"Statuesque" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Press, which had kindled, proceeded to extinguished Presumptuous belief Ready is the ardent mind to take footing on the last thing done She was not, happily, one of the women who betray strong feeling Shuns the statuesque pathetic, or any kind of posturing Straining for common talk, and showing the strain Style resembling either early architecture or utter dilapidation The people always wait for the winner The system is cursed by nature, and that means ...
— Quotations from the Works of George Meredith • David Widger
... scolds while she loves, and can only conceive ideas of the very simplest; only the small change, as it were; of thought passes current with her; she argues about everything, lives in chronic fear of the unknown, makes constant forecasts, and is always thinking of the future. Her statuesque yet girlish beauty, her engaging looks, her freshness, prevented Cesar from thinking of her shortcomings; and moreover, she made up for them by a woman's sensitive conscientiousness, an excessive thrift, by her fanatical love of work, and genius as ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... pack dashed in, for the twentieth time no doubt. But the great gray form leaped here and there, and chop, chop, chop went those fearful jaws, no other sound from the lonely warrior; but a death yelp from more than one of his foes, as those that were able again sprang back, and left him statuesque as before, untamed, unmaimed, ...
— Animal Heroes • Ernest Thompson Seton
... two 'proud young porters' in severe cocked hats and formidable batons, into a broad hall,—threw off our furred boots and cloaks, ascended a carpeted marble staircase, in every angle of which stood a statuesque footman in gaudy coat and unblemished unmentionables, and reached a broad landing upon the top thronged as usual with servants. Thence we passed through an antechamber into a long, high, brilliantly lighted, saffron-papered room, in which a dozen card-tables were arranged, and thence into the ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... the hem of her simple skirt, and a band of the same colour encircled her shapely, though not noticeably slender, waist. Her bosom was rather full for so young a woman, so that, notwithstanding her perfect freshness and air of almost childlike simplicity, there was a certain statuesque quality in the effect of her white-clad figure seen thus in the shaded library, with its russet-red walls and furnishings and ranges of ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... me, looked at me from behind and before, and examined with grave interest the construction of my seat. In front of me sat an olive and lemon seller. Girls bargained with him as best they could in the press, others stood and looked on. I had an opportunity here of watching their innate statuesque grace. When they spoke, the right arm kept time with their speech. When silent, they generally placed one hand on the hip, bent, but not clenched. There were various types. The little blonde, blue-eyed girl with the mild Madonna smile, and absolutely straight nose, and the large-made, pronounced ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... clasped by an agrafe of richest pearls; and the white throat and the jewel lay together, pearl beside pearl, each rivalling the snowy lustre of the other. Had it not been for those starry eyes that looked out so full of mournful splendor, her face might have seemed too statuesque in its beauty; but from their dark depths all the enthusiasm of a nature that had concentrated its every emotion into one master-passion, lit up her face with flashes that came and went ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... winter damps below, and peered curiously out with frowzy heads and beautiful eyes from the high, heavy-shuttered casements above. Every court had its carven well to show me, in the noisy keeping of the water-carriers and the slatternly, statuesque gossips of the place. The remote and noisome canals were pathetic with empty old palaces peopled by herds of poor, that decorated the sculptured balconies with the tatters of epicene linen, and patched the lofty windows with ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... presently, but that makes very little difference; to the first readers it probably made no difference at all. Here again that process of "vivification," which has been so often dwelt on, makes an astonishing progress—the blood and colour of the novel, which distinguish it from the more statuesque narrative, are supplied, if indirectly yet sufficiently and, in comparison with previous examples, amply. Here you get, almost or quite for the first time in the English novel, those spurts and sparks of ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... design, with his usual vividness. Suddenly, as it was relevant, he declared that his Baden doings had not been altogether fruitless, for that the lady who had reminded Rowland of Madame de Cruchecassee was tremendously statuesque. Rowland at last said that it all might pass if he felt that he was really the wiser for it. "By the wiser," he added, "I mean the stronger in ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... stood the great man, with his august head enveloped in a capacious bread-bag. At a given signal, a vast quantity of crackers were let off, the envious bag was withdrawn, and the illustrious dramatist was revealed to the enraptured spectators, in the statuesque resemblance of his elder, but not more celebrated brother, WILLIAM SHAKSPERE. At this moment the plaudits were vigorously enthusiastic. Thrice did the flattered statue bow its head, and once it laid its hand upon its grateful ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, September 12, 1841 • Various
... freedom passed for ever. Vasari being among Andrea's pupils may be trusted here, and Vasari gives her a bad character, which Browning completes. Andrea painted her often, notably in the fresco of the "Nativity of the Virgin," to which we shall soon come at the Annunziata: a fine statuesque woman by no means unwilling to have the most popular artist in Florence as ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... wife's fair hair and snowy shoulders that, rising out of the glistening blue and white, were striped with a glistening red, but the snowy shoulders and fair hair of poor Olga Blomgren. Thus had she paid for her hour of magnificence. Thus had death cut her down because the maid's form was of the same statuesque beauty as her mistress's. Tenderly the doctor stooped to lift up the dead girl, stricken in her mistress's stead. There was a poniard in her throat, and it impaled a piece of paper ...
— The Strange Adventures of Mr. Middleton • Wardon Allan Curtis
... the curtained doorway, the insteps of her bare feet gleaming like marble on the overshadowed matting of the floor. The fall of her lighted shoulders, the strong and fine modelling of her arms hanging down her sides, her immobility, too, had something statuesque, the charm of art tense with life. She was not very big—Heyst used to think of her, at first, as "that poor little girl,"—but revealed free from the shabby banality of a white platform dress, in the simple drapery of the sarong, there was that in her form and in the proportions of her body ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... differently. The cold light of the background displays a barren hill, the bridge and towers of [42] an Italian town, and quiet water. In the foreground, at the root of a vine, Dionysus is sitting, in a posture of statuesque weariness; the leaves of the vine are grandly drawn, and wreathing heavily round the head of the god, suggest the notion of his incorporation into it. The right hand, holding a great vessel languidly and indifferently, ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... last have the true classic severity, and are among the noblest specimens of weighty and sonorous blank verse in modern poetry. In general, Tennyson's art is unclassical. It is rich, ornate, composite, not statuesque, so much as picturesque. He is a great painter, and the critics complain that in passages calling for movement and action—a battle, a tournament, or the like—his figures stand still as in a tableau; and they contrast such passages unfavorably with scenes of the same ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... departments of life as by an instinct. Every divinity was made a plain figure to the mind, every mystery was symbolized in some positive beautiful myth, and every conception of whatever object became statuesque and clear. This artistic character was possible to them from the comparatively limited range of pagan imagination; their thought rarely dwelt in those regions where reason loves to ask the aid of mysticism, and all remote ideas, like all remote nations, ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... he resorted to cold cream, and before I knew what I was doing, I found myself staring at the statuesque brown profile through ...
— The Motor Maid • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... speak to her during the quarter of an hour's drive, sitting mutely beside her in statuesque stillness; and it was she who, when he handed her out, broke ...
— The Odds - And Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... the gully. They were more than a mile distant. When Gale looked without his glass they merged into the roughness of the lava. He was intensely interested. Did the sheep see the red scarf? It seemed incredible, but nothing else could account for that statuesque alertness. The sheep held this rigid position for perhaps fifteen minutes. Then the leading ram started to approach. The others followed. He took a few steps, then halted. Always he held his ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... standing quite still in one of her carefully cultivated, statuesque poses, watched her cousin cross the street and disappear into a narrow and shabbily painted doorway there. Then she took his advice, and producing a red morocco wrist bag from under the counter, shut the necklace ...
— The Wishing Moon • Louise Elizabeth Dutton
... the moment, he had leapt over the partition and darted into the room. There, stretched out across the floor, his head lying on the hearthrug, his hands lying inert and nerveless at his sides, lay an old man, grey-bearded, venerable—Daniel Multenius, no doubt. He lay very still, very statuesque—and Lauriston, bending over and placing a trembling hand on the high, white forehead, ...
— The Orange-Yellow Diamond • J. S. Fletcher
... and looked from one to the other, seeing Lady Graeme standing pale, handsome, and statuesque by her husband's side, while on the other side was Celia, holding her father's hand, and resting her forehead ...
— Cutlass and Cudgel • George Manville Fenn
... Doctor Bridges was a spectacle of physical degeneracy while Guy Little became a grotesque dwarf. The grandfather was much like the grandson, and—though she vowed to like him the less for it—was in his statuesque, leonine way quite the handsomest man she had ever ...
— Man to Man • Jackson Gregory
... fissure so narrow as to make it look very pure and distant. One of our party, passing in, stood some time at the foot of the waterfall, and added much to its effect, as his height gave a measure by which to appreciate that of surrounding objects, and his look, by that light so pale and statuesque, seemed to inform the place with the presence of ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... the drawing-room when he entered—her stately head regally uplifted in the midst of a group of less magnificent demoiselles—a statuesque blonde, with abundant ringlets of flaxen lightness, eyes of turquoise blue, and a ...
— The Baronet's Bride • May Agnes Fleming
... life into the stone, But see yon graceful girl, with straitened zone And statuesque still bearing. You'd say in her the marble must invade The flesh, in so much loveliness arrayed, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98 February 15, 1890 • Various
... atmospheric effect in springtime resembling a light pearl-colored mist, which had none of the qualities of a fog, but rather lent a weird transparency to the air. It gave the impression of sunlight faded or washed of its golden particles, or of a picture drawn on pearl. There was a statuesque stillness about the water, a near and yet a far look about the entire scene, which imparted a sense of unreality, almost of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various
... circular mouths of the trombone, ophicleide, and French horn gleamed out like huge eyes from the shade of their figures. The pretty dresses of the maids lost their subtler day colours and showed more or less of a misty white. Eustacia floated round and round on Wildeve's arm, her face rapt and statuesque; her soul had passed away from and forgotten her features, which were left empty and quiescent, as they always are when feeling goes ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... of its eyes (did those eyes mock us, did they reproach us, when they looked into ours in Flanders?), its face seamed with lines which might have been dolorous, which might have been ironic, with the sweat running from under its steel casque, looms now in the memory, huge, statuesque, silent but questioning, like an overshadowing challenge, like a gigantic legendary form charged with tragedy and drama; and its eyes, seen in memory again, search us in privacy. Yet that figure was the "Cuthbert." It was derided by those onlookers ...
— Waiting for Daylight • Henry Major Tomlinson
... statue, to which the Academician compared her, she lacked statuesque repose. She bent her body like a reed, or spun around like a weather-vane, or danced like a top. Her features possessed even greater mobility, and in consequence were even less statuesque. They were lighted ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... So statuesque were we for that second that I swear those about us were not immediately aware of what had happened. Then Fortini gasped and coughed slightly. The rigidity of his pose slackened. The hilt and hand against my breast wavered, then the arm drooped to his side till the rapier point rested on the lawn. ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... model had been framed upon a symmetrically attenuated French corset, and the unfortunate Minty's fuller and ampler curves had under her simple country stays known no more restraining cincture than knew the Venus of Milo. The alteration was a hideous failure, it was neither Minty's statuesque outline nor Louise Macy's graceful contour. Minty was no fool, and the revelation of this slow education of the figure and training of outline—whether fair or false in art—struck her quick intelligence with all its full and hopeless significance. A bitter light sprang to ...
— A Phyllis of the Sierras • Bret Harte
... plain. Taken separately, her features were good. Her nose was large and straight, the mouth also a trifle large but firm and red, the brow wide and white, shadowed by a straying dash of brown curl or two. She had a certain cool, statuesque paleness, accentuated by straight, fine, black brows, and her eyes were a bluish grey; but the pupils, as I afterward found out, had a trick of dilating into wells of blackness which, added to a long fringe of very dark lashes, made her eyes quite the ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1896 to 1901 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... pictures of peasants in the northern Italian pictures, with the same curious nobility, the same aristocratic, eternal look of motionlessness, something statuesque. His head was hard and fine, the bone finely constructed, though the skin of his face was loose and furrowed with work. His temples had that fine, hard clarity which is seen in Mantegna, ...
— Twilight in Italy • D.H. Lawrence
... hitherto occupied in the mind by, let us say, the Hermes of Praxiteles. Yet this idea still obtained at Bayreuth, and Rosa Sucher walked about, her arms raised and posed above her head, in the conventional, statuesque attitude designed for the ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... standing in a statuesque attitude on the bank. Molly, gazing over the side of the boat into the lake, abstained from feasting her ...
— The Gem Collector • P. G. Wodehouse
... cocked over his eye, prancing behind Lord George on his Roman-nosed charger; he, depend on it, would be for getting off his horse if he had the permission. He did not hesitate about trifles, as we know; but he was a very truth-telling and honorable soldier: and as for heroic rank and statuesque dignity, I would wager a dozen of '20 port against a bottle of pure and sound Bordeaux, at 18s. per dozen (bottles included), that he never would think of claiming any such absurd distinction. They have got a statue ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... his knife, and sat statuesque and expressionless. "Go on," he said hoarsely. "Tell me the worst ...
— The House of Whispers • William Le Queux
... general factotum, irreproachable from his snowy turban to his white-slippered feet, did not take the hint to retire, but stood motionless just inside the room, waiting with statuesque patience till his master should deign to bestow upon him the favour of his ...
— The Way of an Eagle • Ethel M. Dell
... Mark could be seen to grow suddenly less statuesque. His arms would drop to his side, and then as it rushed up towards where he stood, like some mighty sea-monster seeking to make him its prey, Mark's hands joined above his head, he bent forward slightly, and then with one tremendous leap seemed to leave the rocky ...
— A Terrible Coward • George Manville Fenn
... mad animal's flashing with light and resolution, yet with a certain strange calmness, holds aloft in one hand a large knife—walks along not much back from the footlights—turns fully toward the audience his face of statuesque beauty, lit by those basilisk eyes, flashing with desperation, perhaps insanity—launches out in a firm and steady voice the words Sic semper tyrannis—and then walks with neither slow nor very rapid pace diagonally across to the back of the stage, ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... in largesses to the people and the army on the occasion of his inauguration. Meantime, as respected the present, the qualities of the young man were amply fitted to sustain a Roman popularity; for, in addition to his extreme and statuesque beauty of person, he was (in the report of one who did not wish to color his character advantageously) "memor families suce, comptus, decorus, oris venerandi, eloquentice, celsioris, versufacilis, in republic etiam ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... cleared at once, for now Driscoll understood the strategic outlay. Its key was Fra Diavolo, with a pistol at Ney's head, and quite statuesque the romantic Mexican looked. But out of the tail of his eye Fra Diavolo noted the American, at first with contemptuous amusement only. Then, as though such had been the situation from the start, he grew aware of an ugly black muzzle under his chin. For very safety ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... adds colour to outline, modelling to colour, and finally an observant rendering of tints and values. This process gives back to objects their texture and atmosphere, and the space in which they lie. From a representation which is statuesque in feeling and which renders figures by furnishing a visible inventory of their parts and attributes, the artist passes to considering his figures more and more as parts of a whole and as moving in an ambient ether. They tend accordingly to lose their separate emphasis, in order to be like ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... had turned Joe Lewis's word against him, when a tall Indian arose and spread his blanket open like a wing. He stood for a time silent, statuesque, and thoughtful. The men waited seriously to hear what he ...
— The Log School-House on the Columbia • Hezekiah Butterworth
... a subordinate matter, but one which has the most important bearing upon Michelangelo's genius. After designing the architectural theatre which I have attempted to describe, and filling its main spaces with the vast religious drama he unrolled symbolically in a series of primeval scenes, statuesque figures, and countless minor groups contributing to one intellectual conception, he proceeded to charge the interspaces—all that is usually left for facile decorative details—with an army of passionately felt and wonderfully executed nudes, ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... wax—-with lips of faint pink, and eyes that varied from gray to blue and from gray to brown, according to the light in which you saw them. Her hands were thin and shapely, her nose straight, her face artistically narrow. She was not brilliant, not active, but rather peaceful and statuesque without knowing it. Cowperwood was carried away by her appearance. Her beauty measured up to his present sense of the artistic. She was lovely, he thought—gracious, dignified. If he could have his choice of a wife, this was the kind of a girl ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... was another shrug; and, for all their statuesque beauty, the movement of her shoulders was like the shrug of a ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... made out in the distance, flitting indistinctly against the gloomy border of the forest, and near the river two bronze figures, leaning on tall spears, stood in the sunlight under fantastic head-dresses of spotted skins, warlike and still in statuesque repose. And from right to left along the lighted shore moved a wild and ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
... Miss Holmes to Harut who was engaged in putting more tobacco into the bowl, the suspicion of a smile upon his grave and statuesque countenance. Harut received the match with a low bow and fired the stuff as before. Then he handed the bowl, from which once again the blue smoke curled upwards, to Miss Holmes, and gently and gracefully let the antimacassar fall over it ...
— The Ivory Child • H. Rider Haggard
... be done! Her slumber had deepened into that strange stillness which we call death,—and her husband, a statuesque and rigid figure, gazed on her quiet body with ...
— Innocent - Her Fancy and His Fact • Marie Corelli
... Opaque and statuesque stood the figure of the baronet behind them. The wind was low. Dense masses of smoke hung amid the darting snakes of fire, and a red malign light was on the neighbouring leafage. No figures could be seen. Apparently the flames had nothing to contend against, for they ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... nostrils, so delicate that one might believe them transparent; the mouth not very small, but exquisitely shaped, with thin lips, curving obstinately, which curled sometimes sternly, sometimes scornfully, sometimes bitterly, but could also smile with infinite sweetness and charm; the chin round and statuesque, the cheeks neither plump nor hollow, with a delightful play of tender lights and soft, almost imperceptible shadows over their bright surfaces. But the most remarkable characteristics of this head were ...
— How Women Love - (Soul Analysis) • Max Simon Nordau
... field Mike was introduced to the man of hobbies. Mr Smith, senior, was a long, earnest-looking man who might have been Psmith in a grey wig but for his obvious energy. He was as wholly on the move as Psmith was wholly statuesque. Where Psmith stood like some dignified piece of sculpture, musing on deep questions with a glassy eye, his father would be trying to be in four places at once. When Psmith presented Mike to him, he ...
— Psmith in the City • P. G. Wodehouse
... for, if the original were unaccustomed to such a mood, or if his features were incapable of assuming the guise, it seems questionable whether he could really have been entitled to a marble immortality. In point of fact, however, the English face and form are seldom statuesque, however illustrious ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... were at a close, Kincaid spoke from the saddle. Facing him stood his entire command, "in order in the line," their six shining pieces and dark caissons and their twice six six-horse teams stretching back in six statuesque rows; each of the three lieutenants—Bartleson, Villeneuve, Tracy—in the front line, midway between his two guns, the artificers just six yards out on the left, and guidon and buglers just six on the right. At the commander's back was the levee. Only ...
— Kincaid's Battery • George W. Cable
... attitude and declamation. The actors raised on high boots above their natural height, their faces hidden in masks and their tones mechanically magnified, must have relied for their effects not upon facial play, or rapid and subtle variations of voice and gesture, but upon a certain statuesque beauty of pose, and a chanting intonation of that majestic iambic verse whose measure would have been obscured by a rapid and conversational delivery. The representation would thus become moving sculpture to the eye, and to the ear, as it were, a ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... middle size; but every part of his body was so perfectly proportioned that he appeared, in any position, taller than he really was. The upper part of his dress, thrown open from the heat, partly disclosed the fine statuesque formation of his neck and chest. His ears, hands, and feet were of that smallness and delicacy which is held to denote the aristocracy of birth; and there was in his manner that indescribable combination of unobtrusive dignity and unaffected elegance, which in all ages and countries, and through ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... not be seen, anyone looking at the balance of the head, the statuesque neck, would have ...
— The Four Canadian Highwaymen • Joseph Edmund Collins
... brown straw-hat, and was using it as a fan, keeping up a light tattoo with one foot upon the plank flooring. Her face was glowing with her four-mile walk in the hot sun, but she showed no signs of weariness. The position in which she stood was easy and graceful, but there was nothing statuesque or imposing about it; it was evident that at the very next instant she might shift into another equally as happy. Her eyes wandered from one object to another with the absence of concentration of one whose mind is not fixed upon any thing in particular. ...
— Bressant • Julian Hawthorne
... than the other's. The face beneath the picture-hat was small and well-shaped, the nose delicately tip-tilted, the chin determined, the mouth a little wide and suggesting good-humour. A pair of grey eyes looked steadily into his before transferring themselves to the statuesque being ...
— The Man Upstairs and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... glowing, are quite enough for any susceptible maiden's heart; about a broad expanse of forehead cluster thick masses of dark brown hair; his shirt, open at the throat, reveals glimpses of ivory; altogether he is statuesque and beautiful. Even his hands, strongly knit as they are, have not been rendered coarse by labor; they bear the same pallid hue as his face, and he looks like some nobly-born prisoner. "What untoward fate cast him ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861 • Various
... generation. Unluckily he has long been out of office, and his party is condemned to the Cassandra role of uttering true prophecies which find no credence among those who wield the power of putting them to good account. M. Bratiano's appropriate attitude may be described as statuesque. Occasionally his Press organs commented upon the manifestations of the interventionists in words barbed with bitter sarcasm and utilitarian maxims. "Roumania's blood and money," the Independence Roumaine explained, "must be spent only in the furtherance of Roumania's ...
— England and Germany • Emile Joseph Dillon
... heavenly decoction, made by the gods themselves and sent to earth by their favorite messenger! With what grace he opens the carriage door! with what majesty he mounts to his seat by the driver! I wonder if he has a sister. She would be worth a journey to see. I have met such women on their native soil, statuesque, slender, full-breasted, square-shouldered, with jars of water on their heads and clinking silver anklets. What a cursed thing is our American prejudice against color! No other people carries it to such an extent. In ...
— A Black Adonis • Linn Boyd Porter
... Italian head, with that rather tumid outline of features which one often sees in a Roman in middle life, when easy living and habits of sensual indulgence begin to reveal their signs in the countenance, and to broaden and confuse the clear-cut, statuesque lines of early youth. Evidently, that is the head of an easy-going, pleasure-loving man, who has waxed warm with good living, and performs the duties of his office with an unctuous grace as something ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IX., March, 1862., No. LIII. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics, • Various
... like spun bronze; the complexion which neither freckles nor tans; cool gray eyes with underdepths in them that no man but her lover may ever quite fathom; a figure which would be statuesque if it were not altogether human and womanly; features cast in the Puritan mould, with the lines of character well emphasized; lips that would be passionate but for—no, lips that will be passionate when the hour and the man arrive. A soul strong in the strength of ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde
... the upper place, having a fine view of the Master in his carved throne or stall under the organ-loft, where that gentleman, the learned Doctor Donne, sate magnificent, with his great prayer-book before him, an image of statuesque piety and rigid devotion. All the young freshmen behaved with gravity and decorum, but Pen was shocked to see that atrocious little Foker, who came in very late, and half a dozen of his comrades in the gentlemen-pensioners' seats, giggling and talking as if they ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... find was a little girl in a school frock, who had sat on the yellowing grass with one arm around the neck of a great dog, looking fearlessly up at him and telling him she was sorry he was going away. What he had found was a very statuesque little lady, clad in fluffy summer white, with the other Ardea's slate-blue eyes and soft voice, to be sure, but with no other reminder of the ...
— The Quickening • Francis Lynde
... the fair sex of Holland. Beauty is a rare flower in Holland, as in all other countries; notwithstanding, in a walk of a hundred steps in the wood at the Hague I saw many more beautiful women than I had seen in all the pictures in the Dutch galleries. These ladies do not possess the statuesque beauty of the Romans, the splendid color of the English, nor the vivacity of the Andalusians; but there is about them a refinement, a delightful innocence and grace, a tranquil beauty, a pleasing countenance; they ...
— Holland, v. 1 (of 2) • Edmondo de Amicis
... the less said the better; of course, if there were nothing else, they would have been swamped thirty times over during the course of Lantenac's harangue. Again, after Lantenac has landed, we have scenes of almost inimitable workmanship that suggest the epithet "statuesque" by their clear and trenchant outline; but the tocsin scene will not do, and the tocsin unfortunately pervades the whole passage, ringing continually in our ears with a taunting accusation of falsehood. And then, when we come to the place where Lantenac meets the royalists, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Canal, we have no visible clue to guide us in our estimate of their artistic worth. Vasari's description, and Zanetti's engraving of a few fragments (done in 1760, when the frescoes were already in decay), go to prove that Giorgione at this period studied the antique, "commingling statuesque classicism and the flesh and blood of ...
— Giorgione • Herbert Cook
... answered, without enthusiasm. "Rather too cold and statuesque for my taste, although I have heard she has a bit of the devil in her. Quite a sportswoman, and as good after hounds as her brother. They say she had a thin time of it with her step-mother, and has come out wonderfully since the old lady died. Lord Painswick, who lives ...
— The Hunt Ball Mystery • Magnay, William
... Indian of the prairie ever sat with more statuesque rigidity, watching his foe, than did these two friends sit watching that rat. They were sportsmen, both by nature and practice, to the backbone. The idiotic owl at their elbow was not more still than they—one ...
— Post Haste • R.M. Ballantyne
... Fortress, meanwhile, could, might, would, or should, in nowise, be surrendered, save to the King's Messenger: one old man's life worthless, so it be lost with honour; but think, ye brawling canaille, how will it be when a whole Bastille springs skyward!—In such statuesque, taper-holding attitude, one fancies de Launay might have left Thuriot, the red Clerks of the Bazoche, Cure of Saint-Stephen and all the tagrag-and-bobtail of the world, ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... school, only a Florentine in this, that much of his work is, as it were, monumental, composing itself really—as with the Madonna delle Arpie or the great Madonna and Saints of the Pitti, for instance—into statuesque groups, into sculpture. So if we admit that Leonardo and Michelangelo were rather universal than Florentine, the most characteristic work of the school lies in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, in the work of Giotto, so full of great, simple thoughts of life; in that of the Pollaiuoli, ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... and banners emblazoned with texts and symbols. Troops of horsemen in white woollen cloaks, sheikhs and Bedouins with flowing robes and huge turbans, religious chiefs of the great sects, imperturbable and statuesque, were in strange contrast to the shouting dervishes ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... has since received. No attention had been given to topics so obscure as inquiries into the character of the Indian mind—if, indeed, it was thought the Indian had any mind at all. It was still supposed that the Indian was, at all times and in all places, "a stoic of the woods," always statuesque, always formal, always passionless, always on stilts, always speaking in metaphors, a cold embodiment of bravery, endurance, and savage heroism. Writers depicted him as a man who uttered nothing but high principles of natural right, who ...
— The Myth of Hiawatha, and Other Oral Legends, Mythologic and Allegoric, of the North American Indians • Henry R. Schoolcraft
... and the blue lines of the infantry were well out on the field, he followed in glittering column of pieces, his satin-coated horses dancing in sheer exuberance of spirits and his red-crested cannoneers sitting with folded arms, erect and statuesque, upon the ammunition-chests. Mrs. Cram, in her pretty basket phaeton, with Mrs. Lawrence, of the infantry, and several of the ladies of the garrison in ambulances or afoot, had taken station well to the front of the forming line. Then it became apparent that old Brax purposed ...
— Waring's Peril • Charles King
... to bestow any labor on society when society takes it as a crowning favor to be suffered simply to adore. There is a certain grandeur, therefore, of immobility about the English beauty, a statuesque perfection which no doubt has great merits of its own. But it must be owned that it is not amusing, and that it is only the intensity of our worship which saves us from feeling it to be dull. Beauty is apt to be a little heavy on the stairs. A shade of distress flits over the loveliest ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... himself much, on the beholder much. Onlookers differ in opinion. Painters have their clientage. Poets are not omniscient; neither are we, a thing we are prone to forget. For myself, I confess not to see with those who deride the king, nor yet with those who think him statuesque, as if shaped, not out of flesh, but out of marble. He is not incredible, nor is he a shadow, stalking gaunt and battle-clad across the crags that fringe the Cornish sea. Not a few among us approximate perfection in character as blameless ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... a duo-toothed comb had been drawn from cheek-bone to jaw, and, but for the good-humor that beamed from her small berry-like eyes and shone in her white teeth, would have been repulsive. She was short and stout. In her scant drapery and unrestrained freedom she was hardly statuesque, and her more unstudied attitudes were marred by a simian habit of softly scratching her left ankle with the toes of her right ...
— Mrs. Skaggs's Husbands and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... new zest to his interest in her. He was accustomed to find his admiration or attention always acceptable to the young ladies of his acquaintance, and the demeanour of Gladys was at once new and interesting to him. He determined to cultivate her acquaintance, and to awaken that fair, statuesque maiden ...
— The Guinea Stamp - A Tale of Modern Glasgow • Annie S. Swan
... perverted although the effort has been in various ways, appears to have no parallel in ethical history. There is none in the Greek philosophers or the Roman Stoics, high as some of them may soar in their way. Aristotle's ideal man is perfect in its statuesque fashion, but it is not fraternal; it is not even philanthropic. Nor does the Christian character or the effort to create it depart with belief in dogma. Do not men who have totally renounced the dogma still cultivate a character in its gentleness ...
— No Refuge but in Truth • Goldwin Smith
... village sports filed around the table, and glee and song once more prevailed, William began to soften in his statuesque attitude, and laughingly proposed that we "go a poaching" on the imprisoned animals and birds that Squire Lucy corraled for his special delectation, to the detriment of honest apprentices and ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce
... or two of statuesque passion she went across the room and picked up her bruised hat. She looked at it, turning it round in her hands. Then she dropped it suddenly, and flung herself upon the sofa, crying out in a whirlwind ...
— Phyllis of Philistia • Frank Frankfort Moore
... gratuitously. He also decorated the Propylaea, which was erected under the superintendence of Phidias. The pictures of Polygnotus had nothing of that elaborate grouping, aided by the powers of perspective, so much admired in modern art. His greatness lay in statuesque painting, which he brought nearly to perfection by ideal expression, accurate drawing, and improved coloring. He used but few colors, and softened the rigidity of his predecessors by making the mouth of beauty smile. ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume III • John Lord
... of Rinaldo and Tancredi, from the adventures of the Pagan damsels Erminia, Armida and Clorinda. The Gerusalemme is in truth a Virgilian epic, upon which a romantic poem has been engrafted. Goffredo, idealized into statuesque frigidity, repeats the virtues of Aeneas; but the episode of Dido, which enlivens Virgil's hero, is transferred to Rinaldo's part in Tasso's story. The battles of Crusaders and Saracens are tedious copies of the battle in the tenth Aeneid; but the duels of Tancredi with ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... one, but it was a level table-land. This calmness and equability pervades his writings, and for this reason they have been thought to want life and energy. The beauty of his language is, as Cicero says, statuesque rather than picturesque. Simple and severe, it conveys the idea of perfect and well-proportioned beauty, while it banishes all thoughts of human passion. In relating his own deeds, he does not strive to add to ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... Gallery of the Kings ever served as a background for anything lovelier or more high-bred than that untitled slip of a girl from "the States." Her trailing gown of pearl-white satin fell in unbroken lustrous folds behind her. Her beautiful throat and shoulders rose in statuesque whiteness from the mist of chiffon that encircled them. Her dark hair showed a moonbeam parting that rested the eye, wearied by the contemplation of waves and frizzes fresh from the curling-tongs. Her mother's pearls hung in ropes from neck to ...
— Penelope's Progress - Being Such Extracts from the Commonplace Book of Penelope Hamilton As Relate to Her Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... over her feathered fan, then with the slightest upward inclination of her statuesque shoulders—'I admire your books; but are your women quite just? ...
— The Poems And Prose Of Ernest Dowson • Ernest Dowson et al
... her distinctly: she stood in a shaft of moonlight falling between the sombre firs, and her face was marble-like; her whole pose was statuesque, all the girlish gentleness of the other days seemed to have fled from her, and her hour of tribulation had invested her with a dignity and force of will that sat well upon her stately figure. Harry beheld her with something like terror. This was not the woman he loved. His ...
— The Gold-Stealers - A Story of Waddy • Edward Dyson
... decadent and painfully nascent Times, with their distresses, inarticulate gaspings and 'impossibilities;' meeting a tall Lifeguardsman in his snow-white trousers, or seeing those two statuesque Lifeguardsmen in their frowning bearskins, pipe-clayed buckskins, on their coal-black sleek-fiery quadrupeds, riding sentry at the Horse-Guards,—it strikes one with a kind of mournful interest, how, in such universal down-rushing and ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... close-curled hair. I knew him to be the sort of being that painters and poets had been feeling after when they represented or spoke of angels. And I could not help laughing outright at the thought of the meek, mild, statuesque draped figures, with absurd wings and depressing smiles, that encumbered pictures and churches, with whom no human communication would be possible, and whose grave and discomfiting glance would be fatal to all ease or merriment. ...
— The Child of the Dawn • Arthur Christopher Benson
... Cleek met Lady Wilding for the first time. He found her what he afterward termed "a splendid animal," beautiful, statuesque, more of Juno than of Venus, and freely endowed with the languorous temperament and the splendid earthy loveliness which grows nowhere but under tropical skies and in the shadow of palm groves and the flame of ...
— Cleek, the Master Detective • Thomas W. Hanshew
... dizzy height, and then spread his red nostrils wide and pant as violently as if he had been running a race; and all the while he quaked from head to heel as with a palsy. He was a handsome fellow, and he made a fine statuesque picture of terror, but it was pitiful to ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... Musker had discoursed. Now, in spite of his weather-beaten face and hardened hands, he appeared what he was, a man of education and some refinement, and his resolute expression, erect carriage, and muscular frame, rendered lithe and almost statuesque by much swinging of the ax, gave him an indefinite air of distinction. Again she decided that Geoffrey Thurston was a well-favored man, but remembering Musker's stories, she set herself to watch for some trace of inherent ...
— Thurston of Orchard Valley • Harold Bindloss
... of the Revolution David abandoned painting; and on January 17, 1793, as a member of the Convention, voted for the execution of Louis XVI. It was during this period that were painted his pictures of Lepelletier and Marat, in which his cold, statuesque, and correct manner was revivified and warmed to life—paradoxically enough, to paint death. A friend of Robespierre, he was carried down at the overthrow of the "little lawyer from Arras," and imprisoned in the Luxembourg. ...
— McClure's Magazine, January, 1896, Vol. VI. No. 2 • Various
... smothered little cry of pain Helen's eyes shut tight and she groped for her napkin. And to make a good job of it the Fates dragged in at that moment Helen's guardian aunt, the tall and statuesque Mrs. Elvira Burton ...
— Officer 666 • Barton W. Currie
... friars, if his presence at such a show was a defiance or mere curiosity. Others gave no heed to these matters, but were engaged in attracting the attention of the ladies, throwing themselves into attitudes more or less interesting and statuesque, flashing diamond rings, especially when they thought themselves the foci of insistent opera-glasses, while yet another would address a respectful salute to this or that senora or senorita, at the same time lowering his head gravely to whisper to a neighbor, "How ridiculous she ...
— The Reign of Greed - Complete English Version of 'El Filibusterismo' • Jose Rizal
... his wife's silent form. She was a woman some years older than himself, but had not by any means overpassed the maturity of good looks and vigour. Her passionate features, well-defined, firm, and statuesque in life, were doubly so now: her mouth and brow, beneath her purplish black hair, showed only too clearly that the turbulency of character which had made a bear-garden of his house had been no temporary phase of her existence. While he reflected, he suddenly ...
— Wessex Tales • Thomas Hardy
... a strapping great lad in livery stood musing, motionless, statuesque, useless, like that purely decorative warrior whom one sees in the most tumultuous of Mantegna's paintings, lost in dreams, leaning upon his shield, while all around him are fighting and bloodshed and death; detached from the group of his companions who were thronging about ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... door closed upon Chunda Lal, Miska stepped back from it and stood, unconsciously, in a curiously rigid and statuesque attitude, her arms pressed to her sides and her hands directed outward. It was the physical expression of an intense mental effort to gain control of herself. Her heart was leaping wildly in her breast—for the future that had held ...
— The Golden Scorpion • Sax Rohmer
... said. "They're immensely in love with each other I suppose, but without somehow being offensive about it. And they have such a lot of fun. Olive has a piebald cayuse, that she's taught all the haute ecole tricks. He does the statuesque poses and all the high action things just as seriously as a thoroughbred and he's so short and homely and in such deadly earnest about it that you can hardly bear it. You laugh yourself into stitches but you want to cry too. ...
— Mary Wollaston • Henry Kitchell Webster
... were turning toward the house when Jane appeared in the lane leading a horse. In riding-skirt and blouse she seemed to have lost some of her statuesque proportions, and looked more like a girl rider than the mistress of Withersteen. She was brightly smiling, and her greeting was ...
— Riders of the Purple Sage • Zane Grey
... dead silence among the men as the soft white ball of smoke rose slowly and steadily, expanding the while and changing its shape till it became utterly diffused. The occupants of the schooner's deck were statuesque in their rigidity, the crew to a man gazing hard at the captain as they strained their hearing to catch his next command; the captain fixed his eyes from one side upon Uncle Paul, while Rodd stood upon the other with his ...
— The Ocean Cat's Paw - The Story of a Strange Cruise • George Manville Fenn
... of silence is as bad. I hate that particular pose; it's coming up very much now; an imitation of the English, like everything else. A girl who tries to be statuesque at sea—that will act on ...
— The Patagonia • Henry James
... covered with laced drapery; and his head rests on richly ornamented cushions. These decorative accessories, together with the minute work of his scabbard, wrought in the fanciful mannerism of the cinquecento, serve to enhance the statuesque simplicity of the young soldier's effigy. The contrast between so much of richness in the merely subordinate details, and this sublime severity of treatment in the person of the hero, is truly and touchingly dramatic. There is a smile as of ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds |
