"Gothic architecture" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... buildings, or any thing equally obvious to the traveller or the resident. The beauty and elegance of the cathedral have been celebrated for ages, and I only remind you of it to indulge my national vanity in the reflection that one of the most splendid monuments of Gothic architecture in France is the work of our English ancestors. The edifice is in perfect preservation, and the hand of power has not yet ventured to appropriate the plate or ornaments; but this forbearance will most probably give way to temptation and impunity. The Convention ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... the church; and the conversation at dinner turned on the revival of Gothic architecture—an event which gave unmixed satisfaction to all parties. The subject would have died out, almost as soon as it was started, for want of a difference upon it, had not Bateman happily gone on boldly to declare that, if he had ...
— Loss and Gain - The Story of a Convert • John Henry Newman
... Mrs. Ledwich glanced at the mistress's watch, in its pasteboard tower, in Gothic architecture, and insisted on proceeding to business. So they all sat down round a circular table, with a very fine red, blue, and black oilcloth, whose pattern was inseparably connected, in Ethel's mind, ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... one spoken of in Macbeth. England is just beginning to learn what treasures of art in old mansions, churches and cathedrals were saved to the present age by a timely application of that cheap and healthy fluid. For there was a time when stern men of iron will arose, who had no fear of Gothic architecture, French tapestry, or Italian sculpture before their eyes; who treated things that had awed or dazzled the world as "baubles" of vanity, to be put away, as King Josiah put away from his realm the graven images of his predecessors. And ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... striking, characteristic, and peculiarly national in foreign ways is a romantic note. The eighteenth century disliked "strangeness added to beauty"; it disapproved of anything original, exotic, tropical, bizarre for the same reason that it disapproved of mountains and Gothic architecture. ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... and came under the influence of Gothic architecture. There was a blood affinity between Mr. Polly and the Gothic; in the middle ages he would no doubt have sat upon a scaffolding and carved out penetrating and none too flattering portraits of church dignitaries upon the capitals, and when he strolled, with his hands behind ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... be generous—and then her audiences had grown more critical and consequently more exacting. Lecturing—as she understood it— used to be simple enough. You chose your topic—Raphael, Shakespeare, Gothic Architecture, or some such big familiar "subject"—and read up about it for a week or so at the Athenaeum or the Astor Library, and then told your audience what you had read. Now, it appeared, that simple process was ...
— The Greater Inclination • Edith Wharton
... conditions of mutability and transformation. It leads the critic to comprehend the whole, and encourages the habit of scientific tolerance. We are saved by it from uselessly fretting ourselves because of the ungodly and the inevitable; from mourning over the decline of Gothic architecture into Perpendicular aridity and flamboyant feebleness, over the passage of the scepter from Sophocles to Euripides or from Tasso to Marino, over the chaos of Mannerism, Eclecticism and Naturalism into which ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... abbey church, afforded us some amusement while our dinner was getting ready. All these particulars are mentioned in twenty different books of tours, travels, and directions, which you have often perused. I shall only observe, that the abbey church is the lightest piece of Gothic architecture I have seen, and the air within seems perfectly free from that damp and moisture, so perceivable in all our old cathedrals. This must be owing to the nature of its situation. There are some fine marble statues ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... made careful and extensive observations of the Crypt and other parts of the Minster during the restoration, which gave him opportunities for investigation now impossible. He also brought to these observations a learning and sagacity probably greater than those of any other writer on English Gothic Architecture, and his little book remains the standard work on ...
— The Cathedral Church of York - Bell's Cathedrals: A Description of Its Fabric and A Brief - History of the Archi-Episcopal See • A. Clutton-Brock
... The Seven Lamps of Architecture, in which Ruskin expounded his radical views on this kindred art; The Stones of Venice, an eloquent book enforcing the argument that Gothic architecture sprang from a pure national faith and the domestic virtues; King's Treasuries, a noble plea for good books; Fors Clavigera, a series of ninety-six parts published in eight volumes, the record of his social experiments; Preterita, one of the most charming ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... man's works, notwithstanding his boasted reason. Not only are the main features of Greek architecture, mere reproductions in stone of what were originally parts of a wooden building, but our modern copyists of Gothic architecture often build solid buttresses capped with weighty pinnacles, to support a wooden roof which has no outward thrust to render them necessary; and even think they ornament their buildings by adding sham spouts of carved stone, while modern waterpipes, stuck on ...
— Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection - A Series of Essays • Alfred Russel Wallace
... was taken, and the fine tower remains in all its stupendous grandeur, with its flying buttresses, crocketed pyramids and arches, unique in their form; it is said to be one of the largest in Europe, and one of the finest specimens of the decorated style of Gothic architecture. ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello
... on the great works of art are those of a well-informed man of the world, taking many things for granted, rather than of a philosophical critic industriously using his own mind. His book recalls to us how true the eighteenth century was to itself in its hatred of Gothic architecture, that symbol and associate of mysticism, and of the age which the eighteenth century blindly abhorred as the source of all the tyrannical laws and cruel superstitions that still weighed so heavily on ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... merely a manner of writing. Thus e.g., the fugue is a form—i.e., it is a plan, which although capable of variation in details, is yet carried out fairly definitely in every case; but counterpoint is merely a style or manner of writing (just as Gothic architecture is a style of building), which may be cast into ...
— Music Notation and Terminology • Karl W. Gehrkens
... of the Ecclesiastical Antiquities of France, with a View to illustrate the Rise and Progress of Gothic Architecture in Europe. By G. D. Whittington.—Cambridge ...
— Translations of German Poetry in American Magazines 1741-1810 • Edward Ziegler Davis
... chateau ought to be, but seldom is. I say "ought to be," premising that most of us have formed our first ideas of French chateaux, from those works of imagination which endow such places so liberally with gothic architecture and haunted woods. The mansion of the Count de Rouilly would not greatly disappoint a reader of Mrs. Ratcliffe's romances; and bears a strong resemblance to Westwood, near Ombersley, in Worcestershire, the seat of Sir John Packington, which is said ...
— Itinerary of Provence and the Rhone - Made During the Year 1819 • John Hughes
... suppose. But the inside!—a forest-like firmament, glorious in holiness; windows many hued as the Hebrew psalms; a gloom solemn and pathetic as man's mysterious existence; a richness gorgeous and manifold as his wonderful nature. In this Gothic architecture we see earnest northern races, whose nature was a composite of influences from pine forest, mountain, and storm, expressing, in vast proportions and gigantic masonry, those ideas of infinite duration and existence which Christianity opened before them. A barbaric wildness mingles ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... the stars and knows Lord Kelvin's theory of vortices and the nebular hypothesis and the direction of ocean currents and the qualities of kelp and the direction the codfish go in Iceland waters when the northeast wind blows; that he knows about Gothic architecture and Byzantine painting, the social movement in Jerez and the exports of Patagonia, the wall-paper of Paris apartment houses and the red paste with which countesses polish ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos
... About 1841 his father removed to Bourg, in the Department of Ain, where he was chief government engineer of the department. These two residences of the young artist are supposed to account for the mastery of Gothic architecture and of mountain scenery which his admirers find in his mature work. He showed very early in life a passion for drawing, and, as a small child, had always a pencil in his hand, which he begged to have "sharpened at both ends," that he might work longer without interruption. His father ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various
... impression the cathedral imparts, is by no means equivalent to unqualified praise. There are buildings of equal and less importance, whence illustrations might be taken for a complete history of every period of Gothic architecture; here the examples would be limited not only to one style, but if we except the upper stories of the tower and its spire, the cloisters, and a few minor additions, to a very restricted use of Early English, as it was practised from A.D. ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Salisbury - A Description of its Fabric and a Brief History of the See of Sarum • Gleeson White |
