"Arabesque" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... a character of very marked and lofty type, the most suggestive study or sketch of the future American man that has yet appeared in our history. How broad, unconventional, and humane! How democratic! how adhesive! No fine arabesque carvings, but strong, unhewn, native traits, and deep lines of care, toil, and human sympathy. Lincoln's Gettysburg speech is one of the most genuine and characteristic utterances in our annals. It has the true antique simplicity ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... how impossible it would be to convince anybody with the tale of her intention merely to borrow the clothing for a single night of arabesque adventure, finding it difficult now to believe in on her own part, and hurried breathlessly on ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... her early habit of sketching heads and characters. Nobody is, I should think, more faithful and exact in the drawing of the academical figures given her as lessons, but there is a perpetual arabesque of fancies that runs round the margin of her drawings, and there is one book which I know she keeps to run riot in, where, if anywhere, a shrewd eye would be most likely to read her thoughts. This book of hers I mean to see, if I ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... has always seemed to us, was the cleverest writer in his way that has ever contributed to the English periodicals. His fugitive lyrics and arabesque romances, half sardonic and half sentimental, published with Hookham Frere's "Whistlecraft" and Macaulay's Roundhead Ballads, in Knight's Quarterly Magazine, and after the suspension of that work, for the most ...
— The International Weekly Miscellany, Volume I. No. 8 - Of Literature, Art, and Science, August 19, 1850 • Various
... preserved provisions, and in fact everything that, although necessary, was to be kept out of sight. The only mistake in the arrangements was a very large and gorgeous open-brass-work Egyptian lantern, with glass of various colours and outlandish patterns in Arabesque. In the evening we formed an irregular light-house, as two ordinary carriage-lamps were fixed above and on either side the entrance door, while the gorgeous many-coloured lantern swung from the roof inside, and flashed red, green, and yellow signals in wild confusion. I knew this piece of finery ...
— Cyprus, as I Saw it in 1879 • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... "Very vivid and arabesque this, don't you think? ... And now this movement; isn't it reckless and capricious, like a woman who hesitates and then takes the leap? Yet there's a certain nobility there, a feeling for ideals. You see it, of course.... And all the while this undercurrent of the sensual, and that feline, eager ...
— The Pit • Frank Norris
... finely-carved chests, rich carpets, pottery of Bernard de Palissy, tables, prie-dieus, chairs beautifully wrought and covered with precious stuffs, embroidered line and jewels. With an instinct given by paternity, the old man always chose his presents among the works of that fantastic order called arabesque, which, speaking neither to the soul nor the senses, addresses the mind only by its ...
— The Hated Son • Honore de Balzac
... magnificence challenges all description. It might be said that there was a quantity of fairy flower and kitchen gardens in the sea, full of gigantic flowers, blossoms, and leaves, varied by fungi and pulse of every description, like open arabesque work, the whole interspersed with pretty groups of rocks of every hue. The most lovely shell-fish were clinging to these rocks, or lying scattered on the ground, while endless shoals of variegated fish darted in and out between them, like so ...
— A Woman's Journey Round the World • Ida Pfeiffer
... he published all the prose stories he had then written, in two volumes, under the title of "Tales of the Grotesque and the Arabesque." The work was not salable, perhaps because its contents were too familiar from recent separate publication in magazines; and it was not so warmly praised, generally, as I think it should have been, though in point of style the pieces which it ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... impressively to a laborer at this moment approaching with a large lighted lantern in each hand. These, placed upon the mignonette shelves, and snugly protected from wind and rain by the deep hoods, threw a clear light into the test-room, and brought out in grotesque distinctness the arabesque pattern wrought with dust and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various
... and disposed evenly along the lee-side of each swaying stalk, so as to present only their edges to the wind. But, if you approach, those pale husks all break open to display strange splendors of scarlet and seal-brown, with arabesque mottlings in white and black: they change into wondrous living blossoms, which detach themselves before your eyes and rise in air, and flutter away by thousands to settle down farther off, and turn into wheat-colored husks once more ... a whirling ...
— Chita: A Memory of Last Island • Lafcadio Hearn
... of palaces, all with an elusive family resemblance to one another, we paused for consultation. This was Vicenza, the birthplace and beloved town of Palladio; these palaces with fronts crusted with bas relief; these Corinthian pillars, these Arabesque balconies, these porticoes that might have been stolen from Greek temples, all had been designed by Palladio the Great. And the beautiful buildings seemed to say pensively, like lovely court ladies whose day is past, "We are not what we were. Time has changed ...
— My Friend the Chauffeur • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... card-tables were arranged, and thence into the receiving room. This was a large room, with a splendidly inlaid and polished floor, the walls covered with crimson satin, the cornices heavily incrusted with gold, and the ceiling beautifully painted in arabesque. The massive fauteuils and sofas, as also the drapery, were of crimson satin with a profusion of gilding. The ubiquitous portrait of the Emperor was the only picture, and was the same you see everywhere. This crimson room ...
— Memoir of John Lothrop Motley, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... more designs which by careful investigation can be found. Among others the Arabesque, Chinese fret, Circle, Comb, various forms of the Cross, Mina Khani, Octagon, the S form, Scroll, Serrated leaves, Shah Abbas, the Star,—six or eight pointed,—the Tarantula, Triangle, the Y form, and ...
— Rugs: Oriental and Occidental, Antique & Modern - A Handbook for Ready Reference • Rosa Belle Holt
... sparkle of gold made soft by usage. Wherever the eye roved, it was fed as on a banquet of light and color. Nothing could be more exquisite, for depth of green swimming in a bath of shadow, than the meadows curled beneath the cliffs; nothing more tempting, to the painter's brush, than the arabesque of blossoms netted across the sky; and would you have the living eye of nature, bristling with animation, alive with winged sails, and steeped in the very soul of yellow sunshine, look out over the great sheet of the waters, and steep the senses in such a breadth of aqueous splendor as one ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... too near the wave, and on a sylvan declivity, was along, pavilion-looking building, painted in white and arabesque. It was backed by the forest, which had a park-like character from its partial clearance, and which, after a convenient slip of even land, ascended the steeper country and took the form of wooded hills, backed in due ...
— Lothair • Benjamin Disraeli
... prelude in D is Chopin at his happiest. Its arabesque pattern conveys a most charming content; and there is a dewy freshness, a joy in life, that puts to flight much of the morbid tittle-tattle about Chopin's sickly soul. The few bars of this prelude, so seldom heard in public, reveal musicianship of the highest order. The harmonic ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... in a gilt frame surmounted the mantelpiece, on which stood two or three little blue vases. Paper of a light colour and a large flowing arabesque pattern with a broad frieze covered the walls. There was not a single picture of any kind in the room, neither steel engraving, nor lithograph, nor chromo; and remembering what pictures usually are, even in ...
— With Zola in England • Ernest Alfred Vizetelly
... urged Mr. Irving to write something that should illustrate those peculiarities, "something in the Haroun Alrasched style" that should have a dash of that Arabian spice which pervades every thing in Spain. The author set to work, con amore, and has produced two goodly volumes, with a few "Arabesque" sketches and tales founded on popular traditions. His study was THE ALHAMBRA, which must have inspired him for his task. To quote his own words: "how many legends and traditions, true and fabulous; how many songs ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 19, - Issue 549 (Supplementary issue) • Various
... hour. What a recherche, luxurious extravagant little dinner it was, that evening at the Maison Doree! We had a charming little room overlooking the Boulevard, furnished with as much looking-glass, crimson-velvet, gilding, and arabesque painting as could be got together within the space of twelve-feet by eight. Our wine came to table in a silver cooler that Cellini might have wrought. Our meats were served upon porcelain that would have driven Palissy to despair. We had nothing that was in season, except game, and everything ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards
... his rock promontory; but his humour had in the meantime changed. The sun now shone more fairly on the pool; and over its brown, welling surface, the blue of heaven and the golden green of the spring foliage danced in fleeting arabesque. The eddies laughed and brightened with essential colour. And the beauty of the dell began to rankle in the Prince's mind; it was so near to his own borders, yet without. He had never had much of the joy of possessorship in any of the thousand ...
— Prince Otto • Robert Louis Stevenson
... child lived on, surrounded by this arabesque work of his musing fancy, and no one understood him. Mrs Blimber thought him 'odd,' and sometimes the servants said among themselves that little Dombey 'moped;' but that ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... quivering aspen made." To them, as first leaders of ornamental design, belongs, of right, the praise of glistenings in gold, piercings in ivory, stainings in purple, burnishings in dark blue steel; of the fantasy of the Arabian roof,—quartering of the Christian shield,—rubric and arabesque of Christian scripture; in fine, all enlargement, and all diminution of adorning thought, from the temple to the toy, and from the mountainous pillars of Agrigentum to the last fineness of fretwork in the ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... were there told us that nowhere in Europe was there anything as fine as the hall and grand staircase where the Duchess received her guests. It exceeded my utmost conceptions of magnificence and beauty. The vast size of the apartment, the vaulted ceilings, the arabesque ornaments, the fine pictures, the profusion of flowers, the music, the flourish of trumpets, as the Queen passed backward and forward, the superb dresses and diamonds of the women, the parti-colored full dress of the gentlemen ...
— Letters from England 1846-1849 • Elizabeth Davis Bancroft (Mrs. George Bancroft)
... transformed motion in music has been well brought out in a suggestive essay by Goblot ("La Musique Descriptive," Revue Philosophique, July, 1901): "Sung or played, melody figures to the ear a successive design, a moving arabesque. We talk of ascending and descending the gamut, of high notes or low notes; the; higher voice of woman is called soprano, or above, the deeper voice of man is called bass. Grave tones were so called by the Greeks because they seemed heavy and to incline downward. Sounds seem ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 4 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... The soul had hearkened to these ugly messengers from reality since it had desired to know the truth, but it had made them cry their message from as far off as possible and as briefly as might be. But this lovely black arabesque of letters had the power of beauty. It ran into the core of her soul and told its story at its leisure. Her flesh, which before had grieved as any that is living might grieve for any that is dead, now knew ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... because he was making very extensive and costly improvements in the buildings and grounds. I have seen nothing yet in England to compare, for ornate carving, with the new gate-way he is making to the park. It is of the finest kind of arabesque work done in stone that much resembles the Caen. This prevention barred me from even a distant view of the once famous residence of Lord Byron, as it could not be seen from the ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... true that a fine engraving, a good drawing, a Mouilleron lithograph, or a photograph will give an exact idea of the picture in its important effects, and a copy simply in gradations from light to dark would destroy none of its arabesque. ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... gardens of the west end have entirely disappeared to make way for streets of commercial buildings, while the new districts of Kasr-el-Dubara and Ghezireh have arisen to house the well-to-do. Our interest in Cairo, therefore, is centred in the native quarters, where miles of streets and alleys, rich in Arabesque buildings, are untouched except by the ...
— Peeps at Many Lands: Egypt • R. Talbot Kelly
... on embroidered books may be roughly divided into four classes—Heraldic, Figure, Floral, and Arabesque. ...
— English Embroidered Bookbindings • Cyril James Humphries Davenport
... Of the latter he derived no very definite impression, except that it was queerly furnished. Wherein this queerness was manifested he found himself unable to decide on subsequent reflection. But the ante-room was markedly Eastern, having Arabesque mosaics, rugs and low tables of the Orient, and being lighted by a brass mosque-lamp. The footman who had opened the door for him was a foreigner of ...
— The Orchard of Tears • Sax Rohmer
... English effort. The English soldier is very likely to say something like, 'Oh, you'll be wanting to get home to your old woman before that, and asking for a kipper with your tea.' And it is quite likely that the American will be offended in his turn at having his arabesque of abstract beauty answered in so personal a fashion. Being an American, he will probably have a fine and chivalrous respect for his wife; and may object to her being called an old woman. Possibly he in turn may be under the extraordinary ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... Nuovo, another exceedingly handsome church, stands on the borders of the Lago Maggiore, and is full of magnificent frescoes, surrounded by arabesque borders. The latter appear as though they were gilded, and the effect thus produced is remarkably fine. This spacious building contains a number of small chapels, partitioned off by massive gratings. The great cupola is exceedingly handsome, ...
— A Visit to the Holy Land • Ida Pfeiffer
... principles of classical design; but being no longer in touch with natural and popular interests, nor stimulated by mutual cooperation with their brother craftsmen, the mason builders, they adopted the fashionable mode of expression invented by the new architects and the painters of the time. Elaborate "arabesque" and other formal designs gave employment to the carvers, in making an infinite repetition of fiddles, festoons, and ribbons, in the execution of which they became so proficient, that their work is more often admired for ...
— Wood-Carving - Design and Workmanship • George Jack
... feasters; so much the more wild must have been the scene to any European who could have beheld them there, in the strong sun and the strong shadow of the banyan, rubbed with saffron to throw in a more high relief the arabesque of the tattoo; the women bleached by days of confinement to a complexion almost European; the chiefs crowned with silver plumes of old men's beards and girt with kirtles of the hair of dead women. All manner ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... snug and happy family did this of Mariam's appear to be. If you could judge by all the laughter and giggling, by the splendour of the women's attire, by the neatness of the little house, prettily decorated with arabesque paintings, neat mats, and gay carpets, they were a family well to do in the Beyrout world, and lived with as much comfort as any Europeans. They had one book; and, on the wall of the principal apartment, a black picture of the Virgin, whose name ...
— Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo • William Makepeace Thackeray
... looking on, occasionally shifting their position to get a better view of the work. Gianbattista was mounted upon a ladder which leaned against one of the marble pillars at the entrance of the side chapel closed by the grating. A heavy piece of arabesque work had just been got into its place, and was tied with cords while the young man ran a screw through the prepared holes to fasten one side of the fragment to the bar. He was awkwardly placed, but he had sent the men ...
— Marzio's Crucifix and Zoroaster • F. Marion Crawford
... are none of them in very good taste, the more interesting being those to Lady Digges, and a member of the Fogg family, both of the early seventeenth century, in which the Purbeck has been covered with a charming arabesque and diapered pattern ...
— England of My Heart—Spring • Edward Hutton
... thoughts, because, had it been otherwise, how terrible would have been his fate!—either, on the one hand, to marry her and go and dwell with her savage relations—perhaps be compelled to paint his visage scarlet with arabesque devices in charcoal, and go on the war-path against the white man; or, on the other hand, to introduce his Indian bride into the salons of civilisation, with the certainty of beholding the sneer of contempt on the face of outraged ...
— The Rover of the Andes - A Tale of Adventure on South America • R.M. Ballantyne
... laid architecture little under contribution to their own art, they made their own art a glorious gift to architecture, and the walls of Venice, which before, I believe, had received color only in arabesque patterns, were lighted with human life by Giorgione, Titian, Tintoret, and Veronese. Of the works of Tintoret and Titian, nothing now, I believe, remains; two figures of Giorgione's are still traceable on the Fondaco de' Tedeschi, one of which, singularly uninjured, is seen from far above and ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... limbs, frisk all over the walls, and by their gambols and contortions form a pattern of curves and lines, which is a maze of animated life, retaining at the same time the broad and harmonious effect of an arabesque. ...
— Luca Signorelli • Maud Cruttwell
... with Khartoum in the distance. The Mahdi's white, cone-shaped tomb, its dome girt with rings, and ornamented with brazen finials, globe and crescent, shone not six miles away in the midst of miles of mud and straw huts. Four arabesque finials rose, one from each corner of the supporting wall. Before the town was a wall of white tents, the original camping ground of the Khalifa's levies and reinforcements drawn from distant garrisons. ...
— Khartoum Campaign, 1898 - or the Re-Conquest of the Soudan • Bennet Burleigh
... answered all inquiries concerning the school, hours of classes, tuition fees, remunerative rates paid for designs for carpets, wall papers and decorative upholstering. Unrolling from a wooden cylinder a strip of thick paper, two yards long and twenty inches wide, she displayed an elaborate arabesque pattern done in sepia for a sgraffito frieze, sixteenth century, which had been ordered by the architect of the new "Museum ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... Thurtell!' Another, somewhat more elaborate, gives us 'Burke and Hare! As they were loving friends in life, so in death are they undivided! Erected by their affectionate disciples, Bishop and May.' Besides these there are many others all bearing names of mark and fame. The whole is surrounded by a pretty arabesque composed of crowbars and other implements of burglary, pistols, knives, death's heads and cross-bones, halters, handcuffs, and fetters, ingeniously disposed and prettily intertwined with ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... the pomp of a proud palace; writ In tinted arabesque on walls that gems o'erlay, The names of caliphs were who once held court in it, Their baths and bowers were mine to ...
— Poems • Alan Seeger
... heart, he turned away from the record, but the book fell open of itself at a full-page insert of the Decalogue, illuminated by some artless printer with gaudy splotches of gold, red and blue and green initials, and silly curlicues of arabesque, as if the man had been ignorant of what they meant, those ten pillars of ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... music" for the last two hundred years. The third room (a view of which we engrave) is a boudoir, containing the large antique German stove, built up with ornamental tiles cast in relief, with stories from bible history of saints, and arabesque. Beside it is a bronze receptacle for water, shaped like a huge acorn, the tap having a grotesque head, and the spigot being a small seated figure; this was gently turned when wanted, and a thin stream of water trickled over the hands ...
— Rambles of an Archaeologist Among Old Books and in Old Places • Frederick William Fairholt
... cousin Virginia Clemm, a very young girl, who continued devotedly attached to him notwithstanding his many aberrations, until her death in 1847. The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym appeared in 1838, and in 1839 P. became ed. of the Gentleman's Magazine, in which appeared as Tales of the Arabesque and Grotesque many of his best stories. In 1845 his famous poem, The Raven, came out, and in 1848 Eureka, a Prose Poem, a pseudo-scientific lucubration. The death of his wife gave a severe shock to his constitution, and a violent drinking bout on ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... soul, his life, everything. Well, in the old days thoughts and ideas commenced to make themselves felt in me, to crop up in my work. I would start on a picture with a clear settled design; when it was finished, I would notice that by some unconscious freak I had introduced a figure, an arabesque, always something which made the whole incongruous and bizarre. I discovered the cause during the week after I received your last letter. The thoughts, the ideas were yours; better than mine perhaps, but none the less death ...
— Ensign Knightley and Other Stories • A. E. W. Mason
... the middle of which was a fountain, with a lion of massy gold at each angle: water issued from the mouths of the four lions; and as it fell, formed diamonds and pearls, resembling a jet d'eau, which springing from the middle of the fountain, rose nearly to the top of a cupola painted in Arabesque. ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments vol. 1 • Anon.
... by a calico curtain, with a gorgeous Cretonne pattern upon it. I was delighted to see a four-post bed, with mosquito bars, and a clean pulu mattrass, with a linen sheet over it, covered with a beautiful quilt with a quaint arabesque pattern on a white ground running round it, and a wreath of green leaves in the centre. The native women exercise the utmost ingenuity in the patterns and colours of these quilts. Some of them are quite ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... having four windows, one in each side; in the centre of the square is the palace, surrounded by a colonnade one or two stories high. The pavement is either tessellated or of chequered marble; some of the walls of the rooms are also tessellated with arabesque, borders, the ceilings are painted with gay colours, viz. scarlet, sky-blue, green, yellow, and orange, in arabesque, and some of them are very elegant. The houses of the opulent are diminutive imitations of the palaces. The ...
— An Account of Timbuctoo and Housa Territories in the Interior of Africa • Abd Salam Shabeeny
... that unchanging race, Are themes for minstrelsy more high than thine; Of strange tradition many a mystic trace, Legend and vision, prophecy and sign; Where wonders wild of Arabesque combine With Gothic imagery of darker shade, Forming a model meet for minstrel line. Go, seek such theme!"—the Mountain Spirit said. With filial awe I ...
— Some Poems by Sir Walter Scott • Sir Walter Scott
... damask: the same thread runs through the web, but it makes part of different figures. Joined with other colors you hardly recognize it, and in different lights it is dark or light. Thus the Greek fables blend and cross curiously in different directions, till they knit themselves into an arabesque where sometimes you cannot tell black from purple, nor blue from emerald—they being all the truer for this, because the truths of emotion they represent are interwoven in the same way, but all the more difficult to read, and to explain in ...
— The Queen of the Air • John Ruskin
... appearance, should have had a purely sporting character, and exhibited Mr. Pickwick sleepily fishing in a punt, and Mr. Winkle shooting at what looks like a cock-sparrow, the whole surrounded by a chaste arabesque of guns, rods, and landing-nets. To Seymour, too, we owe the portrait of Mr. Pickwick, which has impressed that excellent old gentleman's face and figure upon all our memories. But to return to Dickens' interview with Mr. Hall. They seem to have ...
— Life of Charles Dickens • Frank Marzials
... rounded architecture. And where has that French school its origin? Wholly in the rich conditions of sculpture, which, rising first out of imitations of the Roman bas-reliefs, covered all the facades of the French early churches with one continuous arabesque of floral or animal life. If you want to study round-arched buildings, do not go to Durham, but go to Poictiers, and there you will see how all the simple decorations which give you so much pleasure even in their isolated application were invented ...
— The Two Paths • John Ruskin
... arch which one would expect to see meeting above his head, the lofty pillars on each side bear an unbroken semicircular vault, which is painted a brilliant blue, and spangled with silver stars. These pillars, and the little arches above, which spring from them, are painted in an arabesque style with gold and brilliant colors, and each side-chapel is a perfect casket of richness and elegance. The windows are of silvered glass, through which the light glimmers softly on the splendor within. The whole end of the church behind the high altar, is ...
— Views a-foot • J. Bayard Taylor
... their works: elaborately embroidered veils, scarves, and gold fringes. But being a man of fine imagination and most delicate sense of form, he does not, like Angelico or Benozzo or Carpaccio, merely stick pretty things about; he works them all into his strange arabesque, half intellectual, half physical. Thus the screen of roses[7] behind certain of his Madonnas, forming an exquisite Morris pattern with the greenish-blue sky interlaced; and those beautiful, carefully-drawn branches of spruce-fir and cypress, ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... understand that Schiller, notwithstanding all his admiration of Kant and his prompt recognition of the far-reaching importance of Kant's doctrine, could not be perfectly satisfied with a philosophy which decreed that an arabesque is more beautiful than any woman, and that morality cannot be beautiful at all, except in some mystical poetic sense. Nor could he be content with Kant's sensus communis aestheticus, which seemed to leave the beautiful finally a matter of taste. His mental attitude is clearly ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... gives to this wonderful facade the effect of a dream. The baluster of this staircase forms a spiral connecting itself by a square landing to five of the six sides of the tower, requiring at each landing transversal corbels which are decorated with arabesque carvings without and within. This bewildering creation of ingenious and delicate details, of marvels which give speech to stones, can be compared only to the deeply worked and crowded carving of the Chinese ivories. Stone is made to look like lace-work. ...
— Catherine de' Medici • Honore de Balzac
... authors, what an exquisite poem Tom Moore would have written, had he visited Chapel Island, which you have seen no doubt? (here he gave a little nod with the big hat) and what a rich volume would have dropped from the arabesque pen of your own Irving (another nod), had he written the life of the Baron de St. Castine, chief of the Abenaquis, as he did that ...
— Acadia - or, A Month with the Blue Noses • Frederic S. Cozzens
... seems So tender to my dreams As he, discursive at our mutual desk, Most fervid and most ripe, When dreaming at his pipe, He made the opiate nights grow Arabesque. ...
— Bohemian Days - Three American Tales • Geo. Alfred Townsend
... drawn the sword from its scabbard and laid it across his knee. He felt its edge; he drew his finger down the long groove that ran along the center of the blade; his gaze rested almost passionately on the floral arabesque that fringed that bed of the river of blood. Not a spot of rust from hilt to point; the scabbard, ...
— The Tysons - (Mr. and Mrs. Nevill Tyson) • May Sinclair
... pearl-iridescent colombettes! (I wonder what they may be?) and sent to vie with the variegated carpet of the Turk, and glow upon the arabesque towers of Barbary![2] Was not this a phase of provincial Picard life which an intelligent English traveller might do well to inquire into? Why should this fountain of rainbows leap up suddenly here by Somme; and a little Frankish maid write herself the sister of Venice, and the ...
— Our Fathers Have Told Us - Part I. The Bible of Amiens • John Ruskin
... young man who, according to custom, begins to read the end of his letters first finds an arabesque of this style at the bottom of a lady's letter, he ought to arm himself with patience and resignation ...
— Gerfaut, Complete • Charles de Bernard
... often used for scholastic purposes. Many of the fountains are fine specimens of Arab architecture. While the houses of the poorer classes are mean and too often dirty, in marked contrast are the houses of the wealthier citizens, built generally in a style of elaborate arabesque, the windows shaded with projecting cornices of graceful woodwork (mushrebiya) and ornamented with stained glass. A winding passage leads through the ornamental doorway into the court, in the centre of which is a fountain shaded with palm-trees. The principal apartment ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... almost as close to symbolism as they are to the allegory that Carey claims to be writing (Key, pp. 18, 24 and 29). Collation of Dumpling with its Key clearly reveals (with due allowance for satiric arabesque) a series of allegories moving backwards and forwards through history. At various stages, Sir John Pudding (ostensibly Brawn [or John Brand], the famous cook of the Rummer in Queen Street who appears in Dr. King's Art of Cookery [1708]), becomes identifiable ...
— A Learned Dissertation on Dumpling (1726) • Anonymous
... Jack, knocking the ashes off his cigar on to the arabesque-patterned tapestry carpet—'why, no, not exactly; but these things, you know, are a good deal matter of course; just describe what you saw, you know, and butter Puff well, that's ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees
... he leaves the Senate in 1850 I have nothing whatever to go by; and, being by nature both a timid, and, on occasions, by choice a truthful, man, I would prefer to have some foundation of fact, no matter how slender, on which to build the airy and arabesque superstructure of my fancy—especially as I am writing a history. Now I hesitate to give him a wholly fictitious date of death and to invent all of the work of his later years. Would it be too infernal a nuisance for you to hire some of your minions on the Advertiser ...
— Roosevelt in the Bad Lands • Hermann Hagedorn
... repeated, like the words of peasants or children. They were rarely beautiful in themselves, rarely even significant, but they suggested a singular kind of beauty and significance, through their adjustment in a pattern or arabesque. Atmosphere, the suggestion of what was not said, was everything; and in an essay in "Le Tresor des Humbles" Maeterlinck told us that in drama, as he conceived it, it was only the words that were ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... Sala das Sereias. The pointed door is enclosed in a square frame by a band of narrow dark and light tiles with white squares between, arranged in checks, while in the spandrels is a very beautiful arabesque pattern in ...
— Portuguese Architecture • Walter Crum Watson
... is at the side, and is Gothic, with a dash of Saracenic in the ornamental mouldings above it. The large window at the extremity of the nave is remarkable for having round arches, which circumstance, together with the traces of arabesque painted ornaments on the columns, led me to think it might have been a mosque; but Dr. Robinson, who is now here, considers it a Christian church, of the time of the Crusaders. The village of Aboo 'l Ghosh is said to be the site of the birth-place ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor
... officers, and finally into a more remote part of the building where they met only an occasional servant. At last they came into a great room entirely empty but for themselves. About the walls hung ripened portraits. The decorations were of Arabesque mosaics with fantastic panels of Moorish tiling. It might have been a grandee's house in Seville, patterned on the Alcazar. Evidently this was part of a private suite. Heavy portieres were only partly drawn across a wide window with the sill at the ...
— The Lighted Match • Charles Neville Buck
... beautiful arabesque border might be conceived from a perusal of the late Lord Castlereagh's speeches! We should here have Parliamentary eloquence under a most fantastic yet captivating phase. Who, for instance, but the artist to PUNCH could paint CASTLEREAGH'S ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, October 23, 1841 • Various
... second hall, also for servants, gives tokens of increasing splendors in the richer decorations of the walls and the more elaborate mosaic of the floor. We next entered the audience chamber, in which the court-marshal receives the guests. The ceiling is of arabesque ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume V (of X) • Various
... pattern is a florid arabesque, reminding one of a fungus. If you can imagine a toadstool in joints, an interminable string of toadstools, budding and sprouting in endless convolutions—why, that is ...
— The Yellow Wallpaper • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... powder, lipstick, blush. [ornamental surface pattern: list] pattern, diaper, powdering, paneling, graining, pargeting[obs3]; detail; repousse (convexity) 250; texture &c. 329; richness; tracery, molding, fillet, listel[obs3], strapwork[obs3], coquillage[Fr], flourish, fleur-de-lis[Fr], arabesque, fret, anthemion[obs3]; egg and tongue, egg and dart; astragal[obs3], zigzag, acanthus, cartouche; pilaster &c. (projection) 250; bead, beading; champleve ware[Fr], cloisonne ware; frost work, Moresque[Lat], Morisco, tooling. [ornamental cloth] embroidery; brocade, brocatelle[obs3], ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... people, like some very fine pictures, are best at a distance. But Leonora is not one of these: the nearer you approach, the better you like her; as in arabesque-work you may admire the beauty of the design even at a distance, but you cannot appreciate the delicacy of the execution till you examine it closely, and discover that every line is formed of grains of gold, almost imperceptibly ...
— Tales And Novels, Vol. 8 • Maria Edgeworth
... stories, poems, essays and critiques which the indefatigable Dreamer was putting out, he found time to publish a collection of his "Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque," in book form. He was also (unfortunately for him) induced to prepare a work on sea-shells for the use of schools—"The Conchologist's First Book," it was called. This was unmistakably a mere "pot-boiler" and confessedly a compilation, ...
— The Dreamer - A Romantic Rendering of the Life-Story of Edgar Allan Poe • Mary Newton Stanard
... his wedding and the graces of Constance, and their future prospects, calling my attention to his captain's shoulder-straps, and the triple gold arabesque on his sleeve and fatigue cap. I believe I listened as much to the music of his spurs and sabre as I did to his boyish babble, and at last we stood under the elms on the Fourth Street corner of the square opposite the Lethal Chamber. Then he laughed and asked me what I wanted with him. ...
— The King In Yellow • Robert W. Chambers
... curious horizontal caryatides in the place of brackets. The rich burnt-sienna tint of the carvings contrasts finely with the golden-brown of the massive marble walls,—a combination which is shown in no other building of the Middle Ages. The sunken rosettes, surrounded by raised arabesque borders, between the caryatides, are sculptured with such a careful reference to the distance at which they must be seen, that they appear as firm and delicate as if near the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... feet uneasily and Joseph Schwefel pulled down his waistcoat. As manufacturers of highgrade garments they had accompanied more than one customer to the entertainment described by Benson; but to Elkan the term "ponies" admitted of only one meaning, and this conversational arabesque of flies, little horses, aeroplanes and George DeFrees made him ...
— Elkan Lubliner, American • Montague Glass
... Abbey Farm welcomed Josian in due time as a daughter. When she and Alan had been married about three months Josian was surveying a panel of just-completed embroidery in which all the colors in exquisite proportion blended in a gold-green jeweled arabesque. Alan came up behind her and caught the sunlight through it. He asked to borrow it, and reproduced the design in painted glass. That was the first window which he made for ...
— Masters of the Guild • L. Lamprey
... coolness. Their ceilings for the most part are semicircular vaults, richly painted, and the more valuable because few ceilings have been found in existence. We should attempt in vain to describe the complicated subjects, the intricate and varied patterns with which the fertile fancy of the arabesque painter has clothed the walls and ceilings, without the aid of drawings, which we are unable to give; and, indeed, colored plates would be requisite to convey an adequate notion of their effect. In the splendid work which Mr. Donaldson has published ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... the work of preparing a school textbook on "Conchology." He soon became associate editor of The Gentleman's Magazine with its proprietor Burton. The following year, 1840, his first volume of stories was published, under the title, "Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque." The volume was not a popular success. An edition of seven hundred and fifty copies was barely disposed of, and all that Poe received was twenty copies ...
— Four Famous American Writers: Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, • Sherwin Cody
... the curiously carved windows cut in arabesque-work of marble. (India) or basalt (the Hauran) and provided with small panes of glass set in emeralds where tin would be used ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... a donkey to a mosque in the bazaar, of what we call Arabesque style, like the Alhambra, very handsome. The Kibleh was very beautiful, and as I was admiring it Omar pulled a lemon out of his breast and smeared it on the porphyry pillar on one side of the arch, and then entreated me to lick it. It cures all diseases. The old man who showed ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon
... All the world swings at the top of its beauty; and those hills where we shall live, what robes of color fold them! Tawny filemot gilding the valleys, each seam and rut a scroll or arabesque, and all the year pouring out her heart's blood to flush the maples, the great impurpled granites warm with the sunshine they have drunk all summer! So I am to be married to-day, at noon. I like it best so; it is my hour. There is my veil, that regal ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 5, No. 28, February, 1860 • Various
... the freedom as well, was newspaper arabesque. It was certain, however, that the prince wore a green coat with gold frogs; and upon his head he had a big plume. It was, therefore, quite proper for the crowd to cry occasionally "Long ...
— Walter Pieterse - A Story of Holland • Multatuli
... almost suppose that the matchless tool of the famous Benevanta Cellini had traced its wild and graceful grotesque. The four claws, which are like roots from the stem of the pedestal, partake of the same rich arabesque in their design, and terminate in the form of ...
— The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter
... reached the top of a swelling green hill, and saw the splendid vision of Loch Tay lying beneath him—an immense plate of polished silver, its dark heathy mountains and leafless thickets of oak serving as an arabesque frame ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott
... premisses and the conclusion, and that to them geometry is pure science. So I think it may be said that mechanics and osteology are pure science. On the other hand, melody in music is pure art. You cannot reason about it; there is no proposition involved in it. So, again, in the pictorial art, an arabesque, or a "harmony in grey,"[80] touches none but the aesthetic faculty. But a great mathematician, and even many persons who are not great mathematicians, will tell you that they derive immense pleasure from geometrical reasonings. Everybody knows mathematicians speak of solutions ...
— Autobiography and Selected Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... break in bright blurs of light upon the primrose-tinted wall. A large arm-chair stood by the side of the burnt-out fire, shadowed over by the huge marble mantel-piece, the back of which was carried up twining and curving into a thousand arabesque and armorial devices until it blended with the richly painted ceiling. In one corner a narrow couch with a rug thrown across it showed where the faithful Bontems ...
— The Refugees • Arthur Conan Doyle
... way his wonders to perform." If the greatest of all his wonders be the human individual, the richness with which the specimens thereof are diversified, the limitless variety of outline, from gothic to classic or flowing arabesque, the contradictory nature of the filling, composed of little and great, of comic, heroic, and pathetic elements blended inextricably, in personalities all of whom can go, and go successfully, must surely be reckoned ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... see the olive walls, the unique copper-and-crimson arabesque frieze (his own selection), and the delicate draperies; an open grate full of glowing coals, to temper the sea winds; and in the midst of it, between a landscape by Enneking and an Indian in a canoe in a canyon, by Brush, he saw a somber landscape ...
— Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... no novice at the business of selling a girl, neither was he a stranger to the house to which he had taken me. For, after breakfast, he showed me into a little room with one quaint, Arabesque window. In this room there was a bath, and every toilette requisite, while, from a tin box that he brought in, he took out a number of most exquisite outer and under garments. Telling me to make myself as beautiful-looking as I knew how, ...
— The Mark of the Beast • Sidney Watson
... our American painters have given real attention to Ryder? I find him so much the legend among professional artists, this master of arabesque, this first and foremost of our designers, this real creator of pattern, this first of all creators of tragic landscape, whose pictures are sacred to those that revere distinction and power in art. He had in him that finer kind of reverence for the element of beauty which finds ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley
... feet above the tops of the arches, and contain two rows of twenty-one windows each. The roof is of timber, without being vaulted. The cupola is supported by four large arches resting upon four square pillars. It is spherical, with two rows of windows, and is ornamented with arabesque paintings and gilding of exquisite beauty. Its diameter is equal to ...
— Palestine or the Holy Land - From the Earliest Period to the Present Time • Michael Russell
... was a huge dismal cavern with branching tunnels around that disappeared in thick obscurity, and heights above that lost themselves in gloom; holes in the sides and floor that were of invisible depth, and curious irregular ledges, that formed a sort of arabesque ...
— Charlie to the Rescue • R.M. Ballantyne
... strange "arabesque pattern," as it was called, with no special form,—so it seemed to my eyes,—bringing in gorgeous colors, but set in no shape which Nature ever produced, either above the earth or in metals or crystals ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, No. 38, December, 1860 • Various
... Lord Byron, engr. by J.T. Wedgwood from a painting by W.E. West, in arabesque frame, rests on miniatures of Newstead Abbey and Missolunghi (sic) designed by F. Sieurac. The Title-vignette is tomb, harp, willows, etc. A lithograph of letter, April 27, 1819, to the Editor of Galignani's Messenger, is inserted between ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Vol. 7. - Poetry • George Gordon Byron
... drink a sip of rum-punch, in a very small tumbler, after the soup. It was excellently well-brewed, and it seemed to me almost worth while to sup the soup for the sake of sipping the punch. The rest of the dinner was catalogued in a bill-of-fare printed on delicate white paper within an arabesque border of green and gold. It looked very good, not only in the English and French names of the numerous dishes, but also in the positive reality of the dishes themselves, which were all set on the table to be carved and distributed by ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Liszt and all the world after him got that tempo rubato, that playing with the duration of notes without breaking the time, and those arabesque ornaments which are woven like fine embroidery all about the pages of Chopin's nocturnes, and lift what in others are mere casual flourishes into the dignity of interpretative phrases and poetic ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various
... And there were, to her, vaguely agitating and even fearful things in this lacework also—confusions of outline, broken purposes, multiplicity of opposing intentions, struggle of good and evil powers in the intricacies of some rich arabesque; or monotonous repetitions of design which distressed her as with the terrors of imprisonment and of unescapable fate. She was filled with feverish anxiety until such portions of her self-imposed task were completed. Then she would ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... adored this mood of London: its nights of rain were sheer enchantment, arabesque, nights of secrecy and stealth, mystery, and romance under the rose. On nights such as this lovers prospered, adventures were to the venturesome, brave rewards ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... hominum cognoscere vultus, Area longa patet, sancto contermina Marco, Celsus ubi Adriacas, Venetus Leo despicit undas, Hic circum gentes cunctis e partibus orbis, AEthiopes, Turcos, Slavos, Arabesque, Syrosque, Inveniesque Cypri, Cretae, Macedumque colonos, Innumerosque alios varia regione profectos: Saepe etiam nec visa prius, nec cognita cernes, Quae si cuncta velim tenui describere versu, Heic omnes citius nautas celeresque Phaselos, Et ...
— Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey through France, Italy, and Germany, Vol. I • Hester Lynch Piozzi
... bed, as a canopy for the bed, and as the gorgeous volutes of the curtains which partially shaded the window. The material was the richest cloth of gold. It was spotted all over, at irregular intervals, with arabesque figures, about a foot in diameter, and wrought upon the cloth in patterns of the most jetty black. But these figures partook of the true character of the arabesque only when regarded from a single point of view. By ...
— Famous Modern Ghost Stories • Various
... white lace cap shading her delicate face, that must have been so beautiful, indeed, that was beautiful still, was a lady of middle age. Her seat was low—one of those chairs we are pleased to call, commonly and irreverently, a prie-dieu. Its back was carved in arabesque foliage, and its seat was of rich violet velvet. On a small inlaid table, whose carvings were as beautiful, and its top inlaid with mosaic-work, lay a dainty handkerchief of lace, a bottle of smelling-salts, ...
— Verner's Pride • Mrs. Henry Wood
... dining room she paused to look back at the veranda. She wanted to remember every arabesque that the vines were tracing in silhouette against the moonlit sea; but she could not see anything distinctly. As she left the restaurant some one presented her with a ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman
... grotesque Against the sky, behind her seen, Like shapeless shapes of arabesque Wrought in an Oriental screen; And tall, austere and statuesque She loomed before it—e'en as though The spirit-hand of Angelo Had chiseled her to life complete, With chips of moonshine round her feet. And I grew jealous of the ...
— The Complete Works • James Whitcomb Riley
... perceptible gold threads, through the dress, the flesh, the atmosphere, in Titian's Lace-girl, that staining of the whole fabric of the thing with a new, delightful physical quality. This drawing, then—the arabesque traced in the air by Tintoret's flying figures, by Titian's forest branches; this colouring—the magic conditions of light and hue in the atmosphere of Titian's Lace-girl, or Rubens's Descent from the ...
— The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... book-covers almost always follow certain styles. These are either heraldic, scriptural, symbolical, floral, or arabesque. ...
— Chats on Old Lace and Needlework • Emily Leigh Lowes
... the capitals were left merely roughed out, as were also the mouldings of the attic which would be hidden by the cornice, except in the portions visible from the external sides. The soffit of the arch is carved, and the face of the pilaster below has a very rich and graceful vine arabesque upon it. The other side is fully decorated with victories in the spandrils, festoons and chariot-races on the frieze, and the attic develops three pedestals for statues, inscribed to members of the family of Salvia Postumia, who erected it in honour of her husband, Lucius Sergius, his ...
— The Shores of the Adriatic - The Austrian Side, The Kuestenlande, Istria, and Dalmatia • F. Hamilton Jackson
... of Madame S. de R——d is not more distinguished by its profuse decoration, than by the fine taste which has guided the vast expenditure. Its halls of arabesque are almost without a rival; there is not the slightest embellishment in which the hand and feeling of art are not recognised. The rooms were very crowded; everybody distinguished in Paris was there: the lady of the Court, the duchess ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... or two, he met; but as every one who saw him, knew him instantly for a prince of good blood, he could, of course, wander where he pleased. He passed on among the golden columns and sculptured doorways, and under vaulted and arabesque ceilings, until he came to a door of mother-of-pearl, which had a golden lock, an alabaster knob, and a diamond key-hole. It turned easily on silver hinges, and the Prince passed by it into a beautiful garden. He had never been in such a place of loveliness. The trees were hung with many soft-colored ...
— Ting-a-ling • Frank Richard Stockton
... alternate crystal and frosted silver, on pedestals of alabaster and of aqua-marine, were ranged along the walls, the delicate beauty of their material and workmanship coming out well against the rich coloring of the hangings behind. The roof, a lofty dome, displayed the light Arabesque workmanship, peculiar to Moorish architecture, as did the form and ornaments of the windows. This apartment opened into another, much smaller, each side of which, apparently formed of silver plate, reflected as mirrors every object; and the pillars supporting ...
— The Vale of Cedars • Grace Aguilar
... made, lest memory should be unfaithful. When the third cover is unclosed, in the lowest part of the recess on the right hand, beneath a sliding panel, is a spring, on touching which the whole flies back, and discovers a rare device, beautifully wrought in arabesque relief. So far, in all likelihood, you being his ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... the austerity and intensity of his noblest portraits and other creations. But "great thoughts" in respect of works of art either means the communication of a profound emotion by the creation of a suitable arabesque for a deeply significant subject, as in the flowing masses of Michael Angelo's Creation of Man, or it means the pictorial enhancing of the telling incidents of a dramatic situation such as we find it in Rembrandt's treatment of the Crucifixion, ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore
... spread, the walls were hung, with silken fabrics fine, And arabesque and lotus-flower bore each the broidered sign Of jewels plucked from land and sea, and red ...
— The Mistress of the Manse • J. G. Holland
... he would forever be as silent as the grave, and last no scandal would besmear her virtue. And the lewd fellow, perceiving that the lady did not stop her ears, commenced to describe to her, after the fashion of arabesque pictures, which at that time were much esteemed, the wanton inventions of debauchery. Then did his eyes shoot flame, his words burn, and his voice ring, and he himself took great pleasure in calling to mind the ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 2 • Honore de Balzac
... once more their cloaks vanished or were discarded, so their silver-bright figures advanced, retreated, weaving a way from one arabesque to another. First about the outer rim and then in, by spirals and circles. No light except the crimson glowing rivulets on the floor, the silver bodies of the Foanna moving back and forth, in ...
— Key Out of Time • Andre Alice Norton
... When Abou Hassan laid down his head on the bolster, he opened his eyes; and by the dawning light that appeared, found himself in a large room, magnificently furnished, the ceiling of which was finely painted in Arabesque, adorned with vases of gold and silver, and the floor covered with a rich silk tapestry. He saw himself surrounded by many young and handsome ladies, many of them having instruments of music in their hands, and black eunuchs richly ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments vol. 3 • Anon.
... me, and then launched forth in full tide, accompanying her sweet and mellow voice on that too much neglected instrument, the guitar. It was a wild, irregular sort of ditty, with one or two startling arabesque bursts in it. As near as may be, the following conveys the meaning, but ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... Archbishop's fortified palace, still capable of withstanding a siege if there were no artillery; here are the old houses, one of pre-Gothic construction with very broad Romanesque window, slender columns and storied capitals, billet and arabesque mouldings; another of the sixteenth century quite encrusted with carved wood; and here are the dirty little streets like crooked lanes, where old women, who all through the summer months, Sundays excepted, give their feet an air-bath, may be seen ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... it can receive no more; and instead of looking rugged, or cold, or stern, or anything that a rock is held to be at heart, it seems to be clothed with a soft dark leopard's skin, embroidered with arabesque of purple and silver. ...
— Frondes Agrestes - Readings in 'Modern Painters' • John Ruskin
... remarkable, because boys and girls who had, at an average age of twelve or thirteen, learned the principles of design and its practical application to several kinds of handiwork, and knew the differences and characteristics of Gothic, Arabesque, or Greek patterns, all developed a far greater intelligence in general thought and conversation than others. They had at least one topic on which they could converse intelligently with any grown-up person, and in which they were really superior to most. They soon found this ...
— The Mystic Will • Charles Godfrey Leland
... sated by the miracles of harmonies—noiseless harmonies. It was a new art, and one for the peoples of the earth. Never had the hues of the universe been so assembled, grouped, and modulated. And the human eye, adapting itself to the new synthesis of arabesque and rhythm, evoked order and symbolism from these novel chords of colour. There were solemn mountains of opalescent fire which burst and faded into flaming colonnades, and in an enchanting turquoise effervescence became starry spears and scimiters and sparkling shields, ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... silver and gold and ultramarine and costly minerals. Then they set up for the latticed windows colonnettes of gold and silver and noble ores, and the doors of the sitting chamber were made of chaunders-wood alternating with ebony which they studded with jewels and arabesque'd with gold and silver. Also they placed in each sitting-room a pillar of Comorin lign-aloes and the best of sandal-wood encrusted with gems; and over the speak-room they threw cupolas supported upon arches and connecting ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... little book from my pocket. In this little book John had copied out for me some sweet quaint rhymes which were favourites of his and mine, and because I had thought the writing and the writer could never be glorified enough, I had wrought round the margin of the pages a border of fanciful arabesque, which I had filled in ...
— The Late Miss Hollingford • Rosa Mulholland
... after having demonstrated an entire social system, I shall revert to science in an Essay on the Human Powers. And around the base of my palatial structure, with boyish glee I shall trace the immense arabesque ...
— Honor de Balzac • Albert Keim and Louis Lumet
... Thetford; Eva and Marie were out on the leads; Hawise was busy in her own apartments. Belasez had been unusually silent that morning. She worked on in a hurried, nervous way, never speaking nor looking up, and a lovely arabesque pattern grew into beauty under her deft fingers. ...
— Earl Hubert's Daughter - The Polishing of the Pearl - A Tale of the 13th Century • Emily Sarah Holt
... lines of the Gothic niches traced above them; and what is left of arabesque on their armour. They are far more beautiful and tender in chivalric conception than Donatello's St. George, which is merely a piece of vigorous naturalism founded on these older tombs. If you will drive in the evening to the Chartreuse in Val ...
— Mornings in Florence • John Ruskin
... Columns, arabesque ceilings charged with gilding, light pieces of sculpture applied on blue and violet grounds, imitating cameo, china, or enamel; every thing excites astonishment, and concurs in calling to mind the first epoch of the regeneration of the arts in ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon
... that the room, lit by a lamp on the centre table and candles elsewhere, was decorated and fitted up with cost and in a taste not English. He could see, for instance, that the ceiling was painted, and the walls were not papered, but painted in panels between arabesque pilasters. ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... from her through the folding doors into a retiring apartment, set with arabesque designs, and adorned with inlaid tables bearing statues of alabaster and enamel. Purposely he waited before he replied, and was gratified to see how curiously she regarded him when again his glance returned ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham
... just within the folding doors upon a huge mat of bison skins. In front of them lay a great square court, paved with many-coloured marbles laid out in a labyrinth of arabesque design. In the centre a high fountain of carved jade shot five thin feathers of spray into the air, four of which curved towards each corner of the court to descend into broad marble basins, while the fifth mounted straight up to an immense height, and then tinkled back into the central ...
— The Doings Of Raffles Haw • Arthur Conan Doyle
... can the —— thing be? Three doors and two winders and a fire-place, and all the rest book-cases. By Jinx! there it is, I'll swear." He stepped over to one of the cases where a pair of oaken doors, rich with arabesque carving, veiled a sort of cabinet. He was fingering at them when Sam seized him by the shoulder, ...
— The Bread-winners - A Social Study • John Hay
... now inspired also with a vague idea of attending the Gamma Psi dance. He wanted to see Edith—Edith whom he hadn't met since one romantic night at the Harrisburg Country Club just before he went to France. The affair had died, drowned in the turmoil of the war and quite forgotten in the arabesque of these three months, but a picture of her, poignant, debonnaire, immersed in her own inconsequential chatter, recurred to him unexpectedly and brought a hundred memories with it. It was Edith's face that he had cherished ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... mother had time to change her mind, and John-James began slowly to rinse the china through the darkened water, on whose surface the grease lay in a shimmering arabesque. Annie went round the kitchen rasping the chairs over the stone floor and making futile dabs at their seats with her apron. She had that curious uncertainty of aim usually seen in dogs, who never seem to be sure of touching the object at ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... of those stern recluses—half hermit, half soldier—who, in the earlier crusades, fixed their wild homes amidst the sands and caves of Palestine. The stranger supported his steps by a long staff. His hair and beard hung long and matted over his broad shoulders. A rusted mail, once splendid with arabesque enrichments, protected his breast; but the loose gown—a sort of tartan, which descended below the cuirass—was rent and tattered, and his feet bare; in his girdle was a short curved cimiter, a knife or dagger, and a parchment roll, ...
— Leila or, The Siege of Granada, Book V. • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... imagery rarely adds to the vividness of the situations, but rather obscures and confuses them. It reminds one of a certain style of barocque architecture in which the rage for ornamentation twists every line into a scroll or spiral or arabesque, until whatever design there originally was is lost in a riot of decoration. The metaphors exist for their own sake, and are in nowise subordinate to the themes which they profess to illustrate. Take, ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... tell you all about her. She is with me now, and we are in the morning room, where we always sit; for the great music-room that opens on the verandah and fronts the sea is shut when my guardian is not here. This room looks over the sea, too, but from the side of the house and through an arabesque of trees. The walls are filled with books and flowering bulbs stand in the windows. We have had our tea and the sunlight slants in over the white freesia and white hyacinths. There are primroses everywhere, too, and they make the room ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... specimens of Oriental armor—Turcoman cimeters, Damascus swords, Bedouin lances, and a crimson silk flag, with heavy gold fringe, surmounted by a crescent. The cornice of the lofty arched ceiling was elaborately arabesque, and as Edna looked up she saw through the glass roof the flickering of stars in the summer sky. In the centre of the room, immediately under the dome, stretched a billiard-table, and near it was a circular one of black marble, inlaid with red onyx and lapis ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... in the window of the back one-pair-of-stairs chamber which he called his library, where he sometimes wrote prescriptions, and pondering over his pennyweights, his Roman numerals, his guttae and pillulae, his 3s, his 5s, his 9s, and the other arabesque and astrological symbols of his mystery, he looked over his pen into the church-yard, which inspiring ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... instead of tassels, in two tiny Indian lamps of gold filigreed-work, marvellously finished. By one of those ingenious combinations, so common in barbarous countries, these lamps served also to burn perfumes. Plates of blue crystal, let in between the openings of the arabesque, and illumined by the interior light, shone with so limpid an azure, that the golden lamps seemed starred with transparent sapphires. Light clouds, of whitish vapor rose incessantly from these lamps, and spread all around ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... supper. The house was carpeted throughout. The great parlour was panelled in wood, white and gold. The other chief rooms were wainscoted in oak; and as to their upper walls, some were bright with French paper, while some shone white with smooth plaster; their ceilings and borders were decorated with arabesque woodwork. There were tiled fireplaces, with carved mantels, white, like the rectangular window-frames and panelled doors. Well, well, 'twas but a house like countless others, and why should I so closely describe it?—save that I love the memory of it, and fain ...
— Philip Winwood • Robert Neilson Stephens
... a very long tail. The tail of the kite is the Maydan, the poorest part of Damascus, but rich in ruined mosques and hammams, and houses which at first sight look as though they are in decay. But when we got to know these houses better, we found that marble courts, inlaid chambers, arabesque ceilings, often lay behind the muddy exteriors. The city itself is divided into three districts: the Jewish in the southern part, the Moslem in the northern and western, and the Christian in the eastern. The Moslem ...
— The Romance of Isabel Lady Burton Volume II • Isabel Lady Burton & W. H. Wilkins
... del Gobernador" by the Spaniards. It is 320 feet long, and was built of hewn stone laid in mortar or cement. The faces of the walls are smooth up to the cornice. Then follows, on all the four sides, "one solid mass of rich, complicated, and elaborately sculptured ornaments, forming a sort of arabesque." Figure 36 gives a view of the south end of this edifice, but no engraving can show all the details of ...
— Ancient America, in Notes on American Archaeology • John D. Baldwin
... Library is that of surprise. You might walk through the Great Hall and adjoining galleries without suspecting the place to be a library at all; for the bookcases that line the lower portion of the walls are closed with panelled doors, painted in arabesque on a ground of white and slate colour, and surrounded by gilded mouldings, and not a single book is visible. The vaulted ceiling of the rooms is glowing with gold and ultramarine; the walls are adorned with ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan |
