"Porphyry" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... in the basilican [15] Churches of Italy. The exterior of a Byzantine church is plain and unimposing, but the interior is adorned on a magnificent scale. The eyes of the worshiper are dazzled by the walls faced with marble slabs of variegated colors, by the columns of polished marble, jasper, and porphyry, and by the brilliant mosaic pictures of gilded glass. The entire impression is one of richness and splendor. Byzantine artists, though mediocre painters and sculptors, excelled in all kinds of decorative work. ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... edifices, and four lofty pyramids at the angles of the walls. The entrance was by vast halls, followed by saloons, which conducted to grand porticos, the ascent to which was by a flight of ninety steps. The interior was decorated with columns of porphyry and colossal statues of Egyptian gods. The whole was surrounded by a wall, but the passages were so intricate that no stranger could find the way without a guide. The substructions of this famous labyrinth still exist, and Milizia says, "as they were not arched, it is wonderful that they ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects and Curiosities of Art (Vol. 3 of 3) • S. Spooner
... surrounded its own neighbourhood with poisonous fumes; and that I was approaching it. I must have somehow crawled, or dragged myself forward. There is an impression on my mind that it was a purple land of pure porphyry; there is some faint memory, or dream, of hearing a long-drawn booming of waves upon its crags: I do not know whence I have them. I think that I remember retching with desperate jerks of the travailing intestines; also ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... before our eyes. Rocks of eruption, sedimentary rocks, changed (metamorphosed) rocks, conglomerates — compound rocks are definite associations of cryctognostically simple fossils. There are four phases in the formative condition; rocks of eruption, p 20 endogenous (granite, sienite, porphyry, greenstone, hyperathene, rock, euphotide, melaphyre, basalt, and phonolithe); sedimentary rocks (silurian schist, coal measures, limestone, travertino, infusorial deposit); metamorphosed rock, which contains ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... by the blow of a hand out of the ether, broke in two, and the ravished Sun, like the eye of a Venus floating through her ancient heavens—for she once stood even here—looked mildly in from the upper deep; then a holy radiance filled the temple, and burned on the porphyry of the pavement, and Albano looked around him in an ecstasy of wonder and delight, and said with low voice: "How transfigured at this moment is everything in this sacred place! Raphael's spirit comes forth from his grave in this ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... signet down to the pottery rings and glass beads worn by the poor. As might be expected in an Egyptian collection, the scarabaeus, or sacred beetle, frequently meets the eye. Here are scarabaei in gold, cornelion, chalcedony, heliotrope, torquoise, lapis-lazuli, porphyry, terra cotta, and other materials; many of them having royal names and ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 455 - Volume 18, New Series, September 18, 1852 • Various
... harder than Porphyry or Agate, the Chisel of my love, drove by the Mallet of my fidelity, would have made some impression on thee. I, that have shaped as I pleased the most untoward of substances, hoped by the Compass of reason, the ...
— Town and Country, or, Life at Home and Abroad • John S. Adams
... the day before. Here the scrub approached the river, leaving only a narrow belt of open forest, which was occasionally interrupted by low ridges of stunted silver-leaved Ironbark. Pegmatite and Porphyry (with a very few small crystals of felspar) and Gneiss? were observed in situ. On our way we passed a fine lagoon. A dry but not hot wind blew from the S. S. W.; the night and morning were bright; cumuli with sharp margins hung about after ...
— Journal of an Overland Expedition in Australia • Ludwig Leichhardt
... as also did the prie-dieu, enriched with silver daisies, which Michelangelo had designed for Margaret of Navarre. The jewelled crucifix was gone, together with the old chain bible and ebony lectern from the Cistercian Monastery at La Trappe. The curious chalice, too, of porphyry starred with beryl, taken at the sack of Panama, and recovered a century later from an inn at Saragossa, had disappeared from its place; and where illuminated missals and monkish books had formerly lain upon the long window seat were ...
— The Orchard of Tears • Sax Rohmer
... and covers the granitic rocks of Banda Oriental. From the Strait of Magellan to the Colorado, a distance of about eight hundred miles, the face of the country is everywhere composed of shingle: the pebbles are chiefly of porphyry, and probably owe their origin to the rocks of the Cordillera. North of the Colorado this bed thins out, and the pebbles become exceedingly small, and here the characteristic ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin
... Pellucid as porphyry cell— Is based on a principle wise." "Quite so," exclaimed Pond ...
— Bab Ballads and Savoy Songs • W. S. Gilbert
... stair was marble white so smooth And polish'd, that therein my mirror'd form Distinct I saw. The next of hue more dark Than sablest grain, a rough and singed block, Crack'd lengthwise and across. The third, that lay Massy above, seem'd porphyry, that flam'd Red as the life-blood spouting from a vein. On this God's angel either foot sustain'd, Upon the threshold seated, which appear'd A rock of diamond. Up the trinal steps My leader cheerily drew ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... mosque, and each represented a different portion of the building—presumably that of St. Sophia. The capitals of the pillars were exquisite, few being duplicated, and the shafts were solid columns of black marble, supported on bases of porphyry. The floor was a network of mosaics, and the walls were a blaze of colored marbles. The altar, which stood in the central room, was of silver, with trappings of gold-embroidered velvet, and paraphernalia of gold. Dartmouth ...
— What Dreams May Come • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... had really furnished its capital and its original design. The gilded bar-rooms, flashing with mirrors and cut glass; the saloons, with their desert expanse of Turkey carpet and oasis of clustered divans and gilded tables; the great dining-room, with porphyry columns, and walls and ceilings shining with allegory—all these things which had attracted his youthful wonder without distracting his correct simplicity of taste he now began to comprehend. It was the bank's money "at work." In the clatter of dishes in the ...
— The Three Partners • Bret Harte
... this corrupted age Could scarcely rear: the lofty ceiling shone With richest tracery, the beams were bound In golden coverings; no scant veneer Lay on its walls, but built in solid blocks Of marble, gleamed the palace. Agate stood In sturdy columns, bearing up the roof; Onyx and porphyry on the spacious floor Were trodden 'neath the foot; the mighty gates Of Maroe's throughout were formed, He mere adornment; ivory clothed the hall, And fixed upon the doors with labour rare Shells of the tortoise gleamed, from Indian seas, With frequent emeralds studded. ...
— Pharsalia; Dramatic Episodes of the Civil Wars • Lucan
... creatures were to be found only in limestone; but now that he has sent to the Academie specimens of gneiss and mica schist, containing pholades, on which the acid has no effect, he conceives that they must have entered by boring. They have also been found in porphyry—a fact of which Brongniart said, many years ago, that nature had concealed the explanation, and we must wait for a solution. Whether M. Cailliaud's solution be the true one or not, is a point that will soon be verified or disproved by geologists and naturalists, who ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal - Volume XVII., No 422, New Series, January 31, 1852 • Various
... opposed to modern ontology, which denies all ideas to the brute creation, and explains each proof of their intellectual activity by the unintelligible word "instinct." The ancients held very different opinions, particularly the new Platonists, one of whom (Porphyry, liber ii. De abstinentia) treats largely of the intellect and language of animals. Since Cartesius, however, who denied not only understanding, but even feeling, to animals, and represented them as mere animated machines (De passionib. Pars i. Artic. iv. et de Methodo, No. 5, ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V1 • William Mienhold
... church. Outside it, towards the market-place, is a noble gallery, and above it four famous horses, cut in brass by the ancient Romans, and seem all moving, and at the very next step must needs leap down on the beholder. About the church are six hundred pillars of marble, porphyry, and ophites. Inside is a treasure greater than either, at St. Denys, or Loretto, or Toledo. Here a jewelled pitcher given the seigniory by a Persian king, also the ducal cap blazing with jewels, and on its crown a diamond and a chrysolite, ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... The Romans introduced many innovations in the general use and treatment of the orders. Monolithic shafts were preferred to those built up of superposed drums. The fluting was omitted on these, and when hard and semi-precious stone like porphyry or verd-antique was the material, it was highly polished to bring out its color. These polished monoliths were often of great size, and they were used in ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Architecture - Seventh Edition, revised • Alfred D. F. Hamlin
... To darken, and in cloudy height sublime, The spectral march of some approaching Doom! Nor these alone, oh! Mother of the world, People thy chambers, echoless and vast; Their dewy freshness like ambrosial cools Life's fever-thirst, and to the fainting soul Their porphyry walls are touched with light, and gleams Of shining wonder dazzle through the void, Like those bright marvels which the travele'rs torch Wakes from the darkness of three thousand years, In rock-hewn sepulchres of Theban kings. Prophets, whose brows of pale, unearthly glow Reflect the twilight ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 4 October 1848 • Various
... to do so; it may, indeed, be said that the river is made into a canal. When we come into the courtyards before the house there are several pieces of antiquity to entertain the curious, as particularly a noble column of porphyry, with a marble statue of Venus on the top of it. In Italy, and especially at Rome and Naples, we see a great variety of fine columns, and some of them of excellent workmanship and antiquity; and at some of the courts of the princes ...
— From London to Land's End - and Two Letters from the "Journey through England by a Gentleman" • Daniel Defoe
... of architectural grandeur and beauty which he had never before noticed. The enormous buttresses and lofty pinnacles of the central tower were tinged with the beams of the rising sun, and glowed as if built of porphyry. While gazing at the summit of this tower, and calling to mind the magnificent view he had recently witnessed from it at the same hour, if a wish could have transported him thither at that moment, he would have enjoyed it again. But as this could ...
— Old Saint Paul's - A Tale of the Plague and the Fire • William Harrison Ainsworth
... been called, by Clement of Alexandria, the Moses of Athens; the philosopher of the Christians, by Arnobius; and the god of philosophers, by Cicero—Athenaeus accuses of envy; Theopompus of lying; Suidas of avarice; Aulus Gellius, of robbery; Porphyry, of incontinence; ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... of the avenue are the tombs, with groups of trees about them. Each tomb is really a temple in which white and pink marble, porphyry and carved teak-wood are combined, not indeed with harmony or taste, but, what is rare in China, with lines of great purity and severity. One of the halls of these tombs is about a hundred feet long ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 30. September, 1873 • Various
... secondly, the impression instantly made on Commynes' mind by the distinction between the elder palaces and those built "within this last hundred years; which all have their fronts of white marble brought from Istria, a hundred miles away, and besides, many a large piece of porphyry ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin
... the other paper ball, unfolding it near the orange flame. The inner surface was red, the earthly red of porphyry, and cracked and scarred by the crumpling. Nearly obliterated by the lacework of wrinkles and scratches was a scrawl, evidently scarred into the glazed surface by a knife-point. The upper part was ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts
... down a little by natural steps from the master to the disciples, we have, six or seven centuries later, the Platonists,— who also cannot be skipped,—Plotinus, Porphyry, Proclus, Synesius, Jamblichus. Of Jamblichus the Emperor Julian said, "that he was posterior to Plato in time, not in genius." Of Plotinus, we have eulogies by Porphyry and Longinus, and the favor ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... of Alus, and then went forward again between bare walls of greyish-green and red porphyry. These cliffs rose higher and higher, but from time to time, above the lower range, they could see the rugged summit of some giant of the range, though, bowed under their heavy loads, they paid small heed ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... now brought forward with due ceremony. The bowl was of a species of red stone resembling porphyry; the stem was six feet in length, decorated with tufts of horse-hair dyed red. The pipe-bearer stepped within the circle, lighted the pipe, held it towards the sun, then towards the different points of the compass, after which he handed it ...
— Astoria - Or, Anecdotes Of An Enterprise Beyond The Rocky Mountains • Washington Irving
... the rocks is in general basaltic, but white, black, and green marble, red porphyry, jasper, red and grey granite, abound east of the Buonaventura. Quartz, upon some of the mountains near the sea-shore, is found in immense blocks and principally in that mountain range which is designated in the map as the "Montagne du Monstre," at ...
— Travels and Adventures of Monsieur Violet • Captain Marryat
... the interior fittings is a porphyry altar, placed by Sacheverell, who was Rector from 1713 to 1724, and who is buried beneath it. A marble font, at which Disraeli was baptized at the age of twelve, is also interesting, and the pulpit of richly-carved wood, attributed to Grinling Gibbons, is very handsome. On the west ...
— Holborn and Bloomsbury - The Fascination of London • Sir Walter Besant
... production oPeri tes ton Euangelion diaphonias, the latter Concordia Evangelii Mattaei et Lucae. But by far the ablest of the ancient writings on this subject is the De Consensu Evangelistarum of St. Augustine. Many authors, such as Porphyry, in his Kata Christianon logoi, had pointed with an air of triumph to the seeming discrepancies in the Evangelic records as an argument subversive of their claim to paramount authority ("Hoc enim solent quasi palmare suae vanitatis objicere, quod ipsi Evangelistae inter seipsos dissentiant."—Lib. ...
— Notes and Queries, No. 209, October 29 1853 • Various
... a mountain formed of marine deposits, and which has been raised by subterraneous fire, and those large and singular veins which you see at the base and rising through the substance of the strata are composed of volcanic porphyry, and offer a most striking and beautiful example of the generation and structure of rocks ...
— Consolations in Travel - or, the Last Days of a Philosopher • Humphrey Davy
... the dark forest, where the elv seems to collect within itself nature's whole deep gravity. The stream rolls its clear waters over a porphyry soil where the mill-wheel is driven, and the gigantic porphyry bowls and sarcophagi ...
— Pictures of Sweden • Hans Christian Andersen
... of classification make reference to the so-called bifurcate scheme of division as the only one by which exhaustive division can be surely achieved. This is commonly illustrated by the ancient tree of Porphyry. By this method any subject it is desired to subdivide is first divided by writing the name of one selected species at one branch and writing at the other branch the name of the same species prefixed by "Not." Thus the Agassiz classification of living beings ...
— The Classification of Patents • United States Patent Office
... human reason, and that we must investigate the Bible as we do other books. At least, I suppose he has reached some such conclusion. He may imagine that the pure gold of inspiration still runs through the quartz and porphyry of ignorance and mistake, and that all we have to do is to extract the shining metal by some process that may be called theological smelting; and if so I have no fault to find. Dr. Briggs has taken a step in advance—that is to say, the tree is growing, and when the tree ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... gate of Purgatory. This gate is approached by three stairs (faith, penitence and piety); the first stair is transparent white marble, as clear as crystal; the second is black and cracked; and the third is of blood-red porphyry (canto ix.). The porter marked on Dant[^e]'s forehead seven P's (peccata, "sins"), and told him he would lose one at every stage, till he reached the river which divided Purgatory from Paradise. Virgil continued his guide till they came to Leth[^e], when he left him during sleep (canto xxx.). ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... oblong court, the east end being formed of a gallery with columns inclosing the sanctuary. The north and south sides are inclosed by piazzas with many noble columns. There are two hundred and fifty of these, formed of single stones of granite and porphyry, which are known to have come from Memphis and Heliopolis. The whole deserted temple constitutes the most important monument of Arabian architecture in Cairo. Seen as it was in the dull gray of early morning, before the sun had fairly lighted the well-preserved minarets, it presented ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... the King in St. Peter's itself. Here, a short way from the entrance, was the rota porphyretica, a round porphyry stone inserted in the pavement, on which the King and Pope knelt. The imperial candidate here made his profession of faith, the Cardinal-bishop of Portus placed himself in the middle of the rota and pronounced the second oration. The King was then draped in new vestments, was made a cleric in ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 5 • Various
... the aviation field near the magnificent ruins of ancient Lebna. The extent of these ruins, great arches, portals and columns of marble, porphyry and cut stone overlooking the sea, though half buried by sand dunes, presents conclusive evidence of a ...
— Chit-Chat; Nirvana; The Searchlight • Mathew Joseph Holt
... blocks of porphyry—I believe there are three—in Cornwall, lying one on serpentine, one, I think, on slate, which—so I was always informed as a boy—were the stones which St. Kevern threw after St. Just when the latter stole his host's chalice and paten, and ran away with them to the Land's ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... amid the ruins of an Eastern city, men find a slab of porphyry or malachite so gorgeously grained, that not many whole and perfect works of art can stand undimmed and undiminished beside it. Such is the music ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... the Greek. The conservatism of the University of Paris at first forbade the study of the new Aristotle, but it soon became universal in the medieval universities. In addition to the works of Aristotle, as they were known in the Middle Ages, medieval students read such books as Porphyry's Isagoge, or Introduction to Aristotle; the criticism of Aristotle's Categories, by Gilbert de la Porree, known as the Sex Principia; the Summulae Logicales, a semi-grammatical, semi-logical treatise by Petrus Hispanus (Pope John XXI.); the Parva ...
— Life in the Medieval University • Robert S. Rait
... kinship with the animal world. "The spirit with which he (Theophrastus) regarded the animal world found no second expression till the present age" (Gomperz). Halliday, however, makes the statement that Porphyry(30) goes as far as any modern humanitarian in preaching ...
— The Evolution of Modern Medicine • William Osler
... passage leads to a vertical facade 46 feet high, pierced by a door between 17 and 18 feet in height, which was bordered by columns carrying a cornice, above which was a triangular relieving space, masked by slabs of red porphyry adorned with spiral decorations, while the whole facade appears to have been enriched with bronze ornaments and coloured marbles. The massive lintel of the door is 29 feet 6 inches long, 16 feet 6 inches deep, and 3 feet 4 inches high, with a weight of about 120 tons—a mass ...
— The Sea-Kings of Crete • James Baikie
... you must understand, which sprang up at the renaissance in the fifteenth century, was as indiscriminating as it was earnest. Men caught the trash as well as the jewels. They put the dreams of the Neoplatonists, Iamblicus, Porphyry, or Plotinus, or Proclus, on the same level as the sound dialectic philosophy of Plato himself. And these Neoplatonists were all, more or less, believers in magic—Theurgy, as it was called—in the power of charms and spells, in the occult virtues of herbs and gems, in the power of adepts to ...
— Historical Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... traitors, who, fearing Irene's vengeance or perhaps his own, since she threatened to tell him all the truth concerning them, seized Constantine and delivered him up to Irene. She, the mother who bore him, caused him to be taken to the purple Porphyry Chamber in the palace, that chamber in which, as the first-born of an emperor, he saw the light, and there robbed ...
— The Wanderer's Necklace • H. Rider Haggard
... arrived. The countess, hearing to what a condition his admiration had brought him, came on board the vessel to see him; the sight of her so charmed him, that he was able to say a few words to her before he expired. She caused him to be buried with great splendor, and erected a porphyry tomb over him, with an ...
— Cameos from English History, from Rollo to Edward II • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... the princess retired into a large room of marble and porphyry, where several bubbling fountains, refreshed the air with an agreeable coolness. As soon as she entered the music began, a sumptuous supper was served up, and the birds from several aviaries on each side of the room, of which Abricotina had the chief care, opened ...
— The Little Lame Prince - And: The Invisible Prince; Prince Cherry; The Prince With The Nose - The Frog-Prince; Clever Alice • Miss Mulock—Pseudonym of Maria Dinah Craik
... painted in the same manner, after the Arabian fashion, presented to the mind one of the most charming objects. In every space between the columns was a little sofa adorned in the same manner, and great vessels of china, crystal, jasper, jet, porphyry, agate, and other precious materials, garnished with gold and jewels; in these spaces were also so many large windows, with balconies projecting breast high, fitted up as the sofas, and looking out into ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Complete • Anonymous
... on Nineteenth Street into which Potash & Perlmutter proposed to move was an imposing fifteen-story structure. Burnished metal signs of its occupants flanked its wide doorway, and the entrance hall gleamed with gold leaf and plaster porphyry, while the uniform of each elevator attendant would have graced the high admiral of a ...
— Potash & Perlmutter - Their Copartnership Ventures and Adventures • Montague Glass
... The story of William Porphyry Benham is the story of a man who was led into adventure by an idea. It was an idea that took possession of his imagination quite early in life, it grew with him and changed with him, it interwove at last completely with his being. His story is its story. It was traceably germinating in the schoolboy; ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... prospect burst upon their view; the horizon seemed bounded by majestic mountains of porphyry—this third element or place of deposit of the enchanting primeval earth, out of which mighty but formless mass our living, breathing, and beautiful world sprang into creation, and the stars sang together for joy. In the midst of these mountains ...
— Berlin and Sans-Souci • Louise Muhlbach
... always live close to water, for my work was getting too full of those little jewelled thoughts that come from the sun and have no nation. I have no need to turn to my books of astrology to know that the common people are under the moon, or to Porphyry to remember the image-making power of the waters. Nor did I doubt the entire truth of what she said to me, for my head was full of fables that I had no longer the knowledge and emotion to write. Then you brought me with you to see your friends in the ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... in a building not far from the imperial palace. The pavement was of polished marble, and columns of porphyry supported a paneled dome. An altar with a statue of a heathen deity was at one end of the apartment. Magistrates in their robes occupied raised seats on the opposite end. In front of them were some soldiers guarding ...
— The Martyr of the Catacombs - A Tale of Ancient Rome • Anonymous
... church of the Renascence period, to fragments of mediaeval walls and a great tower which crowns the summit of the hill. At the feet of this height lie the two isles of Lerins, set in the blue waters of the bay; on the east the eye ranges over the porphyry hills of Napoul to the huge masses of the Estrelles; landwards a tumbled country with bright villas dotted over it rises gently to the Alps. As a strictly winter resort Cannes is far too exposed for the more delicate class of invalids; as a spring resort it is without ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... the scarcity of wood, has greatly crippled the iron industry. There are important soapstone quarries in the Gudbransdal and the Trondhjem basin; green colored slate in the Valders and at Vossevangen; and granite, syenite, and porphyry in ...
— Norwegian Life • Ethlyn T. Clough
... Paris to young Foch, in all the depression he found there, was undoubtedly the great Dome des Invalides, where, bathed in an unearthly radiance and surrounded by faded battle flags, lies the great porphyry ...
— Foch the Man - A Life of the Supreme Commander of the Allied Armies • Clara E. Laughlin
... this palace, and under it, is a small but unique Palatine Chapel in the Gothic style, built by King Roger in 1129. It is a perfect gem in its way, the walls and ceiling covered with beautiful mosaics, fine porphyry, and marbles, but it is too dark to be seen to advantage. The only way to obtain any idea of the real beauty of the mosaics is to go into the darkest corner, and so accustom your eyes to the deep gloom, when it becomes radiant with its ...
— Fair Italy, the Riviera and Monte Carlo • W. Cope Devereux
... manner as the others had fled from Madame's apartments. The prince then flew into the wildest rage. He kicked over a chiffonier, which tumbled on the carpet, broken into pieces. He next went into the galleries, and with the greatest coolness threw down, one after another, an enameled vase, a porphyry ewer, and a bronze candelabrum. The noise summoned every one ...
— Ten Years Later • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... myself the mosque before the Christians laid their desecrating hands upon it. The floor was of coloured tiles, tiles such as may still be seen in the Alhambra of Granada and in the Alcazar at Seville. The columns are of marble, of porphyry and jasper; tradition says they came from Carthage, from pagan temples in France and Christian churches in Spain; they are slender and unadorned, they must have contrasted astonishingly with the roof of larch wood, all ablaze with ...
— The Land of The Blessed Virgin; Sketches and Impressions in Andalusia • William Somerset Maugham
... Byzantium heard of me he left his porphyry chamber and set sail in his galleys. His slaves bare no torches that none might know of his coming. When the King of Cyprus heard of me he sent me ambassadors. The two Kings of Libya who are brothers brought ...
— A Florentine Tragedy—A Fragment • Oscar Wilde
... some egg shells remove the internal skin and grind them on a piece of porphyry, then put the powder in a small vessel of pure water, and when it has settled at the bottom, draw off the water and dry the powder in the sun. This powder must be preserved in a bottle; when you want to use it put a small quantity of ...
— Young's Demonstrative Translation of Scientific Secrets • Daniel Young
... only books worth studying are those of Aristotle and his true commentators, Alexander of Aphrodisias, Themistius, Averroes. Alfarabi and Avicenna are also important, but other writings, such as those of Empedocles, Pythagoras, Hermes, Porphyry, represent a pre-Aristotelian philosophy which is obsolete, and are a waste of time. The books of Isaac Israeli on the "Elements" and on "Definitions," are no better, seeing that Israeli was only a physician and no philosopher. He is not familiar with ...
— A History of Mediaeval Jewish Philosophy • Isaac Husik
... very costume of your incomparable slave, who has done me the honor to call here in your service. But now have you given of it the last and highest proof. Never has the wit of man before compounded an essence like that which lies buried in this porphyry vase.' ...
— Aurelian - or, Rome in the Third Century • William Ware
... grounds for supposing me wrong when they seek to invalidate my assertions. Let me assure them, at least, that I mean to be their friend, although they may not immediately recognise me as such. If I could obtain the public ear, and the principles I have advocated were carried into general practice, porphyry and serpentine would be given to them instead of limestone and brick; instead of tavern and shop-fronts they would have to build goodly churches and noble dwelling-houses; and for every stunted Grecism and stucco Romanism, into which they are now forced to shape their palsied thoughts, and to ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin
... pure eloquence of form. Casts of the Vatican busts stood against the walls and a niche at one end of the library contained a marble copy of the Apollo Belvedere. The sarcophagi with their winged genii, their garlands and bucranes, and porphyry tazzas, the fragments of Roman mosaic and Pompeian fresco-painting, roused Odo's curiosity as if they had been the scattered letters of a new alphabet; and he saw with astonishment his friend Vittorio's ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... Porphyry says: "By images addressed to sense, the ancients represented God and his powers—by the visible they typified the invisible for those who had learned to read in these types, as in a book, a treatise on the Gods. We need not wonder if the ignorant ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... mosaic. The walls decorated with marbles and rare sea shells. In every nook were marble pedestals and antique statuary, while the fountain in the centre, supplied from an underground stream, was of porphyry inlaid with mosaic. ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... thought that the Dependencies on Light were warmth, dryness, lightness, swiftness; and those of Darkness, cold, wet, weight, and slowness; and that the world derived its existence from these two principles, as from the male and the female. According to Porphyry, he conceived two opposing powers, one good, which he termed Unity, the Light, Right, the Equal, the Stable, the Straight; the other evil, which he termed Binary, Darkness, the Left, the Unequal, the Unstable, the Crooked. These ideas he received from the Orientals, for he dwelt twelve years at ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... sixty-five Churches of Rome, I have as yet visited but four, and may find time to see as many more of the most noteworthy. They seem richer in Sculpture, Porphyry, Mosaic, Carving, Tapestry, &c. than anything elsewhere well can be; but not equal in Architecture to the finest Churches in Genoa, the Cathedral at Pisa, and I think not externally to Notre Dame at Paris. Indeed, though large ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... must be good for men to hold up their hands even if the skies are empty. For if there are gods, they will be pleased, and if there are none, then there are none to be displeased. Sometimes the skies are gold and sometimes porphyry and sometimes ebony, but the trees and the temple stand still under it all. So the great Confucius taught us that if we do always the same things with our hands and our feet as do the wise beasts and birds, with our heads we may think many things: ...
— Manalive • G. K. Chesterton
... it in the felspathic rocks in 1844; and since then its percentage in granite, lava, trachyte, basalt, porphyry, dolomite, gneiss, syenite, dolerite, diorite, and a number of other rocks, has been determined by numerous investigators. For analyses of these rocks the reader is referred ...
— Manures and the principles of manuring • Charles Morton Aikman
... scientist, tells us that only by losing its life does the cell save it. The new science exhibits the body as a temple, constructed out of cells, as a building is made of bricks. Just as some St. Peter represents strange marble from Athens, beauteous woods from Cyprus, granite from Italy, porphyry from Egypt, all brought together in a single cathedral, so the human body is a glorious temple built by those architects called living cells. When the scientist searches out the beginning of bird or bud or acorn he comes to a single cell. ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis
... of a temple, the arch of an aqueduct, rose crowned with wall-flower and weeds out of the rank grass, the briars and nettles, the heaps of broken masonry and plaster, among which shone beneath the darting lizards, scraps of vermilion wall-fresco, the chips of purple porphyry or dark-green serpentine; long avenues of trees early sere, closed in by arum-fringed walls, or by ditches where the withered reeds creaked beneath the festoons of clematis and wild vine; solemn and solitary wildernesses within the city walls, where the silence was broken only ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... cracks on the plains, so abundant as to impede the traveller, seemed capable of absorbing not only the water which falls upon them, but also any which may descend from the low hills around. During our day's journey I found grey porphyry, the base consisting apparently of granular felspar with embedded crystals of common felspar and grains ...
— Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, Vol 2 (of 2) • Thomas Mitchell
... bitterness with it which cultivation may remove. Mica schist crowned some of the heights on the watershed, then gneiss, and now, as we descend further, we have igneous rocks of more recent eruption, porphyry and gneiss, with hornblende. A good deal of ferruginous conglomerate, with holes in it, covers many spots; when broken, it looks like yellow haematite, with black linings to the holes: this is probably the ore used in former times ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume I (of 2), 1866-1868 • David Livingstone
... vain murmur? Have you forgotten that I am a bit of a philosopher myself? And do you think to satisfy me with some rags, torn by ignorant men from the purple garment of AEmilius, when AEmilius, Porphyry, and Plato, in all their glory, did not satisfy me! The systems devised by the sages are but tales imagined to amuse the eternal childishness of men. We divert ourselves with them, as we do with the stories of The Ass, The Tub, and The ...
— Thais • Anatole France
... a chamber in the palace that has eight walls of red porphyry, and a brass-sealed ceiling hung with lamps. The Emperor touched one of the walls and it opened, and we passed down a corridor that was lit with many torches. In niches upon each side stood great wine-jars filled to the brim with silver pieces. ...
— Selected Prose of Oscar Wilde - with a Preface by Robert Ross • Oscar Wilde
... heads and cobbles that are scattered over the fields, or from quarry chips. And here will arise the question of cost. It would seem decidedly grand to use for the corners substantial blocks of hewn stone,—sandstone, granite, marble, or porphyry,—channelled and chamfered, rock-faced, tooled, rubbed, or decorated; key-stones and voussoirs embellished with your monogram or enriched by any other charming device you choose to invent; bands of encaustic ...
— Homes And How To Make Them • Eugene Gardner
... orders of Magi enumerated by Porphyry, abstained from wine and women, and the first of ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... quantities of fossil remains of marine animals of low organisation, such as sea-urchins, pectens, and other shells; forming a compact mass, of which the greater part of the formation consists. The singular phenomenon of the presence of rounded boulders of euritic porphyry, resembling that of the Niolo, embedded in these strata, proves to a certainty that at an epoch anterior to the upheaval of the system running north and south, and of the mountains of La Tenda depending on it, the high valleys of the present ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester
... the pass, leaving the river and its yellow reeds, and passing through the rich pasture land where the fields were bright with buttercups and daisies gold and silver of the people's property as Raeburn called them. Then on once more between crimson and purple porphyry mountains, nearer and nearer to the snowy mountain peaks; and at last, as the day drew to an end, they descended again, and saw down below them in the loveliest of valleys a little town, its white houses suffused ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... If its restoration had been conducted in better taste this fine old house might have been more beautiful than it is; its best features are the two exquisite fifteenth-century bay windows. The original hall and porch-room also survive, the latter being now known as the "Porphyry Room." Perhaps some visitors will take a deeper interest in the residence of Sir A. T. Quiller-Couch, the "Haven," standing pleasantly by the waterside, facing the mouth of the harbour. Thousands of readers have made the acquaintance of "Troy Town" through the romances of "Q"; and Mr. Couch ...
— The Cornwall Coast • Arthur L. Salmon
... architecture, with friezes displaying bodies in contortion, caryatids, cast from life, supporting the springers of the arches, mixed groups of loins and chests with swelling muscles, under the electric lights, and, in the lobbies, a lavish display of African onyx, Scotch granite and Russian porphyry. The crowd would pass in between Venus and Apollo, holding flowers and lights; and there would be music everywhere; gaiety, noise, red and gold everywhere; all cares would be laid aside and forgotten on entering; it would be a hall containing ...
— The Bill-Toppers • Andre Castaigne
... called beautiful were it kept in repair; it has a splendid marble porch, and a terrace with carved stone balustrade. The view above was taken from this terrace. The finest facade is presented by the old Jesuit church, which has an elaborate front of porphyry. The Church of San Francisco, built by the treasures of Atahuallpa, discovered by an Indian named Catuna, is the richest. It is surmounted by two lofty towers, and the interior is a perfect blaze of gilding. The monastery attached to it is one ...
— The Andes and the Amazon - Across the Continent of South America • James Orton
... of the grave of Lewes, rests the dust of this great and loving woman. As the pilgrim enters that famous old cemetery, the first imposing monument seen is a pyramid of rare, costly porphyry. As you draw near, you ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... artificial flowers, and all manner of trumpery gew-gaws, hanging at the saintly shrines. The rust and dinginess that have dimmed the precious marble on the walls; the pavement, with its great squares and rounds of porphyry and granite, cracked crosswise and in a hundred directions, showing how roughly the troublesome ages have trampled here; the gray dome above, with its opening to the sky, as if heaven were looking down into the interior of ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume II. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... ceased to be easily accessible to the 'most hard-worked member of the Government.' Though for many years he retained his little villa of 'La Sainte Campagne' near Toulon, nestling in its olive groves with, from windows and cliff, the view of the red porphyry rocks across the deep blue of the bay, he had for some time been negotiating for the purchase of strips of land by the riverside near Shepperton, and among the ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2 • Stephen Gwynn
... stained glass represent a variety of rural scenes. Ceiling and doors are richly gilded; the workmanship of the latter is exquisite. Broad divans, resplendent with crimson velvet, run all round the room. In the centre a fountain springs from a basin of porphyry. In this room everything is magnificent, but its effect is neutralized by the curious fashion in which the walls are painted, their surface being covered with the inventions of a prolific fancy in the shape of castles and harbours, bridges, ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... suggested that Porphyry's tract on Abstinence from Animal Food, translated by William Taylor, bears a likeness to the passage. Taylor's translation, however, was not published till 1823, some time ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... nations before it was introduced into Europe. The Hindoos were especially skilled in the art of making steel, as indeed they are to this day; and it is supposed that the tools with which the Egyptians covered their obelisks and temples of porphyry and syenite with hieroglyphics were made of Indian steel, as probably no other metal was capable of executing such work. The art seems to have been well known in Germany in the Middle Ages, and the process is on the whole very faithfully described by ...
— Industrial Biography - Iron Workers and Tool Makers • Samuel Smiles
... Syriac[211], Gothic, and Egyptian versions, as well as by [Symbol: Aleph]BDL[Symbol: Delta], and (according to Tischendorf) by nearly twenty-five cursives; besides the following ancient writers: Irenaeus, Origen, Porphyry, Titus, Basil, Serapion, Epiphanius, Severianus, Victor, Eusebius, Victorinus, Jerome, Augustine. I proceed to shew that this imposing array of authorities for reading [Greek: en to Esaia to prophete] instead of [Greek: en tois prophetais] in St. Mark i. 2, which has certainly imposed upon every ...
— The Causes of the Corruption of the Traditional Text of the Holy Gospels • John Burgon
... church was there nearly finished, of rotunda shape, of a grandeur and size which surprised me. Gold, painting, sculpture, the richest ornaments of all kinds, are distributed everywhere with prodigality but taste. The architecture is correct and admirable, the marble is most exquisite; jasper, porphyry, lapis, polished, wreathed, and fluted columns, with their capitals and their ornaments of gilded bronze, a row of balconies between each altar with little steps of marble to ascend them, and the cage ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, Complete • Duc de Saint-Simon
... was shown in the pretentious titles which he assumed and in the gorgeous pomp with which he was accompanied on public and even on private occasions. On August 15th, after bathing in the porphyry font in which the emperor Constantine had been baptized, he was crowned with seven crowns representing the seven gifts of the Holy Ghost. His most loyal admirer prophesied disaster when the Tribune ventured on this occasion to blasphemously ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... on the point of giving Plotinus a ruined city of Campania to try the experiment of realizing Plato's Republic. See the Life of Plotinus, by Porphyry, in Fabricius's Biblioth. Graec. l. iv.] [Footnote 155: A medal which bears the head of Gallienus has perplexed the antiquarians by its legend and reverse; the former Gallienoe Augustoe, the latter Ubique Pax. M. Spanheim supposes that the coin was struck by some of the enemies of Gallienus, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... was the custom of the Regents to dictate, to the students their observations on such parts of the writings of Aristotle, Porphyry, and others, as were read in their classes. This was done in Latin which was the only language allowed to be used by the students even in their common conversation. At a meeting of commissioners from ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... me a palace fit to receive the Princess Buddir al Buddoor. Let its materials be made of nothing less than porphyry, jasper, agate, lapis-lazuli, and the finest marble. Let its walls be massive gold and silver bricks laid alternately. Let each front contain six windows, and let the lattices of these (except one, which must be left ...
— The Junior Classics, V5 • Edited by William Patten
... all but one or two of his followers, with magnificent chest and shoulders, and a dark, lionlike mane thick-streaked with grey, strode out three or four paces to the front and stood leaning on his huge, porphyry-headed club while he glared down contemptuously ...
— In the Morning of Time • Charles G. D. Roberts
... to be smoothed over with a mason's trowel made red-hot, or rather white-hot, in the fire; and his works have therefore been able to resist the damp and to preserve their colour very well without suffering any change. With the same mixture he worked on peperino-stone, white and variegated marble, porphyry, and slabs of other very hard kinds of stone, materials on which paintings can last a very long time; not to mention that this has shown how one may paint on silver, copper, ...
— Lives of the most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 06 (of 10) Fra Giocondo to Niccolo Soggi • Giorgio Vasari
... it on plates of tempered steel with a cone shaped grinder; then put it in aqua fortis, which melts away the steel that may have been worked up and mixed with the smalt, and which makes it black; it then remains purified and clean; and if you grind it on porphyry the porphyry will work up and mix with the smalt and spoil it, and aqua fortis will never remove it because it cannot ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci
... attributed to Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Raffaelle, Correggio, Titian and other old masters. Statues by Canova, Thorwaldsen, Chantrey and R.J. Wyatt are included among the sculptures. In the state apartments the walls and window-panes are in some cases inlaid with marble or porphyry; the woodcarving, marvellous for its intricacy, grace and lightness of effect, is largely the work of Samuel Watson of Heanor (d. 1715). Chatsworth Park is upwards of 11 m. in circuit, and contains many noble forest-trees, the whole ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various
... this apply here. For surely never was there plainer writing; there are a thousand charms of sun and moonbeam, ripple, and wave, and stormy billow, but all on the surface. Had Chapman read Proclus and Porphyry?—and did he really believe them,—or even that they believed themselves? They felt the immense power of a Bible, a Shaster, a Koran. There was none in Greece or Rome, and they tried therefore by subtle allegorical accommodations ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... quartz, gravel, and red clay, all disposed in the usual direction. Women's washings were seen everywhere along the road, and in some places oozings of iron from the soil heavily charged the streamlets. Some of the quartz-boulders were coloured outside like porphyry by the oxide. About three-quarters of the way from Tumento to Apankru is a hill rich in outcrops of quartz. I believe it to ...
— To The Gold Coast for Gold, Vol. II - A Personal Narrative • Richard Francis Burton and Verney Lovett Cameron
... the tower, and three at the fourth or point of the junction of the apse. In Dean Goulburn's time, the sanctuary space was enlarged by being brought forward one bay. The present floor, designed by Sir A.W. Blomfield in glass mosaic and porphyry, was executed by Powell Brothers. Then also was added the somewhat elaborate communicants' rail, executed in bronze and spars. In enlarging the sanctuary, Dean Goulburn moved the three steps from the fourth pier past the tower to the third, ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Norwich - A Description of Its Fabric and A Brief History of the Episcopal See • C. H. B. Quennell
... its hotels, can testify to this. It is a city that enticed and still entices the mighty of the earth; Roman Emperors in the past came to appease the wrath of its gods, a German Emperor to-day comes to pilfer its temples. For the Acropolis in the poplar grove is a mine of ruins. The porphyry pillars, the statues, the tablets, the exquisite friezes, the palimpsests, the bas-reliefs,—Time and the Turks have spared a few of these. And when the German Emperor came, Abd'ul-Hamid blinked, and the Berlin Museum is now the ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... white so smooth And polish'd, that therein my mirror'd form Distinct I saw. The next of hue more dark Than sablest grain, a rough and singed block, Crack'd lengthwise and across. The third, that lay Massy above, seem'd porphyry, that flam'd Red as the life-blood spouting from a vein. On this God's angel either foot sustain'd, Upon the threshold seated, which appear'd A rock of diamond. Up the trinal steps My leader cheerily ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... "Buffalo;" a second, Kerdaps; a third is known as the "Devourer." The Turks have a healthy awe of this passage, which in old times was a terrible trial to these stupid and always inefficient navigators. For three or four hours we ran in the shade of mighty walls of porphyry and granite, on whose tops were forests of oaks and elms. High up on cliffs around which the eagles circle, and low in glens where one sometimes sees a bear swimming, the sun threw a flood of mellow ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, August, 1878 • Various
... of AEthiopia.—Ver. 320. Possibly these may be the waters of trial, mentioned by Porphyry, as being used among the Indians. He says, that, according to their influence on the person accused, when drunk of by him, he ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso
... that to be a giant's castle," remarked Lawrence, pointing to the opposite side of the ravine, where a huge perpendicular mountain of porphyry was so broken into turrets, towers, and battlements, that it was difficult, except for its size, to believe it other than the work of man. There were even holes and formations about it that had the appearance of antique windows, ...
— The Rover of the Andes - A Tale of Adventure on South America • R.M. Ballantyne
... although he is often short of gold—and throw them at the feet of his snow-clad mountains, piles of rocks, and other cloud-capped philosophers, long and terrible works, marble columns, real thoughts carved in porphyry. ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 3 • Honore de Balzac
... the strata would have been blown up and annihilated. (It is interesting to compare this with what Darwin wrote to Henslow seven years earlier.) He therefore introduces a cooling of one small underground injection, and then the pumping in of other lava, or porphyry, or granite, into the previously consolidated and first-formed mass of igneous rock. (Ideas somewhat similar to this suggestion have recently been revived by Dr See ("Proc. Am. Phil. Soc." Vol. XLVII. 1908, page 262.).) When ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... Browning's poetry; there is the high solemnity brought home to you, not disturbed, by the very triviality of the details; mysteries and wonders overarching the real living life of ex-votos and pictures of runaway horses and houses on fire; the life worn like the porphyry discs of the pavement, precious bits trodden into the bricks, the life of the present filched out of the past, like the columns of the temple supporting arches ...
— The Spirit of Rome • Vernon Lee
... myself master of the latter Platonists. I want Plotinus, and Porphyry, and Iamblichus, and Syrirnus, and Maximus Tyrius, and Proclus, and Hierocles, and ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... thousand and six hundred paces, which he encompassed with a brick wall; in the space of five years, the governor's palace was surrounded with a sufficient number of private habitations; a spacious mosque was supported by five hundred columns of granite, porphyry, and Numidian marble; and Cairoan became the seat of learning as well as of empire. But these were the glories of a later age; the new colony was shaken by the successive defeats of Akbah and Zuheir, and the western expeditions were again interrupted by the civil discord ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 5 • Edward Gibbon
... who told me the gates were upon the point of being closed. So, hurrying down the steps, I left half my vows unpaid and a million of delicate sculptures unexplored; for every pilaster, every frieze, every entablature, is incrusted with porphyry, verde antique, or some other curious marble, carved into as many grotesque wreaths and mouldings as we admire in the loggios of Raffaello. The various portals, the strange projections, the length of cloisters; in short, the noble irregularity of these imperial ...
— Dreams, Waking Thoughts, and Incidents • William Beckford
... the crimson petal, now the white; Nor waves the cypress in the palace walk; Nor winks the gold fin in the porphyry font: The firefly wakens: waken thou ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... who had come from afar. There was not a square inch about him that had anything to do with modern English life. His visage, which was of the colour of light porphyry, had little of its original surface left; it was a face which had been the plaything of strange fires or pestilences, that had moulded to whatever shape they chose his originally supple skin, and left it pitted, puckered, and seamed like a dried water-course. But though dire catastrophes or ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... mortality! Oftentimes near to the surface Of these thy conical earth-runes, —For who shall tell their secret?— Meeting with strange interlopers, Bodies of red Winnebagoes, Each with its bow and its arrows, Each with its knife and its war gear, Its porphyry-carved tobacco pipe, Modern, I know by the fashioning. Often, I asked of them, As they lay there so silently, So stiff and stark in their bones, What right they had in these old places, Sacred to dead men of ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 5, May, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... gateway, but without gates, into an inner court, surrounded on all sides by great marble pillars supporting galleries above, I saw a large fountain of porphyry in the middle, throwing up a lofty column of water, which fell, with a noise as of the fusion of all sweet sounds, into a basin beneath; overflowing which, it ran into a single channel towards the interior of the building. Although the moon was by this time so ...
— Phantastes - A Faerie Romance for Men and Women • George MacDonald
... immersing the remains of the deceased in a jar of methylated spirit was obviously impracticable. However, I bethought me that we had in our collection a porphyry sarcophagus, the cavity of which had been shaped to receive a small mummy in its case. I tried the deceased in the sarcophagus and found that he just fitted the cavity loosely. I obtained a few gallons of methylated spirit which I poured into the cavity, just covering the body, and then I put on ...
— The Vanishing Man • R. Austin Freeman
... overarching foliage, and then for a mile or two the lake wound from one embowered cove to another, till it was lost in the hazy distance. Directly below us, it lay a glorious topaz in the soft November sun, for which the dark porphyry of oaks, the tawny gold of cottonwoods, and the emerald of turf and darker green of cedars made a jeweled setting richer and more harmonious than would have been the flaming scarlet and gold of our Eastern woods. On the bosom of the little lake a white sail was floating ...
— The Rose of Old St. Louis • Mary Dillon
... and you shall hear its history this moment." She stopped for breath, and I wondered if Mrs. Somerville or George Eliot had ever talked in this astounding fashion. I was certain that she must have read Iamblichus and Porphyry. Arthur ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... men, but once were an abomination and destruction to them, and to which the blind people paid divine honour. I shall also pass over the bygone times of our cruel tyrants, whose notoriety was spread over to far distant countries; so that Porphyry, that dog who in the east was always so fierce against the church, in his mad and vain style added this also, that "Britain is a land fertile in tyrants."* I will only endeavour to relate the evils which Britain suffered in the times of the Roman emperors, and also those ...
— On The Ruin of Britain (De Excidio Britanniae) • Gildas
... The chapel was named in honor of Queen Caroline, who furnished the books for the altar and pulpit, the plate, and two solid mahogany chairs, which are still in use in St. John's. Within the chancel rail is a curious font of porphyry, taken by Colonel John Tufton Mason at the capture of Senegal from the French in 1758, and presented to the Episcopal Society on 1761. The peculiarly sweet-toned bell which calls the parishioners of St. John's together every Sabbath is, I believe, the ...
— An Old Town By The Sea • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... a forum, enters a court-yard, stoops under a gate, and he arrives before the front of the palace, adorned with a group in wax representing the Emperor Constantine hurling the dragon to the earth. A porphyry basin supports in its centre a golden conch filled with pistachio-nuts. His guide informs him that he may take some of them. He ...
— The Temptation of St. Antony - or A Revelation of the Soul • Gustave Flaubert
... And I view inside, and all there, all, As the swarming hollow of a hive, The whole Basilica alive! Men in the chancel, body and nave, Men on the pillars' architrave, Men on the statues, men on the tombs With popes and kings in their porphyry wombs, All famishing in expectation Of the main-altar's consummation. For see, for see, the rapturous moment Approaches, and earth's best endowment Blends with heaven's; the taper-fires Pant up, the winding brazen spires Heave ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... populace, with an unerring instinct, had given to one of these the name "Progress checked,'' and to the other the name "Retrogression encouraged.'' To this day one sees every- where in the palaces of Continental rulers, whether great or petty, his columns of Siberian porphyry, jasper bowls, or malachite vases—signs of his ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... fishermen and sailors, and above all, from the old boulders strewed along the shores of the Cromarty Frith. With a big hammer which had belonged to his great- grandfather, an old buccaneer, the boy went about chipping the stones, and accumulating specimens of mica, porphyry, garnet, and such like. Sometimes he had a day in the woods, and there, too, the boy's attention was excited by the peculiar geological curiosities which came in his way. While searching among the rocks on the beach, he was sometimes asked, in irony, by the farm servants who came to load their ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... place of the martyred Queen. There was the Swiss village, of which Louis XVI. had been the miller, the Count of Provence the schoolmaster, the Count of Artois the gamekeeper, the village with its merry mill, the dairy where the cream filled porphyry vessels on marble tables, the laundry where the clothes were beaten with ebony sticks, the granary to which led mahogany ladders, the sheep-house where the sheep were shorn with golden shears. ...
— The Happy Days of the Empress Marie Louise • Imbert De Saint-Amand
... Bastille was good for. This idea of Napoleon, disdained by men, had been taken back by God. That which had been merely illustrious, had become august. In order to realize his thought, the Emperor should have had porphyry, brass, iron, gold, marble; the old collection of planks, beams and plaster sufficed for God. The Emperor had had the dream of a genius; in that Titanic elephant, armed, prodigious, with trunk uplifted, bearing its tower and scattering on all sides its merry and vivifying ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... on his cheek had rained the morning light, Thrice on his lips the mildewed kiss of night, Crouched by some porphyry column's shining plinth, Or stretched beneath the ...
— The Professor at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.)
... is the heat of the same still so great (some reckoning it at two or six thousand degrees while others hold it incomputable) that absolutely no life can exist within such balls of fire. But after the more solid parts are formed (granite, porphyry, etc.,) gradually by cooling off and contracting, and these are fused together into larger masses, then begin the ribs of the earth-structure, the rocky foundations of the super-structure, and as soon as the development of the earth is so far advanced ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, August 1887 - Volume 1, Number 7 • Various
... to attain his ambitious design, the monarch robbed the Temple of the Sun at Baalbek of columns of porphyry, despoiled the Temple of Diana of Ephesus of its finest pillars, took columns of pure white marble from the Temple of Minerva at Athens, and divested the shrines of Isis and Osiris in Egypt of their choicest granite columns. He called upon the quarries of Italy, Greece, and the AEgean Isles for ...
— A Trip to the Orient - The Story of a Mediterranean Cruise • Robert Urie Jacob
... in one word, was not awake; the mind of man was ignorant of its own treasures and its own capacities. It is pathetic to think of the mediaeval students poring over a single ill-translated sentence of Porphyry, endeavoring to extract from its clauses whole systems of logical science, and torturing their brains about puzzles hardly less idle than the dilemma of Buridan's donkey, while all the time, at Constantinople ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... of this there is a bass-relief in bronze, representing the Nativity—a work much in the spirit of the bass-reliefs in San Giovanni e Paolo; and one of the chapels has an exquisite little altar, with gleaming columns of porphyry. There has been no service in the church for many years; and this altar had a strangely pathetic effect, won from the black four-cornered cap of a priest that lay before it, like an offering. I wondered who the priest ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... necessary to ask their permission before pouring water on the ground, lest one should accidentally be soused and vent his anger on the offending human being. But these beliefs are far from being confined to the uncivilized; Greek philosophers like Porphyry, no less than the fathers of the Church, held that the world was pervaded with spirits; side by side with the belief in witchcraft, we can trace through the middle ages the survival of primitive animistic views; and in our ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... once the playhouse of a Caesar, its walls bearded like a pard's face with tufted laurel and splotched like a brandy drunkard's with red stains; a church that is a dismal ruin without and a glittering Aladdin's Cave of gold and gems and porphyry and onyx within; a wide and handsome avenue starting from one festering stew of slums and ending in another festering stew of slums; a grimed and broken archway opening on a lovely hidden courtyard where trees are green and flowers bloom, and in the center there ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... then the Florentines bought a plot of ground near the camp, and killed him there. When the fleet returned and heard this, they determined to send Florence a present to show their gratitude. Now, among the spoil were some bronze gates and two rosy pillars of porphyry, very precious. Then they besought the Florentines to choose one of these, the gates or the pillars, as a gift. And Florence chose the pillars, which stand to-day beside the eastern gate of the Baptistery in that city. But on the way to Florence they ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... Landor. Dear Abbe, porphyry is heavy, gold is heavier; Ossa and Olympus are rough and unequal; the steppes of Tartary, though high, are of uniform elevation: there is not a rock, nor a birch, nor a cytisus, nor an arbutus upon them great enough to shelter a new-dropped lamb. Level the ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... reserved for men who were born indeed in a baser age, but, who being allotted a nature similar to their leader, were the true interpreters of his mystic speculations. The most conspicuous of these are the great Plotinus, the most learned Porphyry, the divine Jamblichus, the most acute Syrianus, Proclus the consummation of philosophic excellence, the magnificent Hierocles, the concisely elegant Sallust, and the most inquisitive Damascius. By these men, who were truly links ...
— Introduction to the Philosophy and Writings of Plato • Thomas Taylor
... unseen bees came louder than ever, from a doorway in the wall upon Katharine's right hand, a wall of black polished marble, decorated with an inlaid ornament in porphyry of yellow and red and pale green. The curtain of dyed and threaded reeds did not hide what lay beyond the doorway. You saw a long, high-pitched whitewashed room, cooled by big wooden electric fans working under the ceiling, and traversed by avenues ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... Society for the encouragement of Arts, etc., in which capacity he made many influential friends, who furnished the means for publishing his various translations, which include works of Plato, Aristotle, Proclus, Porphyry, Apuleius, etc. His aim indeed was the translation of all the untranslated writings of ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... hardly any man in Egypt except her own father had ever seen her face; for she lived apart with the maidens who waited on her, in a lofty tower which her father had built specially for her. It was really a noble palace, with ten great rooms, one over the other. The first room was paved with porphyry and lined with slabs of coloured marbles, and the roof was of gold: and it was a kind of chapel for Aseneth. It had golden and silver images of all the gods of Egypt, and Aseneth worshipped them and burnt incense ...
— Old Testament Legends - being stories out of some of the less-known apochryphal - books of the old testament • M. R. James
... of porphyry resting on lions is the tomb where Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington, was laid in 1852, in the presence of 15,000 spectators, Dean Milman, who had been present at Nelson's funeral, then reading the services. Beyond the tomb of Nelson, ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume I. - Great Britain and Ireland • Various
... his latchkey rattled in the door Mrs. Perlmutter and the baby would be in the hall to greet him; but on this occasion he was disappointed. To be sure the appetizing odour of gedampftes kalbfleisch wafted itself down the elevator shaft as he entered the gilt and plaster-porphyry entrance from the street, but when he crossed the threshold of his own apartment the robust wail of his son and heir mingled with the tones of Lina, the Slavic maid. Of Mrs. Perlmutter, however, ...
— Abe and Mawruss - Being Further Adventures of Potash and Perlmutter • Montague Glass
... this they entirely lost sight of their original meaning. This is strikingly the case with the Scarabaeus which, under the hands of the Etruscan cutter, lost at once all specific character. He might be Scarabaeus anything: he is not pilularius; and, instead of being made of basalt, porphyry, smalt, and very rarely of pietra dura, as in Egypt, he is engraved in carnelian, onyx, sardonyx, and all the rare and lovely varieties of pietra dura,—which, being essentially the same, change their names with their colors,—but mainly in an opaque carnelian, admirably calculated to show off ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various
... miracle, which Hume ought not to have overlooked, but which he has, however, overlooked: he himself observes, very justly, that PROPHECY is a distinct species of the miraculous; and, no doubt, he neglected the Scriptural Prophecies, as supposing them all of doubtful interpretation, or believing with Porphyry, that such as are not doubtful, must have been posterior to the event which they point to. It happens, however, that there are some prophecies which cannot be evaded or 'refused,' some to which neither objection will apply. One, we will ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey |
