"Cornice" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of High Street (Wisconsin Avenue) and Prospect Street, the building which has an interesting cornice and roof is where W. W. Corcoran started his career, in the ...
— A Portrait of Old George Town • Grace Dunlop Ecker
... wood, the doors and panels were richly inlaid with lapis- lazuli, ivory, and mother-of-pearl, among which were twisted delicately chased threads of gold and silver. Above the doors, between them and the cornice, lay another mystery, fully as tormenting as was the first. In a smooth strip of wood about an inch wide, and extending along the whole breadth of the cabinet, was inlaid a fine pattern in gold wire. This at first sight seemed to consist of a legend ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... as that he may draw all the ornaments in detail, under the eye of the architect, which he will have to execute when he comes to you. It will be the cheapest way of getting them drawn, and the most certain of putting him in possession of his precise duty. Plaister will not answer for your external cornice, and stone will be too dear. You will probably find yourselves obliged to be contented with wood. For this, therefore, and for your window sashes, doors, frames, wainscoting, &c. you will need a capital house-joiner; and a capital one he ought to be, capable of directing all the circumstances ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... easy. The intention was to show that all the talents had been taken captive by death, together with Pope Julius, since never would they find another patron to cherish and encourage them as he had done. Above these figures ran a cornice, giving unity to the whole work. Upon the flat surface formed by this cornice were to be four large statues, one of which, that is, the Moses, now exists at S. Pietro ad Vincula. And so, arriving at the summit, the tomb ended in a level space, whereon were two angels who supported a sarcophagus. ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... On the one side is the palace, on the other are the almshouse and "silent poor." The myriads who built the pyramids to be the tombs of the Pharaohs were fed on garlic, and it may be were not decently buried themselves. The mason who finishes the cornice of the palace returns at night perchance to a hut not so good as a wigwam. It is a mistake to suppose that, in a country where the usual evidences of civilization exist, the condition of a very large body of the inhabitants may not be as degraded as that of savages. ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... the other whom he had not noticed, he skulked in a doorway. He might have been thought a visitor there, but, at the next moment, his red whiskers reappeared between the turned-up collar of his mantle as he showed his head under the cornice of oak. ...
— The Son of Clemenceau • Alexandre (fils) Dumas
... rising slant to a rocky buttress situated almost perpendicularly over the point where the southern shore of the cove intersects the eastern margin of the harbor channel. Turning to the left around this buttress, it runs horizontally southward along a shelf-like cornice in the face of the precipice until it reaches a spacious terrace, or esplanade, cut out of the solid rock, at a height of one hundred and fifty feet above the water. This terrace, which is on the western face of the castle and directly under its lower bastions, ...
— Campaigning in Cuba • George Kennan
... about one hundred and fifty feet high. This rock appeared to me remarkable on account of its situation, reposing in the midst of a low and swampy ground, as if it had been dropped from the clouds, and seeming to have no connection with the neighboring mountains. On a cornice or shelving projection about thirty feet from its base, the natives of the adjacent villages deposite their dead, in canoes; and it is the same rock to which, for this reason, Lieutenant Broughton gave ...
— Narrative of a Voyage to the Northwest Coast of America in the years 1811, 1812, 1813, and 1814 or the First American Settlement on the Pacific • Gabriel Franchere
... and springing at a window-sill, dragged himself up and hung to the iron bars. Then reason fled; there surged in his brain the sound of many voices, his heart leaped up beating a mad tattoo, and gripping at cornice and ledge he worked his way along the facade, clung to pipes and shutters, and dragged himself up, over and into the balcony by the lighted window. His hat fell off and rolled against the pane. For a moment he leaned breathless against the railing—then the window ...
— The King In Yellow • Robert W. Chambers
... out of the earth a fabric huge Rose, like an exhalation, with the sound Of dulcet symphonies and voices sweet, Built like a temple, where pilasters round Were set, and Doric pillars overlaid With golden architrave; nor did there want Cornice or frieze with bossy ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863 • Various
... that to find him I had only to continue along the Rue Droite to the first particularly appealing side street. He would be up that somewhere. The Artist is no procrastinator. He takes his subjects when he finds them. The buildings of the Rue Droite are medieval from rez-de-chaussee to cornice. The sky was a narrow curved slit of blue and gray, not as wide as the street; for the houses seemed to lean towards one another, and here and there roofs rubbed edges. Sidewalks would have prevented the passage of horse-drawn vehicles, so there were none. The Rue Droite is ...
— Riviera Towns • Herbert Adams Gibbons
... store's windows were broken; every other street light was smashed; and what had at first looked like a flight of steps in front of a tenement across the street wasn't anything of the kind—it was a pile of bricks and stone from the false-front cornice on the roof! How in the world they had managed to knock that down I had no idea; but it sort of convinced me that, after all, Harrison had been right about this being a big fight. Over where the noise was coming from there were queer flashing lights in the clouds overhead—reflecting ...
— The Day of the Boomer Dukes • Frederik Pohl
... seersucker coat was apparently oblivious of the weather's inclemency. One of the windows of the abandoned photograph gallery was open, and suddenly, without the slightest warning, the head of Miss Phyllis Kirkwood bent over the cornice and she waved her hand with unmistakable friendliness. It was then that Mr. Montgomery, as though replying to a signal, detached his left hand from its pocket, made a gesture as graceful as a man of his figure is capable of, and then, allaying suspicion by passing the hand ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson
... while they explain all the parts and proportions of a pillar. They talk of the cornice, and frieze, and base, and entablature, and shaft, and architrave; and give the description and position of each of these members. But should you ask the description and position of its beauty, they would readily reply, that ...
— An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals • David Hume
... critical period of their lives. We may not be able to produce architecture, but, at the least, we shall resist vice. I do not know if it has been observed that while Dante rightly connects architecture, as the most permanent expression of the pride of humanity, whether just or unjust, with the first cornice of Purgatory, he indicates its noble function by engraving upon it, in perfect sculpture, the stories which rebuke the errors and purify the purposes of noblest souls. In the fulfillment of such function, literally and practically, here ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... by the Colonnas in 1823. It is now in the villa of that family on the Quirinal.[40] In imperial times the conventional shape was preserved, with the addition of two pulvini, or volutes, on the opposite edges of the cornice, as represented in the illustration on page 35 of "Ancient Rome" (a ...
— Pagan and Christian Rome • Rodolfo Lanciani
... in a blaze, though your heart is as cold as marble. Pity my case, pray, madam, for I know not what I say or do. If I go to make a Dragon, I strike out a Cupid; instead of an Apothecary's Mortar, I make a Church Font for Baptism; and, dear Pillar of my hopes, Pedestal of my comfort, and Cornice of my joy, take compassion upon me, for upon your pity I build all my hope, and will, if fortunate, erect Statues, Obelisks and ...
— Town and Country, or, Life at Home and Abroad • John S. Adams
... stringed instruments as they were tuned to pitch by the musicians, who had already taken their place in the singing-pew beneath the pulpit, which stood square and high, canopied with its old-fashioned sounding-board and cornice of plain deal. There was 'owd Joel Boothman,' who had played the double bass for half a century, resining his bow with a trembling hand; and Joe and Robert Hargreaves fondly caressing their 'cellos. Dick ...
— Lancashire Idylls (1898) • Marshall Mather
... from its foundations to the top of each towering minaret with ruby-coloured lights. Each window, door, cornice, column and line of wall glowed in soft red. The palace gleamed in the darkness like a huge ...
— The Root of Evil • Thomas Dixon
... arrived at the house of the Bishop, and were shown into a well-carpeted room, in the old Turkish style, with the roof gilded and painted in dark colours, and an un-artistlike panorama of Constantinople running round the cornice. I seated myself on an old-fashioned, wide, comfortable divan, with richly embroidered, but somewhat faded cushions, and, throwing off my shoes, tucked my ...
— Servia, Youngest Member of the European Family • Andrew Archibald Paton
... one, Thou formest each for life's enjoyments, And, like a mother, all thy children dear, Blessest with that sweet heritage,—a home The swallow builds the cornice round, Unconscious of the beauties She plasters up. The caterpillar spins around the bough, To make her brood a winter house; And thou dost patch, between antiquity's Most glorious relics, For thy mean ...
— The Poems of Goethe • Goethe
... no paltry gilding here, but massive golden cornice, frieze, plate, stud, and boss ornamenting the massive walls—glistening, sparkling, and flashing back the sun's light, while, as if these were not sufficient, emeralds and other precious stones were lavishly spread ...
— The Golden Magnet • George Manville Fenn
... the house; they are matters of use, not of design. He may put them where he pleases, within reasonable limits, and make them of any pattern, with due regard to cost. He may treat one as part of the dado, the other as a member of the cornice, if he chooses, but we must have ...
— The House that Jill Built - after Jack's had proved a failure • E. C. Gardner
... laurel, with a huge wreath of evergreen suspended from the ceiling, and bearing the anniversary date, 1846 and 1896. In the reception-room one friend had hung the emblem of two hearts joined by a band of gold above the cornice. Dining-room and library were festooned with smilax. In the archways and windows were hanging baskets of jonquils and ferns. "An help meet for him," the bride of fifty years was arrayed in heliotrope satin with trimmings of point lace, making, as we thought, with her delicate complexion ...
— Charles Carleton Coffin - War Correspondent, Traveller, Author, and Statesman • William Elliot Griffis
... by a noble staircase, surrounded with armorial escutcheons instead of a cornice, to a suite of very spacious and handsome rooms, of which the principal are the saloon, dining-room, breakfast-room, library, and chapel. The ceilings are finely worked into compartments with escutcheons and pendants. The ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume I. - Great Britain and Ireland • Various
... not only the harmony between obverse and reverse, but how coins were dedicated to more than one divinity. This practice was at first more common in the colonies than in the metropolitan cities. A coin of Crotona of about 479 B.C. has, obverse, eagle perched on the cornice of a temple; reverse, tripod and olive-spray. It would seem likely that this piece was first dedicated to Zeus, and next to Apollo. Zeus often holds the eagle on his hand as falcons were held in ...
— The New England Magazine Volume 1, No. 6, June, 1886, Bay State Monthly Volume 4, No. 6, June, 1886 • Various
... stable, disappeared for a moment in a passage, and a moment later she saw him spring to the top of a rotting board fence, pause, and then lightly let himself down into the shadow of the other side. And just a hundred feet to the left—she could barely see past the front cornice of the four-story dwelling below her—Broadway was thronged with its sleek, pleasure-loving, home-going crowd. You could never tell the ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... have often caught in the mountains around Rome, than his plebeian and utilitarian cousin, the Scarabaeus pilularius. The contour of the stone beneath the Scarabaeus proper is markedly distinguished from the insect portion, and ornamented with a relieved cornice, more or less elaborate according to the general finish of the stone. I have one in which this cornice of .073 inch in width contains an upper and a lower bead and a U moulding of which the parts are only one fourth the height of the cornice in ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various
... each consisting of about twenty entire figures of colossal size; the one on the western pediment representing the birth of Minerva, and the other, on the eastern pediment, the contest between that goddess and Neptune for the possession of Attica. Under the outer cornice were ninety-two groups, raised in high relief from tablets about four feet square, representing the victories achieved by her companions. Round the inner frieze was presented the procession of the Parthenon on the grand quinquennial festival of the Panathenaea. The ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... room, and dining room, for instance, may be treated with a high or low wood wainscoting and wooden panels extending to a wooden cornice at the ceiling. The wood may be a weathered oak, and between the panels is a rough plaster in gray or tinted to suit the house scheme. Friezes and plastic cornices are somewhat on the wane, in smaller houses ...
— The Complete Home • Various
... in a single mass of distinct architectural members; for instance, of the shaft and capital of pillars, of entire pediments with a portion of the wall below them, and of the walls of monuments with the cornice and architrave. M. Renan has made some strong remarks on this idiosyncrasy. "In the Grecian style," he says, "the beauty of the wall is a main object with the architect, and the wall derives its beauty from the divisions between the stones, which observe symmetrical laws, and ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson
... the Brue, 4 m. S.W. of Glastonbury. It possesses a 5th cent. church (St Dunstan's) containing a few features of interest in the chancel, among them being the cornice, the piscina and aumbry, and an old chair dated 1667. The screen is modern. The nave retains a number of the old 15th cent. benches; to the end of one of them is hinged a seat which, when raised, projects into the aisle, perhaps to accommodate some youthful but unruly member ...
— Somerset • G.W. Wade and J.H. Wade
... Villeneuve was built by Philip the Bold in the thirteenth century, and is interesting in many ways. It contains a little chapel of an earlier date with a small apse and little round-headed windows. The whole of the body is under a very low-pitched roof supported on an almost Classic cornice. The fortifications of the castle are an example of a stage of defence carried beyond what was attained at Aigues Mortes. There, as we saw, the upper portion of the walls was covered with a balcony of wood on to which the besieged stepped through ...
— In Troubadour-Land - A Ramble in Provence and Languedoc • S. Baring-Gould
... deeply and so wildly loved. A prie-dieu stood at the foot of the bed; a bluish flame flickering in a bronze patern filled all the room with a wan, deceptive light, here and there bringing out in the darkness at intervals some projection of furniture or cornice. In a chiselled urn upon the table there was a faded white rose, whose leaves—excepting one that still held—had all fallen, like odorous tears, to the foot of the vase. A broken black mask, a fan, and disguises of every variety, which were lying on the armchairs, bore witness that ...
— Clarimonde • Theophile Gautier
... buildings, for to tell the honest truth, there are no fine buildings in Rome, except St Peter's and the Colosseum, both of which lie away from the town. Fragments indeed of old ruins, porticoes built into the wall, bricked-up archways and old cornice-stones, catch your eye from time to time; and so, on and on, over broken pavements, up and down endless hills, through narrow streets and gloomy piazzas, by churches innumerable, amidst an ever-shifting motley crowd of peasants, soldiers, priests, and beggars, you journey onwards ...
— Rome in 1860 • Edward Dicey
... nearly the same surface. The greatest length, or major axis, is 620 feet; the greatest breadth, or minor axis, is 513 feet. The outer wall is 157 feet high in its whole extent. The exterior wall is divided into four stories, each ornamented with one of the orders of architecture. The cornice of the upper story is perforated for the purpose of inserting wooden masts, which passed also through the architrave and frieze, and descended to a row of corbels immediately above the upper range of windows, on which are holes to receive the masts. These masts were ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects, and Curiosities of Art, (Vol. 2 of 3) • Shearjashub Spooner
... wind To many a row of Pipes the sound-board breaths. Anon out of the earth a Fabrick huge 710 Rose like an Exhalation, with the sound Of Dulcet Symphonies and voices sweet, Built like a Temple, where Pilasters round Were set, and Doric pillars overlaid With Golden Architrave; nor did there want Cornice or Freeze, with bossy Sculptures grav'n, The Roof was fretted Gold. Not Babilon, Nor great Alcairo such magnificence Equal'd in all thir glories, to inshrine Belus or Serapis thir Gods, or seat 720 Thir Kings, when Aegypt with Assyria strove In wealth and luxurie. Th' ascending pile Stood ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... over the pages of my books, now already growing old, I receive the impression that, like a somnambulist, I have frequently been walking close to the cornice of a roof, entirely unconsciously, but in imminent danger of falling off; again, it seems to me that I have been travelling paths beset with thorns, which have played havoc with ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja
... in the humour to write to you. To-day I have been to Church, which has not improved my temper I must own. The clergyman did his best to make me hate him, and I took refuge in that admirable poem the Song of Deborah and Barak; I should like to make a long scroll of painting (say to go all round a cornice) illustrative of this poem; with the people seen in the distance going stealthily on footpaths while the great highways go vacant; with the archers besetting the draw-wells; with the princes in hiding on the hills among ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... her into a long, low-ceiled room, wainscotted all over in panels, with a square moulding at the top, which served for a cornice. The ceiling was ornamented with plaster reliefs. The windows looked out, on one side into the court, on the other upon the park. The floor was black and polished like a mirror, with bits of carpet here and there, and a rug before the curious, old-fashioned grate, ...
— Wilfrid Cumbermede • George MacDonald
... diagonally up the snow slope, pausing every few minutes to take new directional readings. The needles were now at right angles to them and reading well into the "hot" red division of the intensity meter. They still were ten feet below the crest and a cornice of snow hung out in a slight roof ahead of them. Both men had closed the face hatches of their insulated helmets and tiny circulators automatically went to work drawing off moisture and condensation from the ...
— The Thirst Quenchers • Rick Raphael
... quasi-subjection to the Empire of the East. Ravenna became a Greek garrison, ruling the Exarchate and Pentapolis under the name of the Byzantine Emperors. The western coast escaped the Lombard domination; for Genoa grew slowly into power upon her narrow cornice between hills and sea, while Pisa defied the barbarians intrenched in military stations at Fiesole and Lucca. In like manner the islands, Sicily, Sardinia, and Corsica, were detached from the Lombard Kingdom; and the maritime cities of Southern Italy, Bari, Naples, Amalfi, ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... wrenched bodily from its Cinque Cento setting by Brunelleschi, and transplanted to this new land to serve the opulent need of a vendor of precious stones and metals. In the strip of dark blue firmament visible above the admirably proportioned cornice he caught sight of two planets flaming high in the west, and in close juxtaposition. Necessity had made him somewhat of an astronomer, and he had studied Chinese astrology as a pastime. He recognized these lamps of the empyrean as Mars and Venus, and, up-to-date American though he was, ...
— One Wonderful Night - A Romance of New York • Louis Tracy
... now go inside by the front door. The cornice of the ceiling of the vestibule first entered is singularly fine. Like every other good artist Professor Aitchison improved as he went on, and this is one of his latest designs in mouldings. When the entrance was altered some years ...
— Frederic Lord Leighton - An Illustrated Record of His Life and Work • Ernest Rhys
... lower than that of the nave, thus expressing the slope of the ground. The west wall is shorter than the east and has two bays only, but south of the second bay, and separated from it by a flat pilaster, is a narrow space, along the top of which are the remains of a cornice: the two bays proper are separated by a recessed buttress of some projection. One round-headed window, divided by a mullion, appears in the second stage; and in the fourth stage are two plain, round-headed windows, not subdivided. The original ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Ripon - A Short History of the Church and a Description of Its Fabric • Cecil Walter Charles Hallett
... door was wide, From hurry to and fro. Soon, up aloft, The silver, snarling trumpets 'gan to chide: The level chambers, ready with their pride, Were flowing to receive a thousand guests: The carvA(C)d angels, ever eager-eyed, Stared, where upon their head the cornice rests, With hair blown back, and wings put cross-wise on their breasts. KEATS, Eve of St. ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... so threatening, so sombre, yet screening so bright and clear a current of life; with the tender green of budding spring trees, chestnuts full of silvery spires, glossy-leaved creepers clinging, with tiny hands, to cornice and parapet, give surely the sharpest and most delicate sense that it is possible to conceive of the contrast on which the essence of so much beauty depends. To pass through one of these dark and smoke-stained courts, with every line mellowed ...
— The Thread of Gold • Arthur Christopher Benson
... Liquors "beginning to look scarce". Subdued and sheepish-looking bacchanals. Nothing extenuated, nor aught set down in malice. Boating on river. Aquatic plants. Bridge swept away in torrent. Loss of canoe. Branch from moss-grown fir-tree "a cornice wreathed with purple-starred tapestry". A New Year's present from the river. A two-inch spotted trout. No fresh meat for a month. "Dark and ominous rumors". Dark ...
— The Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851-52 • Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe
... uncovered me, but at the same time she uncovered her sister, and Clementine with a little scream veiled the charms which my eyes had devoured for a moment. I had seen all, but as one sees lightning. I had seen the cornice and the frieze of ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... is readily to be obtained by working mechanics of all kinds in the towns; remembering that a very small sprinkling of workmen for finer work—such as cornice-mouldings, fine freestone work, cabinetwork, &c.—will be able to find employment for a long time to come, because, till a new generation spring up, who can live upon the accumulations of their sires, money will not be diverted to any great extent from business in land, buildings, ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal, No. 421, New Series, Jan. 24, 1852 • Various
... to escape from the purpose of their creators; and as the characters and incidents become more and more interesting in themselves, the moral, which these were to show forth, falls more and more into neglect. An architect may command a wreath of vine-leaves round the cornice of a monument; but if, as each leaf came from the chisel, it took proper life and fluttered freely on the wall, and if the vine grew, and the building were hidden over with foliage and fruit, the architect would stand in much the same situation as the writer of allegories. The Faery Queen ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... right up close to the cornice in the corner by the door, as though some one had glued him to the ceiling. His face was anxious and angry. He panted and gesticulated. "Shut the door," he said. "If that woman ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... arisen, and lent an uncertain light to the outlines of hill, crag, and moorland, while it gilded the cornice above, where the wind seemed to linger and moan over departed greatness. The Druidical worship of olden days, the deluded worshippers now turned into dust, and the cruel rites of their bloodstained worship, older even ...
— Edwy the Fair or the First Chronicle of Aescendune • A. D. Crake
... looked like ants. So steep did the ascent become that we desisted; for if one of us had slipped on the smooth incline, the result would have been terrible. Our voices rang clear and hollow from the walls. We were so high that the sky was blotted out by the overhanging square, cornice-like top of the door; and the light was weird, dim, shadowy, opaque. It was a ...
— The Last of the Plainsmen • Zane Grey
... agony under which his heart was writhing within him. He mounted a private staircase cut in the hollow of the massive wall of the room, and gaining a passage that ran round the extremities of the ceiling, looked through a sort of lattice concealed in the ornaments of the cornice. As he gazed down and saw the soldier mounting, axe in hand, to the idol's head, great drops of perspiration trickled from his forehead. His hot, thick breath hissed through his closed teeth, and his hands strained at the strong metal supports of the lattice ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... ancient kings of Thebes. Argyropoulos did not stop there, but led the travellers up a sort of steep slope, which at first glance seemed nothing but a break on the side of the mountain, choked in many places by fallen masses of rock, until they reached a narrow platform, a sort of cornice projecting over the vertical cliff on which the rocks, apparently thrown together by chance, nevertheless exhibited on ...
— The Works of Theophile Gautier, Volume 5 - The Romance of a Mummy and Egypt • Theophile Gautier
... corner of the house. A little balcony, covered with virgin vines which climbed the walls, twining themselves around the iron railing and falling thence in festoons from the window, overhung the garden. On both sides of the windows, close to the balcony, large-leafed trees met and formed above the cornice a bower of verdure. A Venetian blind, which was raised and lowered by cords, separated the balcony from the window, a separation which disappeared at will. It was through the interstices of this blind that Morgan had seen ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas, pere
... layer of sand in which the nests are planted stand some big palm-vases measuring nearly a yard and a half in circumference at the top. The caterpillars often scale the sides and climb up to the moulding which forms a cornice around the opening. This place suits them for their processions, perhaps because of the absolute firmness of the surface, where there is no fear of landslides, as on the loose, sandy soil below; and also, perhaps, because of the horizontal position, which is favourable to repose after ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... and his purpose. The weather of the whole story is just enough to play into the human life—the quiet night, the north wind, and the frosty, sunless morning. The snow is not all one surface; the drifts on the hill-sides, the hanging cornice over a gully, these have their place in the story, just enough to make the movements clear and intelligible. This is the way history was written when the themes were later by two centuries than those of the heroic Sagas. There is not much difference, except in the "soothfastness"; ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... pilasters with ornamental caps. On the outside a wainscoting extended three feet from the floor, above which were panels for hanging exhibit material, the whole being capped by an attractive dentulated cornice. The entranceway, which was thrown across the corner at the intersection of the aisles, was a massive arch, surmounted by the coat of arms of the State, tinted in old ivory, underneath which in gold letters was, "State of New York." ...
— New York at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, St. Louis 1904 - Report of the New York State Commission • DeLancey M. Ellis
... mosaic of the pelican feeding its young, the statues of Moses on one side and of the Hellespontic Sibyl on the other—but serve to heighten the awe of the spectator. The artificial light is obtained in part from a row of crystal lamps on the cornice of the niche, in part, too, from the torch borne by the beautiful boy-angel who hovers in mid-air, yet another focus of illumination being the body of the dead Christ. This system of lighting furnishes just the luminous half-gloom, the deeply significant chiaroscuro, that ...
— The Later works of Titian • Claude Phillips
... vessel can take up half her cargo at a better freight by touching at Marseilles. Whereupon Reuben orders him to go thither, promising to join him at that port in a fortnight. A fortnight only for Rome, for Florence, for Pisa, for the City of Palaces, and then the marvellous Cornice road along the shores of the sea. Terracina brought back to him the story of Mr. Alderman Popkins and the Principessa, and the bandits; after this came the heights of Albano and Soracte, and there, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... tone. Should this be the prelude to his own professional performance, we see it returned, with a look of profound wisdom, to the right-hand depository of the nondescript and imaginary velvet double-breaster—we follow his eyes, till, with peculiar fascination, they fix upon the far-off cornice of the most distant corner of the smoke-embued apartment—we perceive the extension of the dexter hand employed in innocent dalliance with the well-sucked peel of a quarter of an orange, whilst the left is employed with the links of what would be a watch-guard, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... reference to their composition or proportions, and then try to conceal the poverty and awkwardness of the structure by pinning up preposterous window-caps, hanging horrible brackets under the eaves that must always be in doubt whether they support the cornice or are supported by it, fixing fantastic verge-boards to the gables, and covering the roof with wooden knick-knacks that mock consistency and defy description. Look rather to the materials at your command, and, whatever they may be, try to dispose them in ...
— Homes And How To Make Them • Eugene Gardner
... built in 1095, and restored in 1604 and 1730. The west portal and tower were rebuilt in 1880. The other parts of the exterior have a venerable appearance. The buttresses are shallow, and do not reach the eaves. Adelicate dentil cornice runs round the building, bending over the round-headed windows and across the buttresses. Within, the church by restoration looks as if it were modern. Tall piers, with attached Corinthian columns and vaulting shafts, run up to the commencement of the arches of the aisles and of the vault ...
— The South of France—East Half • Charles Bertram Black
... shawl fluttering about her, nestled against her daughter, putting out her hand to take one of Miriam's soothingly. She had pretty, silly, near-sighted eyes, a long thin nose, and an upper lip which projected over the under as an ornamental cornice rests on its support. "So much depends—really everything!" she said in answer to some sociable observation of Sherringham's. "It's either this," and she rolled her eyes expressively about the room, "or ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... night; then the deep snow more or less cramped or modified by sudden eminences of emergent rock, or hanging in fractured festoons and huge blue irregular cliffs on the mountain flanks, and over the edges and summits of their precipices in nodding drifts, far overhanging, like a cornice, (perilous things to approach the edge of from above;) finally, the pure accumulation of overwhelming depth, smooth, sweeping, and almost cleftless, and modified only by its lines of drifting. Countless phenomena of exquisite beauty belong ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... his own people the years that are left to him of his age. It has experience and growth and intensity of knowledge, all caught up into one unity; it conquers the hill upon which it stands. I drew one window and then another, and then before I had finished that a cornice, and then before I had finished that a porch, for it was evening when I saw it, and ...
— On Something • H. Belloc
... cornice on the facade of the Hindoo College at Calcutta," said Richard, handing him the paper,—"no, it's the custom-house. I forget which; ...
— The Stillwater Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... was still at its highest when quarter-day approached. Norris was now raised to a position of some trust; at his discretion, trains were stopped or forwarded at the dangerous cornice near North Clifton; and he found in this responsibility both terror and delight. The thought of the seventy-five pounds that would soon await him at the lawyer's, and of his own obligation to be present every quarter-day in ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... through a pillared space, as wide as the gateway of a city. The pillars are of giallo antico, and there are pilasters of the same all the way up and down the walls, forming a perspective of the richest aspect, especially as the broad cornice flames with gilding, and the spaces between the pilasters are emblazoned with heraldic achievements and emblems in gold, and there are Venetian looking-glasses, richly decorated over the surface with beautiful pictures of flowers ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the Holy Cross Mountain turning the snow gullies pure gold against the luminous peak. Just for a moment the white cornice of snow forming the bar of the apparent cross flushed to the Alpine glow, flushed blood-red and quivering like a cross poised in mid-air. An invisible hand of silence touched them both. The sunset became a topaz gate curtained by clouds of fire and lilac mist; while ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut
... Fremont appropriated for his use when he came back from Europe to assume command in the West was not a modest one. It still stands, a large mansion of brick with a stone front, very tall and very wide, with an elaborate cornice and plate-glass windows, both tall and broad, and a high basement. Two stately stone porches capped by elaborate iron railings adorn it in front and on the side. The chimneys are generous and proportional. In short, the house is of that type built by many wealthy gentlemen ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... every gable and cornice of the beautiful old wooden houses; the moonlight shone on the gilded signs, the lambs, the grapes, the eagles, and all the quaint devices that hung before the doors; covered lamps burned before the Nativities and Crucifixions painted on the walls or let into the ...
— Bimbi • Louise de la Ramee
... ambition had "o'erleaped itself" in that sanguine era of the city's growth. There was a smell of plaster and the first coat of paint about it still, but the whole front of the building was occupied by a long room with odd "bull's-eye" windows looking out through the heavy ornamentations of the cornice over the ...
— Under the Redwoods • Bret Harte
... present inhabitants of the castle. The mouldering tapestry, which, in his father's time, had half covered the walls of this stately apartment, and half streamed from them in tatters, had given place to a complete finishing of wainscot, the cornice of which, as well as the frames of the various compartments, were ornamented with festoons of flowers and with birds, which, though carved in oak, seemed, such was the art of the chisel, actually to swell their throats and flutter their wings. Several old family portraits of armed heroes ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott
... the classical Italian Renaissance, with some modifications to harmonize with the treatment of the roofs, which are to be French, as best suited to such architecture on a large scale. The Mansard roof will be covered with an ironclad cornice ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... are divided threefold into pedestal or stylobate, column and entablature; and each of these is again divided threefold: the first into plinth, die and cornice; the second into base, shaft and capital; the third into architrave, frieze and cornice. In many cases these again lend themselves to a threefold subdivision. A more detailed analysis of the capitals already shown to be twofold reveals a third member: in the Greek Doric this consists of the ...
— The Beautiful Necessity • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... the Commonwealth, and by the art and intellect of so many able masters; and with his usual promptness he laid the foundations, and carried the greater part of the building, before the death of the Pope and his own, to the height of the cornice, where are the arches to all the four piers; and these he turned with supreme expedition and art. He also executed the vaulting of the principal chapel, where the recess is, giving his attention at the same time to pressing on the building of the chapel that ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 04 (of 10), Filippino Lippi to Domenico Puligo • Giorgio Vasari
... admirable position, but a short way farther down the Canal, we can almost see, in spite of the curve, from the window at which we stand. This great seventeenth century pile, throwing itself upon the water with a peculiar florid assurance, a certain upward toss of its cornice which gives it the air of a rearing sea- horse, decorates immensely—and within, as well as without—the wide angle ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... but only to make it seem as if she didn't care. "You'd better not say such silly things to Uncle Eric," she said, staring at the pattern of the cornice. "Aren't those funny, gargoyley faces up there? I never noticed them before. But oh—about Mr. Dundas and Maxine de Renzie—I don't think, really, that he troubles himself much about her any more, for the other day I—I happened to ask what she ...
— The Powers and Maxine • Charles Norris Williamson
... looked very pretty now in June, with the pillars of the veranda all blue with flowers of the climbing clematis, and the cornice loaded with the pink and white bouquets of roses. The wild clematis, Virginia creeper, and honeysuckle clothed the trunks of every tree, whilst their roots were hidden by flowers and ferns of ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... heaps and mounds of broken stone, charred and crumbling brick, fire-scarred timbers, and huge contorted masses of rusting steel like the decaying bones of superhuman monsters. From the great height and extent of the piles of debris, and from the occasional sight of the splintered cornice of a roof or of some battered window-frame or door, I knew that this had once been a city, one of the world's greatest; but no other recognizable feature remained amid the gray masses of ruins, and the very ...
— Flight Through Tomorrow • Stanton Arthur Coblentz
... a house that seemed A swelling of the ground; The roof was scarcely visible, The cornice ...
— The Golden Treasury of American Songs and Lyrics • Various
... bought many geraniums from Prentiss and placed them along the broad cornice that stretched across the front of the house over the shop-window. The flowers made a band of scarlet on either side of the Lion as ...
— The Exiles and Other Stories • Richard Harding Davis
... the garret; the rays of the moon having to find their way through the deep window-embrasures of the keep. Less illumination would have sufficed to disclose the ancient character of the garret, with its low ceiling, and the graduated mouldings of the cornice, giving the effect of a shallow dome. The house stood obviously very high, for one could see from the windows for miles over a bleak country, coldly lit by the rays of the moon, which was almost at the full. Into the half light stole presently the sound of some lively instrument: a reel tune played, ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... which in every respect should answer all the requirements of its peculiar position, a line which should have its individual and essential relationships with the other lines around it, those of shaft, architrave, frieze, and cornice, should swell its fitting melody into the great fugue. And so, between the summit of the long shaft and that square block, the abacus, on which reposes the dead weight of the lintel of Greece, the Doric echinus was fashioned, crowning the serene Atlas-labor of the column with exquisite ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 • Various
... the most curious specimens of ancient wood-work I have ever seen. The broadest piece of timber is two feet seven inches by ten inches. A wall-plate on the outside of one beam, from end to end, measures two feet by ten inches. The walls are finished at the square with a moulded cornice ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... of enormous columns of the Doric order, thirty-six in number. They are all fluted, and have an aspect of severe and massive grandeur that is unequalled in any other temple. Above these columns rise an enormous Doric frieze and cornice, the height of which is equal to half the height of the columns; and these proportions give such vastness to the mass above, that it heightens the sublime effect. The columns, which extend round the Temple, are thirty feet high, and seven feet in diameter at the base. Inside, ...
— Among the Brigands • James de Mille
... began to rifle The nest of the sunset fair; Dank vapour began to stifle The scents that enriched the air; The flowers paled fast and faster, They crumbled, leaf and crown, Till they looked like the stained plaster Of a cornice fallen down. ...
— The Poetical Works of George MacDonald in Two Volumes, Volume I • George MacDonald
... to himself sitting there in the hot darkness of the South African night, the great white stars and the vast purple dome they throbbed in shut out of sight by the miserable little gaily-papered ceiling with its cornice of gilt wood, remembering that everything had ended there. Thenceforth no more hopes, no dreams, for the man whom Fate and Destiny, hitherto propitious and obliging, had conspired to lash with scourges, and drive with goads, and hound with despairs and horrors to the sheer brink where ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... There are a number of niches or open closets in the walls, whose arched tops are adorned with pendent wooden ornaments, resembling stalactites, and at the corners of the room the heavy gilded and painted cornice drops into similar grotesque incrustations. A space of bare white wall intervenes between this cornice and the ceiling, which is formed of slim poplar logs, laid side by side, and so covered with paint and with ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor
... buildings of more than ordinary interest. The Casa Consistorial, or City Hall, is a massive Palladian pile of the sixteenth century, resembling the old palaces of Pisa and Florence, except in the circumstance that its roof projects at least ten feet beyond the front, resting on a massive cornice of carved wood with 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 Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... apocalypse to brutes, which St. John is preaching. These are quite the best people he can find to call, or advise. You see many of them carry rolls of paper in their hands, as he does himself. In comparison with the books of the upper cornice, these have special meaning, ...
— Val d'Arno • John Ruskin
... cocked his eye at the gilded cornice of the ceiling and blew a ring from his cigar. But ...
— The Man with the Clubfoot • Valentine Williams
... and cornice, With columns encircle its wall, Throw open its gateway, and make it A HOME ...
— The Liberty Minstrel • George W. Clark
... underneath my dressing-room, grazing the cornice, which it dragged down in its fall to the ground, where it burst feebly. But what was our amazement to see a little crowd of children swoop down on the burning pieces, just like a lot of sparrows on fresh manure when the carriage has passed! The little vagabonds were ...
— My Double Life - The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt • Sarah Bernhardt
... employed. They are strangely suggestive of the capabilities of the art. Here, for instance, is a scene in George Street,—part of the pavement; and a line of buildings, from the stately erection at the corner of Hanover Street, with its proud Corinthian columns and rich cornice, to Melville's Monument and the houses which form the eastern side of St. Andrew Square. St. Andrew's Church rises in the middle distance. The drawing is truth itself; but there are cases in which mere truth might be no great merit: were the truth restricted ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... extent. The exterior of the apsis is very curious: it is obtusely angular, and faced at the corners with large rude columns, of whose capitals some are Doric or Corinthian, others as wild as the fancies of the Norman lords of the country. None reach so high as the cornice of the roof, it having been the intention of the original architect, that a portion of work should intervene between the summit of the capitals and this member. A capital to the north is remarkable for the eagles carved upon it, as if with ...
— Account of a Tour in Normandy, Vol. I. (of 2) • Dawson Turner
... to a place on the sea-coast, which I will not further specify than to say that it is not many miles from Ballymacheen, on the south shore. I have seen Venice and Naples, I have driven along the Cornice Road, I have spent a month at our own Mount Desert, and I say that all of them together are not so beautiful as this glowing, deep- hued, soft-gleaming, silvery-lighted, ancient harbor and town, with the tall hills crowding round it and the black cliffs and headlands planting their iron ...
— David Poindexter's Disappearance and Other Tales • Julian Hawthorne
... the front steps, everyone of 'em with an ear stretched out for the dinner bell. In the window of the first floor front was a beauty doctor's sign, a bull fiddle-artist was sawin' out his soul distress in the hall bedroom above, and up under the cornice the Chicini sisters was leanin' on the ledge and wishin' the folks back in Saginaw would send on that grubstake letter before the landlady got any worse. But maybe you've seen samples of real dogday tragedy among the profesh, when the summer snaps have busted and the fall rehearsals have just ...
— Odd Numbers - Being Further Chronicles of Shorty McCabe • Sewell Ford
... military precautions of Captain Bonneville, he conducted his party in safety through this hazardous region. No accident of a disastrous kind occurred, excepting the loss of a horse, which, in passing along the giddy edge of a precipice, called the Cornice, a dangerous pass between Jackson's and Pierre's Hole, fell over the brink, and ...
— The Adventures of Captain Bonneville - Digested From His Journal • Washington Irving
... they should not be used for the permanent decorative lines of a room—the lines of the walls, openings, hangings, draperies, carpets, or large, immovable pieces of furniture which have a fixed place. In pillows which break the long back line of a couch, in cornice moldings, lambrequin bottoms, chair backs, screens, etc., they lend life. But as a rule they should ...
— Prepare and Serve a Meal and Interior Decoration • Lillian B. Lansdown
... bed in the corner of a large apartment, whose beautiful painted ceiling and cornice, and fine chimney-piece with caryatides of white marble, ill accorded with the heaps of oats and corn, the thrashing cloth and flail, which ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. IX - [Contents: Harrington; Thoughts on Bores; Ormond] • Maria Edgeworth
... African sky, the line of camels trudging on, on. He saw the dahabeah slowly making its way up the winding river, the flat banks on either side, the palm trees in silhouetted clusters against the sunset, the shattered cornice of the ruins he was to explore just coming into view. He saw and heard the shrieking, chattering laborers digging, half naked, amid the scattered blocks of sculptured stone and, before and beneath them, the upper edge of the doorway which they were ...
— Galusha the Magnificent • Joseph C. Lincoln
... and no trivial nor fretful lines weakened the effect of their massive dignity; for the whole of the decoration upon them was a broad panelling that was gained by a combination of heavy pilasters and a heavy cornice; and with the exception of a central entrance, the front was unbroken by openings of any kind. Possessing these characteristics, the building had about it an air of solemnity that bordered closely upon gloom; and the obvious solidity of its construction was such that it seemed destined ...
— The Aztec Treasure-House • Thomas Allibone Janvier
... meteor chain And hallow'd all the beauty twice again, Save when, between th' Empyrean and that ring, Some eager spirit flapp'd his dusky wing. But on the pillars Seraph eyes have seen The dimness of this world: that grayish green That Nature loves the best for Beauty's grave Lurk'd in each cornice, round each architrave— And every sculptured cherub thereabout That from his marble dwelling peered out, Seem'd earthly in the shadow of his niche— Achaian statues in a world so rich? Friezes from Tadmor and Persepolis [17]— ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe
... knives drop and set down the wine-jugs. The traders, who were hotly arguing over Italian politics and the future war with Turkey, were silent. The four monks, who had leaned their heads against the cornice of the wide, closed fireplace and, in spite of the flies which buzzed around them, had fallen asleep, awoke. The vender of indulgences in the black cowl interrupted the impressive speech which he was delivering to the people who surrounded his coffer. This group ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... two circular arches, supported by Corinthian pillars, and a broad entablature; on which the curious can read an inscription, some of the letters of which, with difficulty, we could decipher. Above the cornice, is a double range of battlements, which have a most singular appearance, as they do not, by any means, amalgamate with the rest of the building: they are, nevertheless, very boldly constructed, and appear to form part of the original ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello
... the Mains than he could do—and who was not sorry that the Old Place was allowed to stand, undisturbed by any rich upstart, in the venerable silence of its own decay. And this is the moss-house that we helped to build with our own hands, at least to hang the lichen tapestry, and stud the cornice with shells! We were one of the paviers of that pebbled floor—and that bright scintillating piece of spar, the centre of the circle, came all the way from Derbyshire in the knapsack of a geologist, ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... looking, down the Old Bailey, and not upon it, as is the case of the present structure, with its massive walls of roughened freestone,—in some places darkened by the smoke, in others blanched, by exposure to the weather,—its heavy projecting cornice, its unglazed doubly-grated windows, its gloomy porch decorated with fetters, and defended by an enormous iron door, had a stern and striking effect. Over the Lodge, upon a dial was inscribed the appropriate motto, "Venio sicut ...
— Jack Sheppard - A Romance • William Harrison Ainsworth
... down to this central table would have the fireplace on his left, and a writing table against the wall on his right, next the door, which is further down. He would, if his taste lay that way, admire the wall decoration of Lincrusta Walton in plum color and bronze lacquer, with dado and cornice; the ormolu consoles in the corners; the vases on pillar pedestals of veined marble with bases of polished black wood, one on each side of the window; the ornamental cabinet next the vase on the side nearest the fireplace, ...
— You Never Can Tell • [George] Bernard Shaw
... any reply. Elsie felt suddenly stunned as by a blow. Left alone, she gazed about her in amazement that was almost horror. The large, square, corner room lighted by four great windows that reached from the floor to the heavy cornice was comfortably, even luxuriously, furnished, but—the girl could scarcely believe her eyes—it was the most untidy-looking place she had ever been in! The heavy crimson hangings, faded by the strong summer sunlight, lost further color by their layer of dust, ...
— Elsie Marley, Honey • Joslyn Gray
... of the hill, on this day of the pilgrimage, made those older dead-and-gone bands of pilgrims astonishingly real. On the tops of bastions, in the clefts on the rocks, beneath the glorious walls of La Merveille, or perilously lodged on the crumbling cornice of a tourelle, numerous rude altars had been hastily erected. The crude blues and scarlets of banners were fluttering, like so many pennants, in the light breeze. Beneath the improvised altar-roofs—strips of gay cloth stretched ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 4 (of 10) • Various
... on the ground floor I have mentioned incidentally the verandah outside them, on which they all opened by means of French windows, extending from the cornice to the floor. The top of this verandah was flat, the rain-water being carried off from it by pipes into tanks which helped to supply the house. On the narrow leaden roof, which ran along past the bedrooms, and which was rather less, I should ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins |
