"Octagon" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... laying upon it a flat piece of wood loaded with a heavy weight, to get out as much of the mercury as they can. The paste is then put into a mould of wooden planks bound together, generally in the form of an octagon pyramid cut short, its bottoms being a plate of copper, full of small holes, into which the paste is stirred and pressed down, in order to fasten it. When they design to make many pinnas, or spongy lumps of various weights, these are divided from each other by ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 11 • Robert Kerr
... number 3221 was the home of Dr. William Thornton, the architect of the Capitol; the Octagon House, built by John Tayloe; of Tudor Place, and also of Woodlawn. He was later the first Superintendent of ...
— A Portrait of Old George Town • Grace Dunlop Ecker
... Vicenza, but on a larger scale: yet, though it has cost an hundred thousand pounds, it is still only a fine villa: the finishing of in and outside has been exceedingly Expensive. A wood that runs up a hill behind the house is broke like an Albano landscape, with an octagon temple and a triumphal arch; But then there are some dismal clipt hedges, and a pyramid, which by a most unnatural copulation is at once a grotto and a greenhouse. Does it not put you in mind of the proposal ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... the base of whose field magnets is a ring in general shape, or perhaps an octagon, and with poles ...
— The Standard Electrical Dictionary - A Popular Dictionary of Words and Terms Used in the Practice - of Electrical Engineering • T. O'Conor Slone
... be the play good or bad-except on Moli'ere's nights, whose pieces they are quite weary of. Gray and I have been at the Avare to-night; I cannot at all commend their performance of it. Last night I was in the Place de Louis le Grand (a regular octagon, uniform, and the houses handsome, though not so large as Golden Square), to see what they reckoned one of the finest burials that ever was in France. It was the Duke de Tresmes, governor of Paris and marshal of France. It began on foot from his palace to his parish-church, ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... possibly invented." "I never was so convinced," I said, "of the truth of your observations as at the present moment. What a charming and comfortable effect does that splendid drapery produce!" "I am very fond of drapery," he replied, "but that is nothing to what I had at Fonthill in the great octagon. There were purple curtains ...
— Recollections of the late William Beckford - of Fonthill, Wilts and Lansdown, Bath • Henry Venn Lansdown
... became aware of a house looming out of the bareness of the slope. It dominated that long white incline. Grim, lonely, forbidding, how strangely it harmonized with the surroundings! The structure was octagon-shaped, built of uncut stone, and resembled a fort. There was no door on the sides exposed to Shefford's gaze, but small apertures two-thirds the way up probably served as windows and port-holes. The roof appeared to be made of poles covered with ...
— The Rainbow Trail • Zane Grey
... the chapter-house adjoining to the church, are the finest here of any I have seen in England; the latter is octagon, or eight-square, and is 150 feet in its circumference; the roof bearing all upon one small marble pillar in the centre, which you may shake with your hand; and it is hardly to be imagined it can be any great support to the roof, which makes it the more curious (it is ...
— From London to Land's End - and Two Letters from the "Journey through England by a Gentleman" • Daniel Defoe
... armies which his father knew, Surely the crowning hour of all his life Was when, his task accomplished, he returned A lonely pilgrim to the twilit shrine Of first beginnings and his father's youth. There, in the Octagon Chapel, with bared head Grey, honoured for his father and himself, He touched the glimmering keyboard, touched the books Those dear lost hands had touched so ...
— Watchers of the Sky • Alfred Noyes
... 1738. The baptistery was originally a Roman building, square externally and octagonal within, with four niches, one of which is partially preserved. Remains of the others have been found outside the octagon. There was an hexagonal font in the centre, and in the angles of the walls are the springings of vaults; there are also six pillar-stumps of different thicknesses. Most of the present building is modern, the result of several restorations. On each side of the baptistery ...
— The Shores of the Adriatic - The Austrian Side, The Kuestenlande, Istria, and Dalmatia • F. Hamilton Jackson
... Warrington. Whatever opinion may have been attributed to Dr. Parr concerning Dr. Taylor, this I know, that on revisiting Norwich he desired my father (the Dr.'s grandson) to show him the house inhabited by him while he was the minister of the Octagon Chapel. ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 204, September 24, 1853 • Various
... down to Philip IV., who completed it and gathered in the poor relics of royal mortality from many graves. The key of the vault is the stone where the priest stands when he elevates the Host in the temple above. The vault is a graceful octagon about forty feet high, with nearly the same diameter; the flickering light of your torches shows twenty-six sarcophagi, some occupied and some empty, filling the niches of the polished marble. On the right sleep the sovereigns, on the left their ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... youth was working as a joiner and at the inlaying of wood, he had among his rivals Baccio Cellini, piper to the Signoria of Florence, who made many very beautiful inlaid works in ivory, and among others an octagon of figures in ivory, outlined in black and marvellously beautiful, which is in the guardaroba of the Duke. In like manner, Girolamo della Cecca, a pupil of Baccio and likewise piper to the Signoria, also executed many inlaid works at that same time. ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 3 (of 10), Filarete and Simone to Mantegna • Giorgio Vasari
... lying all higgledy-piggledy on the floor when they arrived. I helped to carry some of them from the train to the rough eight-wheeled springless arabas in which they were borne to hospital. In these wretched vehicles the wheel was not a cycle but an octagon, and the wounded, who were jolted along the street, filled the air with cries of agony. I made an immediate dash to the scene of conflict and there I encountered seventeen officers who, with the exception of the wounded I had ...
— Recollections • David Christie Murray
... having walked to the royal palace of the Octagon, the crown prince received him in the hall; conducted him up stairs; and presented him to the king, whose very infirm state is said to have greatly affected our hero's sensibility. The preliminary objects of this impressive interview having been arranged, with ...
— The Life of the Right Honourable Horatio Lord Viscount Nelson, Vol. II (of 2) • James Harrison
... ahead, a brilliant octagon flared red. That meant "STOP!" in any language. Cloud eased up his accelerator, eased down his mighty brakes. He pulled up at the control station and a ...
— The Vortex Blaster • Edward Elmer Smith
... heavy cement. The entrance was by the door in the church to the right of the main entrance. The room is octagonal, with the altar in a recess, over which is a dome of brick, with a small lantern. At each point of the octagon there is an engaged column, built of circular-fronted brick which run to a point at the rear and are thus built into the wall. A three-membered cornice crowns each column, which supports arches that reach from one column to another. There are two ...
— The Old Franciscan Missions Of California • George Wharton James
... Memoranda: The Octagon is perhaps the most beautiful and original design to be found in the whole range of Gothic architecture. Remember also the retrochoir. The lower tier of windows consists of three long lancets, with groups of Purbeck shafts at the angles; the upper, of five lancets, diminishing from the ...
— A Cathedral Courtship • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... put in the foundation. This consisted of eight concrete piers, each five feet deep in the clay, three feet square, and capped at the level of the ground with a limestone two feet square and eight inches thick. These piers were set in octagon form around the well, with their centres seven feet from the middle of the bore, making the spread of the framework fourteen feet at the ground and ten at the platform. The foundation cost $32. A Rider eight-inch, hot-air, wood-burning, ...
— The Fat of the Land - The Story of an American Farm • John Williams Streeter
... stately entrance, which is still denominated the Golden Gate. The approach was terminated by a peristylium of granite columns, on one side of which we discover the square temple of Aesculapius, on the other the octagon temple of Jupiter. The latter of those deities Diocletian revered as the patron of his fortunes, the former as the protector of his health. By comparing the present remains with the precepts of Vitruvius, the several parts of the building, the ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... the card to him. "You're to go to the office of Ross Metaxa in the Octagon, Commissariat of Interplanetary Affairs, Department of Justice, Bureau of Investigation, ...
— Ultima Thule • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... entered a small, dark room which opened from his study. A pressure of the finger upon the blinds caused them to spring open, and the broad daylight streamed through the high windows. The walls, which were hung with brown velvet, formed an octagon, and opposite the broad windows were two pictures in gold frames. The vicomte's look rested on these pictures. They were the features of his parents which had been placed upon the canvas by the hand of an artist. In all her goodness, Haydee, Ali Tebelen's ...
— The Son of Monte-Cristo, Volume II (of 2) • Alexandre Dumas pere
... coffin of Charles V. was opened so late as 1871, during the visit of the Emperor of Brazil, when the face of the corpse was found to be entire,—eyebrows, hair, and all, though black and shriveled. The last burial here was that of Ferdinand VII. This octagon vault is called the Pantheon of the Escurial; but it is nothing more than a theatrical show room: nothing could be more inappropriate. While we were in Madrid, ex-queen Isabella visited the vault,—her own last resting-place being already designated herein,—and caused mass to be performed while ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... way through the now darkened and empty shop, lighted by one gas jet—past the long cutting counter flanked by shelves bearing rolls of cloth and paper patterns, around the octagon stove where the irons were still warm, and through the small door which led into his private room. There he turned up a reading lamp, its light softened by a green shade, and motioning Jack to a seat, said abruptly, but politely—more as ...
— Peter - A Novel of Which He is Not the Hero • F. Hopkinson Smith
... record of Mr. Flower. After a ride of a thousand miles or so, he presented his letter of introduction to Mr. Jefferson at Poplar Forest, and had a cordial reception. The traveler describes the house as resembling a French chateau, with octagon rooms, doors of polished oak, lofty ceilings, and large mirrors. The ex-President's form, he says, was of somewhat majestic proportions, more than six feet in height; his manners simple, kind, and polite; his dress a dark pepper-and-salt coat, cut in the old Quaker ...
— Captains of Industry - or, Men of Business Who Did Something Besides Making Money • James Parton |
