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... skill is but a seven-and-sixpenny matter, or a trifle beyond. It does well enough what it pretends to do; but this is a subject I never ought to have touched. I know my limits. You'll see, sir," he went on, in a more business-like tone, "I've indicated your ship here in the middle distance. I thought it would give the portrait just that touch ...
— The Delectable Duchy • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... stables of daub and wattle, eking out the ramshackle house. Behind it and to the left of it were scrawls that might have been meant for trees. An enclosure of spiky lines might have indicated an orchard-hedge. And there were things in the middle distance, also to the left, that you might accept as beehives or as native kraals. The man who looked at them knew they were native kraals. He drew in his breath sharply, and the fold between his eyebrows deepened, ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... it scandalous, for the girls were always there, Cousin Maria not having thought it in the least necessary, in order to put herself in accord with French traditions, to relegate her daughters to the middle distance. They occupied a considerable part of the foreground, in the prettiest, most ...
— A London Life; The Patagonia; The Liar; Mrs. Temperly • Henry James
... of important information in its long hieroglyphic inscriptions. Behind this, and on either side, the massive brick walls of the store chambers and the inclosing wall of the temple can be traced; while on the right hand, in the middle distance, is a heap of limestone blocks, already collected by Rameses II. for the completion or enlargement of the temple. The excavations were photographed for M. Naville, by Herr Emil Brugsch, of the Boulak Museum, and our illustrations are taken from these photographs, supplemented by sketches.—S.L.P., ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 401, September 8, 1883 • Various
... background old Vesuvius, like a wicked, fallen angel, wearing his plumy, fumy halo of sulphurous hell-smoke; in the middle distance the Bay of Naples, each larcenous wave-crest in it triple-plated with silvern glory pilfered from a splendid moon; on the left the riding lights of a visiting squadron of American warships; on the right the myriad slanted sails of the coral-fishers' ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... brass plate was opened and Mr. Chayter appeared in the middle distance—he always advanced just to the same spot, as a prime minister receives an ambassador—Nick felt anew that he would be wonderfully like Mr. Carteret if he had had an expression. He denied himself this freedom, never giving a sign of recognition, often as ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... 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, but already unlike anything else under the sun. And the incoming stream ...
— Poems • Alan Seeger
... page 161 [Transcribers Note: Plate XXXVI].—First spear in upright row on the right top of picture, exactly Phi proportion with sides of canvas. Height of gun carried horizontally by man in middle distance above central group, exactly Phi proportion with top and bottom of picture. This line gives height of group of figures on left, and is the most important horizontal line ...
— The Practice and Science Of Drawing • Harold Speed
... moment her eye was fitted with a new lens, through which the road to the summit of the Tehachapi Mountains and Mahatmadom suddenly looked long, weary, and profitless, and by means of which the twins were transferred from the comfortable middle distance they had previously occupied to the immediate foreground of duty. The lens might slip, but while it was in place she saw as ...
— Marm Lisa • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... to decorate Euston Railway Station with frescoes entitled "The Progress of Cosmos." "Chaos" we have in the 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 ...
— Watts (1817-1904) • William Loftus Hare
... at the idea of their being drowned. They are all, too, engaged in noble works; charity, energy, and inventiveness are amongst the virtues they exhibit; there is no panic, or struggling one with another; no anger or selfishness, excepting only in the boat in the middle distance; a woman helps her children, a man his wife, an old man bears a young man in his arms, Priam carrying AEneas, an even more pathetic imagination than Homer's; others attempt to save their household goods; ...
— Michael Angelo Buonarroti • Charles Holroyd
... was a wood-cut representing Darwin's reconstruction of the dingue from the fossil bones in the British Museum. It was a well-executed wood-cut, showing a dingue in the foreground and, to give scale, a mammoth in the middle distance. ...
— In Search of the Unknown • Robert W. Chambers
... in with that on the com again!" Soriki answered with unwonted emphasis. "The sooner I see the old girl standing on her pins in the middle distance, the better I'll feel. You know"—he looked up from his preoccupation with the ration package and gazed out over the city—"this place gives me the shivers. That other town was bad enough. But at least there were people living there. Here's nothing ...
— Star Born • Andre Norton
... valley. It was a scene of quiet beauty, reflecting little of the ravages of war. My vantage of height gave me a wide vista, embracing the silvery stream, and a long stretch of meadow land, dotted with farmhouses, and intersected by roads. In the middle distance small villages faced each other across the stream, and toward these most of the roads converged,—proof of the existence of a ford. I could not be mistaken as to the town—Burlington on the Jersey shore, ...
— My Lady of Doubt • Randall Parrish
... in the cellar of Pervyse. An occasional shell was heard in the middle distance, as artillery beyond the Yser threw a lazy feeler over to the railway station. The three women were entertaining a distinguished guest at the evening meal of tinned rabbit and dates. Their visitor was none other than F. Ainslie-Barkleigh, the famous ...
— Young Hilda at the Wars • Arthur Gleason
... flatness of the picture is still preserved by their ignorance of perspective. When they attempted to express different distances, they did so by placing them one above another, so that in reading the composition the eye first takes in the distant horizon; next below it, the middle distance; and being thus prepared, it comes down to the actual living foreground, on which rests the dramatic action and interest addressed to the spectator. The Chinese understood many of the secrets of ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford
... next example, Fig. 64, the crest in the middle distance is exceedingly fine in its expression of mountain force; the two ridges of it being thrown up like the two edges of a return wave that has just been beaten back from a rock. It is still, however, somewhat wanting in the expression of straightness, and therefore slightly ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... she was accepting social ruin with her freedom, but she had long nourished a rancorous hatred for the society which had seemed to accept her under protest, for Francesca's sake, and she was ready enough to turn her back on it before it should finally make up its polite mind to relegate her to the middle distance of indifferent toleration. ...
— Casa Braccio, Volumes 1 and 2 (of 2) • F. Marion Crawford
... the world that was his own, and he had a vision of those further slopes, distance beyond distance, with Bogota, a place of multitudinous stirring beauty, a glory by day, a luminous mystery by night, a place of palaces and fountains and statues and white houses, lying beautifully in the middle distance. He thought how for a day or so one might come down through passes drawing ever nearer and nearer to its busy streets and ways. He thought of the river journey, day by day, from great Bogota to the still vaster world beyond, through towns and villages, forest and desert places, the rushing ...
— The Door in the Wall And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... interspersed with groves of beautiful trees, through whose aisles are to be seen occasional glimpses of the Hudson and, on a clear day, the distant Catskills that, like low-lying clouds, top the nearer hills of the middle distance. The place is named for Edward Hyde, Lord Cornbury, Governor of the Province at the beginning of the Eighteenth Century. Jacobus Stoutenburg, the first settler, built a stone house which still stands on the east side of ...
— The New York and Albany Post Road • Charles Gilbert Hine |
