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More "Masterpiece" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... them that Toleration is the device of the Devil. "I humbly beseech the Parliament," he says, "seriously to consider the depths of Satan in this design of a Toleration; how this is now his last plot and design, and by it would undermine and frustrate the whole work of Reformation intended. 'Tis his masterpiece for England; and, for effecting it, he comes and moves, not in Prelates and Bishops, not in furious Anabaptists, &c., but in holy men, excellent preachers; moderate and fair men, not for a toleration of heresies and gross opinions, but an 'allowance of a latitude to some lesser differences ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... woman—by God!" he said once more, swinging round to where Miss Van Tuyn was standing between Jennings and Thapoulos. "I'll paint her again. I'll make a masterpiece of her." ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens
... rancours, their dishonesty—all these personages, after voting for the Constitution, now striving to destroy it; and they got into a state of great agitation, and launched forth manifestoes, pamphlets, and biographies. Hussonnet's biography of Fumichon was a masterpiece. Nonancourt devoted himself to the work of propagandism in the country districts; M. de Gremonville worked up the clergy; and Martinon brought together the young men of the wealthy class. Each exerted himself according to his resources, including Cisy himself. With his thoughts now ...
— Sentimental Education, Volume II - The History of a Young Man • Gustave Flaubert
... what I think of Thucydides, Book II. How then shall I frame my opinion of that examination paper? It was Thucydides, Book II, with the few easy parts left out. It was Thucydides, Book II, with special home-made difficulties added. It was—well, in its way it was a masterpiece. Without going into details—I dislike sensational and realistic writing—I may say that I personally was not one of those who required an extra ten minutes to finish their papers. I finished mine at half-past two, and amused ...
— Tales of St. Austin's • P. G. Wodehouse
... Court and the gutter were invaluable. At the camp of Caesar Borgia, in 1502, he found in his host that fantastic hero whom he incarnated in The Prince, and he was practically an eye-witness of the amazing masterpiece, the Massacre of Sinigaglia. The next year he is sent to Rome with a watching brief at the election of Julius II., and in 1506 is again sent to negotiate with the Pope. An embassy to the Emperor Maximilian, a second mission ...
— Machiavelli, Volume I - The Art of War; and The Prince • Niccolo Machiavelli
... few other pieces. 'To him,' says Joerdens, 'the criticism of taste and of art, speculative, practical, and popular philosophy, owe many of their later advances in Germany.' Joerdens pronounces his romance, entitled Lorenz Stark, a masterpiece in its way, and says of his plays, that they deserve a place beside the best of Lessing's. He was the author of a miscellaneous work, entitled The Philosopher for the World, and is praised by Cousin as a meritorious anthropologist. Engel was born September 11, 1741, at Parchim, of ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... his hero perish, and suffered or even wished his noble and true work of art to be changed into a false piece of history. What might have gladdened and elevated poor suffering and blinded humanity as a wonderful masterpiece of art, like the book of Hiob, or the Iliad, or Prometheus Vinctus, or the Athene of the Parthenon, or the Zeus of Olympus, showing how man in the creations of the artist rises highest above personal pettiness and weakness, how the genius in fiction creates ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden
... and the other intriguers and fools constituting his supporters, that in a few days he will throw 55,000 men on Yorktown. He and his staff to do such a thing, which would be a masterpiece even for the French military leaders and their staffs! He, McClellan, never knew what it was to embark an army. Those who believe him are even greater imbeciles than I supposed them to be. Poor Stanton, to be hampered by imbecility and intrigue! I went to Alexandria to ...
— Diary from March 4, 1861, to November 12, 1862 • Adam Gurowski
... in the Cathedral at Antwerp, we conclude that he admired the "Hercules" not wisely but too well, for the muscles stand out on all the figures, even of the Savior, in pure Farnese style. Two years after that picture was painted, he did his masterpiece, "The Descent From the Cross," and we behold with relief the change that had come over the spirit of his dreams. Mere pride in performing a difficult feat had given place to a higher motive. There is no reason to ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 4 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Painters • Elbert Hubbard
... hand, the scene which he beheld was a masterpiece of human art. The proud city, ornamented with stately buildings, as became the capital of the world, showed a succession of glittering spires and orders of architecture, some of them chaste and simple, like those the capitals of which were borrowed from baskets-full ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... the bombardment, which was a masterpiece of method, was as follows:—From 12.30 to 1 a.m. the whole of our front and supervision line was bombarded with field guns, 5.9-inch howitzers and mine-throwers; but the chief intensity of fire was directed at B Company between ...
— The War Service of the 1/4 Royal Berkshire Regiment (T. F.) • Charles Robert Mowbray Fraser Cruttwell
... Syzran, upon reaching Syzran, crosses the Volga on an iron bridge, one verst and a half, or one English mile, in length, and high enough to allow the largest steamer pass without lowering its funnel—a masterpiece of engineering greatly admired by the people here, who describe it as the longest bridge in Russia and ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various
... life teeming with feminine meannesses and virile ambitions; a life of mortal ennui and frantic gayety, a medley of sentiments, actions, and incidents, absurd, tragic, or delightful, from which the pen of a great humorist could extract the materials for a masterpiece. ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: Italian • Various
... the finer issues, admire the supreme genius which takes some poor Italian tale, with its coarse plot and gross personages, and shooting it through with threads of variegated meditation, produces a masterpiece of penetrative reflection and high pensive suggestion as to the deepest things and most secret parts of the life of men. But to the general these finer threads are indiscernible. What touches them in the Shakesperean poetry, ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Volume I (of 3) - Essay 4: Macaulay • John Morley
... there hang, side by side, Rembrandt's first picture, a simple sketch, imperfect and faulty, and his great masterpiece, which all men admire. So in the two names, Simon and Peter, we have, first the rude fisherman who came to Jesus that day, the man as he was before Jesus began his work on him; and second, the man as he became during ...
— Personal Friendships of Jesus • J. R. Miller
... OF MESSINA, which has been regarded as the poetical masterpiece of Schiller, and, perhaps of all his works, presents the greatest difficulties to the translator, is rendered by A. Lodge, Esq., M. A. This version, on its first publication in England, a few years ago, was received with deserved eulogy by distinguished ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... an enormous amount of work, and, what is to be regretted, much of it was contract work or experimental sketching. This has given his art a rather bad name, but judged by his best works in the Ducal Palace and the Academy at Venice, he will not be found lacking. Even in his masterpiece (The Miracle of the Slave) he is "Il Furioso," as they used to call him; but his thunderbolt style is held in check by wonderful grace, strength of modelling, superb contrasts of light with shade, and a coloring of flesh and robes not unworthy ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Painting • John C. Van Dyke
... are reminiscent of Corot or of Anton Mauve; the Woman with the broken neck is related to Manet; the portrait of Sisley invents pointillism fifteen years before the pointillists; La Pensee, this masterpiece, evokes Hoppner. But in everything reappears the invincible French instinct: the Jeune Fille au panier is a Greuze painted by an Impressionist; the delightful Jeune Fille a la promenade is connected with Fragonard; ...
— The French Impressionists (1860-1900) • Camille Mauclair
... national, or at least characteristic of its period, as the classic poetry of each people is that in which its language appears most pure and free. To translate it is impossible; but it is easy to find that the human nature so inimitably expressed in each masterpiece is the same that, under different circumstance, dictates a different performance. The deviations between races and men are not yet so great as is the ignorance of self, the blindness to the native ideal, which prevails ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... hinted that he should not come into Brookes's smelling of the stables. I fired first, and missed. He fired, and I shrieked in despair. 'He's hit! A surgeon! A surgeon!' they cried. 'A tailor! A tailor!' said I, for there was a double hole through the tails of my masterpiece. No, it was past all repair. You may laugh, sir, but I'll never see the like of ...
— Rodney Stone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... did not look as classic under the laurel wreath as had his uncle's, nor had his work the blinding splendor nor the fineness of texture of his great model. But then, an imitation never has. It was a marble masterpiece, done in plaster! But what a clever reproduction it was! And how, by sheer audacity, it compelled recognition and homage, and at last even adulation in Europe!—and what a clever stroke it was, for this heavy, unsympathetic man to bring up to his throne from ...
— A Short History of France • Mary Platt Parmele
... nearly five hundred pages. Will the Saint triumph—will love victoriously claim its own? We hurry on, at the first reading, for the solution; then we go back and discover in it another world of profound interest. That is the true sign of a masterpiece. ...
— The Saint • Antonio Fogazzaro
... not only instrumentally and vocally. In other words we realise that good listeners and appreciative understanders of music are, in their way, as essential as executants. "Shocking as it may seem, hundreds of children 'learn music' for the length of their school life and never hear a masterpiece, and indeed, hear no music at all except such as their own untrained musical sense and half-trained fingers can compass."[21] In increasing measure the teaching of music appreciation is coming into vogue, and as an aid to this the piano-player and gramophone are demonstrating ...
— Spirit and Music • H. Ernest Hunt
... masterpiece in a very difficult style: Catullus himself could hardly have bettered it. In grace, tenderness, simplicity, and humour it is worthy of the Ancients; and even more so, from the completeness and ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... After achieving its masterpiece in the flower, the plant once more goes through a process of withdrawal, this time into the tiny organs of fertilization. (We shall return later to this essential stage in the life cycle of the plant, ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs
... business to respond with his whole being to the appeal of the musical masterpiece he attempts to interpret, and so express the emotions aroused by it from their slumbers in his own bosom that a responsive echo may be found in the bosoms of the listeners. A most ingeniously constructed music-box, with the presentation of a complicated piece of music, may fail to move a heart ...
— For Every Music Lover - A Series of Practical Essays on Music • Aubertine Woodward Moore
... Renaissance, Egyptian, nor Moorish. It gave the impression of being a mere fantastic creation of a gay and irresponsible brain. If a confectioner accustomed to work in coloured sugars were to dream of a superlative masterpiece, his exalted fancy might take some ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... leave it. An ugly house, utterly without architectural merit! A strange house for an architect to inhabit! George, however, had never liked it. Before his marriage he had discovered a magnificent house in Fitzroy Square, a domestic masterpiece of the Adams period, exquisitely designed without and within, huge rooms and many rooms, lovely ceilings, a forged-iron stair-rail out of Paradise; a house appreciably nearer to the centre than the one in Elm Park Road, and ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... good. Good qualities.] Goodness — N. goodness &c adj.; excellence, merit; virtue &c 944; value, worth, price. super-excellence, supereminence; superiority &c 33; perfection &c 650; coup de maitre [Fr.]; masterpiece, chef d'ouvre [Fr.], prime, flower, cream, elite, pick, A 1, nonesuch, nonpareil, creme de la creme, flower of the flock, cock of the roost, salt of the earth; champion; prodigy. tidbit; gem, gem of the first water; bijou, precious stone, jewel, pearl, diamond, ruby, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... in 1842, is the great prose classic of Russia. That amazing institution, "the Russian novel," not only began its career with this unfinished masterpiece by Nikolai Vasil'evich Gogol, but practically all the Russian masterpieces that have come since have grown out of it, like the limbs of a single tree. Dostoieffsky goes so far as to bestow this tribute upon an earlier work by the same ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... of contact still further. She would ask Swann if the picture had not been engraved, preferring, when possible, old engravings with some interest of association apart from themselves, such, for example, as shew us a masterpiece in a state in which we can no longer see it to-day, as Morghen's print of the 'Cenacolo' of Leonardo before it was spoiled by restoration. It must be admitted that the results of this method of interpreting the art of making presents were not always happy. ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... she hath loved him! And I loved her, and she loves the Lord Clifford! And there it ends;—if this be not enough To make mankind merry for evermore, Then plain it is as day, that eyes were made For a wise purpose—verily to weep with! [Looking round.] A pretty prospect this, a masterpiece Of Nature, finished with most curious skill! (To HERBERT.) Good Baron, have you ever practised tillage? Pray tell me what this land ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth - Volume 1 of 8 • Edited by William Knight
... elevated dignity of calm suffering, joined to passionate tenderness and pathos, is touched with hues so vivid and so beautiful that the poet seems to have read intimately the secrets of the noble heart imaged in the lovely countenance of the unfortunate girl. The Fifth Act is a masterpiece. It is the finest thing he ever wrote, and may claim proud comparison not only with any contemporary, but preceding, poet. The varying feelings of Beatrice are expressed with passionate, heart-reaching eloquence. Every character has a voice that echoes truth in its ...
— Notes to the Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley • Mary W. Shelley
... city and has eleven gates. The Mosque of Omar is its principal feature; this was completed by Solyman the Magnificent in 1561; parts of the construction were done by the Crusaders. It has a noble dome and is a masterpiece of architectural beauty; it is said to be one of the ...
— A Fantasy of Mediterranean Travel • S. G. Bayne
... is the greatest picture of the modern world; for, Mr. Aylwin, it renders in Art the inevitable attitude of its own time and country towards the unseen world, and renders it as completely as did the masterpiece of Polygnotus in the Lesche of the 'Not in the flesh; in the spirit, who knows him so well? Your mother I have had the pleasure of meeting at the house of Lord Sleaford, and indeed I have had the distinguished honour of painting ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... Royalty receiving homage from its subjects. This set the ball rolling. Song followed song, the pick of the music-halls. Jonah gave a selection on the mouth-organ. Then Barney, who was growing hoarse, winked maliciously at Jonah and Ada, and struck into his masterpiece, "Trinity Church". It was the success ...
— Jonah • Louis Stone
... men and women cry out like all possessed; some leap to their feet and stamp upon the floor, lifting their glasses and pledging each other. Before long it occurs to some one to demand an old wedding song, which celebrates the beauty of the bride and the joys of love. In the excitement of this masterpiece Tamoszius Kuszleika begins to edge in between the tables, making his way toward the head, where sits the bride. There is not a foot of space between the chairs of the guests, and Tamoszius is so ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... have already spoken in a general way. "Absalom and Achitophel" is of course the masterpiece, and cannot be too highly praised as a gallery of portraits, and for the daring force and felicity of its style. Why enlarge on a poem, almost every line of which has become a proverb? "The Medal" is inferior only in condensation—in spirit and energy it is quite equal. In "MacFlecknoe," ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol II - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... trailed off. He was wasting them, he saw. She was looking through his head. But he rejoiced as to one thing like a potter who opens the door of his oven and finds his masterpiece unbroken. And silence fell upon them, interrupted only by the intermittent humming ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... that paper, whatever it is," said Nora O'Malley to the Phi Sigma Tau, who stood in a group around her desk. "She was here when I came in this morning, and I was early, too. It is some masterpiece of mischief on her part, or she wouldn't take the trouble to get ...
— Grace Harlowe's Junior Year at High School - Or, Fast Friends in the Sororities • Jessie Graham Flower
... have grown up in England and elsewhere and flourished side by side, vying with one another to express the protean graces of man, of architecture and domestic interior, of earth and sky and sea. Where is the Swiss school? Where, in any public gallery, will you find a masterpiece which triumphantly vindicates the charm of Swiss scenery? You will, find it vindicated only on condensed milk tins. These folks can write. My taste in lyrics may be peculiar, but I used to love ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... Antoine; "say an original, neighbor, and an original retouched by Rubens! Look closer at the head of the old man, the dress of the young woman, and the accessories. One can count the pencil-strokes of the Hercules of painters. It is not only a masterpiece, sir; it is a treasure—a relic! The picture at the Louvre may be a pearl, this is ...
— An "Attic" Philosopher, Complete • Emile Souvestre
... rise the slim spires, with an octagonal cupola superimposed over a central structure, which looks to this day as though it were originally intended as one of a battery of three uniform spires. The general plan of this facade is the masterpiece of design of the building, and, except for the ludicrously diminutive clock-face, could withstand nobly the cavil of the most exacting pedant who ever read or studied architectural forms, solely out of books. In the immediate foreground ...
— The Cathedrals of Northern France • Francis Miltoun
... in the Uffizi Gallery at Florence and which Fra Angelico painted for the church of Santa Maria Novella, is still more aerial and celestial, a perfect masterpiece of sentiment and ...
— Fra Angelico • J. B. Supino
... are infinite in number and Spinoza, in a bulky volume, furnished a minute and singularly profound description of the principal ones alone, into the details of which we regret that we cannot enter. The Ethics of Spinoza is an incomparable masterpiece. ...
— Initiation into Philosophy • Emile Faguet
... Chrestien de Troyes; a certain number of songs, partly amatory, partly religious, two curious pieces entitled Die Klage and Buechlein, a verse-rendering of a subject which was much a favourite, the involuntary incest and atonement of St Gregory of the Rock; and lastly, his masterpiece, Der Arme Heinrich. ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... Michelangelo, having overheard them, shut himself up in the chapel, and chiselled his name upon the girdle which crosses the Madonna's breast and supports her flowing garments. His name is not found on any of his other works, and we can understand why he felt proud of such a masterpiece. Though made when on the very threshold of his career, it was never surpassed even in his later years. Some other artist afterwards designed the two little bronze cherubs who hold a crown over the Madonna's head. They are quite out of harmony with ...
— Michelangelo - A Collection Of Fifteen Pictures And A Portrait Of The - Master, With Introduction And Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll
... creative power, the imagination of the author, but also to his dialectic skill and to his critical faculty. It is all very well to talk of great works as the fruits of hot inspiration and not cold intellect. A masterpiece is the outcome of both; the one provides the material, the other shapes it. Schubert was an inspired composer, but most of his works, especially those of large compass, show that he was mastered by moods, not that he was master of them. It may be said that ...
— The Pianoforte Sonata - Its Origin and Development • J.S. Shedlock
... Attock, which is a high structure built across the narrow bed of the Indus, which here foams down with swirling swiftness, is considered a masterpiece of engineering. It is built in two tiers, the upper of which carries the railway, while the lower forms a road for carriages, beasts of burden, and foot-passengers. On either side of the river is a fortified ...
— The Coming Conquest of England • August Niemann
... delightfully philosophic, complained of the carelessness with which human beings were procreated; 'Shame!' he cried 'that he who copies the divine physiognomy of man receives crowns and applause, but he who achieves the masterpiece, the prototype of mimic art, feels that like virtue he must be ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part II. • Honore de Balzac
... an extremely arabesque style. The walls were light green, with narrow bands of red down the sides of each plank. The table was yellow, the chairs blue, and their bottoms red, by way of harmonious variety. But the grand point—the great masterpiece in the ornamentation of this apartment—was the centre-piece in the ceiling, in the execution of which there was an extraordinary display of what can be accomplished by the daring flight of an original ...
— The Wild Man of the West - A Tale of the Rocky Mountains • R.M. Ballantyne
... tin basin and two very dirty towels were the only articles of household furniture in the place. I suppose Tim had his meals with the farmer who owned the barn. No inspired artist, toiling frenziedly with a masterpiece in a garret, ever lived a more Spartan life than Tim Gorman did in that barn. Whatever money he had was certainly not spent on his personal comfort. On the other hand, a good deal of money had been spent on tools and material of various kinds. Packing cases stood piled together ...
— Gossamer - 1915 • George A. Birmingham
... handsome circus-rider, crippled by debt, wrote the following letter to Comte Paz, which, having fallen into the hands of Comte Adam, was read by several of the dandies of the day, who pronounced it a masterpiece:— ...
— Paz - (La Fausse Maitresse) • Honore de Balzac
... brain, each claiming from my hand Its immortality. But thou, my child, Remind'st me of mine oath, my sacred pride, The eternal hatred lodged within my breast. Philip of Spain shall wait. I will not deign To add to-day the final touch of life Unto this masterpiece. ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... Kenelm," by H. A. Payne. The author had the pleasure of watching this work daily while in progress. It was done entirely by the artist's own hand, by way of a specimen "masterpiece" of craftsmanship, and the aim was to use to the full extent every resource ...
— Stained Glass Work - A text-book for students and workers in glass • C. W. Whall
... are exceedingly various. Since literature is the expression of the intellectual life of man, it embodies the various moods and passions to which human nature is subject. Sometimes, for example, there is laughing humor, as in Holmes's "The Deacon's Masterpiece." Sometimes there is violent anger, as in Byron's "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers." We feel his unrestrained wrath, as ...
— Elementary Guide to Literary Criticism • F. V. N. Painter
... by the very depth and softness of its womanhood, that a gush of happy tears blinded the maiden's eyes before she had time to look. Raphael had taken Hilda by the hand, that fine, forcible hand which Kenyon sculptured,—and drawn aside the curtain of gold-fringed cloud that hung before his latest masterpiece. On earth, Raphael painted the Transfiguration. What higher scene may he have since depicted, not from imagination, but as revealed ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume II. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... artist o' that there masterpiece. The Spittin' Devil! I done it on a rainy mornin'. Genius is queer. ...
— Wappin' Wharf - A Frightful Comedy of Pirates • Charles S. Brooks
... repair it, but unfortunately in that wretched style then prevailing, and when not the least intelligence of christian art existed any longer, they pulled down the lobby made by Erwin, so much admired in the middle age as a masterpiece of elegance; in 1692 they adorned the interior of the choir with wainscots of wood painted and gilt; in 1732 they widened it to the detriment of a portion of the nave, and ten years later galleries were made for ...
— Historical Sketch of the Cathedral of Strasburg • Anonymous
... the boys soon found themselves in a rather gloomy apartment, containing the masterpiece of Lucas van Leyden, or Hugens, a Dutch artist born three hundred and seventy years ago, who painted well when he was ten years of age and became distinguished in art when only fifteen. This picture, called the Last ...
— Hans Brinker - or The Silver Skates • Mary Mapes Dodge
... attacking the insurgents with unheard of violence. Never had so much stinging bitterness, so many falsehoods, such bigoted abuse flowed from pen before. Vuillet commenced by narrating the entry of the insurgents into Plassans. The description was a perfect masterpiece. He spoke of "those bandits, those villainous-looking countenances, that scum of the galleys," invading the town, "intoxicated with brandy, lust, and pillage." Then he exhibited them "parading their cynicism in the streets, terrifying ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola
... the dove to the ark was his favourite subject. Such a little ark, on such a hazy morning, and such a little pigeon—the rest of the picture being cheap sky, and still cheaper sea; nothing, I have often heard him say, was more popular than this with his clients. He held it to be his masterpiece, but would add with some naivete that he considered himself a public benefactor for carrying it out in such perishable fashion. "At any rate," he would say, "no one can bequeath one of my many replicas to ...
— Erewhon Revisited • Samuel Butler
... which she was pleased to exert, "your character improves upon us, sir—I could not have thought that it was in you. Yesterday might be considered as your assay-piece, to prove yourself entitled to be free of the corporation of Osbaldistone Hall. But it was a masterpiece." ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... signs of a crowd. People passed to and fro, just as though there had not been a masterpiece within ten thousand miles of them. Once a servant girl, a loaf of bread in her red arms, stopped to glance at the window, but in an ...
— Buried Alive: A Tale of These Days • Arnold Bennett
... with his elbow, on concluding each of the foregoing short sentences, could be surpassed by nothing but the exultation with which he fell back and eyed him when he had finished this brilliant display of eloquence and sagacity; his great blue waistcoat heaving with the throes of such a masterpiece, and his nose in a state of violent inflammation from ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... about the second or third course. Forgetting discretion, he actually smiled. The meal, which had been prepared in anticipation of his coming, was a much more splendid entertainment than would have been got up for me had I been alone. The cook's masterpiece was a very cunningly contrived pasty—a work of local genius that I was quite unprepared for. Even M. le controleur, had he not checked himself in time, would have beamed at this achievement; but he would never have forgiven himself such an admission ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... that he was deficient of talent. An excellent example of the inequality of which we speak will be found in his Shakespeare (Robert Tyas, 1843), a work selected by us for the reason that it was considered by himself and his two favourable friends as his masterpiece. Although we cannot stay to notice all the strange conceptions with which he has enriched this book, we may be permitted to wonder whence he derived his preposterous ideas of Caliban, of Malvolio, of Shylock, of Juliet's nurse, of Launce's unhappy dog, of the Egpytian[ Sphynx ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... commenced the Annals? And how long would he have been engaged in its composition? We see that he must have been bordering on 80, if not 90: consequently with impaired faculties, and thus altogether disqualified for producing such a vigorous historical masterpiece; for though we have instances of poets writing successfully at a very advanced age, as Pindar composing one of his grandest lyrics at 84, and Sophocles his Oedipus Coloneus at 90, we have no instance of any great historian, except Livy, attempting to write ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross
... houses in which I have ever visited was one in which there was, from garret to cellar, so far as I discovered, not one article which was not of the period imitated, not one streak of color which was not "right." It was a masterpiece of correct furnishing, but it gave one a curious sense of limitation. One could not escape the scheme. The inelasticity of it hampered sociability—and there grew on one, too, a sense of unfitness. His clothes were an anachronism! They were the only ...
— The Business of Being a Woman • Ida M. Tarbell
... Italian journeys of his he collected many facts for the great work of his life, that 'History of Fishes' which he dedicated, naturally enough, to the cardinal. This book with its plates is, for the time, a masterpiece of accuracy. Those who are best acquainted with the subject say, that it is up to the present day a key to the whole ichthyology of the Mediterranean. Two other men, Belon and Salviani, were then at work on the same ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... which will be deemed one of the most perfect of new ballads of the olden school, does not seem the chief flower, after inhaling the home sweetness and heart aroma of many of the minor lyrics in this volume. As for the humor, is it not of HOLMES? 'The Deacon's Masterpiece,' and 'Parson Turrell's Legacy,' are of the very best, of the triple est brand; it is only to be wished there were a hundred of them. Of that strange blending of pathos with humor, and the 'sentiment of society,' in which HOLMES equals, or, if you will, surpasses PRAED, there are several ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... for a fleeting holiday, far from the cares of the world strepitumque Romae,—["And the roar of Rome."]—to the sweet shades of Pentonville or the remoter plains of Clapham—conducts some delighted visitor over the intricacies of that Daedalian masterpiece which he is pleased to call his labyrinth or maze,—now smiling furtively at his guest's perplexity, now listening with calm superiority to his futile and erring conjectures, now maliciously accompanying him through a flattering path in ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... celebrated Madam Bennet." We further learn, from the "Spectator" (No. 266), that she was the Lady B. to whom Wycherley addressed his ironical dedication of "The Plain Dealer," which is considered as a masterpiece of raillery. It is worthy of remark that the fair sex may justly complain of almost every word in the English language designating a woman having, at some time or another, been used as a term of reproach; for we find Mother, Madam, Mistress, ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... to that," said Beale, radiant with delight; "you're a fair masterpiece, you are; you earned it honest if ever a kid done. Pats you on the napper, she does, and out with 'arf a dollar! A bit of all ...
— Harding's luck • E. [Edith] Nesbit
... not waver; yet the lean, red-haired man stayed motionless. "Do I appear perturbed?" he said. "Why, but see how lightly I take the destruction of my life-work in this, my masterpiece! For I can assure you it was a masterpiece, the fruit of two years' toil and ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various
... through every convolution, to reproduce it in every tint. The result, according to my friend, would be the greatest literary portrait ever painted, and what he asked of me was just to be so good as not to trouble him with questions till he should hang up his masterpiece before me. He did me the honour to declare that, putting aside the great sitter himself, all aloft in his indifference, I was individually the connoisseur he was most working for. I was therefore to be a good ...
— The Figure in the Carpet • Henry James
... already referred to—and the apposite Latin quotations of the head-master and his pompous English, with the inapposite replies of the organ-blower, given in the local dialect and Billy's own peculiar jabber, were supposed to form a masterpiece of mimicry. ...
— A Great Emergency and Other Tales - A Great Emergency; A Very Ill-Tempered Family; Our Field; Madam Liberality • Juliana Horatia Gatty Ewing
... much explanation is, I consider, due to the public, but whether I have been justified by results or whether, under the sacred mask of Drama, I have erred unpardonably, are points which, so long as this revival draws attention to a forgotten masterpiece, can be of ...
— The Beggar's Opera - to which is prefixed the Musick to each Song • John Gay
... things dreamed of but never seen, her eyes were as blue as the early snowflowers that came after the spring floods, and her voice was the sweetest sound that had ever fallen upon their ears. So these men thought when Cummins first brought home his wife, and the masterpiece which each had painted in his soul and brain was never changed. Each week and month added to the deep-toned value of that picture, as the passing of a century might add to a Raphael or a Van Dyke. The woman became more human, and less an angel, of course, but that only made ...
— Back to God's Country and Other Stories • James Oliver Curwood
... [Footnote 24: His masterpiece, Nedorosl, "Mama's Darling," literally the Minor, published 1787, presents an incomparable picture of the manners, habits, etc. of the Russian country gentry. Potemkin, who was Von Wisin's patron, felt so enchanted once after a theatrical representation ...
— Historical View of the Languages and Literature of the Slavic - Nations • Therese Albertine Louise von Jacob Robinson
... himself on having a heart for any fate, but this was one of the interviews that one would rather have avoided. All day he had schooled himself to resignation, had almost reconciled himself to the spoiling of what had promised to be a masterpiece. Explications with Betty would brush the bloom off everything. Yet he must play the part well. But what part? ...
— The Incomplete Amorist • E. Nesbit
... 51, 66, is the only one having the two first numbers; and if sold, the holder was entitled to one half of the $100, it being a half ticket. Now, the reader may perceive that I have examined and laid open, so that he too may examine, this masterpiece of villany. I find that of the two hundred and eighty-six highest prizes, which, their own handbill states, existed in their lottery, and which, by their own figures, amounted to the enormous sum of $195,967, and, in order to be drawn, only required that the tickets should be bought,—I find, allowing ...
— Secret Band of Brothers • Jonathan Harrington Green
... It must be fully understood that these metrical patterns of line and stanza are purely formal. They are the bottles into which the poet pours his liquid meaning, or better, the sketched-in squares over which the painter, copying from an old masterpiece, draws and paints his figures. They have no literal or concrete existence. They are no more the music ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... churchyard at Croydon, in Surrey, where dead and gone Quakers have tombstones by the score, and inscriptions on them also. It is a good thing to be accurate; it is desperately essential in a novel. The average reader, in his triumph at discovering some slight error of detail, would consign a masterpiece of imagination, knowledge of life and ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... morning of our last day's ride, we rounded "Cape Horn," and halted, as is the custom, for all to have a sight of that masterpiece of the Great Architect. The mist still lay in the deep gorge and on the mountain sides, and all was perfect unbroken silence. Without a word we gazed enraptured on the glorious scene, and waited, as if expectant of ...
— 'Three Score Years and Ten' - Life-Long Memories of Fort Snelling, Minnesota, and Other - Parts of the West • Charlotte Ouisconsin Van Cleve
... Hafner, "at some new masterpiece, at a romance which is laid in Roman society, I am sure. Mistrust him, Prince, and you, ladies, ...
— Cosmopolis, Complete • Paul Bourget
... inarticulate cry. The sudden volume of sound denoted mixed emotions, but amazement and grief were throned upon it, and the exclamation came from a man standing now stiff and spellbound before "Joe's Ship," the famous masterpiece of John Barron. The beholders viewed an amazed figure which seemed petrified even to an expression on his face. There are countenances which display the ordinary emotions of humanity in a fashion unusual and peculiar to themselves. Thus, while the customary and conventional ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... do a little livening up for the old people every July and August. They got acquainted there; they took to it like ducks to water. That's where Bond got his idea for his cow masterpiece,—he may have spoken to you ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... of this organization," said Mr. Sheridan, and not without suspecting his response to be a masterpiece in the inadequate. ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... equestrian statue in bronze of Charles IV, placed on a pedestal of Mexican marble, which stands in the court of the University, but formerly adorned the middle of the square. It is a magnificent picture of sculpture, the masterpiece of Tolosa, remarkable for the noble simplicity and purity of its style, and was made at the expense of an ex-viceroy, the Marquis of Branciforte. We also saw the goddess of war lying in a corner of the court, beside ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca
... nature that the country was known to possess at that time. Our time was divided between the American and Canadian sides, viewing the grand spectacle at all hours, from the rising to the setting of the sun; and, awed by the marvelous masterpiece of grandeur, we were held as if fascinated by its beauty, until we were forced to leave for the want of food and to replenish our commissary. When we boarded the cars to be whirled through the then wilds of Lower Canada, we were liberally ...
— Dangers of the Trail in 1865 - A Narrative of Actual Events • Charles E Young
... bustled out, not sorry to escape with his dignity and so cheap a masterpiece. Kloot was left, with swinging legs, dominating the situation. In idle curiosity and with the simplicity of perfectly bad manners, he took up the poet's papers and letters and perused them. As there were scraps of verse amid the mass, Pinchas ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... prevents our following up the details of Darwin's treatment of expression. Whether we accept or do not accept his three principles of explanation we must regard his work as a masterpiece of descriptive analysis, packed full of observations possessing lasting value. For a further development of the subject it is essential that the instinctive factors in expression should be more fully distinguished from ...
— Evolution in Modern Thought • Ernst Haeckel
... throne of ebon and of ivory, of gold and gems—the olive-crown on his head, in his right hand the statue of Victory, in his left; wrought of all metals, the cloud-compelling sceptre, behold the colossal masterpiece of Phidias, the Homeric dream imbodied [122]—the majesty of the Olympian Jove! Enter the banquet-room of the conquerors—to whose verse, hymned in a solemn and mighty chorus, bends the listening Spartan—it is the verse of the Dorian Pindar! In that motley and glittering ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... blowing on the river, Miss Bell led her friends into the old streets with black stone houses and a view of the distant horizon, where, in the pure air, stands a hill with three slender trees. They walked; and Vivian showed to her friend, on facades where red rags were hanging, some marble masterpiece—a Virgin, a lily, a St. Catherine. They walked through these alleys of the antique city to the church of Or San Michele, where it had been agreed that Dechartre should meet them. Therese was thinking of him now with deepest interest. ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France
... "So young—so handsome—a masterpiece of the Creator's hand! . . . Only to-day as gay as a lark, the pride and joy of his mother-and now! How many hopes, how much triumph and happiness are extinct with that life. O Lord my Saviour, Thou hast said that not only those who call Thee Lord, Lord, shall find grace with our Father in Heaven, ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... advanced further into the Baltic, he found no hostile fleet awaiting him, and the new tsar, Alexander, adopting an opposite policy, entered into a compromise on the subject of maritime rights. The battle of the Baltic is considered by some to have been Nelson's masterpiece. It won for him the title of viscount and for his second in command, Rear-Admiral Graves, the gift of the ribbon of the Bath, but the admiralty, for official reasons, declined to confer any public reward or honour on ...
— The Political History of England - Vol XI - From Addington's Administration to the close of William - IV.'s Reign (1801-1837) • George Brodrick
... of Fort la Lippe," said L'Isle, "which overlooks us from the North. Let us make up a party to visit it to-morrow. Cranfield can entertain and instruct us by discoursing on this masterpiece of the Count de Lippe, and unveil the mysteries of the engineer's art. In the intervals, we can, from that high point, survey the country ...
— The Actress in High Life - An Episode in Winter Quarters • Sue Petigru Bowen
... see and feel perhaps but a trifling portion of what there is to be seen and felt, leaving other sides, other perfections, to be appreciated by our neighbours. Till it comes to pass that we find different persons very differently delighted by the same masterpiece, and accounting most discrepantly for their delight ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... well seen in the picture of the Coronation of the Virgin, which is now in the Louvre (No. 1290). "Superior to all his other works," Vasari says of this masterpiece, "and one in which he surpassed himself, is a picture in the Church of San Domenico at Fiesole; in this work he proves the high quality of his powers as well as the profound intelligence he possessed of the art he practised. The subject is the Coronation ...
— Six Centuries of Painting • Randall Davies
... to Maidenhead and Taplow, with Brunel's masterpiece of bridge-building connecting them, its elliptical brick arches being the broadest of their kind in the kingdom. Below this, as beauties decrease, we are compensated by scenes of greater historical interest. Near Maidenhead ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... sure, it is a book unlikely to be ever superseded. Its truth is of that simple and startling character which is sure of an immortal existence; nor is it paying the gallant author too high a complement to class this masterpiece of military history with the most precious of those classic records which have been bequeathed to us by the great writers of antiquity who took part in the wars ...
— Cattle and Cattle-breeders • William M'Combie
... for the ethereal connexions of the romantic imagination, although it would not be so for the historical. [2] The whole courting scene, indeed, in the beginning of the third act, between the lovers is a masterpiece; and the first dawn of disobedience in the mind of Miranda to the command of her father is very finely drawn, so as to seem the working of the Scriptural command, 'Thou shall leave father and mother', &c. O! with what exquisite purity this scene is conceived and executed! ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge
... buildings of note, but his grandson, Shah Jehan, was undoubtedly the most splendid builder of the Mogul Mohammedan period. To him Delhi owes its stately palace and vast mosque—the Jama Masjid—and Agra would be famous for its wonderful palace of dark red stone and fretted marble, even without that masterpiece of Mohammedan inspiration, the world-famed Taj Mahal. The brief period of supreme magnificence came to an end with the last of the "Great" Moguls—Aurungzeb, died in 1707—having only blazed in fullest glory for ...
— A Holiday in the Happy Valley with Pen and Pencil • T. R. Swinburne
... happy, and thought no more of the lost Theodora. He had forsaken her—her whom he had vowed for ever to love, and to whom he had pledged his word to acknowledge her as his own before the world. This was a masterpiece of ingratitude; and yet Theodora hoped that ingratitude, that blackest stain of the human heart, might have prompted the dereliction of Gomez Arias, rather than love for another. To think that she had entirely lost his love, was a pang more cruel than all she had hitherto endured; ...
— Gomez Arias - The Moors of the Alpujarras, A Spanish Historical Romance. • Joaquin Telesforo de Trueba y Cosio
... further, compare yourselves constantly with your model. Do as the art students do in a gallery, take your poor daub right into the presence of the masterpiece, and go over it line by line and tint by tint. Get near Jesus Christ that you may learn your duty from Him, and you will find out many of ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... swift action which had something of defiance as well as grace in it, she swept aside the concealing curtain. Florian recoiled with an involuntary cry,—and then remained motionless and silent,—stricken dumb and stupid by the magnificent creation which confronted him. This Angela's masterpiece! A woman's work! This stupendous conception! This perfect drawing! This wondrous colouring! Fully facing him, the central glory of the whole picture, was a figure of Christ—unlike any other Christ ever imagined by poet or painter—an etherealised Form through ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... be wakeful to-night, Mr. West, you might be interested in looking over this story by Berrian. It is considered his masterpiece, and will at least give you an idea what the stories nowadays ...
— Looking Backward - 2000-1887 • Edward Bellamy
... overcoming; and the harmony with which he has combined tints of the most daring force, and sharpest apparent contrast, in the edgy building, and opposed them to an uninteresting distance of excessive azure (simple blue country, observe), is one of the chief wonders of the painting: so that this masterpiece can no more furnish an apology for the continuance of a practice which, though it gives some liveliness of character to the warehouses of Amsterdam, is fit only for a place whose foundations are mud, and whose inhabitants are partially animated cheeses,—than ...
— The Poetry of Architecture • John Ruskin
... and epilogue informed you, that OEdipus was the most celebrated piece of all antiquity; that Sophocles, not only the greatest wit, but one of the greatest men in Athens, made it for the stage at the public cost; and that it had the reputation of being his masterpiece, not only among the seven of his which are still remaining, but of the greater number which are perished. Aristotle has more than once admired it, in his Book of Poetry; Horace has mentioned it: Lucullus, Julius Caesar, and other noble Romans, have written on the same subject, though their poems ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden
... that crowns the hill Where Boreas sweeps with icy chill, A masterpiece of studied art Conceived by genius versatile And fashioned with unerring skill, O'erlooks the busy, crowded mart, And, like a kingly domicile, Its burnished dome and sculpture thrill With admiration every heart; And strangers ...
— Poems - Vol. IV • Hattie Howard
... where the great houses begin to thin out, and vacant lots, as if ashamed of their vacancy, shrink behind boardings vivid with the news of picture-plays. It was the year when they were advertising the screen-masterpiece, Passion Aflame; and here was depicted Luciline Lynch, a torch in her hand, her hair in maenadic dishevelment, leading on a mob to set fire to a town. Letty herself having been in that mob paused in search of her face among the horde of the great star's followers. It was a blob of scarlet ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King
... Bluebeard's immense body is prone and lifeless in the dust, Wagner suddenly leaves tragedy and gives us a melodious duet between the brother and sister on the theme: "What can equal a brother's love?" This duet and finale unite to form a masterpiece; a deserved rebuke to any cynic who may consider that Wagner could not adopt the enervating methods of the Italian school if he desired. His cadenzas here are miracles of compressed technique, and, although the melody is conventional, the music itself is ...
— Bluebeard • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... naturally, found in the fact a fresh confirmation of that traditional blindness of authors to their own best work, which is one of the commonplaces of literary history. But this is to premise that she did regard it as her masterpiece, a fact which, apart from this accident of priority of issue, is, as far as we are aware, nowhere asserted. A simpler solution is probably that, of the three novels she had written or sketched by 1811, Pride and Prejudice was languishing ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... three wonderful children, Apollo, the god of the sun, Selene, the goddess of the moon, and Aurora, the goddess of the dawn. When Aurora appears her sister, Selene (the moon), fades and night rolls back like a curtain. Now let us look at this masterpiece by Guido Reni carefully that we may know how wonderful is the coming ...
— The Children's Book of Celebrated Pictures • Lorinda Munson Bryant
... which his instinctive refinement and delicacy of taste enabled him to combine, with all the higher powers of the man, the courtly graces of the gentleman and scholar—still his happiest effort, the masterpiece of his genius, in which his own mind is displayed in the most agreeable light, and his inspiration breathes forth with the greatest brilliancy and beauty, will be found to be dictated by the associations of his early rustic days. When I reflect, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various
... observe it. Only in the answer of its Thou can every I completely feel its endless unity. Then the understanding tries to unfold the inner germ of godlikeness, presses closer and closer to the goal, is full of eagerness to fashion the soul, as an artist fashions his one beloved masterpiece. In the mysteries of culture the spirit sees the play and the laws of caprice and of life. The statue of Pygmalion moves; a joyous shudder comes over the astonished artist in the consciousness of his own immortality, and, as the eagle bore Ganymede, a divine hope bears him ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... "Gulliver's Travels," and Gay set the town wild with his "Beggar's Opera." We are far from any thought of classifying the "Beggar's Opera" as a work of art on a level with the "Dunciad" or "Gulliver's Travels," but in its way it is a masterpiece. It is thoroughly original, fresh, and vivid. It added one or two distinctly new figures to the humorous drama. It is clever as a satire and charming as a story. One cannot be surprised that when it had the attraction of novelty the public raved about it. To say anything ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... spoken of which does not regard this kind of protection as sufficient, and which therefore causes its eggs to hatch outside the surface of the water. The exceedingly adorned and elegant Phyrrhylima Filamentosa performs this masterpiece of truest love. With great dexerity [tr. note: sic] this fish darts from 5 to 7 cm. above the surface of the water and there fastens its eggs on the walls of the aquarium—usually in one corner. Even though ...
— Evolution - An Investigation and a Critique • Theodore Graebner
... that cultured public which had at once accepted his earlier work as that of a master of English. As already stated, it was Will o' the Mill, a charmingly written story of still life, with a quiet philosophy all its own, that Mr Hamerton had pronounced a masterpiece of style. Markheim was a graphic, but very unpleasant, story of a murder; Olalla, a horrible, but powerfully written, sketch of hereditary insanity, with a beautiful setting of Italian scenery to ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • Margaret Moyes Black
... more or less extended backward. This is notably apparent in the work of the Van Eycks: in the Eve in the Brussels Gallery; in the wife of Arnolfini in the highly finished portrait group in the National Gallery; even the virgins in the great masterpiece of the Van Eycks in the Cathedral at Ghent assume the ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 4 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... his own room to add some final reverent touches to the masterpiece, and to meditate upon the delicate blonde beauty of ...
— At the Sign of the Jack O'Lantern • Myrtle Reed
... with admiration for this masterpiece, showered Keldermans with honors; made him director of construction of the towns of Antwerp, Brussels, and Malines, putting thus the seal of artistic perfection ...
— Vanished towers and chimes of Flanders • George Wharton Edwards
... liked than Frith's "Paddington Station"; certainly I should be the last to grudge it its popularity. Many a weary forty minutes have I whiled away disentangling its fascinating incidents and forging for each an imaginary past and an improbable future. But certain though it is that Frith's masterpiece, or engravings of it, have provided thousands with half-hours of curious and fanciful pleasure, it is not less certain that no one has experienced before it one half-second of aesthetic rapture—and this although the picture contains several ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... Whistler with only genius. His artistic perceptions are moreexquisite than Velasquez's. He knows as much, possibly even a little more, and yet the result is never quite equal. Why? A question of health. C'est un temperament de chatte. He cannot pass from masterpiece to masterpiece like Velasquez. The expenditure of nerve-force necessary to produce such a work as the portrait of Lady Archibald Campbell or Miss Alexander exhausts him, and he is obliged to wait till Nature recoups herself; and these ...
— Modern Painting • George Moore
... drunkenness of Guyomar, as alluding to some anecdote of the day, and at any rate as the admitted invention of Terence himself. He might challenge the advocates of Menander to produce the Greek original from which the play was borrowed; he might reject the Greek idioms which abound in that masterpiece of the Roman stage with contempt, as beneath his notice; and disregard the names which betray a Grecian origin, the allusions to the habits of Grecian women, to the state of popular feeling at Athens, and the administration of Athenian law, with supercilious indifference. All this such a reasoner ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 344, June, 1844 • Various
... that astonished his admirers quickly dies down, for the following year, there appeared the sober Pierre et Jean, that admirable masterpiece of typical reality constructed with "human leaven," without any admixture of literary seasoning, or romantic combinations. The reader finds once more in his splendid integrity the ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... not, mine Audacity," said the knight, resuming the affected manner which was become a second nature to him; "nevertheless this fosse is curiously well shaped, and might be the masterpiece of Nature's last bed-maker, I would say the sexton—Wherefore, let us be thankful to chance or some unknown friend, who hath thus provided for one of us the decencies of sepulture, and let us proceed to determine which shall have the advantage of enjoying ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... was welcomed as a great relief, a salvation from probable calamity. Not a few appreciated its completeness and success as a strictly military move. "This evacuation," writes one, "is a masterpiece." "That grand retreat from the Island which will ever reflect honour to our Generals," says another. "Considering the difficulties," is Greene's criticism, "it was the best effected retreat I ever read or heard of." "It was executed," says Scott, "with unexpected success." But in the country ...
— The Campaign of 1776 around New York and Brooklyn • Henry P. Johnston
... beautifully drawn, and this little book is quite a masterpiece. It was published by the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge, and must have been within their guidelines, without being excessively pious. Do read it—it ...
— A Life's Eclipse • George Manville Fenn
... which is said to have been written for some drawings of Mr. Rossetti, is also a masterpiece in this romantic manner. Our brief English age of romanticism, our 1830, was 1856-60, when Mr. Morris, Mr. Burne Jones, and Mr. Swinburne were undergraduates. Perhaps it wants a peculiar turn of taste to admire these strange things, though "The Haystack in the Floods," ...
— Letters on Literature • Andrew Lang
... the old squaw, who sits mutely amid her wares near the traffic gate? She declared this her choicest creation, her masterpiece, indeed. I am so ...
— Joyce's Investments - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... that he was especially pleased with a versification "by G. N. and published especially for the amusement of 'little people' lest in the volumes of The Doctor it should 'escape their sight.'" However, it would appear that teachers at least should know this masterpiece in the only form in which its author put it. To that end this version of "The Three Bears" follows Southey with the change of a single word. At the head of the story he placed these ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... to hear him sounding the depths and cadences of the Living Temple, "bearing on its front this doleful inscription, 'Here God once dwelt,'" was like listening to the recitative of Handel. But Isaiah was his masterpiece; and I remember quite well his startling us all when reading at family worship, "His name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, the mighty God," by a peremptory, explosive sharpness, as of thunder overhead, at the words "the ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... length of time it took him fully to grasp the conception of gilding it with his bounty. He should snatch it from no other rites and associate it with nothing profane; he would simply take it as it should be given up to him and make it a masterpiece of splendour and a mountain of fire. Tended sacredly all the year, with the sanctifying church round it, it would always be ready for his offices. There would be difficulties, but from the first they presented themselves only as difficulties ...
— The Altar of the Dead • Henry James
... of a Tub" eagerly, tasting with a palate consciously fastidious and yet catholic, the fine savour of a masterpiece. By his secret enthusiasm, which would escape from him at rare intervals in a word to a friend, he was continuing the reputation of the "Tale of a Tub" from one century towards the next. A classic remains a classic ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... shade to give meaning to her position, and came down from her perch leisurely. She soon after left the studio, bearing with her, in her memory, the image of a man's head, as beauteous as that of the Endymion, a masterpiece of Girodet's which she had ...
— Vendetta • Honore de Balzac
... hard physical work to break stones for a road-way, but the task itself is a simple one—the lifting of the arm and dropping it again with sufficient force to split a rock apart. But the writing of a prose masterpiece, such as the Areopagitica, involves the highest human faculties in harmonious action. If we add to the requirements of prose, the rhythm, the exalted imagery, and perhaps the assonance and rhyme ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... at the Madrid Academy Exhibition of Oil Paintings. The Municipality of Barcelona purchased this chef d'oeuvre for the City Hall. Other famous productions of his are "The Battle of Lepanto," "The Death of Cleopatra," and "The Blood Compact" (q.v). This last masterpiece was acquired by the Municipality of Manila for the City Hall, but was removed when the Tagalog Rebellion broke out, for reasons which will be understood after reading Chapter xxii. This artist, the son of poor parents, was a second mate ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... said or done; there is opportunity, even in this brief essay, to exercise the pupil in applying the commonplace tests of criticism, although it should be seen to as well that a true appreciation is awakened for the real excellences of this little masterpiece. ...
— De Quincey's Revolt of the Tartars • Thomas De Quincey
... Glossary to their proper places beneath the text; but has availed himself of the labours of Messrs. Craik, Saunders, Sir H. Nicolas, and our able correspondent A. E. B., to give completeness to what is a very useful edition of old Dan Chaucer's masterpiece. We have to thank the same publisher for a corresponding edition of Spenser's Faerie Queene; so that no lover of those two glorious old poets need any longer want a cheap and ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 210, November 5, 1853 • Various
... From this time no one entered the palace except the servants, who had orders to clean it from time to time; not a piece of furniture even, not a book, was moved. The portrait of Napoleon on Mont St. Bernard, David's masterpiece, remained hanging in the grand reception hall, and the queen's portrait opposite, exactly as the king had placed them; and even the cellars were religiously respected. The apartments of King Charles had also remained untouched, and not one of the ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... could represent the buck in the act of upsetting us, it would be our 'masterpiece,' wouldn't it? But I am afraid that is further than our ...
— Frank, the Young Naturalist • Harry Castlemon
... 18, 1821, came the first performance of Weber's masterpiece, "Der Freischuetz." The theater was beseiged for hours by eager crowds, and when the doors were at last opened, there was a grand rush to enter. The whole house from pit to galleries was soon filled, and when the composer entered the orchestra, there was a roar of applause, which it seemed ...
— The World's Great Men of Music - Story-Lives of Master Musicians • Harriette Brower
... this single form of worship, nor be derived from it. This worship is undoubtedly one of the most abundant sources of myth, and Spencer, with his profound knowledge and keen discernment, was able to discuss the hypothesis as it deserves; whence his book, even from this point of view, is a masterpiece of analysis, like all those which issue ...
— Myth and Science - An Essay • Tito Vignoli
... the arts, Dr. Mundson? Surely even your supermen and women cannot instantly learn to paint a masterpiece or to guide their fingers and their brains through the intricacies of a ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science February 1930 • Various
... forgot myself, forgot the place and the occasion. The people looking up at me heard the story of a beautiful little boy, my cousin, whom I had loved very dearly, and who died in far-distant Russia some years after I came to America. My composition was not a masterpiece; it was merely good for a girl of fifteen. But I had written that I still loved the little cousin, and I made a thousand strangers feel it. And before the applause there was a moment of stillness in the ...
— The Promised Land • Mary Antin
... Herald: "A story which lays a spell upon you. The animation is unceasing, and so, therefore, is the interest.... Mr. Hope has not lost his old deftness in dialogue.... The scene between the two men [Sapt and James] after the murder ... is a masterpiece." ...
— His Lordship's Leopard - A Truthful Narration of Some Impossible Facts • David Dwight Wells
... which is considered the masterpiece of the firm of Becquet, is six feet in height and four and a half in width, made entirely of wrought iron, with triple sides, and divided into isolated compartments ...
— File No. 113 • Emile Gaboriau
... for this day's competition. Many of the pictures were highly admirable, and it was most difficult to make any preference between them. For instance, if there was produced by one party a roll of "The Season," which was the masterpiece of some old master, on selected subjects; there was produced also, by the other party, a roll of sketches on paper, which were scarcely inferior to, and more ornamented with flourishing than the ancient works, in spite of the necessary ...
— Japanese Literature - Including Selections from Genji Monogatari and Classical - Poetry and Drama of Japan • Various
... that was a clever trick indeed," cried Herode; "it throws those you are so often applauded for on the stage quite into the shade—a masterpiece of strategy, friend Scapin!—for, as is well known, geese are by nature very vigilant, and never caught off their guard—of which history gives us a notable instance, in the watchfulness of the sacred geese of the Capitol, whose loud cackling ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... began to stretch out the banner by separating with his fingers the cords of the trellis, "the masterpiece of a woman who embroidered in the olden time was always in this difficult work. To become a member of the Corporation she had to make, as it is written in the statutes, a figure by itself in shaded gold, ...
— The Dream • Emile Zola
... characters are beautifully drawn, and this little book is quite a masterpiece. It was published by the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge, and must have been within their guidelines, without being excessively pious. Do read it—it won't take you ...
— A Life's Eclipse • George Manville Fenn
... and had a Michael Angelo's Moses beard curling down from the head of a satyr along the body of an imp. Behrman was a failure in art. Forty years he had wielded the brush without getting near enough to touch the hem of his Mistress's robe. He had been always about to paint a masterpiece, but had never yet begun it. For several years he had painted nothing except now and then a daub in the line of commerce or advertising. He earned a little by serving as a model to those young artists in the colony who could ...
— The Trimmed Lamp and Others • O Henry
... left out the transforming thing," said Anne softly. "There'll be love there, Phil—faithful, tender love, such as I'll never find anywhere else in the world—love that's waiting for me. That makes my picture a masterpiece, doesn't it, even if the ...
— Anne Of The Island • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... to make open confession of the terrible deed. The more I reflected upon the matter the clearer it grew in my own mind that Krespel must be a villain, and in the same proportion did my intended reproach, which assumed of itself the form of a real rhetorical masterpiece, wax more fiery and more impressive. Thus equipped and mightily incensed, I hurried to his house. I found him with a calm smiling countenance making playthings. "How can peace," I burst out, "how can peace find lodgment even for a single moment in your breast, so long ...
— Weird Tales. Vol. I • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... their enjoyment and entertain them with his own in shape of a thousand whims and fancies; but his sleepless observation was at work all the time, and nothing had escaped his keen vision on either side of the river. The fifteenth chapter of the third volume is a masterpiece. ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... The introduction, the four chapters and the eighteen canons, having finally passed the council, were approved by the Holy Father, adopted and promulgated as a Papal "Constitution," which will be known in history as the Constitution Dei Filius. It is a masterpiece of theological science, and may be compared to priceless gems artistically arranged by skilful hands in ...
— Pius IX. And His Time • The Rev. AEneas MacDonell
... from thenceforth the kings had found out a way whereby to help themselves against the mighty by creatures of their own, and such as had no other support but by their favor.. By which means this government, being indeed the masterpiece of modern prudence, has been cried up to the skies, as the only invention whereby at once to maintain the sovereignty of a prince and the liberty of the people. Whereas, indeed, it has been no other than a wrestling-match, wherein ...
— The Commonwealth of Oceana • James Harrington
... it is the best Science Fiction periodical, for it assuredly is not; but it is the most reliable. I am sure when I pick up your magazine that I shall find therein consistently interesting stories. I have yet to find a story that failed to hold my attention; on the other hand, I have yet to find a masterpiece. Of all the Editors, you have shown yourself the shrewdest judge of public taste, but also the least interested in ...
— Astounding Stories, March, 1931 • Various
... a passing Beau, Half Pertness, half Pulvilio;— One of those Mushroom Growths that spring From Grand Tours and from Tailoring;— And dealing much in terms of Art Picked up at Sale and auction Mart. Straight to the Masterpiece he ran With lifted Glass, and thus began, Mumbling as fast as he could speak:— "Sublime!—prodigious!—truly Greek! That 'Air of Head' is just divine; That contour GUIDO, every line; That Forearm, too, has quite the Gusto Of the third Manner of ROBUSTO...." Then, with a ...
— Collected Poems - In Two Volumes, Vol. II • Austin Dobson
... that picture, at once affectionate and satirical, tender and humorous, extravagant and delicately shaded, of the student life enjoyed together for a few short months by the inseparable friends. To make extracts from a masterpiece of such consummate workmanship is almost painful. Future biographers of Shelley, writing on a scale adequate to the greatness of their subject, will be content to lay their pens down for a season at ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... old man! That trick of yours with the table and the water-bottle was really splendid! A masterpiece, on my word! Only, ...
— The Eight Strokes of the Clock • Maurice Leblanc
... their inspiration, rather than those who abandoned themselves to it, to be placed in the first rank of classics; to put Virgil there more surely than Homer, Racine in preference to Corneille. The masterpiece to which the theory likes to point, which in fact brings together all conditions of prudence, strength, tempered boldness, moral elevation, and grandeur, is Athalie. Turenne in his two last campaigns and Racine in ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... a mediocre thing he is unnoticed; if his work is a masterpiece, jealousy wags its tongue and untruth ...
— Evening Round Up - More Good Stuff Like Pep • William Crosbie Hunter
... excused, but to be applauded. Thus the sounding of the clock in "Venice Preserved" makes the hearts of the whole audience quake, and conveys a stronger terror to the mind than it is possible for words to do. The appearance of the ghost in "Hamlet" is a masterpiece in its kind, and wrought up with all the circumstances that can create either attention or horror. The mind of the reader is wonderfully prepared for his reception by the discourses that precede it. His dumb behaviour at his first entrance strikes the imagination very strongly; ...
— The Palmy Days of Nance Oldfield • Edward Robins
... other masterpiece of ancient art we eagerly looked for was the marble Faun of Praxiteles, around which the graceful genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne has woven such a delicate web of romance, the figure itself being inimitably described in the opening chapter. But this ...
— Fair Italy, the Riviera and Monte Carlo • W. Cope Devereux
... innocent, and enchanting. Her figure had acquired a majestic ease, which gave to her movements voluptuousness and firmness. It seemed as if youth had made a supreme effort, and in giving the last touch to her beauty had obtained a masterpiece. She was in the full splendor of ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: Spanish • Various
... up a couple of sheets of paper from the desk and, coughing imposingly, proceeded to read out his masterpiece:— ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Feb. 12, 1919 • Various
... Miss Audrey Craven was the original of "Laura," the heroine of Langley Wyndham's masterpiece. She first attracted the attention of that student of human nature at Oxford, at a dinner given by her guardian, the Dean of St. Benedict's, ostensibly in honour of the new Master of Lazarus, in reality for his ward's entertainment and instruction ...
— Audrey Craven • May Sinclair
... Sigurd the Volsung, which Mr. Morris justly considered his masterpiece, was contemplated early in the history of the Kelmscott Press. An announcement appears in a proof of the first list, dated April, 1892, but it was excluded from the list as issued in May. It did ...
— The Art and Craft of Printing • William Morris
... butterfly just brought from China, which the worthy man keeps in his collection and exhibits to this day, blissfully unconscious that it is only painted paper. Bixiou had the patience to work up the little masterpiece for the sole purpose ...
— Bureaucracy • Honore de Balzac
... Yet the incredible had happened; and England had found its worship once more—the necessary culmination of unimpeded subjectivity. From the provinces had come the like news. In cathedral after cathedral had been the same scenes. Markenheim's masterpiece, executed in four days after the passing of the bill, had been reproduced by the ordinary machinery, and four thousand replicas had been despatched to every important centre. Telegraphic reports had streamed into the London papers that everywhere the new movement had been ...
— Lord of the World • Robert Hugh Benson
... "It is a masterpiece!" exclaimed Gianbattista. "What detail! I shall never be able to finish anything like that ...
— Marzio's Crucifix and Zoroaster • F. Marion Crawford
... of applause ran through the assembled natives. The ngob-burn boye, koom-bur bomb-gur, or exceedingly big-stone, extremely hard hit, was evidently regarded by them as a masterpiece of eloquence; and the contrast between this and the neyp bomb-gur, very gently struck, of Mr. Taalwurt, undoubtedly evinced its superiority in their estimation; but as Taalwurt was a stout able fellow, and one by no means given to deal gentle ...
— Journals Of Two Expeditions Of Discovery In North-West And Western Australia, Vol. 2 (of 2) • George Grey
... the long-haired instinct. I see it now. They always say it is fine. Was it a masterpiece, Connie?" And when Connie hesitated, she urged, "Come on, confess it. Then we shall be convinced that you have found your field. They are always ...
— Prudence Says So • Ethel Hueston
... even of a man so justly celebrated, when addressed to myself: no, I shall hold sacred those revered and but too scarce testimonies of the high honour his kindness conferred upon me. One letter I have from him that is a masterpiece of elegance and kindness united. ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madam D'Arblay Volume 2 • Madame D'Arblay
... physical vigor of Mrs. Stanton was much commented upon as in a rich and resonant voice she read the speech which she had that morning delivered before the Judiciary Committee of the House. It was entitled The Solitude of Self, and is considered by many to be her masterpiece. ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... golden sovereigns, an eight-and-six brass turnip, which went jolly well, although its tick was a trifle vigorous under Gus's pillow, and an agreement. This document, drawn up by himself, Gus regarded as a very masterpiece of business-like acumen. Gus could have his gold watch back again within the year by paying three sovereigns, and buying the brass turnip for half a sovereign, the profit accruing on this latter transaction being, as Gus explained proudly, the ...
— Acton's Feud - A Public School Story • Frederick Swainson
... thought, was a masterpiece of understatement. He started to tell Scotty that compared with Brad Marbek a Hereford bull was downright winsome, but at that moment Cap'n ...
— Smugglers' Reef • John Blaine
... then summoned Leonardo. The painter's gracious speech soon convinced the Duke that men of genius do not work like hired laborers. This painting was to be a masterpiece, fit monument to a wise and virtuous ruler. So consummate a performance must not be hastened; besides there was no one to pose for either the head of Christ or of Judas. The Christ must be ideal and the face could ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... Nap admitted. "But you—you haven't the force of a day-old puppy. Maybe, when I'm out of the way fighting my devils in the desert, you'll give Capper a free hand, and let him make of you what you were always intended to be—a human masterpiece. There won't be any obstacles when ...
— The Knave of Diamonds • Ethel May Dell
... regarded as the masterpiece of Benvenuto Cellini, an artist so highly spoken of in France, without scarcely anything being known about him. This statue, a little affected in its pose, like all the works of the Florentine school, has a juvenile grace ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 7 - Italy, Sicily, and Greece (Part One) • Various
... employ her clumsy pen upon essays. "From my Window" is a favourite title with the rank beginner. Charles Lamb might conceivably have written an essay called "From my Window" which would have been a masterpiece—and there is a remote chance that some editor might have accepted it. But then Charles Lamb is dead, and his ...
— Journalism for Women - A Practical Guide • E.A. Bennett
... atmosphere wherever they are. I have lived in music all my life, but I can say I find musical atmosphere right here in America. If I listen to the Boston Symphony Orchestra, or to the Kneisel Quartet, when these organizations are giving an incomparable performance of some masterpiece, I am entirely wrapt up in the music; am I not then in a musical atmosphere? Or if I hear a performance of a Wagner opera at the Metropolitan, where Wagner is given better even than in Bayreuth, am I not also in a musical atmosphere? To be sure, if I am in Bayreuth I may see some reminiscences ...
— Piano Mastery - Talks with Master Pianists and Teachers • Harriette Brower
... scathing arraignment, a masterpiece of ridicule, but as it went on it became even worse, for it now got down to the making of serious charges against ...
— The Autobiography of Methuselah • John Kendrick Bangs
... impersonations of the two partners when seeking to outwit each other are as well-motived and as fertile in comic effect as any of the attempts of Crispin or of some other of Regnard's interchangeable valets. Is not even the Legataire Universel, Regnard's masterpiece, overrated? To me it is neither higher comedy nor more provocative of laughter than either La Boule or Tricoche et Cacolet; and the modern plays, as I have said, are based on a study of life ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various
... can write your book!" and a little later, pulling open a drawer, showed him a considerable sum of money that she had been saving all unknown to him. Thus it became possible for him to devote himself to the work that proved to be his masterpiece, The Scarlet Letter, published in 1850. The unusual excellence of the romance brought to the writer far-spread praise and popularity, and he became at length recognized as a foremost American ...
— Journeys Through Bookland - Volume Four • Charles H. Sylvester
... said, "before a masterpiece of sea and rock, such as only Richards can paint. It was a view of Land's End, Cornwall, and in the artist's very best vein. My admiration made me totally unmindful of my surroundings, so much so, indeed, that, although the gallery was crowded, I caught myself expressing ...
— The Darrow Enigma • Melvin L. Severy
... voices of the pupils made such a success and the whole work was so enthusiastically applauded that it was revived at the Opera-Comique and won back a success which it has never lost. We also heard there Gluck's Orphee long before that masterpiece was revived at the Theatre-Lyrique. Then there was Mehul's Irato, a curious and charming work which the Opera took up afterwards. And there, too, they gave the last act of Rossini's Otello. The tempest in that act gave me the idea of the one ...
— Musical Memories • Camille Saint-Saens
... of Soame Jennings's Essay on the Origin of Evil; a masterpiece of composition, both for vigour of style and precision ...
— A Poetical Review of the Literary and Moral Character of the late Samuel Johnson (1786) • John Courtenay
... in another renders him the mark of his antipathy. Adams now began to fumble in his pockets, and soon cried out, "O la! I have it not about me." Upon this, the gentleman asking him what he was searching for, he said he searched after a sermon, which he thought his masterpiece, against vanity. "Fie upon it, fie upon it!" cries he, "why do I ever leave that sermon out of my pocket? I wish it was within five miles; I would willingly fetch it, to read it you." The gentleman answered that there was no need, for he ...
— Joseph Andrews, Vol. 2 • Henry Fielding
... Notre Dame de la Garde. Although the Aphrodite lay inside the mole, her bridge and promenade deck were high enough to permit him to see the rocky islet crowned by the Chateau d'If. He knew that the hero of Dumas' masterpiece had burrowed a tunnel out of that grim prison, to swim ashore an outcast, a man with a price on his head, yet bearing with him the precious paper whose secret should make him the fabulously rich Count of Monte Christo. It was only a soul-stirring romance, a dim legend transformed ...
— The Wheel O' Fortune • Louis Tracy
... would be! But if such a thing were possible that the spirit of Raphael should enter into the man and obtain the mastery of his mind and eye and hand, it would be entirely possible that he should paint this masterpiece; for it would simply be Raphael reproducing Raphael. And this in a mystery is what is true of the disciple filled with the Holy Ghost. Christ, who is "the image of the invisible God," is set before him as his divine pattern, and Christ ...
— The Ministry of the Spirit • A. J. Gordon
... antiquity, and have afforded a fertile field of investigation to the learned of the civilized world. To present to the public a faithful translation of a work, universally esteemed, not only for its varied information, but as being the masterpiece of one of the greatest Poets of ancient Rome, is the object of ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso
... made this rather belated acquaintance with Dickens' masterpiece, through reading it aloud to one of his children who was laid up with a swelled face. But, however introduced to his notice, the book made a deep impression on him. In the following June he contributed ...
— Matthew Arnold • G. W. E. Russell
... This masterpiece of humor was first published in 1605, and is, of course, a work of fiction. It is unsurpassed as ...
— The Junior Classics, V4 • Willam Patten (Editor)
... improve this during our first tour by digging an advanced trench well in front of the outpost line, and so as to conform with the front lines of flank battalions. Though the trench was dug with little interruption on the part of the enemy, we did not exactly look upon it as a masterpiece, nor by any means our best piece of work in France, but it served its purpose very well, and in time ...
— The Sherwood Foresters in the Great War 1914 - 1919 - History of the 1/8th Battalion • W.C.C. Weetman
... with elegant and curious trifles-fans on the mantelshelf, an antique lamp upon a bracket, and on the table a silver-mounted bowl of cocoa-nut about half full of unset jewels. The fair Cuban, herself a gem of colour and the fit masterpiece for that rich frame, motioned Harry to a seat, and sinking herself into another, thus began ...
— The Dynamiter • Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny van de Grift Stevenson
... never easy to tell Gyp's feelings from her face; even Winton was often baffled. Her preparation of Aunt Rosamund for the reception of Fiorsen was a masterpiece of casualness. When he duly came, he, too, seemed doubly alive to the need for caution, only gazing at Gyp when he could not be seen doing so. But, going out, he whispered: "Not like this—not like this; I must see you alone—I must!" She smiled and shook her head. But bubbles had come ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... the drama of the present. Not a single detail of it is narrated in cold blood, as, for example, Prospero relates to Miranda the story of their marooning, or Horatio expounds the Norwegian-Danish political situation. I am not holding up The Vikings as a great masterpiece; it has many weaknesses both of substance and of method; but in this particular art of indistinguishably blending the drama of the present with the drama of the past, it is already consummate. The Pretenders scarcely comes ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... one could plot out a book that should be more curious than Rabelais, and jot down the outlines of a romance to surpass Cervantes, and design renaissance tragedies and volumes of contes, and comedies of the Restoration; everything was to be done, and the masterpiece was always the rainbow cup, a ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen
... the Pasture' is a novel of greatness; it is so far Mr. Allen's masterpiece; a work of beauty and finished art. There can be no question of its supreme place in our literature; there can be no doubt of its wide acceptance and acceptability. More than any of his books it is destined to an enviable ...
— A Forest Hearth: A Romance of Indiana in the Thirties • Charles Major
... held by many admirers of Bret Harte to be his masterpiece of verse. The poem is so held for the evident sincerity and depth of feeling it displays as well as for the unusual quality of ...
— Dickens in Camp • Bret Harte
... model in wood of such a masterpiece as the Milan Cathedral didn't particularly recommend itself to me; but when we had arrived at a curiosity shop, and been ushered into a huge inner room, I suddenly changed my mind, for what I saw there was wonderful—as wonderful ...
— My Friend the Chauffeur • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... disturbed in this resigned acceptance of the situation. One afternoon he raised his head from the enthralled perusal of "Maiden Sweet" to find that the sands were empty of his charge. He struggled up from his chair, dropped the luscious masterpiece into it, and hurried in search of him. Pollyooly was a good sixty yards away; and he was breathless when he reached her. He clamoured wheezily for information as to the whereabouts of the prince. Pollyooly told him, indifferently enough, that he had gone ...
— Happy Pollyooly - The Rich Little Poor Girl • Edgar Jepson
... the /Lettres Provinciales/ (1656-57) written by Pascal (1623-62). The writer was an exceedingly able controversialist, and in many respects a deeply religious man. From the point of view of literature the /Provincial Letters/ were in a sense a masterpiece, but they were grossly unfair ...
— History of the Catholic Church from the Renaissance to the French • Rev. James MacCaffrey
... stretching, piercing, rending, crushing, all the most sensitive portions of the human body, one at a time or many at once. The famous Virgin, whose embrace drove a hundred knives into the body of the poor wretch she took in her arms, was an angel of mercy compared to this masterpiece ...
— Our Hundred Days in Europe • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... a poet and critic could not fail to give it a place in his treasure-house of American poetry. The poet, Mr. Clarence Hawkes, has been blind since childhood; yet he finds in nature hints of combinations for his mental pictures. Out of the knowledge and impressions that come to him he constructs a masterpiece which hangs upon the walls of his thought. And into the poet's house come all the true ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... advised. One can only regret that it was not set aside for a year or so, and written afresh, or, at least, largely revised. Perhaps this would have been expecting too much from so unmethodical a worker as Clarke. The far finer dramatic taste and literary form of his masterpiece, issued five years later, showed how little indicative of his talent was the ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... the Mountain," for instance, was written while the author was contemplating this lofty New Hampshire crag, whose rugged outlines resemble the profile of a human face. Inspired by the grandeur of this masterpiece of nature's handiwork, and looking "up through nature, unto nature's God," the poem began to take form in her thought, and alighting from her carriage, she seated herself by the roadside and began to write. Some tourists ...
— Poems • Mary Baker Eddy
... Everybody saw through the discreet veil with which she flattered herself she concealed her exultation when others than the affianced twain were by—and while nobody was so unkind as to expose the thinness of the pretence, she was given to understand in many and gratifying ways that her masterpiece was considered, in the Aylett circle, a suitable crown to the achievements that had preceded it. Mabel was popular and beloved, and her betrothed, in appearance and manner, in breeding and intelligence, justified Mrs. Sutton's pride ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... Confusion now hath made his masterpiece. Most sacrilegious murder hath broke ope the Lord's anointed temple and stole thence the ...
— ZigZag Journeys in Northern Lands; - The Rhine to the Arctic • Hezekiah Butterworth
... however, hung a small picture with naked figures in the foreground, and with much foliage behind. It might not have struck every beholder, for it looked old and smoke-dried; but a connoisseur, on inspecting it closely, would have pronounced it to be a Judgment of Paris, and a masterpiece of the ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... dwelling of the Chevalier Pierre Bayard du Terrail, once without fear and without reproach; a street has now been built by the present bourgeois administration through the site of the hotel Necker. Old Paris is departing, following its kings who abandoned it. For one masterpiece of architecture saved from destruction by a Polish princess (the hotel Lambert, Ile Saint-Louis, bought and occupied by the Princess Czartoriska) how many little palaces have fallen, like this dwelling of Petitot, into the hands ...
— The Lesser Bourgeoisie • Honore de Balzac
... city that remains in our hands. The bridge head has become the most disputed spot on the map of Europe; "The Elephant" a heap of waste in No Man's Land, while doubtless from the very place where Corot painted his masterpiece, a German machine gun dominating the city is belching forth its ...
— With Those Who Wait • Frances Wilson Huard
... Lion. The bridge is a part of life out of the Middle Ages, and the Lion is a masterpiece ...
— A Woman's Will • Anne Warner
... And he uncovered the masterpiece of the great artist, expecting to be joyous in the joy with which she would receive it. But something strange occurred. Madame de Nailles sprang back a step or two, stretching out her arms as if repelling an apparition, ...
— Jacqueline, v1 • Th. Bentzon (Mme. Blanc)
... that once a club of ladies in high society tried to high-pressure the publishers of Mr. Webster's dictionary to change the old spelling in their favor. Yet there is a lot to be said for this more genteel and appetizing rendering of the word, for the Welsh masterpiece is, after all, a very rare bit of cheesemongery, male ...
— The Complete Book of Cheese • Robert Carlton Brown
... presentation, freshness of personal experience, picturesqueness in description, novelty in incident and story, scholarship, and taste in art criticism. In short, it is not only the best of his poems, but it has great merit besides that of the poetry. The story of Ginevra is a masterpiece of cabinet art, and is universally appreciated. With these works Rogers contented himself. Rich and distinguished, his house became a place of resort to men of distinction and taste in art: it was filled with articles of vertu; and Rogers the poet lived long as Rogers the virtuoso. His breakfast ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... essayists, in the same manner we have succeeded in making the Bible undesirable to youth. If you read passages aloud, use the tone of voice which would be appropriate if this was a new book not bound in leather. Read it for pleasure as one would read a literary masterpiece—not because opinion might frown on you if you had not read the classic. Does someone object that that would be to degrade the Bible to the level of secular writings? You cannot degrade a literature; it makes its own level and our labels ...
— Religious Education in the Family • Henry F. Cope
... embarrassment she may have felt—if she felt any! thought Clavering—by talking to her escort nor by gazing idly about the house comparing other women's gowns and crowns with her own. She might have been a masterpiece ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... compare yourselves constantly with your model. Do as the art students do in a gallery, take your poor daub right into the presence of the masterpiece, and go over it line by line and tint by tint. Get near Jesus Christ that you may learn your duty from Him, and you will find out many of the ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... That June the Marchesino was married at Milan to a daughter of Count Giovanni Borromeo, and on this occasion, doubtless, he employed the gifted Roman sculptor to design the magnificent doorway which now adorns the Louvre and is a masterpiece of classic elegance. But now a fresh invitation reached Cristoforo ...
— Beatrice d'Este, Duchess of Milan, 1475-1497 • Julia Mary Cartwright
... improvement. Wishing to put gymnastics in harmony with Nature, he studied anatomy, physiology, and the natural sciences. Of their value in directing rational exercise he says: "Anatomy, that sacred genesis, which shows us the masterpiece of the Creator, and which teaches us how little and how great man is, ought to form the constant study of the gymnast. But we ought not to consider the organs of the body as the lifeless forms of a mechanical mass, but as the living, active ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various
... intently asking themselves. It was not a very important piece of literary workmanship, to be sure; only a social leader for a newspaper, to be carelessly skimmed to-day and used to light the fire to-morrow, if even that; and yet had it been the greatest masterpiece ever produced by the human intellect Ernest could not have worked at it with more conscientious care, or Edie watched him with profounder admiration. When Shakespeare sat down to write 'Hamlet,' it may be confidently asserted that neither ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... sarcophagi turned into Christian tombs, with heraldic devices chiselled on to their arabesques and vizored helmets surmounting their garlands, the great unsigned artist of the fourteenth century, be he Sienese or Florentine, be he Orcagna, Lorenzetti, or Volterra, painted the typical masterpiece of mediaeval art, the great fresco of the Triumph of Death. With wonderful realization of character and situation he painted the prosperous of the world, the dapper youths and damsels seated with dogs and falcons beneath the orchard trees, amusing themselves with Decameronian tales ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... "Aida" is much more refined and dramatically truthful than any of those before it. As the composer was now an old man nothing farther was expected from his pen. Nevertheless, in "Otello," he has given the world a masterpiece of a still higher order, the music throughout being subservient to the story, while the dramatic handling of the work is masterly in the extreme. For this he was in part indebted to his librettist, the distinguished poet and composer, Signor Arrigo Boito. ...
— A Popular History of the Art of Music - From the Earliest Times Until the Present • W. S. B. Mathews
... likewise, in another picture, said to be the plague of Athens, but without much reason so named, in the collection of J. P. Mills, Esq. Dr Waagen, in his admiration for the executive part of art, speaks of it as "a very rich masterpiece of Poussin, in which we are reconciled by his skill to the horrors ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... show this progression of their favorite work from absolute pravity to finished perfection, they will find themselves engaged in a civil war with those whose cause they maintain. What! alter our sublime Constitution, the glory of France, the envy of the world, the pattern for mankind, the masterpiece of legislation, the collected and concentrated glory of this enlightened age? Have we not produced it ready-made and ready-armed, mature in its birth, a perfect goddess of wisdom and of war, hammered by our blacksmith midwives out of the brain ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IV. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... purpose here to dwell upon Raleigh's masterpiece. From the preface of the History of the World, which opens with 'the boundless ambition of mortal man,' to the epilogue which closes up the work with the glorious triumph of Death, the whole book is replete with lessons of wisdom and warning. No one can rise from its perusal without perceiving ...
— Thomas Hariot • Henry Stevens
... battered to pieces, and the glorious company of the apostles, the goodly fellowship of the martyrs, suffered another and a less resurgent martyrdom. After days of this crepuscular existence he emerged to find the cathedral less disfigured than he had feared. One masterpiece of the mediaeval craftsmen's chisel is, however, irremediably destroyed—the figure of the devil. We ...
— Leaves from a Field Note-Book • J. H. Morgan
... relented of its rain. The day was a masterpiece of good weather. A brilliant throng mounted to the platform, an admiral, sea-captains and lieutenants, officers of the army, a Senator, Congressmen, judges, capitalists, the jubilant officers of the ship-building corporation. And Mamise was ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... wonder of the crowd! Seated on a throne of ebon and of ivory, of gold and gems—the olive-crown on his head, in his right hand the statue of Victory, in his left; wrought of all metals, the cloud-compelling sceptre, behold the colossal masterpiece of Phidias, the Homeric dream imbodied [122]—the majesty of the Olympian Jove! Enter the banquet-room of the conquerors—to whose verse, hymned in a solemn and mighty chorus, bends the listening Spartan—it is the verse of the Dorian Pindar! In that motley ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... its greater side, as coming (like all that happens) from the providence of God, it is of divine manufacture. And how just are its blows! And how efficacious it is! ... I do not hesitate to say that patience in a long illness is mortification's very masterpiece, and consequently the triumph of mortified souls.'" According to this view, disease should in any case be submissively accepted, and it might under certain circumstances even be blasphemous to wish ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... how childlike was the mind of the early men, whose God is not "wonderful in counsel'' (Isa. xxviii. 29), and fails in his first attempt to relieve the loneliness of his favourite. For no beast however mighty, no bird however graceful, was a fit companion for God's masterpiece, and, apart from the serpent, the animals had no faculty of speech. All therefore that Adam could do, as they passed before him, was to name them, as a lord names his vassals. But here arises a difficulty. How came Adam by the ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... he had shown in advocating Wilson's presidential candidacy has already been set forth; and many phases of the Wilson administration had aroused his admiration. The President's handling of domestic problems Page regarded as a masterpiece in reconciling statesmanship with practical politics, and his energetic attitude on the Panama Tolls had introduced new standards into American foreign relations. Page could not sympathize with all the ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume II • Burton J. Hendrick
... undeserved contempt with which our books of astronomy too often treat the labours of Ptolemy, Tycho Brahe, and others who advocated erroneous theories. If the simple truth were told, that the theory of Ptolemy was a masterpiece of ingenuity and that it was worked out by his followers in a way which merits the highest possible praise, while the theory of Tycho Brahe was placed in reality on a sounder basis than that of Copernicus, and accounted as well and as simply for ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... division of Norfolk." Here the added shade of indefiniteness can hardly seem valuable to any but the author himself. In another place he prefers (chapter XIII.) the vague "one of the most glorious of Homer's rhapsodies" to "the enchantments of Canidia, the masterpiece of ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... two hundred pounds, but that seemed to him no reason for moving into cheaper rooms. He called the man up, and represented to him that he was about to paint a great masterpiece, which would take him two years, during which period he would earn nothing, and be unable to pay any rent. The landlord, surely a unique specimen of his order, deliberated rather ruefully over the prospect set before him, rubbed his chin, and muttered: 'I should not like ye to go—it's hard for both ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... The letter was a masterpiece of dissembling. It suggested, without promising, that Charles Maxwell intended to send his young charge to boarding school along with his housekeeper's daughter. It asked the school's advice and explained the deformity that made Charles Maxwell a recluse. The reply could hardly have ...
— The Fourth R • George Oliver Smith
... century and to write the one standard work on Botticelli. Connoisseur in several arts, he had designed a little church in the manner of Inigo Jones for a burial ground near the Marble Arch. Though I now think his little church a masterpiece, its style was more than a century too late to hit my fancy at two or three and twenty; and I accused him of leaning towards that ...
— Four Years • William Butler Yeats
... who has followed the fortunes of Christian in the stately diction of the Pilgrim's Progress must wish to know from whence came those wonderful word pictures with which the dreamer of Bedford Jail gems his masterpiece. That phrase "delectable mountains" conjures up in each individual reader's mind those particular hills wherever they may be, which are his own peculiar delight, and for which, exiled, his spirit so ...
— Seaward Sussex - The South Downs from End to End • Edric Holmes
... do, too!" cried Judith ardently, flinging out a masterpiece. "You sound like a syncopated opera; doesn't ...
— Miss Pat at School • Pemberton Ginther
... Paridis." The Sentimental Journey is a book sui generis, and in the reliable kind of popularity, which takes concrete form in successive reprints, it has far eclipsed its eighteenth-century rivals. The fine literary aroma which pervades every line of this small masterpiece is not the predominant characteristic of the Great Cham's Journey. Nevertheless, and in spite of the malignity of the "Ossianite" press, it fully justified the assumption of the booksellers that it would prove a "sound" book. It is full ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... literary eminence. At length critics condescended to inquire where the secret of so wide and so durable a popularity lay. They were compelled to own that the ignorant multitude had judged more correctly than the learned, and that the despised little book was really a masterpiece. Bunyan is indeed as decidedly the first of allegorists as Demosthenes is the first of orators, or Shakspeare the first of dramatists. Other allegorists have shown equal ingenuity, but no other allegorist has ever been able to touch the heart, and to make abstractions objects of terror, ...
— The Riches of Bunyan • Jeremiah Rev. Chaplin
... ii. 506. Sir Walter Scott wrote in his Diary in 1827:—'I finished the review of John Home's works, which, after all, are poorer than I thought them. Good blank verse, and stately sentiment, but something luke-warmish, excepting Douglas, which is certainly a masterpiece. Even that does not stand the closet. Its merits are for the stage; and it is certainly one of the best acting plays going.' ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... translated the Gerusalemme Liberata, the immortal masterpiece of Torquato Tasso"—and a bulging packet of manuscript under his arm confirmed ...
— The Aspirations of Jean Servien • Anatole France
... human affairs begin to decline, they grow steadily worse until the time comes when they can no longer deteriorate any further. In the time of Pope Liberius the architects of the day took considerable pains to produce a masterpiece when they built S. Maria Maggiore, but they were not very happy in the result, because although the building, which is also mostly constructed of spoils, is of very fair proportions, it cannot be ...
— The Lives of the Painters, Sculptors & Architects, Volume 1 (of 8) • Giorgio Vasari
... palaeolithic epoch has to be broken up. The man of the late St. Acheul period, as it is termed, was truly a great artist in his way. If you stare vacantly at his handiwork in a museum, you are likely to remain cold to its charm. But probe about in a gravel-bed till you have the good fortune to light on a masterpiece; tenderly smooth away with your fingers the dirt sticking to its surface, and bring to view the tapering or oval outline, the straight edge, the even and delicate chipping over both faces; then, wrapping it carefully in your handkerchief, take it home to wash, and feast till bedtime on the ...
— Anthropology • Robert Marett
... of nothing else, there are thirteen s-s to five in the original. Even Crashaw, whose translation of Strada's "Music's Duel" is a masterpiece for litheness of phrase and sinuous suppleness of rhythm, quails before the "Dies Ir," and contents himself with a largely watered paraphrase. No one has ever yet succeeded more than tolerably with ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... she said; she didn't believe one bit in woman's rights; no, indeed; she was a great deal too fond of being taken care of for that. And who wouldn't take care of her,—that delicate little thing,—like some choice small masterpiece of cunning workmanship? Why, she almost looked as if she were made of Venetian glass, and a fall on deck would shatter ...
— Stories by English Authors: The Sea • Various
... words of recitative which is interrupted by a subterranean noise, whereupon the oracle speaks also from the depths. The voice and the accompaniment must be moving, terrifying and most extraordinary; it ought to make a masterpiece of harmony.") ...
— Mozart: The Man and the Artist, as Revealed in his own Words • Friedrich Kerst and Henry Edward Krehbiel
... selected, the foibles attacked, the ingenious and remorseless ridicule with which they are overwhelmed, the comprehensive vindictiveness which converted every personal characteristic into an instrument for the more refined torment of the unhappy victim, conjoin to constitute a masterpiece of this lower form of poetical composition;—poetry it is not. While Flecknoe's pretensions as a dramatist were fairly a subject of derision, Shadwell was eminently popular. He was a pretender to learning, and, entertaining ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... in five Books, are occasional poems, descriptive and lyrical, on miscellaneous subjects. These may well be considered his masterpiece. 'Genuine poetry,' says Niebuhr, 'imprinted with the character of the true poet, and constituting some of the most graceful productions ...
— Helps to Latin Translation at Sight • Edmund Luce
... among the viol players and began playing; but she had forgotten to tune her instrument, and her father stopped the performance. She looked at him, a little frightened, and laughed at her mistake. The piece they were playing was by Henry VIII., a masterpiece, Mr. Innes had declared it to be, so, to stop the performance on account of Evelyn's viola da gamba, and then to hear her play worse than he had ever heard her play before, was ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... good nature of American business men, had abandoned his affairs for half a day in order to go with me on a voyage of discovery, and he asked me, so as to get some basis of understanding or disagreement, what building in New York had pleased me most. I at once said the University Club—to my mind a masterpiece. He approved, and a great peace filled our automobile; in which peace we expanded. He asked me what building in the world made the strongest appeal to me, and I at once said the Strozzi Palace at Florence. Whereat he ...
— Your United States - Impressions of a first visit • Arnold Bennett
... some of these as "mephitic exhalations from the bogs of perverted imaginings!" Welcker's defence of Sappho is a masterpiece of naivete written ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... of course, a masterpiece of "thesis drama,"—an argument, dogmatic, insistent, inescapable, cumulative, between science and common sense, on one side, and love, of various types, on the other. It is what Mr. Bernard Shaw has called a "drama ...
— Damaged Goods - A novelization of the play "Les Avaries" • Upton Sinclair
... the paper was so remarkably thin that the book was only an inch and a quarter thick;47 and thus it was suited in every way to hold the same place in the affections of the people that the Geneva Bible held in England in the days of our Puritan fathers. The Kralitz Bible was a masterpiece. It helped to fix and purify the language, and thus completed what Stitny and Hus had begun. It became the model of a chaste and simple style; and its beauty of language was praised by the Jesuits. It is a relic that can never be forgotten, ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... over without protest the establishment of monarchy on American soil by foreign arms? Between these horns of a dilemma, the Government maintained its precarious position during another year. Seward's correspondence with Paris was a masterpiece of evasion. He neither protested against the intervention of Napoleon nor acknowledged the authority of Maximilian. Apparently, both he and Lincoln were divided between fear of a French alliance with the Confederacy and fear of premature action in the North that would render Napoleon desperate. ...
— Abraham Lincoln and the Union - A Chronicle of the Embattled North, Volume 29 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Nathaniel W. Stephenson
... wearying her with his ecstatic flights. He would ascend from epithet to epithet, would work himself into a state of intoxication, of delirium, and would end by thinking that he was negotiating with an imaginary purchaser, would dispute with him over the price of a masterpiece, and would cry out: "A hundred thousand francs for my Rosso! yes, monsieur, a hundred thousand francs!" His daughter, dismayed by the large amount of money that those great, ugly things, in which there were so many ...
— Germinie Lacerteux • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
... the Toroczko church is its people. The churches of Rome boast many a masterpiece of early Italian art on their walls, but their worshippers are ragged and dirty. The walls of the Toroczko temple are bare, but the faces of its congregation beam with happiness. No works of sculpture, ...
— Manasseh - A Romance of Transylvania • Maurus Jokai
... guess the cause of my tears, and what, at this moment, passed within me? I said to myself: the object in my power is the masterpiece of love; her wit and person equally approach perfection; she is as good and generous as she is amiable and beautiful. Yet she is a miserable prostitute, abandoned to the public. The captain of a merchantship disposed of her at will; she has thrown herself into my arms, ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... Stepsons of Light, and other novels. "Gene" Rhodes had the "right tune." He achieved a style that can be called literary. The Hired Man on Horseback, by May D. Rhodes, is a biography of the writer. Perhaps "Paso Por Aqui" will endure as his masterpiece. Rhodes had an intense loyalty to his land and people; he was as gay, gallant, and witty as he was earnest. More than most Western writers, Rhodes was conscious of art. He had the common touch and also he was a writer for writing men. The elements of simplicity ...
— Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest • J. Frank Dobie
... betrayed their feelings as they led me hither and thither; for them and their enterprise I felt a hearty respect. When we had surveyed everything within doors I was asked to look at the mostra—the sign that hung over the entrance; a sort of griffin in wrought iron, this, too, copied from an old masterpiece, and reminding one of the fine ironwork which adorns the streets of Siena. Don Pasquale could not be satisfied until I had privately assured him of my genuine admiration. Was it, he asked, at all like a chemist's shop in London? My reply certainly gratified him, but ...
— By the Ionian Sea - Notes of a Ramble in Southern Italy • George Gissing
... who had received this order looked at each other in silence, and did not obey. It was repeated by the captain, who considered that he had hit upon a masterpiece of diplomacy. The officers expostulated; the officer commanding the party of marines turned away in disgust; but in vain: the brutal order was reiterated with threats. The whole party of marines now murmured, and consulted ...
— The King's Own • Captain Frederick Marryat
... appears that he has produced a masterpiece, if you please! I suppose it was not meant to amuse us at all, but that he arranged the performance and fumigated us with sulphur to demonstrate to us how plays should be written, and what is worth acting. I am tired of him. No one could stand his constant thrusts and sallies. ...
— The Sea-Gull • Anton Checkov
... this they divide most of their time and attention between rolling cigarettes and smoking them. Their heads are bound with jaunty silk handkerchiefs; they wear rakish-looking short jackets, down the back of which their luxuriant black hair dangles in two tresses; but the crowning masterpiece of their costume is that wonderful garment which is neither petticoat nor pantaloons, and which can be most properly described as "indescribable," which tends to give the wearer rather an unfeminine appearance, and is not to be compared ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... party," says a famous London hostess, "resembles nothing so much as a masterpiece of the jeweler's art in the center of which is some crystalline gem in the form of a sparkling and sympathetic hostess round whom the guests are arranged in an effective setting." It would seem quite as necessary that a host prove a crystalline ...
— Conversation - What to Say and How to Say it • Mary Greer Conklin
... and seemed preening their purple wings to bear their precious charge to heaven. The mausoleum was adorned with a variety of little seraphs who supported an illuminated shrine, which was fixt to the top of the cupola. Nothing so magnificent or so well imagined was ever seen; it is Le Brun's masterpiece. The whole church was adorned with pictures, devices, and emblems, which all bore some relation to the life, or office of the chancellor; and some of his noblest actions were represented in painting. ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... Vaninka; but a moment had sufficed for the haughty girl to banish the feeling she had shown. The blush which had suffused her cheek had disappeared, and she had become again cold and haughty like an alabaster statue-a masterpiece of pride begun by nature and finished by education. Foedor kissed her hand; it was trembling but cold he felt his heart sink, and thought he ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - VANINKA • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... man's handiwork up into the blue fields of the air; this achievement alone would mark it as unique among hills. It appears as if for once man and nature had agreed to work in concert to produce a masterpiece in stone. The hill and the architectural beauties it carries aloft, are like a taunt flung out to sea and to the upper heights of air; for centuries they appear to have been crying aloud, "See what we can do, against your tempests ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 4 (of 10) • Various
... were treading in the steps of Boileau and Horace. Roscommon selected for a poem the lively topic of "translated verse," and Sheffield had written with Dryden an essay upon satire, and afterwards a more elaborate essay upon poetry. To these masterpieces, said Addison, another masterpiece was now added by Pope's Essay upon Criticism. Not only did Addison applaud, but later critics have spoken of their wonder at the penetration, learning, and taste exhibited by so young a man. The essay was carefully finished. Written apparently in 1709, it ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... trembling fingers drew one of her husband from an antique cabinet, and descanted on the manly beauty of the deceased original, and the graceful genius of the young and lamented artist. Hazlitt wrote an ingenious essay on "A Portrait by Vandyck," which gives us an adequate idea of what such a masterpiece is to the eye and mind of genuine artistic perception and sympathy. Few sensations, or rather sentiments, are more inextricably made up of pleasure and sadness than that with which we contemplate (as is not infrequent in some old ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 • Various
... wide the doors for us and, passing reverently inside, we are confronted by the magnificent equestrian statue of Mr. Bookham Pryce, the founder of the firm. This masterpiece of the Post-Cubist School was originally entitled, "Niobe Weeping for her Children," but the gifted artist, in recognition of Mr. Pryce's princely offer of one thousand guineas for the group, waived his ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, July 7th, 1920 • Various
... that excellent work of his which is very justly stiled his masterpiece, earnestly recommends using the terms of art, however coarse or even indecent they may be. Mr Tate is ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding
... at Attock, which is a high structure built across the narrow bed of the Indus, which here foams down with swirling swiftness, is considered a masterpiece of engineering. It is built in two tiers, the upper of which carries the railway, while the lower forms a road for carriages, beasts of burden, and foot-passengers. On either side of the river is a fortified gate. The English commander of Attock trusted to the strength ...
— The Coming Conquest of England • August Niemann
... Humbert had completed the disguises to his satisfaction. His own was a masterpiece in its way. He assumed a grace and a lightness that might well become a minstrel of no ordinary degree. The character of his face was completely changed, and was reduced, by means of long flaxen curls and other artificial additions, from frank manliness to almost feminine delicacy. The Lord of ...
— The Truce of God - A Tale of the Eleventh Century • George Henry Miles
... but it has also certain of those qualities which are more thoroughly appreciated in company. Beauty and tenderness can make their appeal alone; but humour demands two at least and does not resent a crowd, and the humour of this little masterpiece is ...
— A Boswell of Baghdad - With Diversions • E. V. Lucas
... the Panama-Pacific International Exposition has been given than one that was forced from the lips of a charming Eastern woman of culture. Walking one evening in the Fine Arts colonnade, while the illumination from distant searchlights accented the glory of Maybeck's masterpiece, and lit up the half-domes and arches across the lagoon, she exclaimed to her companion: "Why, all the beauty of the world has been sifted, and the finest of ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... could pour out his plans and his innermost longings. Otherwise his life was as solitary as it was cloistered. He confined himself to his room for days at a time, working fiercely at the manuscript of the play, Cromwell, which he felt to be a masterpiece. ...
— Women in the Life of Balzac • Juanita Helm Floyd
... also of one lovely lyric—who treated our rivers after the fashion of his day, which ran to length and tedious excess. Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis is by pages too long; but that is nothing to Drayton's masterpiece. With the best dispositions in the world I have never been able to get right through the Polyolbion. His anthropomorphism is surprising, and a little of ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett
... night before you contemplate this masterpiece of baking take half a cupful of corn meal and a pinch each of salt and sugar. Scald this with new milk heated to the boiling point and mix to the thickness of mush. This can be made in a cup. Wrap in a clean cloth and put ...
— The Handy Cyclopedia of Things Worth Knowing - A Manual of Ready Reference • Joseph Triemens
... at this stage, and victory seemed to rest with the shot, when the war came to an end on the very day when Nicholl had completed a new armor-plate of wrought steel. It was a masterpiece of its kind, and bid defiance to all the projectiles of the world. The captain had it conveyed to the Polygon at Washington, challenging the president of the Gun Club to break it. Barbicane, peace having been declared, ...
— Jules Verne's Classic Books • Jules Verne
... the hill Where Boreas sweeps with icy chill, A masterpiece of studied art Conceived by genius versatile And fashioned with unerring skill, O'erlooks the busy, crowded mart, And, like a kingly domicile, Its burnished dome and sculpture thrill With admiration every heart; And strangers pause beyond the rill To view its grandeur, ...
— Poems - Vol. IV • Hattie Howard
... off it. His first published book was 'Better Dead' (1887); it works out a cynical idea which would be amusing in five pages, but is diluted into tediousness by being spread over fifty. But in 1889 came a second masterpiece, 'A Window in Thrums,' a continuation of the Auld Licht series from an inside instead of an outside standpoint,—not superior to the first, but their full equals in a deliciousness of which one cannot say how ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... the cellar consist of a single pellet, a masterpiece of plastic art. It is a miniature reproduction of the pear-shaped ball of the Scarabaeus, a reproduction whose very smallness gives an added value to the polish of the surface and the beauty of its curves. Its larger diameter varies from ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
... with a trudging sturdiness, not without its grace. She came to the part of Fifth Avenue where the great houses begin to thin out, and vacant lots, as if ashamed of their vacancy, shrink behind boardings vivid with the news of picture-plays. It was the year when they were advertising the screen-masterpiece, Passion Aflame; and here was depicted Luciline Lynch, a torch in her hand, her hair in maenadic dishevelment, leading on a mob to set fire to a town. Letty herself having been in that mob paused in search of her face among ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King
... following these interviews dogged John was at church, and the butterfly Protheroe also. Thistlewood looked as he always looked, rudely healthy, and a masterpiece of masterfulness and sullen perseverance and resolve. Lane was pallid and miserable, and Bertha remarking him was compelled to fall back on the bitter consolation of her former thoughts. He would take it heavily for a day or two, and would then forget all about it. He cast a glance or two in ...
— Bulldog And Butterfly - From "Schwartz" by David Christie Murray • David Christie Murray
... consummate technique in expression of a rarer English tradition, that of Milton, and Gray, and Keats. Beauty abounds in our later poets, but it is a beauty that flashes in broken lights, not the full-orbed radiance of a masterpiece. To enlarge the grasp of poetry over the field of reality, to apprehend it over a larger range, is not at once to find consummate expression for what is apprehended. The flawless perfection of the Parnassians—of Heredia's sonnets—is nowhere ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... the Lord's prayer, emphasising and confirming everything by that wonderful finger, which seemed to be designed by Providence for delicate distinctions, just as another man's fist served for popular declamation. His pulpit masterpiece was a lecture on the Council of Jerusalem, in which its whole deliberations were reviewed by the rules of the Free Kirk Book of Procedure, and a searching and edifying discourse concluded with two lessons. First: That no ecclesiastical body can conduct its proceedings without ...
— Kate Carnegie and Those Ministers • Ian Maclaren
... at this masterpiece for a year and a half. For little Willy, in consideration of the aristocratic propensities one might expect, or at any late encourage, in the heir to a large estate, there was a Flobert rifle, the strap of which was ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... been writing as if you were already in the thick of your play; but it may well be that the enormous difficulty of getting the first character on has been too much for you. How, you may be wondering, are you to begin your masterpiece? ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, June 10, 1914 • Various
... no thought of Chick's insincerity. "That is it," she said. "We use our souls for everything, even physical processes. One of our geniuses is inventing a dance for Miss Fairfield. Appreciating her genius for dancing, he is making a masterpiece in which she can dance ...
— Patty Blossom • Carolyn Wells
... upon a concrete base before it can be used. Heretofore the concrete which was available for this purpose required at least a fortnight of exposure before it was sufficiently firm and hardened; but when Fraulein Bertha Krupp's engineers escorted the Fraulein's newest and most impressive steel masterpiece to the war, they brought along with them the ingredients for a new kind of concrete; and those who claim to have been present on the occasion declare that within forty-eight hours after they had mixed and molded it, it was ready to bear the weight of the ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb
... Tauris," Gluck's second "Iphigenia," produced in 1779, was such a masterpiece that his rival shut his own score in his portfolio, and kept it two years. All Paris was enraptured with this great work, and Gluck's detractors were silenced in the wave of enthusiasm which swept the public. Abbe Arnaud's opinion was the echo of the general mind: "There ...
— The Great German Composers • George T. Ferris
... heads of selections from longer masterpieces are introductory notes which give some little account of the larger work and enough of the context so that the selection may not seem a fragment. In some instances this note gives the historical setting of a masterpiece or tells something of the circumstances under which it was written, when those facts help to an appreciation of the selection. Sometimes an acquaintance with the personality of an author is so necessary to a clear understanding of what he ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... of Mr. Cotton looked at this masterpiece of her husband's art with a mischievous twinkle ...
— Legends of the Rhine • Wilhelm Ruland
... Gore, in her masterpiece of 'Mrs. Armytage;' Mrs. Marsh, too; and then (for Scottish ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... sojourns we had never yet visited what is left of that famous Whitehall, so tragically memorable of the death of Charles I. The existing edifice is only the noble remnant of that ancient palace of the English kings which the fire of 1697 spared, as if such a masterpiece of Inigo Jones would be the fittest witness of its highest, saddest event. Few, if any, of the tremendous issues of history are so nearly within seeing and touching as that on which the windows of Whitehall still look, and I must ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
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