"Picturesqueness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... petrified, measuring him. He was lightly built and slender. He had a manner as glittering as his weapon, and a pair of remarkably cool and clear gray eyes. His picturesqueness seemed wasted on mere flesh and blood it was so perfect. Coatless, but wearing a shirt of the finest linen, he looked like some old French duelist and ought, I felt, to be gazing at me, rapier in hand, from a gilt-framed canvas ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti
... last so long? In the secluded mountain valleys, where agriculture supplies the only employment of the industrious classes, you sometimes meet with very ancient cottages, built quite in the style of the middle ages, with an abundance of projection and recesses, all calculated to produce picturesqueness of effect. The modern houses, more particularly in the district of the lagoons, are constructed more with reference to comfort than show, the object being to secure as much room and air as possible. In most places a garden is attached to every dwelling; and where ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... through the streets past the houses that had been burned down, he was surprised by the beauty of those ruins. The picturesqueness of the chimney stacks and tumble-down walls of the burned-out quarters of the town, stretching out and concealing one another, reminded him of the Rhine and the Colosseum. The cabmen he met and their passengers, the carpenters cutting the timber for ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... o'clock I saw Culpepper, a trim little village, lying in the hollow of several hills. A couple of steeples added to its picturesqueness, and a swift creek, crossed by a small bridge, interposed between myself and the main part of the place. It looked like Sunday when I rode through the principal street. The shutters were closed in the shop windows, the dwellings seemed ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... from the paper which contained his dinner. A 'bonne' coiffed with ribbon shepherded two little girls with pig-tails and frilled drawers. A cab meandered by, whose cocher wore a blue coat and a black-glazed hat. To Soames a kind of affectation seemed to cling about it all, a sort of picturesqueness which was out of date. A theatrical people, the French! He lit one of his rare cigarettes, with a sense of injury that Fate should be casting his life into outlandish waters. He shouldn't wonder if Irene quite enjoyed this foreign ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... passed Marsh's cannery, Cherry saw a tender moored to the dock, and noticed strangers among the buildings. They stared at her curiously, as if the sight of a white girl attended by a copper-hued giant were part of the picturesqueness they expected. As she drew near her own house, she saw a woman approaching, and while yet a stone's-throw distant she recognized her. A jealous tightening of her throat and a flutter at her breast told her that this ...
— The Silver Horde • Rex Beach
... truly poetic. George Muncaster's marriage is a type of the new poetry, the poetry of essentials. The old poetry, as exemplified in the old-fashioned marriage, is a poetry of externals, and certainly it has the advantage of picturesqueness. ...
— The Quest of the Golden Girl • Richard le Gallienne
... unpicturesquely ugly, the house stood among its great oaks. It did not nestle among them. It stood. As well expect a breadth of starched brown holland to nestle. To deprive the abode of any lingering taint of picturesqueness, a blue and white signboard, thirty feet long, stretching between it and the main street, flashed to all the passing world the news that this was the headquarters of the celebrated "Grimm's Botanical Gardens ...
— The Return of Peter Grimm - Novelised From the Play • David Belasco
... of the Nebraska who had never before traversed the "Inside Passage" were loud in the praises of its picturesqueness, while those to whom the route was familiar seemed to find an ever-fresh fascination in its ...
— The Iron Trail • Rex Beach
... In Switzerland, every canton has its distinctive costume which has come down from a remote past. The peasants of Norway, of the German and Austrian Alps, of the Basque settlements in the Pyrenees, of mountain-bound Alsace and Bohemia, give local color to the landscape by the picturesqueness of their national dress. ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... with an additional element of picturesqueness. These charming vehicles are not used, however, by Europeans during the day. Then the Anglo-Saxon instinct for respectability (or some more subtle reason) prescribes the use of the ghari, which is practically a four-wheeled ...
— A Visit to Java - With an Account of the Founding of Singapore • W. Basil Worsfold
... Barons and the wars of the Roses; but the ancient character of the town was almost entirely destroyed by the great fire of 1675,—not without benefit to the health, though at the expense of the picturesqueness ...
— Rides on Railways • Samuel Sidney
... No doubt our honoured visitors could perceive many technical points in which the ruling race exposed itself as having something yet to learn, but they tactfully concealed all signs of superior civilisation; and the British audience, well pleased with the novelty and picturesqueness of the scenes, were content ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, October 7, 1914 • Various
... always busy. Destroyers and huge transports churned up foam, and submarines left their faint trace on the wide extent of bluest ocean. The scene was one of war in all its picturesqueness and horror, for one could easily imagine awful scenes taking place under the far cloud of smoke and dust. It was war in all its force seen so for the ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... sun crept through the moon-vine. Out on the wide veranda was the long table. They were a happy group at luncheon there. Even the taciturn Brand Williams had been persuaded to come. His native picturesqueness was rather effaced by a black, characterless suit ...
— Overland Red - A Romance of the Moonstone Canon Trail • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... of the wharves, when his attention was drawn to a female form on the opposite side of the way, going towards the spot he had just left. She was somewhat small, slight, and graceful; her attire alone would have been enough to attract him, being simple and countrified to picturesqueness; but he was more than attracted by her strong resemblance to Avice Caro the younger—Ann Avice, as she had ...
— The Well-Beloved • Thomas Hardy
... motor snapped a camera and hummed away. They had no prevision of being stuck halfway up Crazy Woman's Hill with no water within fifteen miles, or they wouldn't have exclaimed so gayly at the beauty and picturesqueness of ...
— Hidden Creek • Katharine Newlin Burt
... her probable circumstances, as we sat around the camp-fire that evening, after the way of idle people. It occurred to me, as I glanced toward her tent door, illuminated by our blazing fire, and saw her regarding the weird scene with evident admiration of its picturesqueness, to ask her to come and sit with us and help us eat roast potatoes—roasted as they cook pigs in the Islands, by covering up in the ground with hot stones. The fact that the potatoes, and the butter which went with them, were purloined from our host's larder, gave a special flavor to the ...
— The New Penelope and Other Stories and Poems • Frances Fuller Victor
... healthy, well-bred Englishman, accustomed to good society. He was neither talkative nor reserved, but natural and free; speaking our language with uncommon propriety, French and German still better, and Italian like a native, and often expressing himself with singular strength and picturesqueness,—reminding me of the Italian poet and critic, Ugo Foscolo,—whom I saw at the time he was furnishing the papers translated by Mrs. Sarah ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... travellers, is the delightful scenery of the Morvan, and the beauty of its white oxen, a race apart. We find these gentle, majestic creatures everywhere tenderly cared for, as perhaps no other animals are in France, and lending wonderful picturesqueness and charm to every landscape. No matter whither you go, winding up the forest-girt mountain road, from Autun to Chateau-Chinon, traversing the romantic valley of the Cure, from Avallon to Vezelay, exploring the pretty, Surrey-like woods and hills around ...
— The Roof of France • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... and a small garden of pot-herbs, inclosed by a strong fence of timber, lay on the sunny side of a spacious rambling forest lodge, only one story high, built of solid timber and roofed with shingle. It was not without strong pretensions to beauty, as well as to picturesqueness, for the posts of the door, the architecture of the deep porch, the frames of the latticed windows, and the verge boards were all richly carved in grotesque devices. Over the door was the royal shield, between a pair of magnificent antlers, the spoils of a deer ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte M. Yonge
... This does not strike one as anything out of the common, because the composition is so true, so perfectly natural and simple. I cannot remember having seen a single picture in which the peculiar style and picturesqueness of those days is so vividly expressed, as in the figures of these two men calmly walking along on the ...
— Rembrandt • Josef Israels
... continued. "There should be a picturesqueness in my descent to hell which would go far to place my name at the head of the list of those sinners ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... his friends by his impersonations. We have seen that it was once within the bounds of possibility that he would have become a professional singer. His conversational gifts were great. He was a writer of singular picturesqueness. A considerable interest in the progress of science was noted in him to the last. If we look back at the record of the lives of artists to find what manner of men as a rule they were, we shall find that, in contradistinction to poets and musicians, they ...
— George Du Maurier, the Satirist of the Victorians • T. Martin Wood
... this Sabbatical city, and the lack of which kept one forever falling short of the higher sort of contentment. And I soon recognized that it was the element that gives to the wicked outer world all its moral style, expressiveness and picturesqueness,—the element of precipitousness, so to call it, of strength and strenuousness, ...
— Talks To Teachers On Psychology; And To Students On Some Of Life's Ideals • William James
... should begin to rule these lands also? Betty, in her growing up, heard all this intimated. At twelve years old, though she had detested Rosalie's marriage, she had rather liked to hear people talk of the picturesqueness of places like Stornham Court, and of the life led by women of rank in their houses in town and country. Such talk nearly always involved the description of things and people, whose colour and tone had only reached her through the medium ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... City had changed, and its colour and picturesqueness were gone, at no time was London more powerful or more magnificent. There were no nobles living within the walls: only two or three of the riverside palaces remained along the Strand: there were no troops of retainers riding along the streets in the ...
— The History of London • Walter Besant
... of evidence on the subject, with the wisdom of these modern ghost-experts, when they affirm that you can always tell a genuine ghost-story by the circumstance of its being about a nobody, its having no point or picturesqueness, and being, generally speaking, flat, stale, ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... you in merit." One of the most diverting personages in Jonson's comedy is Captain Tucca. "His peculiarity" has been well described by Ward as "a buoyant blackguardism which recovers itself instantaneously from the most complete exposure, and a picturesqueness of speech like that of a ...
— Volpone; Or, The Fox • Ben Jonson
... desolate part of this desolate country, the car was stopped, and two Syrians laden with heavy grips got on. These tall, darkly gaunt men, their sinister picturesqueness thinly disguised by their Western garb, these Orientals in the midst of the extremest phase of the New World, passed Carroll with grace, and seated themselves, with a weary air, and yet an air of ineffable lengths of time at command, suggestive of anything but weariness. There was actually, ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... rendering to produce their full effect; and by far the most extraordinary exhibition of skill I ever heard on the piano was his performance of the airs from the Don Giovanni, arranged by himself. His literary style had the same qualities and defects as his music: brilliancy and picturesqueness, and an absence of genuineness and simplicity. He wrote a great deal of musical criticism, and an ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... village, with a large mountain torrent dashing over the rocks in the middle of it. The huts were dotted about irregularly on a natural grass lawn, and large trees, clumps of bamboo, coconuts, bread-fruit trees, and bright-coloured "crotons" added a great deal to the picturesqueness of the village. At the back the wooded hills towered up to a height of nearly 4,000 feet, and white streaks amid the mountain woods showed where many a fine waterfall tumbled over ...
— Wanderings Among South Sea Savages And in Borneo and the Philippines • H. Wilfrid Walker
... to see the glorious panorama around, she considered, surpassed all her previous most noble experiences. Ravello, with its magnificent cathedral covered with mosaics, is indeed a sight to have seen; the road to Amalfi, the ruinous paper mills in the ravine, the glorious picturesqueness, are all "well expressed and understood." Mrs. Shelley seems to have considered June (1844) the perfection ...
— Mrs. Shelley • Lucy M. Rossetti
... an exceedingly excitable and impressionable man, and his curiosity was so aroused by the occult discourse of his host that he begged to be admitted to the seances. Always alert to the main chance, Kelley, after a few preliminary sittings of unusual picturesqueness, inspired the spirits to predict that Lasky would one day be elected King of Poland. It needed nothing more to induce the happy and hopeful count to invite both Dee and Kelley to return with him to Bohemia. He would, he promised, protect and provide for ...
— Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters • H. Addington Bruce
... Walford Sploshington bought Hydra House we all hoped that beyond papering and painting, dabbing on a bit of plaster where it was needed, and grubbing the groundsel in the drive, he would allow it to remain in the state of old-world picturesqueness in which he had found it. We would not have objected even if he had decided on having water laid on; although this would be getting dangerously near our limit, as there was a dear old draw-well in the garden and one in the ripping ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, June 3, 1914 • Various
... now buried. In place thereof they had those huge central markets, that colossus of ironwork, that new and wonderful town. Fools might say what they liked; it was the embodiment of the spirit of the times. Florent, however, could not at first make out whether he was condemning the picturesqueness of Baratte's ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... world may one see such great picturesqueness, variety, and brilliancy of color in the costumes of the masses as then still prevailed in Mexico. Largely of more or less pure Indian blood, come of a race Cortez found habited in feather tunics and head-dresses ...
— The Red-Blooded Heroes of the Frontier • Edgar Beecher Bronson
... the harbor, July 2, was, in the way of picturesqueness, one of the most original and most beautiful ever seen. The sky was clear, the sea calm, the crowd of spectators enormous. Napoleon and Josephine, going down from the terrace in the garden of the Palazzo Doria, entered a large round temple, ...
— The Court of the Empress Josephine • Imbert de Saint-Amand
... neglected, Monnie. A poor man's pleasure grounds must rely on Nature, and trust to her for effects. Where there is fine timber, however, and abundance of slope, and rock, and hollow, we sometimes gain in picturesqueness what we ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu
... sprinkling of small cheap houses along a sidehill, a big hotel with a flag-staff, and a very peaceful looking arsenal. It is doubtless a very enterprising and deserving city, but its aspect that morning was that of cheapness, newness, and stagnation, with no compensating picturesqueness. White paint always looks chilly under a gray sky and on naked hills. Even in hot August the place seemed bleak. The tourist, who went ashore with a view to breakfast, said that it would be a good place to stay in and go a-fishing and picnicking ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... change is all gain, or the milder method more effectual than the old one, I would hesitate to affirm. He would be a bold man who would assert any lack of burnworthy books. The older custom had perhaps a certain picturesqueness which was lost with it. It was a bit of old English life, reaching far back into history—a custom that would have been not unworthy of the brush of Hogarth. For all that we cannot regret it. The practice became so common, and lent itself so readily to abuse by its indiscriminate application in ...
— Books Condemned to be Burnt • James Anson Farrer
... m. from Sparkford. It lies in pretty country, and has a church to which the possession of a slender spire adds picturesqueness. Internally there is little that calls for remark. There is a squint in one of the piers, and a ...
— Somerset • G.W. Wade and J.H. Wade
... wonder his dog had struck in the gaudy Jewesses and the shaky generals, Frank threatened and finally forced the dog to lie down. He continued to expatiate on the dog's points— the number of wrinkles, the bandiness of the legs, etc. The conversation dropped in heat and glare, and the picturesqueness of ...
— Spring Days • George Moore
... acquainted with the spot at which he stood. Those old quarries had a certain picturesqueness. They had become grass-grown; ivy, shrubs, trees had clustered about them—the people who lived in the few houses half a mile away, sometimes walked around them; the children made a playground of the place: Pratt himself had often gone into some quiet corner to read and smoke. And ...
— The Talleyrand Maxim • J. S. Fletcher
... suffers from the maximum bombardment of charged particles of which the sun is capable. Incessant auroral displays, with their undulating draperies, flitting colors, and marching columns might not be objectionable from the point of view of picturesqueness, but one magnetic storm of extreme intensity following closely upon the heels of another, for months on end, crazing the magnetic needle and continually putting the telegraph and cable lines out of commission, to say nothing of their effect upon "wireless telegraphy'', ...
— Curiosities of the Sky • Garrett Serviss
... a moral picturesqueness in the contrasts of the scene,—a man moved as deeply as his nature would admit, in the midst of hardened, gibing spectators, heartless towards him. It is worth thinking over and studying out. He seemed ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 1 • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... who has no idea or desire to give us 'fine writing,' the effect produced is that of reality itself. The names of the tribes he meets or describes take on a strange virtue, as if we heard them on the spot. Even the French officers' names scattered over a narrative from which all attempt at picturesqueness is banished, produce picturesqueness. . . . On the whole he is a primitive, and with all the primitive's ...
— Boys' Book of Famous Soldiers • J. Walker McSpadden
... For picturesqueness, if the unconventional has a greater appeal than the more standardized type of home, remodeling an old barn into a country home has its advantages. This is particularly so if one can find either a capacious one of roughly laid ledge stone, once ...
— If You're Going to Live in the Country • Thomas H. Ormsbee and Richmond Huntley
... Italy of 1844; Dickens charmed with its untidy picturesqueness; he is idle for a few weeks; his palace at Genoa; he sets to work upon "The Chimes"; gets passionately interested in the little book; travels through Italy to read it to his friends in London; reads it on December ...
— Life of Charles Dickens • Frank Marzials
... remoter South African warfare as a topic of conversation among the students. Their sympathies were with Augusta Goold. Even members of the divinity classes suffered themselves to be lured from their habitual worship of respectability so far as to express admiration for the dramatic picturesqueness of the part she played. It is true that the lady herself was called by names universally resented by women, and that the broadest slanders were circulated about her character. Still, a halo of glory hung round her. It ...
— Hyacinth - 1906 • George A. Birmingham
... story gained in picturesqueness from the dragging-in of diplomatic "atmosphere," it ceased from that moment to command any acceptance as a record of current events. Gorworth had warned his neophyte that this would be the case, but the traditional enthusiasm ...
— Beasts and Super-Beasts • Saki
... employment to a population reaching nearly forty thousand. The continuance of prosperous trade in most of the ancient English boroughs is a very interesting feature in their history; and though no doubt the picturesqueness of towns is increased or preserved by their falling into the Pompeii stage and dwindling into loneliness or decay, one cannot wish such to be their fate. Few English towns that have been of any importance centuries ago have gone back, though some have ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various
... plaint of the meadow-lark and the note of the robin sounded sweetly against the stillness of the air. A trio of crows sailed athwart the blue, their great wings beating the air to slow, solemn measure. The pine woodland added shelter and picturesqueness to the road, and to the light breeze its sweet resinous odor. And Fairfax was here, there, everywhere, looking after things with all the zeal of ...
— Peggy Owen and Liberty • Lucy Foster Madison
... word, or upon traumatic philosophy (as Mr. M'Culloch says so grandly, Economic Science). But, apart from this, we cannot allow that simply to say [Greek: Zakunthos nemoessa], woody Zacynthus, is any better argument of picturesqueness than Stony Stratford, or Harrow on the Hill. Be assured, reader, that the Homeric age was not ripe for the picturesque. Price on the Picturesque, or, Gilpin on Forest Scenery, would both have been sent post-haste to Bedlam in those days; or perhaps Homer himself would have ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey—Vol. 1 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... delighted with the beauty of the scenery which on every side met our eyes—woods and green fields, and hills and valleys, diversified the banks of the river, which branched off in different directions, and added much to the picturesqueness of the landscape. From the accounts we received of the barbarities committed by the Spaniards, we longed to meet them, to chastise them as they deserved. They had just before this made an attack on the settlement, where ...
— Hurricane Hurry • W.H.G. Kingston
... the exception of the passages already quoted from the Troades and the Phaedra, touches of genuine poetry are most rare.[198] In certain of the long descriptive passages (H.F. 658 sqq., Oed. 530 sqq.) we get a stagey picturesqueness, but no more. It is for different qualities that we read the iambics of Seneca, if we read ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... Leomont, the unseen choir of bird-voices; but their song emphasized the silence. In the pale light the shells of wrecked houses glimmered white, like things seen deep down under clear water. They were mysterious as daytime ghosts; and already a heartbreaking picturesqueness had taken possession of the streets, as an artist-decorator comes into an ugly room and mellows all its ...
— Everyman's Land • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... the fire of London. The martial half is infinitely the better of the two. He altogether surpasses his model, Davenant. If his poem lack the gravity of thought attained by a few stanzas of "Gondibert," it is vastly superior in life, in picturesqueness, in the energy of single lines, and, above all, in imagination. Few men have read "Gondibert," and almost every one speaks of it, as commonly of the dead, with a certain subdued respect. And it deserves respect as an honest effort to bring poetry back to its highest office in the ideal ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... and grassy, wholly without shade trees, and bordered generally by rail fences or stone walls. The houses, usually separated by wide intervals of meadow, are rarely over a story and a half in height. When painted, the color is usually red, brown, or yellow, the effect of which is a certain picturesqueness wholly outside any design on the part of ...
— The Duke of Stockbridge • Edward Bellamy
... of hereditary offices still held by the representatives of the ancient houses. For it was the sons and daughters of the great nobles of England that held high revelry in Buckingham Palace that night. There was an additional picturesqueness, as well as a curious vividness, lent to the pageant by the circumstance that in many cases the blood of the men and the women represented ran in the veins of the ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen V.1. • Sarah Tytler
... century malefactors, Deacon Brodie. It is quite otherwise with Charley Peace. There is little enough gay or debonair about him. Compared with Sheppard, Peace is as drab as the surroundings of mid-Victorian crime are drab compared with the picturesqueness of eighteenth ...
— A Book of Remarkable Criminals • H. B. Irving
... which enjoyed much celebrity, more on account of the personality of the poet who founded it than from any originality or picturesqueness in its intallation, was the “Mirliton,” opened by Aristide Bruant in the little rooms that had sheltered the ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory
... less elevated and less pure than the old Zoroastrian creed, must be pronounced to have possessed a certain loftiness and picturesqueness which suited it to become the religion of a great and splendid monarchy. The mysterious fire-altars on the mountain-tops, with their prestige of a remote antiquity—the ever-burning flame believed to have been kindled ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 3. (of 7): Media • George Rawlinson
... nothing for the present. Surely they would appear in due season, for it was impossible the girl could live alone in so large a house, and without natural protection; and so he simply made a further allusion to the apparent age and great picturesqueness of the building. ...
— The Ghost of Guir House • Charles Willing Beale
... first haven May 16. At that time, we can readily imagine, in this northern region the weather would not be very balmy. Even now the wild rocky shore stretches along drearily—though with certain stern picturesqueness—as far as eye can reach, and then must have been even less attractive, as it ...
— Over the Border: Acadia • Eliza Chase
... the annual addresses been listened to with such profound attention and interest. Mr. Lowell says of it, that its delivery "was an event without any former parallel in our literary annals, a scene to be always treasured in the memory for its picturesqueness and its inspiration. What crowded and breathless aisles, what windows clustering with eager heads, what enthusiasm of approval, what grim silence ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... in which he died at last. Altogether, it is an exceedingly unsuitable place for a pastoral and rural poet to live or die in,—even more unsatisfactory than Shakspeare's house, which has a certain homely picturesqueness that contrasts favorably with the suburban sordidness of the abode before us. The narrow lane, the paving-stones, and the contiguity of wretched hovels are depressing to remember; and the steam of them (such is our human weakness) might almost make ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... amusement, in fact. The malgamite industry is neither better nor worse than the other dangerous trades, and no man need go into it unless he likes. But the man who started this thing—whoever he may be—supplied that picturesqueness without which the public cannot be moved—and lo! We have an army ...
— Roden's Corner • Henry Seton Merriman
... was a good subject for a portrait, being distinguished by a gentle picturesqueness, which was perhaps unconsciously bestowed by some minute peculiarity of dress, such as artists seldom fail to assume. The effect was to make her appear like an inhabitant of pictureland, a partly ideal creature, not to be handled, nor even approached too closely. ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume I. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... all the windows and doors. For the first few nights, as a matter of fact, we had to sleep in these rooms on straw ourselves, and in the greatest luxury. No one who has slept all his life in a bed would ever realize how comfortable straw is, and for picturesqueness ...
— A Surgeon in Belgium • Henry Sessions Souttar
... December he arrived at Zinder, the frontier town of Bornou, built round and about masses of rock, which rose out of the ground, the picturesqueness of the place being increased by groups of date-palms. Water, which collects at short depths below the surface, fertilises a number of tobacco-fields, and gives to the vegetation around a very ...
— Great African Travellers - From Mungo Park to Livingstone and Stanley • W.H.G. Kingston
... "And I think she loves to hear me tell of that wonderful country—the white nights of St. Petersburg—the splendid steppes—the grandeur of our Venice of the north. Of course, she is immensely interested in Russia now." Significantly. "Its ostentation, its splendor, its barbaric picturesqueness! But tell me, what is her prince like? He is very handsome, naturally! Or she would not ...
— A Man and His Money • Frederic Stewart Isham
... and pretty black shady hat. There was a new sort of picturesqueness about her, which Aunt Marjorie noticed in an abstracted way; she put it down to "the polish which even a short residence in the metropolis always gives;" she had not the faintest idea that it was due to the dignity which a ...
— A Young Mutineer • Mrs. L. T. Meade
... national spirit. Impressionism is an art which does not give much scope to intellectuality, an art whose followers admit scarcely anything but immediate vision, rejecting philosophy and symbols and occupying themselves only with the consideration of light, picturesqueness, keen and clever observation, and antipathy to abstraction, as the innate qualities of French art. We shall see later on, when considering separately its principal masters, that each of them has based his art upon some masters of ...
— The French Impressionists (1860-1900) • Camille Mauclair
... up while she was dressing for dinner, to explain that I was not responsible for any of this picturesqueness. "Oh, perhaps I am to blame myself!" she exclaimed. "I think I ...
— Sylvia's Marriage • Upton Sinclair
... the Hudson's Bay Company, or of the colony once called Upper Fort Garry, and situated at the mouth of the Assinniboin, and the other termini the Lower Fort Garry, which is twenty miles farther down the river, helped to give additional picturesqueness to the scene. I had almost forgotten to mention what is, after all, the most prominent and peculiar feature of that singular landscape, singular from its location— and that is the numerous wind-mills, nearly twenty in all, which on every point of land made by ...
— Minnesota and Dacotah • C.C. Andrews
... empty pitcher upon her head, at the time of moonrise. Anticipating the Eastern subjects which future years produced, we may note a picture of Old Damascus, showing the Jews' quarter in that fabled city, in all its motley picturesqueness, and the delightful Moorish Garden,—A Dream of Granada, which were exhibited in 1874. A powerful picture, shown in 1875, of the Egyptian Slinger,[4] is illustrated later in this volume, but no reproduction can quite suggest the ...
— Frederic Lord Leighton - An Illustrated Record of His Life and Work • Ernest Rhys
... number of those curious accidents which we call coincidences have fallen to my share in this life, but for picturesqueness this one puts all the others in the shade: that a crowned head and a portier, the very top of an empire and the very bottom of it, should pass the very same criticism and deliver the very same verdict upon a book of mine—and almost in the same hour and ...
— Chapters from My Autobiography • Mark Twain
... sermon—that is, some discourse picked out of the effusions of the year as the one most adapted to excite admiration; and in those churches, from the way the ladies hold their fans, you know that they are not so much impressed with the heat as with the picturesqueness of half-disclosed features. Four puny souls stand in the organ-loft and squall a tune that nobody knows, and worshipers, with two thousand dollars' worth of diamonds on the right hand, drop a cent into ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... Washington, when a change of administration brought Boker's tenure of office to a close, asking if it were not possible to have him retained. He had had his difficulties at the Porte, as Lowell had had at Madrid. But his artistic nature responded quickly to the picturesqueness of his surroundings. "Within a mile of me," he writes Leland from Turkey,—"for I am now living at Therapia upon the Bosphorus—there is a delicious encampment of the black tents of a tribe of Gypsies." While he was in Russia he was continually ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: Francesca da Rimini • George Henry Boker
... features associated with it which I have not seen in print, which have probably disappeared with the progress of the age, and to which, therefore, allusion may be made. One, as it presents itself to my memory, is the great variety and picturesqueness of character which the university then presented. I would like to know whether the changes in men which one fancies he sees during his passage from youth to age are real, or only relative to his point of view. If my impressions ...
— The Reminiscences of an Astronomer • Simon Newcomb
... lurched sideways on the trail, so that the missile merely grazed him. We heard a subdued protest of one syllable, as he turned and went back. It was all uninteresting night to me now—beauty, picturesqueness, enchantment gone, with that repressed yelp. I didn't even rise from my seat on the rock. I had looked too close. ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort
... where a row or double row of Lombardy poplars is very effective. But I think you'll agree with me that one lone poplar is not. The catalpa is quite lovely by itself. Its leaves are broad, its flowers attractive, the seed pods which cling to the tree until away into the winter, add a bit of picturesqueness. The bright berries of the ash, the brilliant foliage of the sugar maple, the blossoms of the tulip tree, the bark of the white birch, and the leaves of the copper beech—all these are beauty ...
— The Library of Work and Play: Gardening and Farming. • Ellen Eddy Shaw
... and retreating chins—such are the features of this singular trio. The man's face is somewhat forbidding, the boy's less so, while the countenance of the girl has a pleasing expression—or, at least, a picturesqueness such as is commonly associated with gipsies. What chiefly attracts Henry Chester to them, however, while still further perplexing him as to their nationality, is that all three are attired in the ordinary way as other well-dressed people in the streets of Portsmouth. The man and boy wear ...
— The Land of Fire - A Tale of Adventure • Mayne Reid
... by means of loops and ribbons, has an effect which is not without its picturesqueness, perhaps more so than is our system of "keeping things together" in clothing matters. After all it is only a matter of opinion. The inhabitants of the land of Cho-sen, from my experience, are not much given to washing and still less to bathing. I have seen them ...
— Corea or Cho-sen • A (Arnold) Henry Savage-Landor
... which gave a name to the place, is at the meeting of two rivers—one flowing from Spirillen Lake and the other from the Randsfjord, and was at one time beautiful. Now, however, its picturesqueness is marred by the presence of a barn-like structure containing the pulping works, while the fall itself is utilized to drive the machinery. And, it must be confessed, all this has been brought about by an ...
— Peeps at Many Lands: Norway • A.F. Mockler-Ferryman
... doubtless, aware of the effect of her graceful attitudinizing, seemed in no haste to conclude her devotions. As I recalled the charming tableau, those lines wherein Buchanan sought to photograph the picturesqueness of the Digentia, float up from some sympathetic cell ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... the South." These and similar outgivings attracted the attention of a large element of the Republican party, and he was nominated for the Presidency, against General Grant, in 1872. Mr. Greeley's canvass was one of great picturesqueness and industry. He made a series of speeches extending over a tour from New England to the West, and returning to New York, which were marked by a most wonderful originality, freshness, and brilliance; but nothing could avail to stem the tide of prejudice which rose ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various
... announced? There were the majestic sweep of velvet, the floating of cloudlike gossamer, the flashing diamond, the starry pearl, the flaming ruby, the blazing carbuncle. There were marvelous toilets where contrast and harmony and picturesqueness—the effect of every color and ornament—had been patiently studied as the artist studies each shade and line on his canvas. And when the laugh and the jest and the wit were sounding all about her, and the intoxicating music came sweeping in from the dancing-room, there came over Mary ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 11, No. 24, March, 1873 • Various
... Churchmen and Dissenters in an English city, and they threaten no organic controversy. England has great reason to be proud of Quebec. The English flag has a home on those heights which we have already said may challenge the world for bold picturesqueness and beauty. ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume II (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... in a prahu which was upset. Afterward we had a swift and beautiful passage in a canyon through the mountain ridge between almost perpendicular sides, where long rows of sago-palms were the main feature, small cascades on either side adding to the picturesqueness. At the foot of the rapids we made camp in order to enable me to visit a small salt-water accumulation in the jungle a couple of kilometres farther down the river. As we landed near the place, we ...
— Through Central Borneo: - An Account of Two Years' Travel in the Land of Head-Hunters - Between the Years 1913 and 1917 • Carl Lumholtz
... in the Southern Department" is a valuable military history and a very interesting book. The movements of Greene in face of Cornwallis are described with a precision which renders the narrative valuable to military students, and a picturesqueness which rivets the attention of the general reader. From these memoirs a very clear conception of the writer's character may be derived, and everywhere in them is felt the presence of a cool and dashing nature, a man gifted with ...
— A Life of Gen. Robert E. Lee • John Esten Cooke
... is not the secret of the success of this book. Its flowing style, the use of short Anglo-Saxon words,[3] its picturesqueness, the power of description, the philosophic arrangement all contribute to it, but chiefly, I believe, the enthusiasm of the young Dana, his sympathy for his fellows and interest in new scenes and strange peoples, and with it all, the real poetry that runs through ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... sound he gave to the syllables threw the word into wonderful picturesqueness, enchanting Owen. It was the first time he had heard an Arab pronounce this word, so characteristically African; and he asked him to say it again for the pleasure of hearing it, liking the way the Saharian spoke it, with an accent at once tender and proud, that of a native speaking of his ...
— Sister Teresa • George Moore
... The bark is of a bright cinnamon color and is handsomely braided and reticulated on thrifty trees, flaking off in thin, shining ribbons that are sometimes used by the Indians for tent matting. Its fine color and picturesqueness are appreciated by artists, but to me the juniper seems a singularly strange and taciturn tree. I have spent many a day and night in its company and always have found it silent and rigid. It seems to be a survivor of some ancient race, wholly ...
— The Yosemite • John Muir
... runners, by way of refreshing them. As darkness comes on, torches of resinous pine wood are lighted and carried along to illuminate the path for the runners, that they may not stumble, making the scene one of extreme picturesqueness, as these torchbearers, demon-like, hurry ...
— Unknown Mexico, Volume 1 (of 2) • Carl Lumholtz
... Hodshon's lack of picturesqueness. He was like no detective she had read about between Sherlock Holmes and Philo Gubb. He was like no detective at all. It was almost impossible to accept him as ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... "I'm afraid his picturesqueness as a Kentucky Colonel appeals to her too much. And then he is new to her—a new type. She only met him in Paris, and he had done some things in ...
— The Beautiful Lady • Booth Tarkington
... which, though without education, learns everything. He possessed an inexhaustible, imperturbable store of talk. His words gushed forth abundantly in original remarks, laughable images, the metaphors that flow from the comic genius of crowds. He had the natural picturesqueness of the unadulterated farce. He was brimming over with amusing stories and buffoonery, rich in the possession of the richest of all repertories of house-painter's nonsense. Being a member of divers of the low haunts called lists, ...
— Germinie Lacerteux • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
... the left shoulder that attractive attachment, or frilled half-coat, hanging loosely behind like the wounded wing of a bird, which was called the pelisse, though it was known among the troopers themselves as a 'sling-jacket.' It added amazingly to their picturesqueness in women's eyes, and, indeed, in the eyes of ...
— A Changed Man and Other Tales • Thomas Hardy
... reforms. He merely changes his vice. And he! Mr. Mortlake, who is fond of what he calls the picturesqueness of Charlestown by night, has seen him—well, it is enough that I should have heard. You have been too intimate with the little Queen lately. You never could stand it! Suffice it to say, that brandy, or rum, or whatever he ...
— The Gorgeous Isle - A Romance; Scene: Nevis, B.W.I. 1842 • Gertrude Atherton
... past. But there is no redeeming feature in the Manchegan landscape; it has all the sameness of the desert without its dignity; the few towns and villages that break its monotony are mean and commonplace, there is nothing venerable about them, they have not even the picturesqueness of poverty; indeed, Don Quixote's own village, Argamasilla, has a sort of oppressive respectability in the prim regularity of its streets and houses; everything is ignoble; the very windmills are the ugliest and shabbiest ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... so keenly alive to the picturesqueness of the scenes through which he passed as the modern visitor, and in the account of his travels he took no note of the long lines of laden boats going up or down stream, nor of the vast sheet of water glowing in the midday sun, nor of the mountains honeycombed with tombs and quarries, at the ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 9 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... See was the modern and fashionable district. It was here that the king and the archbishop had their palaces and the wealthy their brick and stone. The public park skirted the lake, and was patterned after those fine gardens which add so much to the picturesqueness of Vienna and Berlin. There were wide gravel paths and long avenues of lofty chestnuts and lindens, iron benches, fountains and winding flower beds. The park, the palaces, and the Continental Hotel enclosed a public square, paved with asphalt, ...
— The Puppet Crown • Harold MacGrath
... delightful story of a little girl who had inherited a most remarkable musical talent, which found its natural expression through the medium of the violin. The picturesqueness of Mrs. Jamison's stories is remarkable, and the reader unconsciously becomes Seraph's friend and sympathizer in all her trials ...
— The Land of the Kangaroo - Adventures of Two Youths in a Journey through the Great Island Continent • Thomas Wallace Knox
... Paris, in four handsome octavo volumes. It is the fruit of long and conscientious researches, and is written in a style of seductive elegance. The author is no dry chronicler, or plodding statician, but an artist, fully alive to the picturesqueness of his topic. He carries his reader with him into the time and the scenes he describes, and makes him a participant in the romantic and adventurous life of the period. His book is thus as entertaining as it ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... almost as completely effaced as Verulam. But the church, by being bought for $2000 for the St. Albans parish church, is still preserved, and is one of the most interesting ecclesiastical structures in England; yet its great length and massive central tower are rather unfavorable to its picturesqueness, though the tower when seen from a distance impresses by its grandeur and simplicity. In this tower, as well as in other parts of the church, can be detected the ancient bricks from Verulam. The ground-plan of St. Albans Church is a Latin ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... morning it still rained. Dark skies, thick atmosphere, a gloomy outlook upon ways where no traveller for mere pleasure was to be seen; none but people bent on business of one sort or another. Yet everything was delightful to Dolly's eyes; the novelty was perfect, the picturesqueness undeniable. What she could see of the lagoon, of the vessels at anchor, the flying gondolas, the canals and the bridges over them, and the beautiful Riva, put Dolly in a rapture. Her eye roved, her heart swelled. "O mother!" she exclaimed, ...
— The End of a Coil • Susan Warner
... partly because the parties naturally do not let outsiders into all their secrets, and partly because romantic minds and imaginative litterateurs are always busy developing plain facts and unfounded rumours into wonderful myths. The picturesqueness of the story, the piquancy of the anecdote, is generally in inverse proportion to the narrator's knowledge of the matter in question. In short, truth is only too often most unconscionably sacrificed to effect. Accounts, for instance, such as L. Enault and Karasowski have given ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... heathen kingdoms to accept the cross was Mercia, which corresponds very roughly to what we call the Midlands. The unbaptized king, Penda, has even achieved a certain picturesqueness through this fact, and through the forays and furious ambitions which constituted the rest of his reputation; so much so that the other day one of those mystics who will believe anything but Christianity proposed to "continue the work of ...
— A Short History of England • G. K. Chesterton
... freer moral limbs of natural folk, faded and stained by weather and earth into new and richer tints, had lost all its original fashionable stiffness, and crudeness of colour, and niminy-piminy fit, and had acquired instead I know not what grace of unexpectedness, picturesqueness, and ease.[1] ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... the doctor were ordinary looking men. They did not add to the picturesqueness of the scene, but each carried a bag which was charged with romance ...
— The Huntress • Hulbert Footner
... One sees through all his nature-poetry the traces of the heredity of the early settler, the keen enjoyment of the fresh and unhackneyed in nature, even of the angularity of the New England farmhouse and the brightness and newness of the villages, so crude to the tastes founded in the picturesqueness of the Old World. Not even Emerson, with all his indifference to the mere form of things, took to unimproved and uncivilized nature as Lowell did, and his free delight in the Wilderness was a thing to remember, and perhaps by none so keenly ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... and the poet write. During his life in Salem, of which the introduction to The Scarlet Letter describes the official aspect, he wrote that romance. It is inspired by the spirit of the place. It presents more vividly than any history the gloomy picturesqueness of early New England life. There is no strain in our literature so characteristic or more real than that which Hawthorne had successfully attempted in several of his earlier sketches, and of which The Scarlet Letter is the great triumph. It became ...
— Literary and Social Essays • George William Curtis
... the rush of fugitives fleeing under the influence of panic-terror. They are like the well-known words, 'I came, I saw, I conquered,' only that here we have to do with swift defeat—they came, they saw, they were conquered. They are, in regard to vivid picturesqueness, arising from the broken construction, singularly like other words which refer to the same event in the forty-sixth psalm, 'The heathen raged, the kingdoms were moved; He uttered His voice, the earth ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... now wearing away. Trees grow in some of the deserted apartments, and ivy creeps along the walls; though the ruins have little of the picturesqueness of decay. The best point of view, or north-west, is represented in the Engraving; a short distance hence lies ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 566, September 15, 1832 • Various
... and on the other, a most interesting professional argument; for when he described the battle, and illustrated his views by diagrams, it was like a chapter in one of his own sea-stories, so minute, graphic, and spirited was the picture he drew. The dogmatism was more than compensated for by the picturesqueness of the scene; his self-complacency was exceeded by his wonderful ability. He quoted Cooper's 'Naval History' as if it were 'Blackstone;' he indulged in reminiscences; he made digressions and told anecdotes; ...
— James Fenimore Cooper - American Men of Letters • Thomas R. Lounsbury
... herself in Lord Lambeth again, as she had done at Newport; only it seemed to her that here he might become more interesting. He would be an unconscious part of the antiquity, the impressiveness, the picturesqueness, of England; and poor Bessie Alden, like many a Yankee maiden, was terribly ...
— An International Episode • Henry James
... situated amid the umbrageous woods and pastoral meadow-lands through which the Shannon flows at its confluence with the little Ovaan River. His infancy thus cradled in a landscape rich in the diversified picturesqueness of storied ruin and historic tradition, what wonder that Gerald at a very early age should feel the inspiration of his poetic surroundings as he looked towards the winding river, the green fields, the islands mirrored in the tributary Fergus, and the solemn shade ...
— Donahoe's Magazine, Volume 15, No. 1, January 1886 • Various
... is a wealth of imagery, a luxury of picturesqueness, together with that straightforward simplicity so alluring in the story- teller. Not only is our attention so captivated that we seem under a spell, but our sympathy is invoked and retained. We actually wince ...
— Malayan Literature • Various Authors
... expatiated on the picturesqueness of the country and from time to time, as if by chance, his eyes met those of Jeanne, and she felt a strange sensation at the quickly averted glance which betrayed tender admiration and ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... learned lady, who taught me in person the picturesqueness of grumpiness. Her temper was ever perfect, because she was never in the wrong, but I being so, she was grumpy. She carried my iniquity under her brows, and looked out on me through it. I was ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... to thinking that Mr. Allen's account of the influences which surrounded Mr. Darwin's youth, if tainted with picturesqueness, is still substantially correct. On an earlier page he had written:- "It is impossible to take up any scientific memoirs or treatises of the first half of our own century without seeing at a glance how every mind of high original scientific importance was permeated ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... has not succeeded in retaining any of its gates it is interesting by reason of the few old houses that still surround it, whilst behind their gabled roofs rises the double-towered Cathedral, completing the picturesqueness of a really charming scene, of which the prevailing tone is a dark grey, stained and almost blackened by weathering and by age. In the fourteenth century the Close at Exeter was enclosed with walls, and until ...
— Exeter • Sidney Heath
... alike through his writings and his life. A busy scholar at Paris, a reforming Archdeacon in Wales, the wittiest of Court chaplains, the most troublesome of bishops, Gerald became the gayest and most amusing of all the authors of his time. In his hands the stately Latin tongue took the vivacity and picturesqueness of the jongleur's verse. Reared as he had been in classic studies, he threw pedantry contemptuously aside. "It is better to be dumb than not to be understood," is his characteristic apology for the novelty of his style: "new times require new fashions, and so I have thrown ...
— History of the English People, Volume I (of 8) - Early England, 449-1071; Foreign Kings, 1071-1204; The Charter, 1204-1216 • John Richard Green
... verse flowed as naturally from his pen as music from the throat of the nightingale, Clare, all his life long, was unable to express his thoughts in prose composition. There was not wanting in his letters a certain ruggedness and picturesqueness of style, but it was marred nearly always by ill-expressed and frequently incoherent eruptions, and disquisitions on extraneous matters, marking the absence of a regular chain of thought. It was here that Clare's want of education was ...
— The Life of John Clare • Frederick Martin
... brow, her penetrating gaze, her straight nose, high cheek bones and delicately molded lips and chin and grace of her supple, sinuous body, together with the picturesqueness of her costume, presented a picture of ...
— When Dreams Come True • Ritter Brown
... stranger take into consideration that Rembrandt took up his abode in the town when it was rapidly growing, and when the picturesqueness of its late-mediaeval appearance had to concede to graver conceptions, based on the classics and the Italian renaissance. Let him remember that the threefold girdle of wide canals lined with big houses, which now embraces the old city, was at that time only in course of construction, ...
— Rembrandt's Amsterdam • Frits Lugt
... were the robbers of the Rhine, and such the code of honour which existed among them. A romantic institution they no doubt were, yet it was a form of picturesqueness whose ...
— Hero Tales and Legends of the Rhine • Lewis Spence
... pledges; old earthen jugs, flasks, a brass kettle, old books, and a huge pile of worn-out and broken rubbish, which he is examining. These things are represented with vast fidelity, yet with bold and free touches, unlike the minute, microscopic work of other Dutch masters; and a wonderful picturesqueness is wrought out of these humble materials, and even the figure and head of the pawnbroker have ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... letters to his friends of Rome, Naples, and other Italian cities in which he willingly lingered, are picturesque and worthy of the subject. Petrarch is also conscious of the beauty of rock scenery, and is perfectly able to distinguish the picturesqueness from the utility of nature. During his stay among the woods of Reggio, the sudden sight of an impressive landscape so affected him that he resumed a poem which he had long laid aside. But the deepest ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... it has not been demolished. If you reach Guerande from Croisic, after crossing a dreary landscape of salt-marshes, you will experience a strong sensation at sight of that vast fortification, which is still as good as ever. If you come to it by Saint-Nazaire, the picturesqueness of its position and the naive grace of its environs will please you no less. The country immediately surrounding it is ravishing; the hedges are full of flowers, honeysuckles, roses, box, and many enchanting plants. It is like an English garden, designed ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... the altar. The east window had either then or previously been deprived of all its tracery, and was an expanse of plain glass with only a little remains of a cusp at the top of the arch. The bells were in one of the true Hampshire weather-boarded square towers, of which very few still exist in their picturesqueness. There were the remains of an old broken font, and a neat white marble one, of which the tradition was that it was given by a parish clerk named David Fidler, and it still exists as the lining ...
— John Keble's Parishes • Charlotte M Yonge
... distance of more than two thousand miles, is a republic which represents a civilization possibly as old as that of Egypt; a land, notwithstanding its proximity to us, of which the average American knows less than he does of France or Italy, but which rivals them in natural picturesqueness, and nearly equals ...
— Aztec Land • Maturin M. Ballou
... extent. Only one of the ponies was visible, and he resembled a small dog, standing with head down, in the middle of the grassy plot. Beyond and between were foot-hills, peaks of varying heights, gorges, ravines and hollows, with rocks, boulders and stunted trees scattered in profusion. The picturesqueness of the scene was deepened by a thin, blue column of vapor in the distance, ascending from an invisible camp-fire. The smoke rose steadily, so it was not to be supposed that it was meant for a ...
— Two Boys in Wyoming - A Tale of Adventure (Northwest Series, No. 3) • Edward S. Ellis
... all this region, which was now to be disturbed by the din and havoc of war. Its picturesqueness long since disappeared. Upon Manhattan Island, the city's push "uptown"-ward has been like the cut of a drawing knife, a remorseless process of levelling and "filling-in." Forty times in population and twenty in area has it expanded beyond the growth of 1776. ...
— The Campaign of 1776 around New York and Brooklyn • Henry P. Johnston
... Boston to find a city under martial law, a city whose streets were patrolled by khaki-clad figures with guns, whose traffic was regulated by soldierly semaphores, who linked intelligence with military training, and picturesqueness ...
— The Trumpeter Swan • Temple Bailey
... difficult to distinguish between the light and life. The sunshine seemed literally to push back the houses to make room for the crowd, and the wide boulevards looked wider than ever. If you had cursed the sentiment of the day ever so, you would have had eyes for its picturesqueness, I think, so I wish you had been there to see. Louis Napoleon showed his usual tact and courage by riding on horseback quite alone, at least ten paces between himself and his nearest escort, which of course ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning |
