"Tinsel" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... used in Ireland by Sir Walter Scott's eldest son. The controversy as to whether fish can distinguish colours was unknown to our ancestors. I am inclined to believe that, for salmon, size, and perhaps shade, light or dark, with more or less of tinsel, are the only important points. Izaak stumbled on the idea of Mr. Stewart (author of The Practical Angler) saying, 'for the generality, three or four flies, neat, and rightly made, and not too big, serve for a trout in most rivers, all the summer.' Our ancestors, though they did not fish with ...
— Andrew Lang's Introduction to The Compleat Angler • Andrew Lang
... be called the taste for heroic literature at that time, and the taste for—we really hardly know what to call it—literature of the present, made up, as it too generally is, of shreds and patches—bits of gold and bits of tinsel—things written in a hurry, to be read in a hurry, and never thought of afterward—suggestive rather than reflective, at the best: and we must plead guilty to a too great proneness to underrate what our fathers ...
— The International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. 1, No. 7 - Of Literature, Art, and Science, August 12, 1850 • Various
... a poor piece of mockery, of false tinsel and fringe and folly and pretence, is your stage-player beside one of these fellows! Who is going to sit three weary hours at the Haymarket, bored by the assumed plausibility of the actor, when the real, the actual, the positive thing that he so poorly simulates is to be met on the ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever
... meaningless tinsel the unrestricted right to trade in furs was. To get the furs access to the land was necessary; and the land was monopolized. In the South, where tobacco and corn were the important staples, the worker was likewise denied ...
— History of the Great American Fortunes, Vol. I - Conditions in Settlement and Colonial Times • Myers Gustavus
... gold and silver money, besides a lot of beads, trinkets, and gaudy tinsel things, such as earthly savages have been willing to ...
— Pharaoh's Broker - Being the Very Remarkable Experiences in Another World of Isidor Werner • Ellsworth Douglass
... tinsel taints the dress Of him who holds the natal power, No weighty helmet's fastenings press On brow that shares Columbia's dower, No blaring trumpets mark the step Of him with mind on peace intent, And so—HATS OFF! Here comes the State, ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For, Book Two • Various
... in the midst, a Pageant of a Throne In the extreme of Tinsel Splendor shone. No Sacred Ensigns, no Imperial Chair, Mark'd the high worth of those who counseled there; But, shaded by a Curtain's vivid green, A splendid, soft, luxuriant Couch was seen. The spangled Banners glitter'd all around, And the unfolded Silver strew'd the ground; ...
— The First of April - Or, The Triumphs of Folly: A Poem Dedicated to a Celebrated - Duchess. By the author of The Diaboliad. • William Combe
... off one's perceptions. Though not the case with all the fine churches and cathedrals of Normandy, yet with an unpleasantly large proportion—unfortunately including the magnificent Church of St Ouen at Rouen—there is beyond the gaudy tinsel that crowds the altars, an untidiness that detracts from the sense of reverence that stately Norman or Gothic does not fail to inspire. In the north transept of St Ouen, some of the walls and pillars have at various times been made to bear large printed notices which have ...
— Normandy, Complete - The Scenery & Romance Of Its Ancient Towns • Gordon Home
... ranee sat on a low-cushioned seat, and there were a lot of other ladies with her—all in trousers and veils, and sparkling with tinsel and gold and jewels. And the brown, turbaned gentleman stood behind a sort of carved screen, and interpreted what the children said and what the queen said. And when the queen asked to buy the ...
— The Phoenix and the Carpet • E. Nesbit
... 877. tinsel-slippered. The 'permanent epithet' of Thetis, a daughter of Nereus and mother of Achilles, is "silver-footed" (Gk. argyropeza). ...
— Milton's Comus • John Milton
... our young man to the contempt of superior minds if I say that all this seemed to him an insuperable impediment to his making up to Verena. His scruples were doubtless begotten of a false pride, a sentiment in which there was a thread of moral tinsel, as there was in the Southern idea of chivalry; but he felt ashamed of his own poverty, the positive flatness of his situation, when he thought of the gilded nimbus that surrounded the protegee of Mrs. Burrage. This shame was possible to him even while he was conscious of what a mean business ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. II (of II) • Henry James
... into little Drina's heart. She did so, and there were no more difficulties. Drina learnt her letters like an angel; and she learnt other things as well. The Baroness de Spath taught her how to make little board boxes and decorate them with tinsel and painted flowers; her mother taught her religion. Sitting in the pew every Sunday morning, the child of six was seen listening in rapt attention to the clergyman's endless sermon, for she was to be examined upon it in the afternoon. The Duchess was ...
— Queen Victoria • Lytton Strachey
... of tinsel for a poor little woman to carry around! How it must have shocked you to find me so commonplace! None of us escape the common fates. It is always a surprise to me to discover how simple the men of great ...
— The Light of the Star - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... tinsel satin favors that used to be the featured and gayest decoration of every ballroom, is gone; the cotillion leader, his hands full of "seat checks," his manners a cross between those of Lord Chesterfield and a traffic policeman, is gone; and much of ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... escaped cascades of silver-lustrous Chinese silks and waves of tinsel, which an oblique sunbeam shot through with luminous beads, while portraits of every era, in frames more or less tarnished, smiled through ...
— The Mummy's Foot • Theophile Gautier
... only. He is accustomed to the lights, to the spectators, to the laughter, to the applause, to the frightened scream of the hysterical women in the audience, to the close air and to the narrow stage behind the bars. The tamer in his tights and tinsel has grown used to his tiger, to his emotions, to his hourly danger. He even finds at last that his mind wanders during the performance, and that at the very instant when he is holding the ring for the leap, or thrusting his head into the beast's fearful jaws, he is thinking of his wife, of his ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... change horses at Hof, a handfulof houses on the brow of a breezy hill, the church and tavern standing opposite to each other, and nothing between them but the dusty road, and the churchyard, with its iron crosses, and the fluttering tinsel of the funeral garlands. In the churchyard and at the tavern-door, were groups of peasants, waiting for divine service to begin. They were clothed in their holiday dresses. The men wore breeches and long boots, ...
— Hyperion • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... verse thrown over the features of nature and of old romance. The deep incisions into character are "skinned and filmed over"—the details are lost or shaped into flimsy and insipid decorum; and the truth of feeling and of circumstance is translated into a tinkling sound, a tinsel common-place. It must be owned, there is a power in true poetry that lifts the mind from the ground of reality to a higher sphere, that penetrates the inert, scattered, incoherent materials presented to it, and by a force and inspiration of its own, melts and moulds them ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... much about a man as I did was exactly a 'stranger' to him. And then, twice as suddenly, to great, grown-up, cool-blooded, money-staled, book-tamed me—it swept over me like a cyclone that I should never be able to decide anything more in all my life—not the width of a tinsel ribbon, not the goal of a journey, not the worth of a lover—until I'd seen the Face that belonged to the Voice ...
— The Indiscreet Letter • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... And thou art a tinsel thing, And I in my play Broke thee easily, And from the little fragments Arose my long sorrow— Woe ...
— War is Kind • Stephen Crane
... with great solemnity, to the upper end of the room, an antiquated Abigail, dressed in her lady's cast-clothes; whom he (I suppose) mistook for some countess just arrived at the Bath. The ball was opened by a Scotch lord, with a mulatto heiress from St Christopher's; and the gay colonel Tinsel danced all the evening with the daughter of an eminent tinman from the borough of Southwark. Yesterday morning, at the Pump-room, I saw a broken-winded Wapping landlady squeeze through a circle of peers, to salute ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... they prize thy virtues when in bed, One pinch of thee revives the vapor'd head, Removes the spleen, removes the qualmish fit, And gives a brisker turn to female wit, Warms in the nose, refreshes like the breeze, Glows in the herd and tickles in the sneeze. Without it, Tinsel, what would be thy lot! What, but to strut neglected and forgot! What boots it for thee to have dipt thy hand In odors wafted from Arabian land? Ah! what avails thy scented solitaire, Thy careless swing ...
— Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce • E. R. Billings
... Costa-mongered; finally even the late eminent Macfarren, the worst enemy music has ever had in this country, did not disdain to prepare "a performing edition," and to improve Mozart's improvements on Handel. One wonders whether Mozart, when he overlaid the "Messiah" with his gay tinsel-work, dreamed that some Costa, encouraged by Mozart's own example, and without brains enough to guess that he had nothing like Mozart's brains, would in like manner desecrate "Don Giovanni." Like "Don Giovanni," there the "Messiah" lies, almost unrecognisable under its ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman
... you Chinatown. To some the ivories will always be but crudely carven bone, the jades the potter's sham, the musk and aloes the product of a soap factory, the joss but a cigar-store Indian, and the Oriental dainties of Hong Fah the scrappings of a Yankee grocery store. Yet behind the shoddy tinsel of Doyers and Pell Streets, as behind Alice's looking-glass, there is another Chinatown—a strange, inhuman, Oriental world, not necessarily of trapdoors and stifled screams, but one moved by influences undreamed of in our banal philosophies. Hearken then to the story ...
— Tutt and Mr. Tutt • Arthur Train
... the dark Kings of Iron and Lead, the one mighty in black, the other sullen in blue; and after them were the Copper King, gleaming ruddy and brave, and the Tin King, strutting in his trimmings of gaudy tinsel which looked nearly as well as silver, but were more economical. And this fine troop of lackey kings most politely led Thor and Loki into the palace, and gave them of the best, for they never suspected who these ...
— Myths That Every Child Should Know - A Selection Of The Classic Myths Of All Times For Young People • Various
... carefully for one symmetrical in shape and small of size and price, to fit our tiny flat and, oh yes, indeed, our casual income. I remember, too, that when it was finally bought I put it on my shoulder with a proud feeling, and we drifted farther, picking up the trimmings—the tinsel and gay ornaments, the small gifts for the one very small person who had so recently come to live with us, discussing each purchase with due deliberation, going home at last with rather more than we could afford, I fear, for I recall further that ...
— Dwellers in Arcady - The Story of an Abandoned Farm • Albert Bigelow Paine
... Maury, by far the most powerful debater of France since Mirabeau—figured among the chief ornaments of the salons of De Stael. Roland, and the showy and witty Theresa Cabarrus, and even the flutter of La Fayette, the most tinsel of heroes, and the sullen sententiousness of Robespierre, then known only as a provincial deputy, furnished a background which increased ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... characterise the modern woman, that saddens men, and destroys in them that respect which their very pride prompts them to feel. And it is the painful conviction that the ideal woman of truth and modesty and simple love and homely living has somehow faded away under the paint and tinsel of this modern reality which makes us speak out as we have done, in the hope, perhaps a forlorn one, that if she could be made to thoroughly understand what men think of her, she would, by the very force of ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... back from her, and really she looked so much like Elizabeth painted by Gheeraerts or on the Great Seal of Ireland or something—though the ash-colored plush dress trimmed in silver and the little silver-edge ruff and the black-silver tinsel-cloth cloak lined with white plush hanging behind her looked most like a winter riding costume—and her face was such a pale frozen mask of Elizabeth's inward tortures, that I told myself, Oh, I got to talk ...
— No Great Magic • Fritz Reuter Leiber
... I humbly thank Him to whom we are but as worms of the dust, that he has been pleased to call me to serve such men! Earth has no higher, no grander position for me. Let kings and emperors keep their tinsel crowns, I want them not; ...
— The Gilded Age, Complete • Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner
... And presently he saw on his left a house rich and gay of aspect, shining with gold, and all the windows flung up to the air; and from one window a face of a fair woman laughed on him, and beckoned, and waved a tinsel scarf with bells that tinkled ...
— The Silver Crown - Another Book of Fables • Laura E. Richards
... present one. The age of Tiberius forms an interval of silence during which the dead are buried, and the new generation prepares itself to appear. Under Nero it will have started forth in all its panoply of tinsel armour; at present the seeds that will produce it are being sown by ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... who was in many ways the most learned of the then recent converts to Catholicism, was, as is well known, the original of Lothair in Lord Beaconsfield's famous novel. Lord Beaconsfield's portrait of him was disfigured, and indeed made ridiculous, by the gilding, or rather the tinsel, with which his essentially alien taste bedizened it; but, apart from such exaggerations, there were elements in it of unmistakable likeness, and the entertainment to which I am now referring was, apart from its peculiar sequel, like a page of Lothair ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... run with a loose rein, until they are brought to a halt by reason or disenchantment. I would not have you be towards me like the sportsman, who when he has bagged a hare thinks no more of it, but runs after another. The eyes are sometimes deceived; at first sight tinsel looks like gold; but they soon recognise the difference between the genuine and the false metal. This beauty of mine, which you say I possess, and which you exalt above the sun, and declare more ...
— The Exemplary Novels of Cervantes • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... on a crown Wrought of gilded thistle-down, And a scarf of velvet vapor, And a ravelled-rainbow gown; And his tinsel-tangled hair, Tossed and lost upon the air, Was glossier and flossier ...
— Afterwhiles • James Whitcomb Riley
... Puylaurens, du Coudrai-Montpensier, and de Goulas were tried and executed in effigy; the figures by which they were represented being clothed in costly dresses, richly decorated with lace, and glittering with tinsel ornaments.[193] ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... royal happy pair. Great in themselves, 360 They smile superior; of external show Regardless, while their inbred virtues give A lustre to their power, and grace their court With real splendours, far above the pomp Of eastern kings, in all their tinsel pride. Like troops of Amazons, the female band Prance round their cars, not in refulgent arms As those of old; unskilled to wield the sword, Or bend the bow, these kill with surer aim. The royal offspring, fairest of the ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... places, therefore, had to be taken by the banderilleros. These gay-looking people are men on foot with arrows two feet long, each with a hooked point. On the other end these arrows are decorated with little flags, brass foil, tinsel, and even bird cages whence gaily decked birds are permitted to escape. With these arrows the banderilleros walk right up to the bull, and, when he is ready to charge, jump to one side and thrust their weapons deep into ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... deserted that I have no other comfort but in my wife and daughter and dear little Cicero. For those ambitious friendships with great people are all show and tinsel, and contain nothing that satisfies inwardly. Every morning my house swarms with visitors; I go down to the Forum attended by troops of friends; but in the whole crowd there is no one with whom I can freely jest, or whom ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... outraged chickens, though one shrieked with dismay, the other with diversion. At last the Colonel, slower of foot than the rest, arrived on the scene, just as the pride of his heart, the old King Chanticleer of the yard, made his exit, draped in a royal red paper robe and a species of tinsel crown, out of which his red face looked most ludicrous as he came halting and stupefied, haying evidently been driven up in a corner and pinched rather hard; but close behind him, chuckling forth his terror and flapping his wings, came the pert little white ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... of five more bulls there was general applause. The band rolled out fresh music. There was a thunder of drums and the banderilleros came on, gorgeous in velvet, glittering in spangle and tinsel. ...
— Five Nights • Victoria Cross
... English sovereigns, rather a high character for sobriety and gravity of deportment, and purity of morals; but the glimpses we get of the real, every-day routine of his domestic life, are such as to show that the pomp and parade of royalty is mere glittering tinsel, after all. ...
— Charles I - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... softly, as a better man might have spoken the name of the girl he loved. "Its a great little Christmas tree. The candles are always burning and the tinsel presents ...
— Seven Keys to Baldpate • Earl Derr Biggers
... Hurried, harassed, Thinking of all my problems that never are solved. Suddenly out of the mist, a flaring gas-jet Shone from a huddled shop. I saw thru the bleary window A mass of playthings: False-faces hung on strings, Valentines, paper and tinsel, Tops of scarlet and green, Candy, marbles, jacks— A confusion of color Pathetically gaudy and cheap. All of my boyhood Rushed back. Once more these things were treasures Wildly desired. With covetous eyes I looked again at the marbles, ...
— Rivers to the Sea • Sara Teasdale
... suggest anything for the people to negative it, whether it were good or bad. They not only avowed their natural right to do as they pleased, but deemed it due to their self-respect not to do what was pleasing to their tinsel sovereigns in London. And finally, when Colleton, one of the sovereigns in question, tried to declare martial law in the colony, on the plea of danger from Indians or Spanish, the indomitable freemen treated him as their brethren at Albemarle had ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... the territory of another great chief, Katema, who received them hospitably, sending food and giving them solemn audience in his kotla surrounded by his tribe. A tall man of forty, dressed in a snuff-brown coat with a broad band of tinsel down the arms, and a helmet of beads and feathers. He carried a large fan with charms attached, which he waved constantly during the audience, often laughing heartily—"a good sign, for a man who shakes his sides with mirth is seldom difficult ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne
... real and rather common, sort of plain boiled-dinner variety. It gives me an excuse to take time off from the eternal frolic. I'm glad when there's a strike or a row and I dig out of town to stay in a commercial hotel. I have to get away from the whole tinsel show. And yet it was what I wanted, was willing to play modern Faust ...
— The Gorgeous Girl • Nalbro Bartley
... men of the South, on their side, had made little altars between two trees, decked with white cloths and adorned with tinsel ornaments and little crosses and small carved images carefully brought, like household gods, from the far home, and treasured only next to their arms. The thin, dark faces of the men were fervent with southern faith, and their wild black ...
— Via Crucis • F. Marion Crawford
... spending much time in scanning similar embroidery in the literature of the Napoleonic Era, I unhesitatingly place the work of Archibald Forbes, and that of several knights of the pen still living, far above the delusive tinsel of Marbot, Thiebault, and Segur. I will go further and say that, if we could find out what were the sources used by Thucydides, we should notice qualms of misgiving shoot through the circles of scientific historians as they contemplated his majestic work. In any case, I ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... respect—that "it is particularly happy in the composition of two or three words together, near equal to the Greek". No one has done more than Milton to justify this praise, or to make manifest what may be effected by this marriage of words. Many of his compound epithets, as 'golden-tressed', 'tinsel-slippered', 'coral-paven', 'flowry-kirtled', 'violet-embroidered', 'vermeil-tinctured', are themselves poems in miniature. Not unworthy to be set beside these are Sylvester's "opal-coloured morn", Drayton's "silver-sanded shore", ...
— English Past and Present • Richard Chenevix Trench
... said Miss Dassonville, "as the things I've seen the children make at school, with bits of coloured stone and broken china and rags of tinsel or whatever treasures, laid out in a ...
— The Lovely Lady • Mary Austin
... Pocahontas. She was resolved that her beloved white chief should want for nothing, and now every four or five days she came to the fort laden with provisions. Smith also took Captain Newport to visit the Powhatan, and great barter was made of blue beads and tinsel ...
— This Country Of Ours • H. E. Marshall Author: Henrietta Elizabeth Marshall
... him; and declared, that, were there not another man in England, she would not have him. She was ready, on the contrary, she could assure them, to resign her pretensions under hand and seal, if Miss Clary were taken with his tinsel, and if every one else approved of his address to ...
— Clarissa, Volume 1 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... to issue a number of sumptuary laws which were far from mild. Food was regulated, minstrels were not allowed to sit at the same table with ladies and gentlemen, most rigid rules were formulated against the abuse of gold, silver, and tinsel trimmings on the dresses of the women, and of the men as well, and the use of ermine and of all fine and Costly furs was carefully restricted. In Castile the same movement was taking place, and Alfonso X., who followed Fernando, issued similar ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... us o'er and o'er, Nor leaf, nor fruit, nor blossom bore. Sid's sceptre, full of juice, did shoot In golden boughs, and golden fruit; And he, the dragon never sleeping, Guarded each fair Hesperian Pippin. No hobby-horse, with gorgeous top, The dearest in Charles Mather's[7] shop, Or glittering tinsel of May Fair, Could with this rod of Sid compare.[8] Dear Sid, then why wert thou so mad To break thy rod like naughty lad?[9] You should have kiss'd it in your distress, And then return'd it to your mistress; Or made it a Newmarket switch,[10] And not a rod for thine own ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... we dine. Wear hodden gray and a' that, Gie fools their silks, and knaves their wine, A man's a man, for a' that! For a' that, and a' that, Their tinsel show, and a' that; The honest man, though e'er sae poor, Is king o' men for ...
— The Evolution of Expression Vol. I • Charles Wesley Emerson
... this regard, faithful to the traditions of the republic, which his family had really changed from a democracy to a ploutarchy, he had the good taste to scorn the vulgar pomp of kings,—"the horses led, and grooms besmeared with gold,"—all the theatrical paraphernalia and plebeian tinsel "which dazzle the crowd and set them all agape"; but his expenditures were those of an intellectual and accomplished oligarch. He was worthy, in many respects, to be the chief of those haughty merchants and manufacturers, who wielded more power, through the length of their ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... of the Tahitian monarchy—the degradation of the regal house of Pomaree, is painful to contemplate. The queen still wears a crown—a tinsel one, received as a present from her sister-sovereign of England,—she has also a court and a palace, such as they are; but her power is little more than nominal, her exchequer seldom otherwise than empty. Typee draws a touching contrast between times past ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 380, June, 1847 • Various
... sake of whose beauty one might give up all things. Young, elegant, serpentine; clad in a single garment, a light cinnamon gown clasped at the waist; no stockings, her legs bare and brown; on her head a Persian scarf embroidered with red and gold tinsel; her face white, with a delicate pink flush over it; hair and eyes black as night, but also with a glitter of stars. Wherever she walked she was a picture, and whether she was working about the house, or idling with a cigarette on the verandah, or running over the sand to spank mischievous boys ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham
... trade of these Adventurers is in general scanty enough; and their Art therefore consists in disposing it to the best advantage. But if such be the aim of the Writer, it is the Critic's business to detect and defeat the imposture; to warn the public against the purchase of shop-worn goods and tinsel wares; to protect the fair trader, by exposing the tricks of needy Quacks and Mountebanks; and to chastise that forward and noisy importunity with which they present themselves to ...
— An English Garner - Critical Essays & Literary Fragments • Edited by Professor Arber and Thomas Seccombe
... them were caught, so that few fell to the floor. Wrapped in tinsel, they shone like stars as they caught the light, and the boys and girls vied with each other, laughing as they tried to see which would be lucky, and secure ...
— Princess Polly's Gay Winter • Amy Brooks
... there is in every hour! and the worshipper is pressing out and drinking the essence of the hours: he lives in the life of Brahma. I speak truth, for I have accepted truth in life; I am now attached to truth, I have swept all tinsel away. Kabr says: "Thus is the worshipper set free from fear; thus have all errors of life and of death ...
— Songs of Kabir • Rabindranath Tagore (trans.)
... one the core is made from a double strand of strong lock stitch twine, over which is placed a linen braid. Then the tip conductor, which is of stranded copper tinsel, is braided on. This is then covered with two layers of tussah silk, laid in reverse wrappings, then there is a heavy cotton braid, and over the latter a linen braid. The sleeve conductor, which is also of copper tinsel, is then braided over the structure so formed, ...
— Cyclopedia of Telephony & Telegraphy Vol. 1 - A General Reference Work on Telephony, etc. etc. • Kempster Miller
... entered at once on the business of proprietor of that old house, where so many a Roscius has strutted and declaimed with more or less fame; so many a Walking gentleman done his five shillings' worth of polite comedy, so many a tinsel king degraded the 'legitimate drama,' in the most illegitimate manner, and whose glories were extinguished with the reign of Macready, when we were boys, ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... evening frock executed in moonlight blue, a tinsel sylph's diadem on her brow with her dancecard fallen beside her moonblue satin slipper, curves her palm softly, breathing quickly) Voglio e non. You're hot! You're scalding! The left hand ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... pinnacles without, and struggling against the massive gloom within, the shadow of a man with a child on his arm might be seen flitting across the more stationary shadows of pillar and mullion, and making its way towards a little tinsel Madonna hanging in a retired spot near the choir. Amid all the sublimities of the mighty cathedral, poor Sarti had fixed on this tinsel Madonna as the symbol of divine mercy and protection,—just as a child, in the presence of a great ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... much intimacy between them, in spite of the respect which each of them might well have had for the vast knowledge of the other. When the Decline and Fall was published, Burke read it as everybody else did; but he told Reynolds that he disliked the style, as very affected, mere frippery and tinsel. Sir Joshua himself was neither a man of letters nor a keen politician; but he was full of literary ideas and interests, and he was among Burke's warmest and most constant friends, following him with an admiration and reverence that even Johnson sometimes ...
— Burke • John Morley
... be a sort of safety-valve to that ardent spirit most like Benvenuto Cellini both in pen and tongue and person. Our dear Mr. Bennoch was the providence of his later years. They tell me that that powerful work has entirely stopped the sale of Moore's Life, which, all tinsel and tawdry rags, might have been written by a court newsman or a court milliner. I wonder whether they will print the other six volumes; for the four out they have given Mrs. Moore three thousand pounds. A bad account ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... limbes tinsel I her silke soft sheets, Her rose-crownd cheekes eclipse my daze led sight, O glasse with too much ioy my thoughts thou greets, And yet thou shewst me day but by twielight Ile kisse thee for the kindnesse I hauefelt, Her lips one kisse would vnto ...
— The Vnfortunate Traveller, or The Life Of Jack Wilton - With An Essay On The Life And Writings Of Thomas Nash By Edmund Gosse • Thomas Nash
... might be called a street of cafes at Perpignan, not far from the Castillet. They are great, splendid establishments, with wide, overhung, awninged terraces, and potted plants and electric lights and gold and tinsel, and mixed drinks and ices and sorbets, and all the epicurean cold things which one may find in the best establishment in Paris. These cafes are side by side and opposite each other, and are as typical of the life of the town as is the Rambla typical of Barcelona, or ...
— The Automobilist Abroad • M. F. (Milburg Francisco) Mansfield
... characteristic?—the ruling passions of Pope are nothing to it. Whilst the poor distracted manager was bewailing the loss of a building only worth 300,000 l., together with some twenty thousand pounds of rags and tinsel in the tiring rooms, Bluebeard's elephants, and all that—in comes a note from a scorching author, requiring at his hands two acts and odd ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. I. (of VI.) - With his Letters and Journals. • Thomas Moore
... wept for sympathy when no one else would weep, will be my strong, faithful friend through it all, and not for all the worlds glittering there in yonder sky, much less for ray poor little gilt and tinsel world in New York, will ...
— From Jest to Earnest • E. P. Roe
... his rare moments of reflection in his gorgeous palace on the hills. Here they could at least be once more in the country they loved, albeit of a milder and less heroic type, and a little degraded by the overlapping tinsel and scattered ...
— Devil's Ford • Bret Harte
... is silly. As I walked into the city I was stopped with clusters of boys and wenches buzzing about the cake-shops like flies.(7) There had the fools let out their shops two yards forward into the streets, all spread with great cakes frothed with sugar, and stuck with streamers of tinsel. And then I went to Bateman's the bookseller, and laid out eight-and-forty shillings for books. I bought three little volumes of Lucian in French for our Stella, and so and so. Then I went to Garraway's(8) to meet Stratford and dine with him; but it was an idle day with the ...
— The Journal to Stella • Jonathan Swift
... Seward as “all tinkling and tinsel—a sort of Dr. Darwin in petticoats.” Edgeworth described her as “a handsome woman of agreeable manners, she was generous, possessed of good sense, and capable of strong affection”; and Sir Walter Scott thought that she ...
— Anna Seward - and Classic Lichfield • Stapleton Martin
... smelled Oriental spices, which Marco Polo had described as abounding in Cipango; when he walked by the shore and saw the shells of pearl oysters, he believed the island to be loaded with pearls and precious stones; when he saw a scrap of tinsel or bright metal adorning a native, he argued that there was a gold mine close at hand. And so he went on in an increasing whirl of bewildering enchantment from anchorage to anchorage and from island to island, always being led on by ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young
... Alas! 'tis in vain: Who hid, in their turns have been hid; The treasures are squandered again; And here, in the grave, are all metals forbid, But the tinsel that shone on ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... to the guitar. He had had them instructed by the famous Gorilla, who was crowned poetess-laureate at the capitol by night, six years later. She was crowned where our great Italian poets were crowned; and though her merit was no doubt great, it was, nevertheless, more tinsel than gold, and not of that order to place her on a par with Petrarch ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... University of Oxford issued from the Clarendon Press: "Epicedia Oxoniensia in obitum celsissimi et desideratissimi Frederici Principis Walliae." Here an {277} obsequious vice-chancellor displayed all the splendors of a tinsel Latinity in the affectation of offering a despairing king and father such consolations for his loss as the Oxonian Muses might offer. Here Lord Viscount Stormont, in desperate imitation of Milton, did ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume II (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... Tamerhamer's little place. That tawny sovereign had insulted the French, but it was difficult for them to define the nature of the offence. However, they claimed the right to mount guard, if only to the end of getting a better foot-hold. Poor, hapless sovereign! she thought more of her tinsel than the French did of her rights: thus the small difficulty. Frenchmen are clever fellows in a small way, have very pliable ideas, which they can change with wondrous celerity; they aim to do good, if, through their eccentricities, they too often ...
— The Adventures of My Cousin Smooth • Timothy Templeton
... envy and admiration of all beholders. Sometimes the tall felt chimney-pot is graced by a large feather which has done duty in the turban of a dowager thirty years ago in England. The addition of a little gold tinsel to the coat collar is of considerable consequence, but the presence of a nether garment is not at all requisite to the completeness of the general get-up. For this most ridiculous-looking costume a Blackfeet chief will readily exchange his beautifully-dressed deerskin Indian ...
— The Great Lone Land - A Narrative of Travel and Adventure in the North-West of America • W. F. Butler
... tree occupied the spot where the pulpit and the minister's chair usually held sway. The tree was likewise adorned with silver paper and tinsel, and pink and white tarlatan in the shape of plump stockings filled with candy and nuts. Each of the little girls was to have one of these, and each boy a candy cane. These also hung in red and white striped ...
— Chicken Little Jane • Lily Munsell Ritchie
... in fancy at the faces blending there—the old man's and the boy's—and, with the nimbus of the smoke-wreaths round the brows, the gilding of the firelight on cheek and chin, and the rapt and far-off gazings of the eyes of both, why, but for the silver tinsel of the beard of one and the dusky elf-locks of the other, the faces seem ...
— Complete Works of James Whitcomb Riley • James Whitcomb Riley
... extravagantly fond of dress; a stranger would take Montreal to be a city inhabited by none but the rich and idle: they are all finely powdered, walk with their hats under their arms, and wear long coats, adorned with tinsel lace, and buttoned down to the extremity. Since I came here, I have not seen one man dressed like a tradesman. The ladies in general are handsome, ...
— The Olden Time Series: Vol. 2: The Days of the Spinning-Wheel in New England • Various
... with wondering eyes. Such magnificence and wealth as was displayed in this palace was more than he had ever dreamed of, and he could scarcely believe that all the gorgeous glitter was real and not tinsel. ...
— Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz • L. Frank Baum.
... not vanished: our work, behold, it remains, or the want of it remains;—for endless Times and Eternities, remains; and that is now the sole question with us forevermore! Brief brawling Day, with its noisy phantasms, its poor paper-crowns tinsel-gilt, is gone; and divine everlasting Night, with her star-diadems, with her silences and her veracities, is come! What hast thou done, and how? Happiness, unhappiness: all that was but the wages thou hadst; thou hast ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... piercing, and yet humble, which divines so well the hidden thoughts and secrets of the heart, and brings them all into the sacred bondage of love to God and man, how good and delightful a thing it is! Everything in it is smooth, even well put together, well thought out, but no display, no tinsel, no worldly ornaments of style. The moralist forgets himself and in us appeals only to the conscience. He becomes a confessor, ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... traditions of things. He is not led away by the cry of the mob, and the gleam of gold so pure and solid almost changes into indignation our regret that he has ever suffered himself to be deceived by the glare of tawdry tinsel. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... women passed, but they, also, were of the night, gaudily bedecked in tinsel and glittering finery that would have been fustian by day to the least discriminating eye. Respectability was not abroad in Ascalon by night. With the last gleam of day it ...
— Trail's End • George W. Ogden
... very sweet and juvenile and innocent and pretty about these little tinsel vanities, these grave apings of monarchical fuss and feathers and ceremony, here on our ostentatiously democratic soil. She is the same lady that we found in the Autobiography, who was so naively vain of all that little ancestral military riffraff that she had dug up and annexed. A person's ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... 'I suppose tinsel or gold depends on the using,' said he, thoughtfully; 'there are some lumps of solid gold among those papers, I am sure, one, in particular, about a trifle. May I see that ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the eyes; hence, ophthalmia is rather prevalent at Malta. Never was there a place so priest-ridden and superstitious; everywhere in the streets, under the lamps at the corners, within niches cut in the walls, you see some painted image of a saint, bedizened with jewels, silver and gold and tinsel, grandly painted and decorated—the objects of abject adoration to the benighted poor people and other passers-by. Indeed, of late years some very serious disturbances have occurred at Malta, because our soldiers ...
— Fair Italy, the Riviera and Monte Carlo • W. Cope Devereux
... hopes and dreams. I say a child's heart, Chapman, and that phrase Crowns, not dis-crowns, his manhood. Well—he turned An honest penny, taking some small part In plays at the Red Bull. And, all the while, Beyond the paint and tinsel of the stage, Beyond the greasy cock-pit with its reek Of orange-peel and civet, as all of these Were but the clay churned by the glorious rush Of his white chariots and his burning steeds, Nay, as the clay were a shadow, his great dreams, Like bannered ...
— Collected Poems - Volume Two (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... illustration again, lighted up like a great transparency, the focus for a thousand eyes. For on the dais of the barge, in the place of honour nearest the idols, stood three women and a child. The women were swathed in fold upon fold of rich violet silk, sprinkled all over with tinsel and gold; they were crowned with white flowers, wreathed round a golden ornament like a full moon set in their dark hair; and the effect of the whole, seen in the luminous flush of colour thrown upon them from the shore, was as if the night sky sparkling with stars had come down ...
— Lotus Buds • Amy Carmichael
... it; and much peace of mind it gave him!' answered Lancelot. 'I have grown sick lately of such dreary tinsel abstractions. When you look through the glitter of the words, your "spirit of beauty" simply means certain shapes and colours which please you in beautiful things and ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... from the men and women in whose eyes he was always haloed by a crown of thousand-rouble pieces. To-day, how different his estate! He saw his world now with the eyes of the outsider. And what a thing it was!—This stolid dummy, from which both tinsel robe and leering mask had now been stripped for him, exposing the brutal, heartless machine that had taken such delight in ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... story illustrative of this altered manner and matter of preaching. He had been preaching when very young, at Galashiels, and one wife said to her "neebor," "Jean, what think ye o' the lad?" "It's maist o't tinsel wark," said Jean, neither relishing nor appreciating his fine sentiments and figures. After my mother's death, he preached in the same place, and Jean, running to her friend, took the first word, "It's ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... certain propositions of the orator, and among others at one concerning justification by faith alone in Christ—an old error, which, for many ages, has been trailed along in all the writings of heretics; often dead and resuscitated—and which Calvin, in Cop's discourse, dressed out in tinsel in order to give it some appearance of novelty. But our Franciscans had sight and hearing equally as good; they detected the heresy easily, and denounced to the parliament the evil-sounding propositions, which they had taken pains to note down ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various
... Tonight the contrast between Yokohama, with its pitiful western vulgarity obtruding at every turn, and the quiet beauty of his surroundings struck Craven even more sharply than usual. It seemed impossible that only two miles away was Theatre Street blazing and rioting with all its tinsel tawdriness, flaring lights and whining gramophones. Here was another world—and here he had found more continuous contentment than he had known in the last ten years. The garden was an old one, planned by a master hand. By day it was lovely, but by night ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull
... their places at the tables, and the stretchers were placed in a row two deep up the whole length of the room. In the middle of it stood an altar, covered with silver tinsel, and two priests in tinsel and gold stood beside it. Upon it was the sacred ikon, and the everlasting Mother and Child smiled down at the men laid in helplessness and weakness ...
— My War Experiences in Two Continents • Sarah Macnaughtan
... do a thing for Christmas this year," she declared, as nearly everybody in the village had intermittently declared, "not a living, breathing thing. I can't, and folks might just as well know it, flat foot. What's the use of buying tinsel and flim-flam when you're eating milk gravy to save butter and using salt sacks for handkerchiefs? I ain't educated up ...
— Christmas - A Story • Zona Gale
... willing to forsake the thoughtful soberness of antique oak-panelling for the tinsel of Venetian gold and the richness of Genoa velvet, Florentine tapestry, and Persian arras? If so, we will ascend to the drawing-rooms and gallery. But stay a moment and permit this lady and oddly-dressed gentleman to pass us on their exit ...
— A Walk from London to Fulham • Thomas Crofton Croker
... the scant, indifferent affairs that most of the neighbors found acceptable strung with a few strands of dingy popcorn and pasteboard ornaments. No, the Robson tree was always an opulent work of art, freighted with bursting cornucopias and heavy glass balls and yards of quivering tinsel. The money for all this dazzling beauty usually came a fortnight or so before the eventful day in the shape of a ten-dollar bill tucked away in the folds of Gertrude Sinclair's annual letter to Mrs. ...
— The Blood Red Dawn • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... respectfully as I could, but my words failed me-a misfortune not too common to me, who am apt to say too much, not too little! Perhaps it is that very quality which your ladyship calls wit, and I call tinsel, for which I dread being praised. I wish to recommend myself to you by more essential merits-and if I can only make you laugh, it will be very apt to make me as much concerned as I was yesterday. For people to whose approbation I am indifferent, I don't care whether they commend or condemn ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... account of the other confessions (except one), tinsel or tawdry fragments from the drift-wood of life, that were offered blithely by three or four members of the gay company. We are concerned with Penelope's confession, and with this only as it leads up to subsequent developments of the evening. There ...
— Possessed • Cleveland Moffett
... ever was before. Their work has been wrought in a spirit of serious truthfulness, which in itself places the Oberammergau stage in a class by itself, above and beyond all other theaters. Everything is real, and stands for what it is. Kings and priests are dressed, not in flimsy tinsel, but in garments such as real kings and priests may have worn. And so no artificial light or glare of fireworks is needed to make these costumes effective. And this genuineness enables these simple players to produce effects which the richest theaters would scarcely dare to ...
— The Story of the Innumerable Company, and Other Sketches • David Starr Jordan
... you unfledged Guy Fawkes. I know nothing would give you greater joy than to put on a mask, grasp a dagger in your hand, and go to Wesley, crying, 'Villain, your secret or your life!' Dick, you're a stage hero; you're a thing of sawdust and tinsel. Come to the parlor and hear Kate play the divine songs of Mendelssohn; perhaps, night-eyed conspirator, to whirl Polly or Miss Rosa in the delirium ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... leg, and luxury on the fantastic toe—the wasted mind and famished visage beside hoyden mirth and bloated luxury. Then the South American Mining Association Deed "lies for signature:"—what a relief in this sheet of chiaro-scuro—a kind of tinsel to set off its grave parts, with gold dust enough to blind half its readers. To this little flash of golden light succeeds shade—Chancery and creditors' notices—proving debts and consciences—followed by civil contracts for Bridewell and building a Lunatic Asylum in Kent. The association is too ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 13, - Issue 368, May 2, 1829 • Various
... Anglo-Indians, she prided herself on keeping airily apart from the country of her exile. Natives gave her 'the creeps.' Useless to argue. Her retort was unvarying and unanswerable. "East is East—and I'm not. It's a country of horrors, under a thin layer of tinsel. Don't talk to me——!" Lance Desmond had achieved fame among the subalterns by christening her the Banter-Wrangle; but he liked her well enough, on the whole, to hope she would never find ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... And the Carpathian wizard's hook, [Footnote: Proteus] By scaly Triton's winding shell, And old soothsaying Glaucus' spell, By Leucothea's lovely hands, And her son who rules the strands. By Thetis' tinsel-slippered feet, And the songs ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... whether of landscape or of architecture, the panoply of war, or the luxury of royal courts. That is fun—pleasure and amusement. No; the real work of the stage lies in the creation of a character. A great character will live forever, when paint and canvas and silks and satins and gold foil and tinsel shall have gone the way of ...
— [19th Century Actor] Autobiographies • George Iles
... end. Denmark was a small nation, and moreover was left utterly unsupported by the European powers who had guaranteed her integrity. Bavaria was frightened, and will be frightened again when her hot fit gives way to her cold fit. France was divided and half-hearted under a tinsel emperor. It is Germany's misfortune that on these three special cases she based a general doctrine of war. A very little knowledge of human nature—a knowledge so alien to her that she calls it psychology and assigns it ...
— England and the War • Walter Raleigh
... and behaving with admirable propriety, no sign of opium about him anywhere. One element that they introduced was Colour. Our modern Fairs are not very strong in the element of Colour. It is true that one of the roundabouts was ablaze with gilt and tinsel, and in the centre of it, whence comes the music, there were women with brazen faces and bosoms of gold. It is true also that outside the Circus and the Fat Sisters and Battling Edwardes there were flaming pictures with reds and yellows thrown about like ...
— The Cathedral • Hugh Walpole
... peevish, repining race of beings, who, possessing themselves but a scanty portion of happiness, are supposed to envy mankind their more complete and substantial enjoyments. They are supposed to enjoy, in their subterraneous recesses, a sort of shadowy happiness,—a tinsel grandeur; which, however, they would willingly exchange for the more ...
— The Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... of one side flew over the enemy's territory diligently mapping out his trenches, observing the movements of his troops, or indicating, by dropping bunches of tinsel for the sun to shine upon or breaking smoke bombs, the position of his hidden battery, the foe thus menaced sought to drive them away with anti-aircraft guns. These proved to be ineffective and it may ...
— Aircraft and Submarines - The Story of the Invention, Development, and Present-Day - Uses of War's Newest Weapons • Willis J. Abbot
... Bertram, indeed, had come to assume a vastly different aspect from what it had displayed in times past. Heretofore it had been a plaything which like a juggler's tinsel ball might be tossed from hand to hand at will. Now it was no plaything—no glittering bauble. It was something big and serious and splendid—because Billy lived in it; something that demanded all ...
— Miss Billy • Eleanor H. Porter
... of ceremony is a funeral without a legacy; an assembly is a mob, and a ball a compound of glare, tinsel, noise, and dust. However amusing in their freshness, after a few repetitions, they are only rendered endurable by the prospect of some collateral gain, or the gratification of personal vanity. To exhibit the beauty of a young ...
— The Mirror, 1828.07.05, Issue No. 321 - The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction • Various
... immense amount of popularity if I had gone in for a crescendo of anti-clericalism after the Vie de Jesus. The general reader likes a strong style. I could easily have left in the flourishes and tinsel phrases which excite the enthusiasm of those whose taste is not of a very elevated kind, that is to say, of the majority. I spent a year in toning down the style of the Vie de Jesus, as I thought that such a subject could not be treated too soberly or too simply. And we know ...
— Recollections of My Youth • Ernest Renan
... had veneration for titles. She considered them a tinsel, and the devotee on his knee-caps to them a lump for a kick. Adding: 'Of course I stand for my class; and if we can't have a manlier people—and it 's not likely in a country treating my brother so badly—well, then, let things go on as they are.' But it was the pretension to a part in the name of ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... editors. There was a market for the best, and the problem was to supply it. At first I bound my books in paper covers and simple boards. Men wrote to me wanting fine bindings. I said, "There is a market in America for the best—cheap boards, covered with cloth, stamped by machinery in gaudy tinsel and gilt, are not enough." I discovered that nearly all the bookbinders were dead. I found five hundred people in a book-factory in Chicago binding books, but not a bookbinder among them. They simply fed the books into hoppers and shot them out ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... the supreme honor of settling for all time the secret of this most poetic river of mystery. Long ere this he had been honored with a gold medal from the Royal Geographical Society. How futile must the bit of metal have seemed to this dark, silent man, whose mind had grown away from bauble and tinsel, and who had learned in the silences the real value of the trinkets ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... la Roche-Guyon and M. de Liancourt, sons of La Rochefoucauld, who expressed themselves with the same boldness, went so far as to say of their ruler that he was but a stage and tinsel king. The son-in-law of Louvois accused him of being most courageous in his gallery, but of turning pale on the eve, and at the moment, of an action; and D'Alincourt, son of Villeroi, carried his outrages further still. No one knows better than myself how unjust these accusations were, ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... all its display, all its tinsel, all its Jesuitism, all its bad taste, San Sebastian will become an important, dignified city within a very few years. When that time comes, the author who has been born there, will not prefer to hail from some hamlet buried in the mountains, rather than from the capital of Guipuzcoa. But ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja
... the door between them. Lap-robes were hung over the windows, and soon a gorgeous figure of Santa Claus was smiling down from the very tiptop of the tree. With her flushed face, eager eyes, and golden hair the busy marquise looked like its patron saint. Ropes of gold and silver tinsel were swiftly draped around and up and down; enmeshed in these were little red Santas, gayly colored paper horns filled with candy, colored balls, white and yellow birds, little colored candles with holders to match, and other glittering things; while over the whole tree a glistening powder was ...
— In Happy Valley • John Fox
... did, like the true and faithful friend you are. You helped and guided and found grains of gold, where others saw mostly nonsense, and perhaps half a screw loose. While I was straying in search of the spiritual tinsel, with which the esprits forts of the age were glittering, you taught me, and impressed upon me, again and again, that I had to seek in myself for whatever I might possess of sentiment and simplicity—and that it was out of this I would ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... countries where beasts of chase are found in great abundance; sell your land to us, and go to live happily in those solitudes." After holding this language, they spread before the eyes of the Indians fire-arms, woollen garments, kegs of brandy, glass necklaces, bracelets of tinsel, ear-rings, and looking-glasses.[214] If, when they have beheld all these riches, they still hesitate, it is insinuated that they have not the means of refusing their required consent, and that the government itself will not long have the power of protecting them in their rights. What ...
— American Institutions and Their Influence • Alexis de Tocqueville et al
... evening we lit up, and it was very good. Mr. Vanderbilt and his wife and some of his daughters came in, and were there a few minutes when a fire occurred. The large picture-gallery was lined with silk cloth interwoven with fine metallic thread. In some manner two wires had got crossed with this tinsel, which became red-hot, and the whole mass was soon afire. I knew what was the matter, and ordered them to run down and shut off. It had not burst into flame, and died out immediately. Mrs. Vanderbilt became hysterical, and wanted to know where it came from. We told her we had the plant ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... and thither on business had to dismount and kneel in obeisance, and farmers, instead of cultivating the fields, had to act as bearers of the dogs' sedan-chairs. Thus, the city of Kamakura presented the curious spectacle of a town filled with well-fed dogs, clothed in tinsel and brocades, and totalling from four to five thousand. Twelve days in every month used to be devoted to dog-fights, and on these occasions, the regent, the nobles, and the people inside and outside the mansion used to ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... all one mighty eye, Behind the living captives came the dead, Poor noseless gods, and some without a head, With pictures, ivory images and plumes, And priceless tapestry from palace-looms; Ev'n such, although Night's alchymy no more The crinkling tinsel turns to precious ore, Appears the pomp of this discarded race, As heaped with spoil they quit their ancient place, Bearing their Lares with them as they go— Two dusty statues and a bust or so; With mail which once a Harry Fifth had on, Triumphal ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, January 1844 - Volume 23, Number 1 • Various
... of the ship, and the water soon washing off the paint, reduced them to the appearance of shapeless logs. There were still several cases of crucifixes of all sizes, having the appearance of silver but were found to be of iron, covered with the thinnest tinsel. The priests pleaded hard to have ...
— Villegagnon - A Tale of the Huguenot Persecution • W.H.G. Kingston
... them was sufficiently brilliant to dazzle their eyes for a moment. In one corner of the dining room stood the great tree, radiant with gilt and silver ornaments. At the top was a huge silver star, while the branches were wound with glittering tinsel, and heavily laden with beribboned bundles of all shapes and sizes, while the space around the base of the tree was ...
— Grace Harlowe's Senior Year at High School - or The Parting of the Ways • Jessie Graham Flower |
