"Carven" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Millicent, I believe I don't care. That carven block of stone has had a curious effect upon me. It has made me think as I have never done before. I want to take the clearest picture away ...
— His Hour • Elinor Glyn
... was scrubbed and furbished in the living chambers, the ancient silver was exhumed from mildewed cupboards, the heavy oil-paintings were dusted, a lively canary in a bright cage was hung on a marble pillar of the dining-room, over the carven angels; flowers were brought in, and at night, in the soft light of the candles, the traces of year-long neglect being subdued and hidden, a spirit of festivity and gaiety pervaded the house as of natural wont, while the Moorish attendant's ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... of the orchard, near the dusty highway, under a huge misshapen olive tree sat a boy, still as a carven Buddha save that his eyes stood wide, full of dreams. His was a sensitive face, thoughtful beyond his childish years, full of weariness when from time to time he closed his eyes, full of dark brooding when the lids lifted again. ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... to and fro sounded insolently obtrusive in such a stillness. Gherardi abstractedly raised his eyes to a great ivory crucifix which was displayed upon the wall against a background of rich purple velvet,—Manuel was standing immediately in front of it, and the tortured head of the carven Christ drooped over him as though in a sorrow-stricken benediction. A dull anger began to irritate Gherardi's usually well-tempered nerves, and he was searching in his mind for some scathing sentence wherewith to overwhelm and reprove the confident ease of the boy, when the door leading to the Pope's ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... on, the guests practising their gluttonies and their absurdities, and the guards standing to their arms round the circuit of the walls as motionless and as stern as the statues carven in the white stone beyond them. But a term was put to the orgy with something of suddenness. There was a stir at the farther doorway of the banqueting-hall, and a clash, as two of the guards joined their spears across the entrance. ...
— The Lost Continent • C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne
... gather the rose that blossomed in his path, a golden flower scentless and stiff was all he grasped. When he called to him the carrier-dove that sped with a scroll of love words across the mountains, the bird sank on his breast a carven piece of metal. When he was athirst and shouted to his cupbearer for drink, the red wine ran a stream of molten gold. When he would fain have eaten, the pulse and the pomegranate grew alike to gold between his teeth. And lo! at eventide, ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... Friar Laurence, who testified that he had often seen old Hanne instructing the young woman who was now a prisoner in the art of drugs, in the preparation of images carven in dough—and it might be also in clay—things well known in the art ...
— Red Axe • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... see again the hall; The stairway leading to that room.—Then all The terror of that night of blood and crime Passes before me.— It is Catherine's time: The house De Herancour's. On floors, splashed red, Torchlight of Medicean wrath is shed. Down carven corridors and rooms,—where couch And chairs lie shattered and black shadows crouch Torch-pierced with fear,—a sound of swords draws near— The stir of searching steel. What find they here, Torch-bearer, swordsman, and fierce halberdier, ...
— Poems • Madison Cawein
... great hall there stood a vacant chair, Fashion'd by Merlin ere he past away, And carven with strange figures; and in and out The figures, like a serpent, ran a scroll Of letters in a tongue no man could read And Merlin call'd it 'The Siege perilous,' Perilous for good and ill; 'for there,' he said, 'No man could sit but he should ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... it with grass and mosses. And from the door of the hut he had formed likewise a path strewn thick with jagged stones and sharp flints, a cruel track, the which, winding away through the green, led to where upon a gentle eminence stood a wooden cross most artfully wrought and carven by the hermit's ...
— Beltane The Smith • Jeffery Farnol
... and five in the morning, about when grandfather would be getting up by candle-light to start the kitchen fire for mother, and then go out and fodder the cattle. They'd be home in time to wake the three younger children (young Steve was the eldest of a family of four), and to add certain little carven products of the woodsman's whittling—ingenious wooden toys, and tiny elaborate boxes, filled with choicest globules of spruce gum—to the few poor Christmas gifts which the resourceful and busy little mother had managed to get together against the festival. As they talked these things ...
— The Watchers of the Trails - A Book of Animal Life • Charles G. D. Roberts
... I wish him alive again, Lying so peacefully, placidly still, With that carven smile on his marble face. How can I pray that his heart should thrill To waking and waking's pain? Lying so peacefully, placidly still. With the old, sweet smile on his quiet face, Dead to the sting of a heart's disgrace.... How should I wish him a lesser grace, How should ...
— The Path of Dreams - Poems • Leigh Gordon Giltner
... or but little; of such dimensions was your hatred and of such monstrous growth. You did not realise that there was no room for both passions in the same soul: they cannot live together in that fair carven house. Love is fed by the imagination, by which we become wiser than we know, better than we feel, nobler than we are; by which we can see life as a whole; by which and by which alone, we can understand others in their real as in their ideal relations. Only what is fine, and finely conceived, ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 2 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... would live long and make your peace with God. Hearken to me; I am a scholar, a Bachelor. To-day the holy relics will be borne through the streets and crossways of the city. You will find great solace in touching the carven shrines which enclose the cornelian cup wherefrom the child Jesus drank, one of the wine-jars of the Marriage at Cana, the cloth of the Last Supper, and the holy foreskin. If you take my advice, we will go wait for them, under cover, at a cookshop I wot of, before which ...
— The Merrie Tales Of Jacques Tournebroche - 1909 • Anatole France
... swarming in through the wide gateway and doorway by dozens. While they still leaned over the balustrade, Marguerite, one of their pupils, a blue-eyed blonde girl of lovely complexion, with red, voluptuous lips, and beautiful hair held by a carven shell comb, came and bent over the balustrade with them. Suddenly her comb slipped from its hold, flashed downward, and striking the marble pavement flew into pieces at the feet of the men who were about to ascend. Several of ...
— Strange True Stories of Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... struck by the unusual form of the sermon, remained silent and motionless, waiting. In his stall sat the rector with downcast eyes. Malling could not at that moment discern his expression. His large figure and important powerful head and face showed almost like those of a carven effigy in the lowered light of the chancel. The choirboys did not stir, and the small, fair man in the pulpit, raising his thin hands, and resting them on the marble ledge, continued quietly, taking up his sermon with a repetition of the last words uttered, "whose footprints ...
— The Dweller on the Threshold • Robert Smythe Hichens
... her heavy, compactly crouched figure, wound about with Eastern stuffs and glistening with gold, recall the images we are accustomed to associate with the worship of Vishnu. Her face, too, so far as it was visible in the subdued light, had the unresponsiveness of carven wood, and if not exactly hideous of feature, had in it a strange and haunting quality calculated to impress a sensitive mind with a sense of implacable fate. Cruel, hard, passionless, and yet threatening to a degree, must this countenance have seemed to those who willingly ...
— The Bronze Hand - 1897 • Anna Katharine Green (Mrs. Charles Rohlfs)
... a little minute, I did see it again; but whether it did be the shape of some utter monster of eternity—even as the Watchers about the Mighty Pyramid—or whether it did be no more than a carven mountain of rock, shaped unto the dire picturing of a Monster, I did have no knowing. But I made that I should get hence very quick, and I did turn me about in the bushes, and went upon my hands and knees; and so came at last a great ...
— The Night Land • William Hope Hodgson
... palace of the King In Lacedaemon, was there revelry, Since Menelaus with the dawn did spring Forth from his carven couch, and, climbing high The tower of outlook, gazed along the dry White road that runs to Pylos through the plain, And mark'd thin clouds of dust against the sky, And gleaming bronze, and ...
— Helen of Troy • Andrew Lang
... inexplicable and rare—something of a maidenly composure and sweet dignity that I had never beheld on any woman's face before. Her cheeks flushed softly as she modestly returned my salute, and when she was once outside the church door she paused, her small white fingers still clasping the carven brown beads of her rosary. She hesitated a moment, and then spoke ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... Horn. Now take from me this carven ring of gold. On it is wrought: 'Be true to Rimenhild.' Wear it always on your finger, for my love's sake. The stone in it has such grace that never need you fear any wound nor shrink from any combat, if you do but wear this ring, and look ...
— The Junior Classics, V4 • Willam Patten (Editor)
... silver-inlaid kris, with its carven handle of bone, and it was indeed a trophy worth carrying home. At mess that evening Bob's father announced his desire to take Joe Swanson with him on his initial hunting-trip, at which the burly mate was no ...
— The Pirate Shark • Elliott Whitney
... eaten and drunk sufficiently, the venerable chief waved his hands, and the remains of the food and drink were taken away. Then Gray Beaver drew from beneath his robe a beautifully ornamented pipe, with a curved horn stem and a carven bowl. He pressed into the bowl a mixture of tobacco and aromatic herbs, which he also drew from beneath his robe, and lighted it with a coal which one of the chiefs brought from the fire. Then he ...
— The Forest Runners - A Story of the Great War Trail in Early Kentucky • Joseph A. Altsheler
... said Nicholas, a little reminiscent smile dawning in his eyes. It had an oddly softening effect upon his rather carven face. For the moment he ...
— Antony Gray,—Gardener • Leslie Moore
... half crouching, the long Arab knife glistening in the moonlight. Behind him the tense figure of the girl, motionless as a carven statue. She leaned slightly forward, her lips parted, her eyes wide. Her only conscious thought was wonder at the bravery of the man who dared face with a puny knife the lord with the large head. A man ...
— The Return of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... carven in on a ground Of that shadowy hair where the roses are wound; And the gleam of a smile O as fair and as faint And as sweet as the masters of old used to paint Round the lips of their ...
— Riley Love-Lyrics • James Whitcomb Riley
... wear two," says Patteson, "one at your girdle, and one that nobody sees. We alle wear the unseen one, you know. Some have theirs of gold, alle carven and shaped, soe as you hardlie tell it for a cross ... like my lord cardinall, for instance ... but it is one, for alle that. And others, of iron, that eateth into their hearts ... methinketh Master Roper's must be one of 'em. For me, I'm content with one of wood, like ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... on the borders of the great mosses of Ingvar's lands. But there were many more folk in this land than in ours, and I thought that they were ill off in many ways. In those days of hunting, Ingvar, seeing me ride with the carven spear that was partly his gift, and with Lodbrok's hawk on my wrist, would speak more often with me, though now and again some chance word of mine spoken in the way of my own folk would seem to turn him gloomy and sullen, so that he would spur his horse and leave me. But Hubba ...
— Wulfric the Weapon Thane • Charles W. Whistler
... considered too good or too costly or too wondrous for this House of God and Home of Man. The sculptors, who since the destruction of the Roman Empire have been out of employment, haltingly return to their noble art. Portals and pillars and buttresses and cornices are all covered with carven images of Our Lord and the blessed Saints. The embroiderers too are set to work to make tapestries for the walls. The jewellers offer their highest art that the shrine of the altar may be worthy of complete adoration. Even the painter does his best. Poor man, he ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... walks to the balustrade, Idly notes how the blossoms fade In the sun's caress; then crosses where The shadow shelters a carven chair. Within its curve, supine she lies, And wearily closes her tired eyes. The minstrel beseeches his silver strings, And holding the lady spellbound, sings: — Down the road to Avignon, The long, ...
— A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass • Amy Lowell
... for a great feast in honor of my two daughters.' And when the northern tribes got this invitation they flocked down the coast to this feast of a Great Peace. They brought their women and their children: they brought game and fish, gold and white stone beads, baskets and carven ladles, and wonderful woven blankets to lay at the feet of their now acknowledged ruler, the great Tyee. And he, in turn, gave such a potlatch that nothing but tradition can vie with it. There were long, glad days of joyousness, long pleasurable nights ...
— Legends of Vancouver • E. Pauline Johnson
... the frowning walls, to right and left, were spiral, slender pillars, gilded and gleaming. They supported an archwork of fancifully carven wood, which curved gently outward to the center of the ceiling, forming, by conjunction with a similar, opposite ...
— The Yellow Claw • Sax Rohmer
... the slender pillars supporting upon the corroded sculpture of their capitals a clinging vine, that dappled the floor with palpitant light and shadow in the afternoon sun. The gate, whose exquisite Saracenic arch grew into a carven flame, was surmounted by the armorial bearings of a family that died of its sins against the Serenest Republic long ago; the marble cistern which stood in the middle of the court had still a ducal rose upon either of its four sides; and little lions of stone perched upon the posts at the head of ...
— A Fearful Responsibility and Other Stories • William D. Howells
... he sat like a carven thing on his haunches. Then the wind shifted, and the scent grew less and less, until it was ...
— The Grizzly King • James Oliver Curwood
... 1869.) speaks of it as, "perhaps the purest expres- sion of the belle Renaissance francaise." "Its height," he goes on, "is divided between two stories, terminat- ing under the roof in a projecting entablature which imitates a row of machicolations. Carven chimneys and tall dormer windows, covered with imagery, rise from the roofs; turrets on brackets, of elegant shape, hang with the greatest lightness from the angles of the building. The soberness of the main lines, the harmony of the empty spaces and those that are filled out, ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... a golden morning of the spring, My cheek is pale, and hers is warm with bloom, And we are left in that old carven room, And she ...
— Books and Habits from the Lectures of Lafcadio Hearn • Lafcadio Hearn
... parts of words remain on the broken stone, and the date is gone. Though after the death of her husband, Sir William Berkeley, this lady became Mrs. Philip Ludwell, yet she clung to the greater name and insisted that her long sleep should be under its carven pomp. ...
— Virginia: The Old Dominion • Frank W. Hutchins and Cortelle Hutchins
... and looked it over with real admiration. It was a flimsily beautiful and costly thing; whose ivory handle was deftly carven and set with several uncut stones; and whose deep fringe of lace was ...
— Further Adventures of Lad • Albert Payson Terhune
... divides and betrays. Beware of that danger. Do not imagine, because you are gathered in this queerly beautiful old building today, because I preside here in this odd raiment of an odder compromise, because you see about you in coloured glass and carven stone the emblems of much vain disputation, that thereby you cut yourselves off and come apart from the great world of faith, Catholic, Islamic, Brahministic, Buddhistic, that grows now to a common consciousness of the near Advent of God our King. You enter that waiting world fraternity ...
— Soul of a Bishop • H. G. Wells
... are displayed here and there by persons of a pleasantly bizarre turn of mind: canes encased in the hide of an elephant's tail, canes that have been intricately carven by some Robinson Crusoe, or canes of various other such species of curiosity. There is a veteran New York journalist who will be glad to show any student of canes one which he prizes highly that was made ...
— Walking-Stick Papers • Robert Cortes Holliday
... look intently at Jeff, dreaming that some shadowy recognition of this former friend had passed across that broken mind—but the head, pale, carven, would only move slowly in its sole gesture toward the light as if something behind the blind eyes were groping for another light long ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... all these affairs. In a mediaeval town every house was different, in a mediaeval cathedral no two pillars were alike, and in the dress of a mediaeval crowd was captured the colours of the rainbow. With an odd result. Men laughed at the devil in the freedom of their souls. They tweaked his tail on carven misericords, and in the mystery play he was invariably ...
— Nonsenseorship • G. G. Putnam
... the list. I cannot do more than attempt to describe—and that very briefly—a few of the typical old houses. On this same Pleasant Street there are several which we must leave unnoted, with their spacious halls and carven staircases, their antiquated furniture and old silver tankards and choice Copleys. Numerous examples of this artist's best manner are to be found here. To live in Portsmouth without possessing a family portrait done by Copley is like living ...
— An Old Town By The Sea • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... within it is a dream and a delight. A Norman nave of round, red stone piers and arches, a delicate choir of the richest flamboyant, a High Altar of the time of Francis I., form only the mellow background and frame for carven tombs and dark old pictures, hanging lamps of iron and brass, and black, heavily carved choir-stalls of ...
— Black Spirits and White - A Book of Ghost Stories • Ralph Adams Cram
... by love exalted, change to man indeed and I—mount up to heaven—thus!" So saying, Jocelyn began to climb by gnarled ivy and carven buttress. And ever as he mounted she watched him through the silken curtain of her hair, wide of ...
— The Geste of Duke Jocelyn • Jeffery Farnol
... with the smell of tar and the loading of the innumerable and fascinating materials of life; and many a journey they must have made on the calm waters of Cadiz harbour from ship to ship, dreaming of the distant seas that these high, quaintly carven prows would soon be treading, and the wonderful bays and harbours far away across the world into the waters of which their ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young
... sun-shaded by huge cedar-trees, The layered branches horizontal stretched, like Japanese Dark-banded prints. Carven cathedrals, on a sky Of faintest colour, where the gothic spires fly And sway like ...
— Sword Blades and Poppy Seed • Amy Lowell
... darkness, Sheard began to see more clearly the objects about him. A seated figure of the Pharaoh Seti I. surveyed him with a scorn but thinly veiled; beyond, two towering Assyrian bulls showed gigantic in the semi-light. He could discern, now, the whole length of the lofty hall—a carven avenue; and, as his gaze wandered along that dim vista, he detected a black shape emerging from the ...
— The Sins of Severac Bablon • Sax Rohmer
... beauty blown. Solemn and invented gravely In its bulk the fabric stood, Even as Love, that trusteth bravely In its own exceeding good To be better than the waste Of time's devices; grandly spaced, Seriously the fabric stood. But over it all a pleasure went Of carven delicate ornament, Wreathing up like ravishment, Mentioning in sculptures twined The blitheness Love hath in his mind; And like delighted senses were The windows, and the columns there Made the following sight to ache ...
— Emblems Of Love • Lascelles Abercrombie
... carven stuff; Some sneer, but others smile and buy; And these light smiles are quite enough To make the wistful ...
— Ionica • William Cory (AKA William Johnson)
... is not dead, she breathes! And we have staunched the damned wound and deep, The cavern-carven wound. She doth but sleep And will awake. Bring wine, and new-wound wreaths Wherewith to crown awaking her dear head, And make her Queen again."—But no, ...
— A Treasury of War Poetry - British and American Poems of the World War 1914-1917 • Edited, with Introduction and Notes, by George Herbert Clarke
... our littleness in their sombre splendour. This was so even in the sunshine, but when the storm-clouds gathered on her imperial brow Milosis looked more like a supernatural dwelling-place, or some imagining of a poet's brain, than what she is — a mortal city, carven by the patient genius of generations out of the red ...
— Allan Quatermain • by H. Rider Haggard
... the low hall that extended north and south three hundred feet in either direction from the base of the great tower; he would note the artistry of the iron-braced, oaken doors, flanked at the lintels by inscrutable faces of carven stone, of the windows with their diamonded panes of milky glass peeping through a wilderness of encroaching vines. Nor would this be all. Had he ever viewed the quadrangles of Oxford and Cambridge, ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... old time coming conquering from Araby first saw her, a solitary mountain in the desert, and cut the mountain into towers and terraces. They destroyed one of the hills of God, but they made Babbulkund. She is carven, not built; her palaces are one with her terraces, there is neither join nor cleft. Hers is the beauty of the youth of the world. She deemeth herself to be the middle of Earth, and hath four gates facing outward to the Nations. There sits outside her eastern ...
— The Sword of Welleran and Other Stories • Lord Dunsany
... the terrace; paused in the arcaded garden-hall at the end of it—the carven stone benches and tables of which showed somewhat ghostly in the dimness—to put off her bonnet and push back the lace scarf from her shoulders. An increasing solemnity was upon her. There were things to think of, things deep and strange. She must needs ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... carefully to note the different means of egress, my attention was attracted by a carven shield above the main door. The arms were the same as those graven on the locket shown me by Colonel d'Ortez the night I left Biloxi. There, standing out boldly above the door, was the same sable wolf, the crest of the d'Artins. For a moment his story filled my mind again but I had no time then ...
— The Black Wolf's Breed - A Story of France in the Old World and the New, happening - in the Reign of Louis XIV • Harris Dickson
... was old and gaunt, save for a few modern soft-cushioned chairs which seemed to have been recently deposited there, and were, by the brilliant color of their coverings, not at all in harmony with the faded tapestries of their high-backed and carven predecessors. On one of the gaunt old chairs Abraham Windsor was seated, holding in his right hand the London Times, which slowly issued from a "ticker" upon the table at his side. After looking sharply at the financial ...
— The King's Men - A Tale of To-morrow • Robert Grant, John Boyle O'Reilly, J. S. Dale, and John T.
... adhered to the stone. This hall, dignified, grand, but happy, was open on all sides to the sun and air. From it I could see tamarisk- and acacia-trees, and far-off shadowy mountains beyond the eastern verge of the Nile. And the trees were still as carven things in an atmosphere that was a miracle of clearness and of purity. Behind me, and near, the hard Libyan mountains gleamed in the sun. Somewhere a boy was singing; and suddenly his singing died away. And I thought of the "Lay of the Harper" ...
— The Spell of Egypt • Robert Hichens
... accomplish by the etherization of excitement and the magnetism of crowds what is possible only in the solitary exaltations of the soul. This is the high moral of Dante's poem. We have likened it to a Christian basilica; and as in that so there is here also, painted or carven, every image of beauty and holiness the artist's mind could conceive for the adornment of the holy place. We may linger to enjoy these if we will, but if we follow the central thought that runs like the nave from entrance to choir, it leads ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... our galley from her carven steering-wheel To her figurehead of silver and her beak of hammered steel; The leg-bar chafed the ankle, and we gasped for cooler air, But no galley on the water with our galley ...
— Kipling Stories and Poems Every Child Should Know, Book II • Rudyard Kipling
... visible: 'How great Was he, our Founder! In that ample brow, What brooding weight of genius! In his eye, How strangely was the pathos edged with light! How oft, his churches roaming, flashed its beam From pillar on to pillar, resting long On carven imagery of flower or fruit, Or deep-dyed window whence the heavenly choirs Gave joy to men below! With what a zeal He drew the cunningest craftsmen from all climes To express his thoughts in form; while yet his hand, Like meanest hand among ...
— Legends of the Saxon Saints • Aubrey de Vere
... Varney lay at his ease, as quiet as a statued man. Over the bed, industriously at work, hung the keen-faced town doctor, whom Hare had gotten with a speed which passed all understanding. At the foot of the bed stood Peter Maginnis, his face like the face of a carven image. ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... the stone-paved courtyard of a ruined temple. In the centre lies a square pool, with wide rows of steps leading down to the water, now overgrown with lotus plants. Around the court rise long colonnades of pillars with grotesquely carven bases and capitals of luxuriant design. Beyond these appear green masses of dense tropical foliage, in which an ...
— Mr. Faust • Arthur Davison Ficke
... air of cunning confusion. There were tall cabinets, there were caskets and chests of exquisite lacquer and enamel, loot of an emperor's palace; robes heavy with gold; slippers studded with jewels; strange carven ivories; glittering weapons; pots, jars, and bowls, as delicate and as fragile as the petals of ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... moment Anna cowered, alarmed by what a quick glimpse of his face had shown her. She had never seen a human face so—not whitened by his fear, but greyed—greyed as if seared with fire and turned to carven ashes. She could tell, by that, that he would never, really, forgive her. Too firmly had his hopes been fixed upon the plans which he had built in many long hours of reflections going back along the years, no doubt, to that far time when she was lying, a mere babe, in her dear mother's ...
— The Old Flute-Player - A Romance of To-day • Edward Marshall and Charles T. Dazey
... Branstock and the hawks that cried on the fight! Woe's me for the tireless hearthstones and the hangings of delight, That the women dare not look on lest they see them sweat with blood! Woe's me for the carven pillars where the spears of the Volsungs stood! And who next shall shake the locks, or the silver door-rings meet? Who shall pace the floor beloved, worn down by the Volsung feet? Who shall fill the gold with the wine, or cry for the triumphing? Shall it be kindred or ...
— The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs • William Morris
... the long hall of the palace, over soft rugs and great mosaics, and between walls aglow with tints of sky and garden. These two bore with them a tender feeling as they passed the figures of embattled horse and host in carven wood, and mural painting and colored mosaic and wrought metal—symbols of the martial spirit of the empire now oddly in contrast with their own. They came out upon a peristyle overlooking an ample garden wherein were vines, ...
— Vergilius - A Tale of the Coming of Christ • Irving Bacheller
... so deftly dealing the fateful pasteboards from the box. The impatient, excited crowd facing him moved restlessly, cursing or laughing with each swift turn of play; but he who wrought the spell neither spoke nor smiled, his face remaining fixed, immutable, as emotionless as carven granite. Suddenly he glanced meaningly aside, and, nodding silently to a black-moustached fellow lounging beside the croupier, rose quickly from his chair. The other as instantly slipped into it, his hands guarding the few remaining ...
— Beth Norvell - A Romance of the West • Randall Parrish
... chain, and a small golden cylinder was revealed, curiously carven. Its lightness ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... the hall to the library. Crailey was lying on the long sofa, his eyes closed, his head like a piece of carven marble, the gay uniform, in which he had tricked himself out so gallantly, open at the throat, and his white linen stained with a few little ...
— The Two Vanrevels • Booth Tarkington
... land of the tribe was neither fish nor fruit, And the deepest pit of popoi stood empty to the foot. {2a} The clans upon the left and the clans upon the right Now oiled their carven maces and scoured their daggers bright; They gat them to the thicket, to the deepest of the shade, And lay with sleepless eyes in the deadly ambuscade. And oft in the starry even the song of morning rose, What time the oven smoked in the country of their foes; For oft to loving hearts, and ...
— Ballads • Robert Louis Stevenson
... her hand, and her fingers looked carven white in the moonlight, though by daylight they were brown. "Monsieur, you watched the star. It went into the unknown,—a way so wide and terrible that we may not follow it even in thought. We live alone with majestic forces,—forests greater than an empire, ...
— Montlivet • Alice Prescott Smith
... Italian," says Alfred Austin, "it must seem a reproach never to have had a pope in the family, and you will with difficulty find a villa of any pretension, certainly not in Frascati, where memorial tassels and tiara carven in stone over porch and doorway do not attest ...
— Romance of Roman Villas - (The Renaissance) • Elizabeth W. (Elizbeth Williams) Champney
... years ago, a carved screen that ran across the chancel arch, with the Rood upon it, and St. Mary and St. John on this side and that. The high-altar, it was remembered, had been of stone throughout, surrounded with curtains on the three sides, hanging between posts that had each a carven angel, all gilt. Now all was gone, excepting only the painted windows (since glass was costly). The chancel was as bare as a barn; beneath the whitewash, high over the place where the old canopy had hung, pale colours still glimmered through where, ...
— Come Rack! Come Rope! • Robert Hugh Benson
... that in Atli's feast-hall on the side that joined the house Were many carven doorways whose work was glorious With marble stones and gold-work, and their doors of beaten brass: Lo now, in the merry morning how the story cometh to pass! —While the echoes of the trumpet yet fill the people's ...
— Lyra Heroica - A Book of Verse for Boys • Various
... carven balconies were noisy with shrill voices. Every self-respecting house was plastered with fresh mud; every window and doorway garlanded with marigold and jasmine buds; every brain, absorbed in the paramount speculation, as to how ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... two girls crossed the room, and with a caressing and almost a reverent touch, the dark girl opened the doors of a little carven cabinet that hung upon the wall, above a small table covered with a delicate white cloth. In its depths, framed in a mat of odorous double violets, stood the photograph of the face of a handsome man of forty—a face crowned with clustering black locks, from beneath which a pair of large, ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... the roots of grass Had burst asunder all the joints; the brass, The gilded ornaments, the carven stones Lay tumbled all together ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce
... flying things, Fan-trees and dwarfed nodosities of pine, Mixed with old alphabets, and faded lore Fallen from ecstatic mouths before the Flood, Or gathered by the daughters when they walked Eastward in Eden with the Sons of God Whom love and the deep moon made garrulous. Between the carven tusks his trunk hung dead; Blind as the eyes of pearl in Buddha's brow His beaded eyes stared thwart upon the road; And feebler than the doting knees of eld, His joints, of size to swing the builder's crane Across the war-walls ...
— Gloucester Moors and Other Poems • William Vaughn Moody
... of doom are the casquets carven, That never the rivets thereof should burst. When the heart of the darkness is hunger-starven, And the throats of the gulfs are agape for thirst, And stars are as flowers that the wind bids wither, And dawn is as hope struck dead by fear, The rage of the ravenous ...
— A Midsummer Holiday and Other Poems • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... Carter, Christopher Hall, David Ellis, uxor Ellis, John Frogmorton, Robert Marshall, Thomas Snow (orig. Swnow), John Smith, Lawrance Smalpage, Thomas Crosse, Thomas Prichard, Richard Crouch, Christopher Redhead, Henry Booth, Richard Carven, uxor Carven, John Howell, William Burtt, William Stocker, Nicholas Roote, Sara Kiddall, infants { Kiddall, { Kiddall, Edward Fisher, Richard Smith, John Wolrich, Mrs. Wolrich, Johathin Giles, Christopher Ripen, Thomas Banks, Frances Butcher, Henry Daivlen, ...
— Colonial Records of Virginia • Various
... linoleum, with a big draught-board pattern in white and red, that he found in the middle of the dining-room of some temporary refuge. That is Pepin. We know him afar off by his harlequin placard sooner even than by his pale Apache face. Here is Barque's bulging chest-protector, carven from an eiderdown quilt, formerly pink, but now fantastically bleached and mottled by dust and rain. There, Lamuse the Huge rises like a ruined tower to which tattered posters still cling. A cuirass ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... high and triple-arch'd there was, All garlanded with carven imageries Of fruits, and flowers, and bunches of knot grass, And diamonded with panes of quaint device, Innumerable of stains and splendid dyes, As are the tiger-moth's deep-damask'd wings; And in ...
— A Day with Keats • May (Clarissa Gillington) Byron
... which froze every living thing they touched. The interior of the immense vault of stone in which they were was even more bitterly chill than the snow-covered plains without. Now and then a bat moved in the shadows—now and then a gleam of light came on the ranks of carven figures. Under the Rubens they lay together quite still, and soothed almost into a dreaming slumber by the numbing narcotic of the cold. Together they dreamed of the old glad days when they had chased each other through the flowering grasses of the summer meadows, or sat hidden in the tall ...
— A Dog of Flanders • Louisa de la Rame)
... any man, with sleepless care oppressed, On many a night had risen, and addressed His hand to make him out of joy and moan An image of sweet sleep in carven stone, Light touch by touch, in weary moments planned, He would have wrought her with a patient hand, Not like her brother death, with massive limb And dreamless brow, unstartled, changeless, dim, But very fair, though fitful and afraid, More sweet and ...
— Among the Millet and Other Poems • Archibald Lampman
... Shoreby was a tall, commodious, plastered mansion, framed in carven oak, and covered by a low-pitched roof of thatch. To the back there stretched a garden, full of fruit-trees, alleys, and thick arbours, and over-looked from the far end by the tower of the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 8 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Gunnar has seen his death: he is spoken for. He would not sail because, when he rode down Unto the ship, his horse stumbled and threw him, His face toward the Lithe and his own fields. Olaf the Peacock bade him be with him In his new mighty house so carven and bright, And leave this house to Rannveig and his sons: He said that would be well, yet never goes. Is he not thinking death would ride with him? Did not Njal offer to send his sons, Skarphedin ugly and brave and Hauskuld with him, To hold this house ...
— The Atlantic Book of Modern Plays • Various
... in order to do freely. Now that every one has his own apartments and his own privacy secure, this disposition to own has found its release in a new direction. Men study and save and strive that they may leave behind them a series of panels in some public arcade, a row of carven figures along a terrace, a grove, a pavilion. Or they give themselves to the penetration of some still opaque riddle in phenomena as once men gave themselves to the accumulation of riches. The work that was once the whole substance of social existence—for most men spent all ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells
... a carven flagon," said Sara, arranging tendrils of the wreath about the mug. "And this"—bending tenderly over the soap dish and heaping it with roses—"is ...
— A Little Princess • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... chopped down fifteen or twenty feet above the ground, and upon the tops of them spherical habitations of woven twigs, mud covered, had been built. Each ball-like house was surmounted by some manner of carven image, which Ja told me indicated the identity of ...
— At the Earth's Core • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... the old gray walls, Soon the last stone will be gone, The olden church of the Recollects, We shall look no more upon; And though, perchance, some stately pile May rise its place to fill, With carven piers and lofty towers, Old Church, we shall ...
— The Poetical Works of Mrs. Leprohon (Mrs. R.E. Mullins) • Rosanna Eleanor Leprohon
... had been known from the days of Solomon to those of Linnaeus. Prodigious stories were told of his hoard of gold, and some of the less enlightened thought that even the outlandish ornaments of the balustrade over the portico were carven silver. Curious vases adorned the hall and side-board; and numberless quaint trinkets, whose use the villagers could not even imagine, gave to the richly-furnished rooms an air of Oriental magnificence. Tropical ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Number 9, July, 1858 • Various
... the ear-trumpet, and afterwards wipes it very carefully with his handkerchief. MANSON stands, as though carven in marble, waiting for him to fix ...
— The Servant in the House • Charles Rann Kennedy
... almost beyond all recognizing, form part of solemn ceremonies whereby good hunting is held to be secured. Something of the sort, then, we may suppose, took place ages ago in the cave of Niaux. So, indeed, it was a cathedral after a fashion; and, having in mind the carven pillars of stalactite, the curving alcoves and side-chapels, the shining white walls, and the dim ceiling that held in scorn our powerful lamps, I venture to question whether man has ever lifted up his heart in a ...
— Anthropology • Robert Marett
... palace, dim and rich, Dim as a dream, rich as a reverie, I knew it all of old, surely I knew This floating twilight tinged with rose and blue, This moon-soft carven niche Whence the calm marble, wan as memory, Slopes to the wine-brimmed bath of cold dark fire Perfumed with old regret and ...
— Collected Poems - Volume One (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... Queed closed up the twenty-five minutes of time he had bestowed upon Fifi, and pulled into supper only three minutes behind running-time. After-wards, he sat in the Scriptorium, his face like a carven image, the sacred Schedule in his hands. For it had come down to that. Either he must at any cost hew his way back to the fastness of his early days, or he must corrupt the Schedule ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... done; the echoes of the following notes of the violin fainted and died among the carven angels of the roof. It was done, and Morris ...
— Stella Fregelius • H. Rider Haggard
... firmly planted by time as the avenue of live-oaks they headed, showed clearly in the afternoon light. And from the nearest, deep carven in the stone, a jagged-toothed skull, crowned and grinning, stared blankly at the three in the shabby car. Beneath it ran the insolent motto of an ancient and disreputable clan, "What ...
— Ralestone Luck • Andre Norton
... I shook my head at my accusers with stupid complacency. My denial of guilt seemed to me a trivial lie. I had become a man of wood. I went through my trial like a carven image. I seemed to myself to be a puppet, a jointed figure, a manikin. In a dull, insensate way I had learned to hate the Judge as a superior being who showed loathing for me on his face. The jury foreman and all ...
— The Blue Wall - A Story of Strangeness and Struggle • Richard Washburn Child
... green leaves repeat the beauty that gladdened man in ancient days. But for themselves they are, and not for us. Their glory fills the mind with rapture but for a while, and it learns that they are, like carven idols, wholly careless and indifferent to our fate. Then is the valley incomplete, and the void sad! Its hills speak of death as well as of life, and we know that for man there is nothing on earth really but man; the human species owns ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... personage he was indeed. He was equipped in a wonderful solidity of armour, with a hard, carven helmet on his head, a splendid red-bossed shield swinging on his shoulder, a wide-grooved, straight sword clashing along his thigh. On his shoulders under the shield he carried a splendid scarlet mantle; over his breast ...
— Irish Fairy Tales • James Stephens
... Spirit made the world." He held up his carven obscenity. "He made the World out of himself. This is ...
— Oomphel in the Sky • Henry Beam Piper
... seemed ill and more nervous than usual. He said he found General Pierce greatly needing his companionship, for he was overwhelmed with grief at the loss of his wife. I well remember the sadness of Hawthorne's face when he told us he felt obliged to look on the dead. "It was," said he, "like a carven image laid in its richly embossed enclosure, and there was a remote expression about it as if the whole had nothing to do with things present." He told us, as an instance of the ever-constant courtesy of his friend General Pierce, that while they were standing at the grave, the General, though completely ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... until Revolutionary times, and even after were mixed with Roman text with so little regard for any printer's law that, at a little distance, many a New England tombstone of the latter part of the past century seems to be carven ...
— Customs and Fashions in Old New England • Alice Morse Earle
... gladness of the God. Meanwhile the gleaming house within with kingly pomp is dight, And in the midmost of the hall a banquet they prepare: Cloths laboured o'er with handicraft, and purple proud is there; Great is the silver on the board, and carven out of gold 640 The mighty deeds of father-folk, a long-drawn tale, is told, Brought down through many and many an one ...
— The AEneids of Virgil - Done into English Verse • Virgil
... so, but I have always imagined that even that carven image of an old aborigine must, have smiled a ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... stood in the same place like a carven woman. She waited for him with wide, harassed eyes. As he came to her she ...
— The Woman from Outside - [on Swan River] • Hulbert Footner
... his hands away. Sound died, the room was normal again. The milky, white eyes surveyed him, the hands remained locked securely over those of the mother. The thin carven features of the ...
— Now We Are Three • Joe L. Hensley
... some carven form of grief There the poor black Mumma stands On her hind feet, with her paws Pleading ...
— Atta Troll • Heinrich Heine
... a rigid carven statue in the midst of a barren sandy waste in the vast cup of a towering volcano top—sand that was in reality coarse pumice and ash. This was a place of death, a place where raging fires had left nothing for plant or animal life. And, over all, the desert stars shone down coldly ...
— Two Thousand Miles Below • Charles Willard Diffin
... Jennie Baxter drove to the address the editor had given her, and she found Mr. Cadbury Taylor at home, in somewhat sumptuous offices on the first floor. Fastened to his door was a brass plate, which exposed to public view the carven words— ...
— Jennie Baxter, Journalist • Robert Barr
... talk," cried the archer; "for being a man of no learning myself, my tongue turns to blades and targets, even as my hand does. Know then that for every parchment in England there are twenty in France. For every statue, cut gem, shrine, carven screen, or what else might please the eye of a learned clerk, there are a good hundred to our one. At the spoiling of Carcasonne I have seen chambers stored with writing, though not one man in our Company could read them. Again, in Arles and Nimes, and other ...
— The White Company • Arthur Conan Doyle
... we came upon the first church built in the Marquesas. It was a small wooden edifice bearing a weatherbeaten sign in French, "The Church of the Mother of God." Above the shattered doors were two carven hearts, a red dagger through one and a red flame issuing from the other. A black cross was fixed above these symbols, which Vanquished Often and Exploding Eggs regarded with respect. To the Marquesan these are all tiki, or charms, ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... too, And squire and dame,—in the great Audience Hall Gathered; where sat the king, with the high crown Upon his brow, beneath a drapery That fell around him like a cataract, With flecks of color crossed and cancellate; And over this, like trees about a stream, Rich carven-work, heavy with wreath and rose, Palm and palmirah, fruit and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various
... closed, the launch skelped forward like a dog from in front of the traffic. It escaped by a yard or two. Then, like a dog, it seemed to look round. The gentleman in the stern glanced back quickly. He was a handsome, dark-haired man with dark eyes. His face was as if carven out of oak, set and grey-brown. Then he looked to the steering of his boat. No one had uttered a sound. From the tiny boat coursing low on the water, not a sound, only tense waiting. The launch raced out of danger towards the yacht. The gentleman, with ...
— The Trespasser • D.H. Lawrence
... to warp and crack, The silver plates turned filthy black, And drooping down on the carven rails Hung those once lovely ...
— Forty-Two Poems • James Elroy Flecker
... on a great chair, skilfully carven, with a footstool for my feet. Afterward she gave me drink in a cup of gold, but she had mixed in it a deadly charm. This I drank, but was not bewitched, for the herb saved me. Then she smote me with her wand, saying: 'Go now ...
— The Story Of The Odyssey • The Rev. Alfred J. Church
... significance that most interested him. "What an institution the confessional is! Man needs it so, that it seems as if God must have ordained it." And he dwells upon the idea with remarkable elaboration and persistence. Those who have followed the painful wanderings of heart-oppressed Hilda to the carven confessional in the great church, where she found peace, will recognize the amply unfolded flower of this seed. What I supposed to be my notion of St. Peter's looking like the enlargement of some liliputian edifice is also there, ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... and white and gleaming. There were windows in the walls, and they were closed with sheets of glass so smooth and clear that one seemed looking through a clear opening rather than through glass. The floor was of stone, smooth and seamless as though carven from one great rock, yet seeming not, in some way, to be stone at all. There was a great circle of smooth metal inset in it, and it was on ...
— The Man Who Saw the Future • Edmond Hamilton
... stone lay loose in its place, And a foot might hold in the chink between, The carven niche where the arms had been, And the iron rings in the tower's face; For the scarlet lilies lay broken round, Snapped through at the place where his tread would fall, As he slipped at dawn to the yielding ground, Near the flood that runs by ...
— Songs of Angus and More Songs of Angus • Violet Jacob |
