"Statuesque" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... a Saracen maiden, Brunette, statuesque, The reverse of grotesque, Her pa was a bagman from Aden, Her mother she played ...
— The Bab Ballads • W. S. Gilbert
... at once, for now Driscoll understood the strategic outlay. Its key was Fra Diavolo, with a pistol at Ney's head, and quite statuesque the romantic Mexican looked. But out of the tail of his eye Fra Diavolo noted the American, at first with contemptuous amusement only. Then, as though such had been the situation from the start, he grew aware of an ugly black muzzle under ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... in the department of Fine Arts and awarded a medal by the jury. The architectural beauty of these groups, in relation to the arched panels of the pylons forming their background, is worthy of study. It will be seen that the group, in spite of its statuesque quality, is actually part of the wall surface. The beauty of the ensemble is greatly enhanced by the ...
— The Sculpture and Mural Decorations of the Exposition • Stella G. S. Perry
... in the full and faultless perfection of her form—in her graceful and yielding motions—in her statuesque bust, rounded cheek and night-black hair, she would, to the casual observer, have indicated hardly the half of that age. Her figure was tall and dignified, yet mobile as a willow; her eyes were dark and luminous, ...
— Edmond Dantes • Edmund Flagg
... savage clutched his companion's knee. Then lifting his hatchet, shook it with a significant gesture in Sheppard's face, at the same time putting a finger on his lips to enjoin silence. Both Indians became statuesque in their immobility. They crouched in an attitude of listening, with heads bent on one side, nostrils ...
— The Last Trail • Zane Grey
... rustling noise; he speaks rarely and gruffly; he opens his mouth to insert food, and closes it with a snap; but he is a humorous old fellow, with a twinkle in his eye; generous if whimsical; and more good-natured than he wishes you to believe. Some of my friends are silent and abrupt; there is the statuesque chaplain who, whatever you may talk of, appears to be preoccupied with something else; there are brisk, bird-like men, who pick up their food and interject disconnected remarks. But the majority are lively, sensible fellows, ...
— The Upton Letters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... attitude. That is not what a Greek meant by beauty. The same quality holds to a great extent of Greek poetry. Not, of course, that the artistic convention was the same, or at all similar, for treating stone and for treating language. Greek poetry is statuesque in the sense that it depends greatly on its organic structure; it is not in the least so in the sense of being cold or colourless or stiff. But Greek poetry on the whole has a bareness and severity which disappoints a modern reader, accustomed as he is to lavish ornament and exaggeration at ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... Along the same path that Tara of Helium had been led Turan was conducted toward the throne room of O-Tar the jeddak, and when he entered the Hall of Chiefs his interest turned to wonder and admiration as he viewed the ranks of statuesque thoatmen decked in their gorgeous, martial panoply. Never, he thought, had he seen upon Barsoom more soldierly figures or thoats so perfectly trained to perfection of immobility as these. Not a muscle quivered, ...
— The Chessmen of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... Silesia either; a hopeless matter that,—is it not, your Majesty? And your Majesty's forces all lying there, in mere dead-lock; and we in such need of them! "Peace with Prussia is indispensable."—To which her Majesty listened, in statuesque silence mostly; "never saw her so ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... world, "Art still has truth, take refuge there." It would be a poor refuge for most of us; it was so even for the great Goethe; for with all his intellectual splendour, his character never rose above a grandiose and statuesque self-love; he behaved ill to his country, ill to women. Instead of being religion, Art seems, for its own perfection, to need religion—not a system of dogma, but a faith. This, probably, we all feel when we look at the paintings in the Church of Assisi or ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... her slender wrists. An indescribable grace and charm is in every movement of her sinuous body. Her well-poised head is set upon a neck of ivory. The lustrous dark eyes rove around the circle of eager betters with languishing velvety glances. A smile, half a sneer, lingers on the curved lips. Her statuesque beauty of feature is enhanced by the rippling dark masses of hair crowning her lovely brows. In the silky waves of her coronal, shines one diamond star of surpassing richness. In all the pride and freshness of youth her loveliness is unmarred by the tawdry arts of cosmetic and make-up. Unabashed ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... Gwin, statuesque, graceful, dressed in the most suitable manner, made a perfect contrast to poor, excitable Kitty. Kitty's words had been plainly audible, and Alice ...
— Wild Kitty • L. T. Meade
... hero-worship. He is a poet, sentimentalist, and evangelist for Greater Germany. His book is a collection of incidents, reflections, and conversations, carefully assorted and arranged, so as to allow the limelight to glare on the statuesque figure of a mighty Germanic hero, fresh from ...
— What Germany Thinks - The War as Germans see it • Thomas F. A. Smith
... watched her as she took her key out of the lock and put it back in her purse. He was struck by the fact that with this new "personality" that had become a part of her, she was even more attractive than before. A glow had been added. The quiet, dignified, statuesque beauty of before had been mysteriously vitalized by a ...
— Ten From Infinity • Paul W. Fairman
... have put away one as a sentimental souvenir, but to my mind she did not seem the kind of a girl to do that. I knew my reasoning was absurd, for what man can predicate what a woman will do? but at the same time I could not seem to imagine the statuesque, imperial Miss Lloyd tenderly preserving a rose that her lover ...
— The Gold Bag • Carolyn Wells
... the animal could regain its feet the knife had found its heart. As Tarzan rose upon the body of his kill to scream forth his hideous victory cry into the face of the moon the wind carried to his nostrils something which froze him to statuesque immobility and silence. His savage eyes blazed into the direction from which the wind had borne down the warning to him and a moment later the grasses at one side of the clearing parted and Numa, the lion, strode majestically into view. His yellow-green eyes were fastened upon Tarzan as he ...
— Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... face could not be seen, anyone looking at the balance of the head, the statuesque neck, would have surmised that ...
— The Four Canadian Highwaymen • Joseph Edmund Collins
... thistle-down. As Desdemona curveted down past Finn the tip of her gaily-waving tail was allowed once to glance over the Irish wolfhound's wiry coat; the merest suggestion of a touch. But it seemed this was a magic signal, converting the dancing Desdemona into a graven image and transforming the statuesque Finn into a hound of ...
— Jan - A Dog and a Romance • A. J. Dawson
... deliberately; a tall, fair, handsome man of eight-and-thirty or forty, with one of those cold, intellectual, statuesque faces in which there is a chill harmony, and which are types of a calm temperament, or an extinct volcano. Perhaps it was that cast of countenance which recommended him to the Bowers; yet Leslie was dark, bright, ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... was disconcerted he certainly did not show it. His was a face eminently calculated to conceal whatever thought or feeling might be passing through his mind. Of an even white complexion—verging on pastiness—he was handsome in a certain statuesque way. His features were always composed and dignified; his hair, thin and straight, was never out of order, but ever smooth and sleek upon his high, narrow brow. His eyes had that dulness which is characteristic of many Frenchmen, and may perhaps be attributed to the habitual ...
— The Sowers • Henry Seton Merriman
... door closed upon Chunda Lal, Miska stepped back from it and stood, unconsciously, in a curiously rigid and statuesque attitude, her arms pressed to her sides and her hands directed outward. It was the physical expression of an intense mental effort to gain control of herself. Her heart was leaping wildly in her breast—for the future that had held only horror and a living tomb, ...
— The Golden Scorpion • Sax Rohmer
... Uncle George's eyelids were drooping slowly and William's sudden statuesque calm would have surprised ...
— More William • Richmal Crompton
... expression of countenance, so even then in absolute childhood she put forward the blossoms and the dignity of a woman. Never yet did my eye light upon creature that was born of woman, nor could it enter my heart to conceive one, possessing a figure more matchless in its proportions, more statuesque, and more deliberately and advisedly to be characterised by no adequate word but the word magnificent (a word too often and lightly abused). In reality, speaking of women, I have seen many beautiful figures, but hardly one except Agnes that could without hyperbole be styled truly ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... and followed the footman through several wide corridors filled with palms and flowers, which formed a kind of winter-garden, until we crossed a red-carpeted ante-room, where two statuesque sentries stood on guard, and the man conducting me rapped at the great polished mahogany ...
— The Czar's Spy - The Mystery of a Silent Love • William Le Queux
... other diseases Press, which had kindled, proceeded to extinguished Presumptuous belief Ready is the ardent mind to take footing on the last thing done She was not, happily, one of the women who betray strong feeling Shuns the statuesque pathetic, or any kind of posturing Straining for common talk, and showing the strain Style resembling either early architecture or utter dilapidation The people always wait for the winner The system is cursed by nature, and that means ...
— Quotations from the Works of George Meredith • David Widger
... whose statuesque figure had so strangely recalled Teresa's supple, powerful form was holding up the child, propping it on the ...
— Studies in love and in terror • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... Manuel who stood by the horses in the white track between the laurels. It was a figure as statuesque as his, but younger, and the pose was not that of a servant. It was the stand-at-ease of a soldier, or of an Indian wrapped in his blanket in the city square. This man was conscious of being looked at, but his training, of whatever sort, ...
— A Touch Of Sun And Other Stories • Mary Hallock Foote
... know. It reminded him vaguely of those odours which he remembered in his childhood in the East. It was remote and strange. It gave Margaret a new and troubling charm. There had ever been something cold in her statuesque beauty, but this touch somehow curiously emphasized her sex. Arthur's lips twitched, and his gaunt face grew pale with passion. His emotion was so great that it was nearly pain. He was puzzled, for her eyes expressed things that he had ...
— The Magician • Somerset Maugham
... course, at last, bathing the hand she bowed to kiss. The simple ardor of the outbreak would have affected many men to a show of responsive weakness. Even Winston Aylett's physiognomy was more human and less statuesque, as he patted her head, ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... figure, scantily covered by a tunic of light-red cloth; in the right hand a whip; in the other, the arm raised and lightly extended, the four lines. The pose was exceedingly graceful and animated. The cheers and clapping of hands were received with statuesque indifference. Ben-Hur stood transfixed—his instinct and memory had served ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... as to make it look very pure and distant. One of our party, passing in, stood some time at the foot of the waterfall, and added much to its effect, as his height gave a measure by which to appreciate that of surrounding objects, and his look, by that light so pale and statuesque, seemed to inform the place with ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... veritable bloodhounds which were employed once upon a time in tracking fugitive slaves. His dimensions were beyond all my previous conceptions of the canine race. He impressed me rather as an institution than an animal. And as he stood across my path in a statuesque repose, with his red tongue and massive jaws, and a slumbering fire in his eye, I conceived a new idea and ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, September, 1885 • Various
... sentinel who hears the challenge, or a knight listening for the charge! Tenerani's "Descent from the Cross," in the Torlonia Chapel, outlives in remembrance the brilliant assemblies of that financial house. The outlines of Flaxman, essentially statuesque, seem alone adequate to illustrate to the eye the great Mediaeval poet, whose verse seems often cut from stone in the quarries of infernal destiny. How grandly sleep the lions of Canova ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... the men are more finely proportioned, more statuesque, more worthy of preservation in marble or bronze than those of the women. Only at rare intervals does one find among this branch of the Polynesian race a female shape which from crown to sole will satisfy ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... with its singular preservation of the unities. But his contributions to The Spectator and other periodicals are historically of great value. Here he abandons the artificial school; nothing in his delineations of character is simply statuesque or pictorial. He has done for us what the historians have left undone. They present processions of automata moving to the sound of trumpet and drum, ushered by Black Rod or Garter King-at-arms; but in Addison ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... hear the soft snorting of his mount above the thumping of our hearts. I managed to get into a position to steal a glimpse. It was difficult, but at length I made out the statuesque lines of the horse, and the rider himself, standing in his stirrups and leaning slightly forward, peering intently about him. The figures were in silhouette against the sky, but nobody ever fooled me as to a horse. It was the Morgan ...
— The Killer • Stewart Edward White
... to the young girl's memory as she gazed at the cold, statuesque face of her lover's father. It seemed as if he held his tall, noble figure more haughtily erect than usual, and that his plain dark garments were of richer material and more faultless cut than ever; nay, she even fancied that, like the ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... the infantry were well out on the field, he followed in glittering column of pieces, his satin-coated horses dancing in sheer exuberance of spirits and his red-crested cannoneers sitting with folded arms, erect and statuesque, upon the ammunition-chests. Mrs. Cram, in her pretty basket phaeton, with Mrs. Lawrence, of the infantry, and several of the ladies of the garrison in ambulances or afoot, had taken station well to the front of the forming line. Then it became apparent that old Brax purposed ...
— Waring's Peril • Charles King
... possessor of that right is still at fault. If fascination is the bond by which the man can be held, why does she not make use of it herself? A face of statuesque beauty that knows not how to smile has often been ...
— Manasseh - A Romance of Transylvania • Maurus Jokai
... thought John Vansittart Smith, and he moved his position slightly in order to catch a glimpse of the man's face. He started as his eyes fell upon it. It was indeed the very face with which his studies had made him familiar. The regular statuesque features, broad brow, well-rounded chin, and dusky complexion were the exact counterpart of the innumerable statues, mummy-cases, and pictures which adorned the walls of ...
— The Captain of the Pole-Star and Other Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... fellow when rid of the self-consciousness of jealousy. His eyes, mouth, chin, and nose, acquired from reliable and recognizable sources, were good features, and statuesque in their immobility beneath the drooping curves of his broad soft hat. He was tall, with the slenderness of youth, despite his evident weight and strength. He was long-waisted and lithe and small of girth, with broad square shoulders, whose play of muscles as he strove with the gate was not ...
— The Phantoms Of The Foot-Bridge - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... green chiton with a rakishness that proved him anything but a dandy. His companion, addressed as Democrates, slighter, blonder, showed Simonides a handsome and truly Greek profile, set off by a neatly trimmed reddish beard. His purple-edged cloak fell in statuesque folds of the latest mode, his beryl signet-ring, scarlet fillet, and jewelled girdle bespoke wealth and taste. His face, too, might have seemed frank and affable, had not Simonides suddenly recalled an old proverb about mistrusting a man with eyes ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... the grounds in the late summer afternoon, her blue-lined parasol making an azure sky over her golden head, her white dress draping her slender figure in a strikingly statuesque way. She is the kind of girl to madden men and win admiration on the right hand and on the left, and he does like the women on whom the world sets a signet of approval. No sweet domestic drudge for him, and if Violet has a fault, it is this tendency. When a man begins ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... Wilding for the first time. He found her what he afterwards termed "a splendid animal," beautiful, statuesque, more of Juno than of Venus, and freely endowed with the languorous temperament and the splendid earthy loveliness which grows nowhere but under tropical skies and in the shadow of palm groves and the flame of cactus flowers. She showed him but scant courtesy, however, for she was but a poor ...
— Cleek: the Man of the Forty Faces • Thomas W. Hanshew
... remuneration for his labor, content to live frugally that he might thus exemplify his art and his devotion. He certainly excelled any artist with whom we are acquainted in causing figures painted on a flat surface to appear to the spectator far below them to stand out with statuesque effect. In this Church of St. John, the Knights seemed to have vied with each other in adding to its ornaments and its treasures, so that the rich marbles, bas-reliefs, and mosaics are almost confusing in their abundance. The floor is closely ornamented with inlaid marble ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... prayer breathed life into the stone, But see yon graceful girl, with straitened zone And statuesque still bearing. You'd say in her the marble must invade The flesh, in so much loveliness arrayed, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98 February 15, 1890 • Various
... skill displayed in the drawing and colour of the borders. These secondary embellishments consist of fruit, flowers, birds, beetles, and butterflies. But, of course, the great interest of this book lies in its miniatures, scenes from the poet's allegory, and in the little statuesque figures of the various characters in ...
— Illuminated Manuscripts • John W. Bradley
... Tancredi, from the adventures of the Pagan damsels Erminia, Armida and Clorinda. The Gerusalemme is in truth a Virgilian epic, upon which a romantic poem has been engrafted. Goffredo, idealized into statuesque frigidity, repeats the virtues of Aeneas; but the episode of Dido, which enlivens Virgil's hero, is transferred to Rinaldo's part in Tasso's story. The battles of Crusaders and Saracens are tedious copies of the battle in the tenth Aeneid; but ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... however, was down again in a minute, with some drapery which she wound about her after the fashion Lady Hamilton was said to do, and represented, like her, the Muses, and various statues. With the curtain and one light she managed to give a very statuesque effect. Mr. Lewis was evidently very proud of her grace and talent, and she had a pretty, wilful, bird-like way with him, that was fascinating, and did not seem, as I thought it must really be, mechanical. I felt, more than ever, how ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... acquaintances of quite a different sort. One of them, Madame Delestang, an imperious, handsome lady in a statuesque style, would carry me off now and then on the front seat of her carriage to the Prado, at the hour of fashionable airing. She belonged to one of the old aristocratic families in the south. In her haughty weariness she used to make me think of Lady Dedlock in ...
— A Personal Record • Joseph Conrad
... resorted to cold cream, and before I knew what I was doing, I found myself staring at the statuesque brown profile ...
— The Motor Maid • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... came in and the three dined together, a statuesque maid in a yellow bodice and a purple skirt waiting on them. Agata's "Si?" was like a flute-note, and the two women loved to see her moving about their rooms. It was like ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler
... earth by their favorite messenger! With what grace he opens the carriage door! with what majesty he mounts to his seat by the driver! I wonder if he has a sister. She would be worth a journey to see. I have met such women on their native soil, statuesque, slender, full-breasted, square-shouldered, with jars of water on their heads and clinking silver anklets. What a cursed thing is our American prejudice against color! No other people carries it to such an extent. In the ...
— A Black Adonis • Linn Boyd Porter
... with Gibberne on the Folkestone Leas, under the influence of the New Accelerator, was the strangest and maddest of all. We went out by his gate into the road, and there we made a minute examination of the statuesque passing traffic. The tops of the wheels and some of the legs of the horses of this char-a-banc, the end of the whip-lash and the lower jaw of the conductor—who was just beginning to yawn—were perceptibly in motion, but all the rest of ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... by the scent it makes," in a phrase of her creator's which, though in the actual context it does not refer to her, yet exquisitely conveys her influence on these two works. "Rosy Balaustion": she is that, as well as "superb, statuesque," in the admiring apostrophes from Aristophanes, during the long, close argument of the Apology. In that piece, the Bald Bard himself is made to show her to us; and though it follows, not precedes, the Adventure, I shall steal from him at once, ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... the jewel lay together, pearl beside pearl, each rivalling the snowy lustre of the other. Had it not been for those starry eyes that looked out so full of mournful splendor, her face might have seemed too statuesque in its beauty; but from their dark depths all the enthusiasm of a nature that had concentrated its every emotion into one master-passion, lit up her face with flashes that came and went ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... Lansdowne House he was reading people's thoughts and describing their houses from the lines in their hands, and a few leading questions. The old Marquess asked my mother to let Alexis read her thoughts, and, I suppose, impressed by her grand air and statuesque beauty, imagining that she would think about some great hero of ancient days, he said, after careful inspection of her hand, 'Madame vous pensez a Jules Cesar.' She shook her head and told him to try again. His next guess was Alexander the Great. She smiled ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon
... their pocket, and the other on their heart! Be it so for the present; we shall see how long this statuesque attitude can be maintained; meantime, it chances strangely—as several other things have chanced while I was writing these notes to you—that they should have put in that sneer (two lines before) at my note on the meaning of the Homeric and Platonic Sirens, at the very ...
— Time and Tide by Weare and Tyne - Twenty-five Letters to a Working Man of Sunderland on the Laws of Work • John Ruskin
... this period of life. Her form was ripening into a noble and statuesque symmetry; the light in her eyes shot forth from darkening depths; a faint bloom was creeping into her cheek; a soft smile was wreathing those lips, wrought by nature, into a somewhat haughty curve; ...
— Adele Dubois - A Story of the Lovely Miramichi Valley in New Brunswick • Mrs. William T. Savage
... a very picturesque assembly. Indians dress in an endless variety of fashions. Some in their native costumes looked as statuesque and beautiful as the ancient Greeks; others as ...
— Oowikapun - How the Gospel Reached the Nelson River Indians • Egerton Ryerson Young
... Colette, statuesque and sublime, caught the flash of radiance that illumined the face of her pastor, and her heart-strings ...
— Amarilly of Clothes-line Alley • Belle K. Maniates
... hand on his hip, could fill the place hitherto occupied in the mind by, let us say, the Hermes of Praxiteles. Yet this idea still obtained at Bayreuth, and Rosa Sucher walked about, her arms raised and posed above her head, in the conventional, statuesque attitude designed for ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... poem or a short piece that detaches itself, and assumes something like ejaculatory and statuesque proportion, as "O Captain, my Captain," "Pioneers," "Beat, Beat, Drums," and others in "Drum-Taps;" but all the great poems, like "Walt Whitman," "Song of the Open Road," "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry," "To Working Men," "Sleep-Chasings," etc., are out-flamings, out- rushings, of the pent fires ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... indistinctly against the gloomy border of the forest, and near the river two bronze figures, leaning on tall spears, stood in the sunlight under fantastic head-dresses of spotted skins, warlike and still in statuesque repose. And from right to left along the lighted shore moved a wild and gorgeous apparition of ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
... to brown, according to the light in which you saw them. Her hands were thin and shapely, her nose straight, her face artistically narrow. She was not brilliant, not active, but rather peaceful and statuesque without knowing it. Cowperwood was carried away by her appearance. Her beauty measured up to his present sense of the artistic. She was lovely, he thought—gracious, dignified. If he could have his choice of a wife, this was the kind of a girl ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... discovered, because there never was but one. But the real man has been so overlaid with myths and traditions, and so distorted by misleading criticisms, that, as has already been suggested, he has been wellnigh lost. We have the religious or statuesque myth, we have the Weems myth, and the ludicrous myth of the writer of paragraphs. We have the stately hero of Sparks, and Everett, and Marshall, and Irving, with all his great deeds as general and president duly recorded and set down in polished and eloquent sentences; and ...
— George Washington, Vol. I • Henry Cabot Lodge
... up a light tattoo with one foot upon the plank flooring. Her face was glowing with her four-mile walk in the hot sun, but she showed no signs of weariness. The position in which she stood was easy and graceful, but there was nothing statuesque or imposing about it; it was evident that at the very next instant she might shift into another equally as happy. Her eyes wandered from one object to another with the absence of concentration of one whose mind is not fixed upon any thing ...
— Bressant • Julian Hawthorne
... declamation. The actors raised on high boots above their natural height, their faces hidden in masks and their tones mechanically magnified, must have relied for their effects not upon facial play, or rapid and subtle variations of voice and gesture, but upon a certain statuesque beauty of pose, and a chanting intonation of that majestic iambic verse whose measure would have been obscured by a rapid and conversational delivery. The representation would thus become moving sculpture to the eye, and to the ear, as it were, a sleep ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... were nothing else, they would have been swamped thirty times over during the course of Lantenac's harangue. Again, after Lantenac has landed, we have scenes of almost inimitable workmanship that suggest the epithet "statuesque" by their clear and trenchant outline; but the tocsin scene will not do, and the tocsin unfortunately pervades the whole passage, ringing continually in our ears with a taunting accusation of falsehood. And then, when we come to the place where Lantenac meets the royalists, under the idea that ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... almost continuous, is at times very rapid. The passage connects a succession of vast and lofty spaces, which are not inappropriately termed salles. In some of these, the dropping water has raised from the floor of the cavern statuesque and awful forms of colossal grandeur. Some of these have been little changed by the smoke, but stand like white figures of fantastic giants. While looking at them, I thought how little I should like to be in ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... spread out full and her elbows sticking akimbo, she caught the lad in her arms and began dandling him to right, and left, humming some nursery ditty. At the same moment there loomed in the tent entrance the great, statuesque figure of the Sioux squaw, whom I had seen in the gorge. I kicked my feet under the canvas wall, while Miriam's swaying shawl completely concealed me from the Sioux woman and thus I crawled out backwards. Then I lay outside ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... marble—blue-gray, buff, and chestnut, and placed against the tree to deceive the eye. The figure is so smooth and compact, the tints so soft and stone-like; and when he is still, he is so wonderfully still, and his attitude so statuesque! But he is never long still and when he resumes his lively, eccentric, up-and-down and sidewise motions, he is interesting in another way. He is like a small woodpecker who has broken loose from the woodpecker's ...
— Our Bird Comrades • Leander S. (Leander Sylvester) Keyser
... were dark. But this was an unimportant preliminary. In sleep there come to the surface buried genealogical facts, ancestral curves, dead men's traits, which the mobility of daytime animation screens and overwhelms. In the present statuesque repose of the young girl's countenance Richard Newson's was unmistakably reflected. He could not endure the sight of her, ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy
... and in heightening mental distress—since time was fleeting and the cat as statuesque as ever,—Mrs. Major again dratted it twice with marked sincerity and a third time as a sharp sound advertised the splitting of a secret portion of her wear against the tremendous strain her unnatural position placed upon it. Unable longer ...
— Once Aboard The Lugger • Arthur Stuart-Menteth Hutchinson
... some light on the cause of the 'separate maintenance?' People are not particular here, and have no right to be; still, one would like to know. I fancy it can not be her fault; she is perfectly gentle in her manner, but rather cold—very beautiful too, in a placid, statuesque style." It is not worth transcribing the writer's farther speculations. If a silent, but ultra-fervent benediction can at all profit the person for whom it is intended, very few people have been so well paid for epistolary ...
— Sword and Gown - A Novel • George A. Lawrence
... desertion, and consequently of perfect self-reliance. Iphigenia, again, though not dramatically coming before us in her own person, but according to the beautiful report of a spectator, presents us with a fine statuesque model of heroic fortitude, and of one whose young heart, even in the very agonies of her cruel immolation, refused to forget, by a single indecorous gesture, or so much as a moment's neglect of her own princely descent, and that ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... transcendental I shall spare you the pain of listening to them. There are limits to my cruelty. No! I didn't reckon up carefully in my mind all this I have been telling you. How could I have done so, with Fyne right there in the room? He sat perfectly still, statuesque in homely fashion, after having delivered himself of his effective assent: 'Yes. The convict,' and I, far from indulging in a reminiscent excursion into the past, remained sufficiently in the present to muse in a vague, absent-minded way on the respectable ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... directly at the bird several seconds before cutting it out from the stalks and branches. It was a least bittern, a female. She was clinging to a perpendicular stem of elder, hand over hand, wren fashion, her long neck thrust straight into the air, absolutely stiff and statuesque. ...
— Roof and Meadow • Dallas Lore Sharp
... thinking?" asked Adele of her companion, whose countenance she had been watching with a little amused attention, arrested by the absorbed expression which seemed to have seized and fixed every feature into a statuesque repose. ...
— The Awakening and Selected Short Stories • Kate Chopin
... East Harniss became temporarily fevered. Issy McKay dashed out of the station and rushed importantly up and down the platform. Ed Crocker and Cornelius Rowe emerged and draped themselves in statuesque attitudes against the side of the building. Obed Gott came hurrying from his paint and oil shop, which was next to the "general store." Mr. Higgins, proprietor of the latter, sauntered easily across to ...
— The Depot Master • Joseph C. Lincoln
... quite wide, and may be protected by a flap, as in that excellent overall the modern Inverness cape; secondly, it should not be too tight, as otherwise all freedom of walking is impeded. If the young gentleman in the drawing buttons his overcoat he may succeed in being statuesque, though that I doubt very strongly, but he will never succeed in being swift; his super-totus is made for him on no principle whatsoever; a super-totus, or overall, should be capable of being worn long or short, quite loose or moderately tight, ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... the Bellinis, Venetian art ceased to be provincial, blossoming out into national. Jacopo Bellini was a teacher—mild, gentle, sympathetic, animated. His work reveals personality, but is somewhat stiff and statuesque: sharp in outline like an antique stained-glass window. This is because his art was descended from the glassworkers; and he himself continued to make designs for the glassworkers of Murano all his life. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... all was her simplicity—a simplicity that was not only in the calm regularity of her face, with its statuesque evenness of contour, its broad surface of cheek and forehead and the masses of her straight smooth hair, but was apparent as well in the long line of her carriage, from her foot to her waist and the single deep swell from her waist to her shoulder. Almost unconsciously ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... of silence is as bad. I hate that particular pose; it's coming up very much now; an imitation of the English, like everything else. A girl who tries to be statuesque at sea—that will ...
— A London Life; The Patagonia; The Liar; Mrs. Temperly • Henry James
... interview perfectly motionless—almost statuesque, except a slight clinching of the hands at times. His feelings, however, were at the highest possible tension, and his eyes observant of the slightest changes on the faces of those concerned, and when he found de Villerai—who was a stranger to ...
— The False Chevalier - or, The Lifeguard of Marie Antoinette • William Douw Lighthall
... Mrs. Rollo!' said Annabella, who evidently had some difficulty in commanding herself, and was very unlike her usual statuesque manner. For she was a handsome girl, of the Madonna type, and either by temperament or for policy had long adopted a calm style to match. To-day it was broken up.'I am very much obliged to you!' she went on. 'I ...
— The Gold of Chickaree • Susan Warner
... artistic influence. His pupils, even the greatest, were long in breaking away from his convention, and few of them threw it off entirely, even in after life. That convention was carried with undeviating thoroughness into every detail. Draperies are arranged in statuesque folds, designed to display every turn of the form beneath; the figures are moulded with all the precision and limitations of statuary. The very landscape becomes sculpturesque, and rocks of a volcanic character are ...
— The Venetian School of Painting • Evelyn March Phillipps
... her grandfather's liberal intent, watched Mrs. Haxton closely while she read that kindly message. Her pallid face was unmoved. Its statuesque rigor gave no hint of the thoughts that raged behind ...
— The Wheel O' Fortune • Louis Tracy
... of the folk who live their lives in the wild, there are bred certain animal traits. The good trapper learns that, like rabbit or bob-cat, he must be able to freeze into statuesque immobility at the sudden appearance of danger. Nature, who does her best to protect her children, sees to it that the trapper's costume soon resembles nothing so much as a hoary tree-trunk. And the men who tramp the wild gradually assimilate the silent, furtive ...
— The Wilderness Trail • Frank Williams
... distinctly: she stood in a shaft of moonlight falling between the sombre firs, and her face was marble-like; her whole pose was statuesque, all the girlish gentleness of the other days seemed to have fled from her, and her hour of tribulation had invested her with a dignity and force of will that sat well upon her stately figure. Harry beheld her with something like terror. ...
— The Gold-Stealers - A Story of Waddy • Edward Dyson
... through the room could be seen the tawny hues of naked flesh, limbs thrust into the darkness, projecting beyond the cots; upreared knees, arms hanging long and thin over the cot edges. For the most part they were statuesque, carven, dead. With the curious lockers standing all about like tombstones, there was a strange effect of a graveyard ...
— Men, Women, and Boats • Stephen Crane
... reverence. Some such perception, coinciding with native taste, had moved George Washington to assume the trappings of royalty, in order to surround the new presidential office with impressive dignity. Posterity has, accordingly, visualized the first President and Father of his Country as a statuesque figure, posing at formal levees with a long sword in a scabbard of white polished leather, and clothed in black velvet knee-breeches, with yellow gloves and a cocked hat. The third President of the United States harbored no such illusions ...
— Jefferson and his Colleagues - A Chronicle of the Virginia Dynasty, Volume 15 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Allen Johnson
... the kitchen was prolonged, and Mr Verloc felt disappointed. He had expected his wife to say something. But Mrs Verloc's lips, composed in their usual form, preserved a statuesque immobility like the rest of her face. And Mr Verloc was disappointed. Yet the occasion did not, he recognised, demand speech from her. She was a woman of very few words. For reasons involved in the very foundation of his psychology, Mr Verloc ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad
... of warfare that morality always presents itself to Browning. It is not a mere equilibrium of qualities—the measured, self-contained, statuesque ethics of the Greeks, nor the asceticism and self-restraint of Puritanism, nor the peaceful evolution of Goethe's artistic morality: it is valour in the battle of life. His code contains no negative commandments, and no limitations; but he bids each man let out all the power ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... no sound by the standards of human ears, yet to the highly attuned and delicate organs of the beast a message seemed to be borne to the savage brain. A wondrous transformation was wrought in the motionless mass of statuesque bone and muscle that had an instant before stood as though carved ...
— The Beasts of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... chair to the bars to receive her sorrowing lover. Her pale face retained its statuesque beauty of outline, ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... Miss Holmes to Harut who was engaged in putting more tobacco into the bowl, the suspicion of a smile upon his grave and statuesque countenance. Harut received the match with a low bow and fired the stuff as before. Then he handed the bowl, from which once again the blue smoke curled upwards, to Miss Holmes, and gently and gracefully ...
— The Ivory Child • H. Rider Haggard
... enlisted together with Miss Eames and Mme. Scaichi to make the one "sensation" of the season—Gounod's "Faust," which had six regular performances, and two extra. Of the women singers the greatest popularity was won by Miss Eames, whose youthfulness, freshness of voice, and statuesque beauty, compelled general admiration. The smallness of her repertory, however, prevented her from helping the season to the triumphant close which it might have had if the company had been enlisted to carry out the policy adopted when the season was half over. Miss Eames's dbut was made on the opening ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... Scriptural themes, seeks both to embellish the sacred page and to honor his art,—and of the sculptor, and the poet, likewise, each of whom, ranging divine ground, remarks upon the objects there presented according to the law of his profession. As the picturesque, the statuesque, the poetical in the Bible are legitimate studies, so also ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... had been drawn from cheek-bone to jaw, and, but for the good-humor that beamed from her small berry-like eyes and shone in her white teeth, would have been repulsive. She was short and stout. In her scant drapery and unrestrained freedom she was hardly statuesque, and her more unstudied attitudes were marred by a simian habit of softly scratching her left ankle with the toes of her right foot, ...
— Mrs. Skaggs's Husbands and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... The audience made no attempt to grasp the situation of the characters until it had satisfactorily settled the private identity of each. That done, it applied itself to the sympathetic comprehension of the feelings of a dozen young women who appeared to spend their whole existence in statuesque poses and plaintive but nonsensical lyricism. It failed, honestly; and even when the action descended from song to banal dialogue, it was not reassured. 'Silly' was the unspoken epithet on a hundred tongues, ...
— Leonora • Arnold Bennett
... has a heavenward inclination—who pretends to no strictness of beauty, according to absurd rules laid down in drawing-books—why is she brought into such fatal juxtaposition with this other severe and classical-looking and statuesque lady! To be merely a foil? Much obliged, Mr. Sherwin! The offended belle expressing angry and ironic gratitude sweeps from the painter's studio, gathering her rustling skirts together that they may not be soiled ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook
... statuesque on one side of the table, immovable save for an occasional puff of his cigar, suddenly shot into silent activity as the two men turned their backs on him and bent, apparently absorbed, over the desk in the corner. Like a ...
— Ravensdene Court • J. S. (Joseph Smith) Fletcher
... tree, satisfied that the tunnel would prove a dry and quiet retreat for the night, he turned to retrace his way to the outer end of the entrance that he might block it with boulders against Numa's return, but even with the thought there came something to his sensitive ears that froze him into statuesque immobility with eyes glued upon the tunnel's mouth. A moment later the head of a huge lion framed in a great black mane appeared in the opening. The yellow-green eyes glared, round and unblinking, straight at the trespassing Tarmangani, a low growl rumbled from the deep chest, and lips curled ...
— Tarzan the Untamed • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... large mirror directly in front of them, Marjorie could see him all the time. It struck her very funny to see the four Maynards eating their ice cream soda, without laughing or chatting, and with a statuesque footman in charge of them! However, the Maynards' enjoyment of their favorite dainty was not seriously marred by the conditions, and when at last they laid down their spoons, Marjorie suddenly realized that she had no money with her ...
— Marjorie's Maytime • Carolyn Wells
... "the dream reader," and although Mrs. Irvin had seen him before, his statuesque repose and the weirdness of his unfaltering ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer
... to become rigid, almost statuesque. Sudden terror often acts thus upon women of her highly nervous temperament. She allowed me to lead her downstairs and back to the dining room. On the way I met Short in the hall, and ordered him to go at once to the ...
— The Seven Secrets • William Le Queux
... clasped back of her head and the wide sleeves of the robe slipped back, showing the perfect arms. She seemed a trifle taller than when in Paris that first springtime, and the open robe revealed a figure statuesque, perfect as a sculptor's ideal, yet without the statue's coldness; for the uncovered throat and bosom held delicious dimples where the robe fell apart and was swept aside ...
— The Bondwoman • Marah Ellis Ryan
... at the message eagerly, and a second later, with blanched face, stood rigid, statuesque, as though ...
— The Doctor of Pimlico - Being the Disclosure of a Great Crime • William Le Queux
... buck, stepping warily along the trail toward water, halted as a burst of laughter broke upon his startled ears. For a moment he stood statuesque but for his sensitively dilating nostrils; then he wheeled and fled noiselessly from ...
— Jungle Tales of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... washstand, and other similar strongholds. Then he took his gun, the barrel of which, broken before it was given to him, had been replaced by a thin bamboo curtain-rod, and his finger on the trigger (a wooden match) he waited for an invader. After ten minutes of statuesque silence Mark began to think that this was a dull game, and he wished that his mother had not gone to her room with a headache, because if she had been with him she could have undoubtedly invented, so clever was she, a method of invading the nursery ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... massive. His muscles bulged out. The veins in his forearms were cord-like. His great chest seemed as broad as a door. His legs were statuesque in their size and strength. In that camp of strong men probably he was ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... animal's, flashing with light and resolution, yet with a certain strange calmness holds aloft in one hand a large knife—walks along not much back of the footlights—turns fully towards the audience, his face of statuesque beauty, lit by those basilisk eyes, flashing with desperation, perhaps insanity—launches out in a firm and steady voice the words, 'Sic semper tyrannis'—and then walks with neither slow nor very rapid ...
— Lincoln's Yarns and Stories • Alexander K. McClure
... seemed disposed to intensify his misery. "Did you ever see a more statuesque creature—with those superb broad shoulders and that little head, and that thick braid brought round over the top? Doesn't her face, with that calm look in those starry eyes, and that peculiar fall of the corners of the mouth, remind you of some of those exquisite great ...
— Indian Summer • William D. Howells
... for a closer inspection of the hotels. At the door of the largest a pair of children sported in the solitude, as fearlessly as the birds on Selkirk's island; looking into the hotel, he saw a few porters and call-boys seated in statuesque repose against the wall, while the clerk pined in dreamless inactivity behind the register; some deserted ladies flitted through the door of the parlor at the side. He recalled the evening of his former visit, when he and Isabel had met the Ellisons in that parlor, and it seemed, in ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... that has never known freedom. The performance consisted of three parts. The first was of the kind common to menageries. The tamer entered by the little door in a corner, with the celerity which all tamers employ, and stood for a moment in the statuesque immobility to which they are also given, in coming before the public. Having done this, he started forward with the black rod in his left hand, approached the animals, driving them to the end of the cage, the end of the rod nearly touching their faces. Here they stood under protest, ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various
... his eyes of black and gold never wavering; statuesque, his heroic body set solidly upon his sturdy legs, his regal head high, his lodestone feet secure upon the sloping rock, he was a handsome figure. He outweighed me about three pounds to one; so the longer I looked at ...
— A Mountain Boyhood • Joe Mills
... not rampant, as that inopportune charger on which Clark Mills perched General Jackson, at the national Capital. Nor is this "first in peace" by any means "the first" on horseback; the figure being theatric rather than dignified, and the extended arm more gymnastic than statuesque. ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... still standing rigid, statuesque, he heard, as has been said, the brush of steps through the straw, glimpsed a face, and trembled. But only for a moment. Then he steadied, head high, tail straight out. The birds rose with a whir—and then was repeated that horror ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... she knew very well how to fool the sterner sex. She had fine eyes and was wont to fix them with a bold stare on the gentlemen of the divan, who colored and became like wax in her hands. She also had the reputation of possessing a wonderfully fine figure, and southerners appreciate a statuesque style of beauty. ...
— Nana, The Miller's Daughter, Captain Burle, Death of Olivier Becaille • Emile Zola
... scandal, wondering if his Excellency had quarreled with the friars, if his presence at such a show was a defiance or mere curiosity. Others gave no heed to these matters, but were engaged in attracting the attention of the ladies, throwing themselves into attitudes more or less interesting and statuesque, flashing diamond rings, especially when they thought themselves the foci of insistent opera-glasses, while yet another would address a respectful salute to this or that senora or senorita, at the same time lowering his head ...
— The Reign of Greed - Complete English Version of 'El Filibusterismo' • Jose Rizal
... old work, and Mr. Slotman practised temporarily a courtesy and a forbearance that were foreign to him. But Mr. Slotman had by no means given up his hopes and desires. Joan appealed to him as no woman ever had. He admired her statuesque beauty. He admired her air of breeding; he admired the very pride that she had attempted to crush ...
— The Imaginary Marriage • Henry St. John Cooper
... small square opening at Thelma's white throat—an opening just sufficient to display her collar of diamonds—and every figure seemed either dumpy and awkward, too big or too fat, or too lean and too lanky—when brought into contrast with her statuesque outlines. ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... attributed by religious enthusiasts to supernatural agencies, but which are explainable by what we know of hypnotism. The Hesychasts of Mount Athos who remained motionless for days with their gaze directed steadily to the navel; the Taskodrugites who remained statuesque for a long period with the finger applied to the nose; the Jogins who could hibernate at will; the Dandins of India who became cataleptoid by 12,000 repetitions of the sacred word Om; St. Simeon Stylites who, perched on a lofty pillar, preserved an attitude of saint-like ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... image; acrolith, caryatid; xoanon. Associated Words: sculpture, statuary, sculptor, statuesque, figurine, esquisse. ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... statue, to which the Academician compared her, she lacked statuesque repose. She bent her body like a reed, or spun around like a weather-vane, or danced like a top. Her features possessed even greater mobility, and in consequence were even less statuesque. They were lighted up beautifully ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... took it from her, and then stood up before them all, holding it high in her strong arms—so superb, so statuesque, and yet so womanly a figure, that a thrill shot through the heart ...
— That Lass O' Lowrie's - 1877 • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... glossy curls to polished Hessians; at my uncle George, standing broad back to the mantel, a graceful, stalwart figure in tight-fitting riding-coat, buckskins and spurred boots; at my wonderful aunt, her dark and statuesque beauty as she sat, her noble form posed like an offended Juno, dimpled chin on dimpled fist, dark brows bent above long-lashed eyes, ruddy lips close-set and arched foot tapping softly beneath the folds ...
— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol
... lady riding across the moor behind them. She was mounted on one of the Orme horses, was habited by Redfern, who had done justice to her superb and supple figure, and the sunlight which poured from between the clouds fully revealed the statuesque beauty of ...
— At Love's Cost • Charles Garvice
... "Luck to our neighbour" was the toast—"luck," and the hope that all his ventures might be as successfully carried through as his practical joke. After that the Maluka gravely proposed "Cheon," and Cheon instantly became statuesque and dignified, to the further diversion of Brown of the Bulls—gravely accepting a thimbleful for himself, and, as gravely, drinking his own health, the Maluka just as gravely "clinking glasses" with ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn
... window, causing her to start. The figure was that of a man. She rose from the piano with a cry, and stood erect, motionless, statuesque. ...
— The House of Whispers • William Le Queux
... departments of life as by an instinct. Every divinity was made a plain figure to the mind, every mystery was symbolized in some positive beautiful myth, and every conception of whatever object became statuesque and clear. This artistic character was possible to them from the comparatively limited range of pagan imagination; their thought rarely dwelt in those regions where reason loves to ask the aid of mysticism, and all remote ideas, like all remote nations, were indiscriminately ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... silence among the men as the soft white ball of smoke rose slowly and steadily, expanding the while and changing its shape till it became utterly diffused. The occupants of the schooner's deck were statuesque in their rigidity, the crew to a man gazing hard at the captain as they strained their hearing to catch his next command; the captain fixed his eyes from one side upon Uncle Paul, while Rodd stood upon the other with his lips apart, gazing questioningly in his uncle's ...
— The Ocean Cat's Paw - The Story of a Strange Cruise • George Manville Fenn
... of the Duchess Mary Isabella was statuesque, classical; her features were noble. She received admiration as her right, but gave not largesse of smiles and wit in return. She was not as the Devonian divinity, "The woman in whose golden smile ...
— Some Old Time Beauties - After Portraits by the English Masters, with Embellishment and Comment • Thomson Willing
... her at the door of the tent. She nodded thrice; then she glided back, serpentine, and threw herself gracefully, in a statuesque pose, on the native mat beside him. "Here, drink some more kava," she cried, holding a bowl to his lips, and wheedling him with her eyes. "Kava is good; it is fit for gods. It makes them royally drunk, as becomes great deities. ...
— The Great Taboo • Grant Allen
... with a clear skin and delicate bloom which any young beauty of the court might have envied. Her figure was graceful and queenly, her gestures and pose full of a natural dignity, and her voice, as he had already remarked, most sweet and melodious. Her face was handsome rather than beautiful, set in a statuesque classical mould, with broad white forehead, firm, delicately sensitive mouth, and a pair of large serene gray eyes, earnest and placid in repose, but capable of reflecting the whole play of her soul, from the merry gleam of humour to the ...
— The Refugees • Arthur Conan Doyle
... a spectacle of physical degeneracy while Guy Little became a grotesque dwarf. The grandfather was much like the grandson, and—though she vowed to like him the less for it—was in his statuesque, leonine way quite the handsomest man she had ever ...
— Man to Man • Jackson Gregory
... had turned Joe Lewis's word against him, when a tall Indian arose and spread his blanket open like a wing. He stood for a time silent, statuesque, and thoughtful. The men waited seriously to ...
— The Log School-House on the Columbia • Hezekiah Butterworth
... the morning— So the mystic legend goes— With the placid face still smiling In its statuesque repose;— With a lily in his left hand, And in his right a rose, With their fragrance curling upward Through a nimbus 'round ...
— Nye and Riley's Wit and Humor (Poems and Yarns) • Bill Nye
... to get Rea's meaning, then vigorously shook his head and gazed at Jones in fear and horror. Following this came an action as singular as inexplicable. Slowly rising, he faced the north, lifted his hand, and remained statuesque in his immobility. Then he began deliberately packing his blankets and traps on his sled, which had not been unhitched from ...
— The Last of the Plainsmen • Zane Grey
... with his usual vividness. Suddenly, as it was relevant, he declared that his Baden doings had not been altogether fruitless, for that the lady who had reminded Rowland of Madame de Cruchecassee was tremendously statuesque. Rowland at last said that it all might pass if he felt that he was really the wiser for it. "By the wiser," he added, "I mean the stronger in purpose, ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... nothing at all; a Kaiser much sunk in the sediments of his muddy Epoch. Sure enough, he was a proud lofty solemn Kaiser, infinitely the gentleman in air and humor; Spanish gravities, ceremonials, reticences;—and could, in a better scene, have distinguished himself by better than mere statuesque immovability of posture, dignified endurance of ennui, and Hapsburg tenacity in holding the grip. It was not till 1735, after tusslings and wrenchings beyond calculation, that he would consent to quit the Shadow of the Crown of Spain; and ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume V. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... dream about statuesque beauties Who look from the shadows of opera boxes; Or elegant ladies in novels of eighteen thirty, At the hunt ball... Reflections in a polish floor, A portrait by Renoir, A Degas dancing girl, English country houses, An autumn afternoon in the Bois, ...
— Precipitations • Evelyn Scott
... Canal, we have no visible clue to guide us in our estimate of their artistic worth. Vasari's description, and Zanetti's engraving of a few fragments (done in 1760, when the frescoes were already in decay), go to prove that Giorgione at this period studied the antique, "commingling statuesque classicism and the flesh and blood of ...
— Giorgione • Herbert Cook
... Propylaea, which was erected under the superintendence of Phidias. The pictures of Polygnotus had nothing of that elaborate grouping, aided by the powers of perspective, so much admired in modern art. His greatness lay in statuesque painting, which he brought nearly to perfection by ideal expression, accurate drawing, and improved coloring. He used but few colors, and softened the rigidity of his predecessors by making the mouth of beauty smile. He gave great expression to the ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume III • John Lord
... was not a whit more warmed by Zenobia's passion than a salamander by the heat of its native furnace. He would have been absolutely statuesque, save for a look of slight perplexity, tinctured strongly with derision. It was a crisis in which his intellectual perceptions could not altogether help him out. He failed to comprehend, and cared but little for comprehending, why Zenobia should put herself into such ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the door again with superhuman vigour. Behind me I heard Dona Rita laughing softly, statuesque, turned all dark in the fading glow. I called out to her quite openly, "Do keep your self-control." And she called back to me in a clear voice: "Oh, my dear, will you ever consent to speak to me ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... another shrug; and, for all their statuesque beauty, the movement of her shoulders was like the shrug of a little girl ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... he said. "Only there's a statuesque old lady about two tables back of you who has been staring at you, with intervals for refreshment, for the last five minutes. You seem ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse
... hairdressing, held in their hands, which were bending and flexible as serpents, combs and mirrors of polished steel; two Grecian maidens from Kos, who were simply like deities, waited as vestiplicae, till the moment should come to put statuesque folds in the ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... guilty-looking tumbler with one hand, while she neatly wipes her mouth on the back of the other. She has that effect, observable in all tippling women of low degree, of having no upper garment on but a shawl, which hangs about her in statuesque folds and lines. She slinks out directly, but the lady behind the counter ...
— Suburban Sketches • W.D. Howells
... Mademoiselle de Montijo had the good or ill fortune to fall into one of the ornamental fishponds in the garden. She was taken out insensible, and her wet and clinging garments revealed a form of such statuesque perfection that all Madrid went raving about her beauty. She plunged a commonplace girl—she rose a Venus. And when she first attracted the notice of Napoleon she was indisputably one of the loveliest women in Europe. She was tall, slender, exquisitely proportioned, and her ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, August, 1878 • Various
... little woman, one of those marvelous, graceful creatures, who bear the trade-mark of Paris. Pretty? Well, yes and no. Well-made? No, better than that: her waist was too slight, her shoulders too narrow, her breast too full, no doubt; but I prefer those exquisite human dolls to that great statuesque corpse, ...
— The works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 5 (of 8) - Une Vie and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant 1850-1893
... much fine stock among them or even any, the fact remained that hundreds of wild horses together in one drove, captive and knowing it, were collected in this great trap. The intense vitality of them, the vivid coloring, the beautiful action of many and the statuesque immobility of the majority, were thrilling and all satisfying to the hearts of ...
— Valley of Wild Horses • Zane Grey
... enemy who has surprised a secret vital to the safety of one's self and comrades—an enemy more formidable for his knowledge than all his army for its numbers? Carter Druse grew pale; he shook in every limb, turned faint, and saw the statuesque group before him as black figures, rising, falling, moving unsteadily in arcs of circles in a fiery sky. His hand fell away from his weapon, his head slowly dropped until his face rested on the leaves in which he lay. This ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. II: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians • Ambrose Bierce
... "Piety itself is no aim, but only a means whereby, through purest inward peace, we may attain to highest culture." And his penetration of every secret of the fine arts will make Goethe still more statuesque. His affections help him, like women employed by Cicero to worm out the secret of conspirators. Enmities he has none. Enemy of him you may be,—if so you shall teach him aught which your good-will cannot,—were ...
— Representative Men • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... instrument in a graceful fashion against her shoulder as one holds a violin, and with her flowing white gown caught in the other hand, she bowed and smiled and instantly seemed transformed. From the statuesque and dreamy singer she became a marvel of graceful motion. To and fro she swept from end to end of the great rug, her tiny feet and slim ankles tripping so lightly that she seemed to move ...
— The Land of the Changing Sun • William N. Harben
... proffered assistance of the passengers, they helped each other into the coach, and freezingly requesting the driver to stop at Mr. Peyton's gate, maintained a statuesque and impressive silence. At the gates they got down, followed by the ...
— Susy, A Story of the Plains • Bret Harte
... continued his work, reflecting on her. He had been so caught by her influence that he had taken no count of her general mould and build. He remembered now that she was not a large figure, that she was light and slight, of the type dubbed elegant. That was about all he had seen. There was nothing statuesque in her; all was nervous motion. She was mobile, living, yet a painter might not have called her handsome or beautiful. But the much that she was surprised him. She was quite a long way removed from the rusticity that was his. How could one of his cross-grained, unfortunate, almost accursed stock, ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... by two 'proud young porters' in severe cocked hats and formidable batons, into a broad hall,—threw off our furred boots and cloaks, ascended a carpeted marble staircase, in every angle of which stood a statuesque footman in gaudy coat and unblemished unmentionables, and reached a broad landing upon the top thronged as usual with servants. Thence we passed through an antechamber into a long, high, brilliantly ...
— Memoir of John Lothrop Motley, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... George on his Roman-nosed charger; he, depend on it, would be for getting off his horse if he had the permission. He did not hesitate about trifles, as we know; but he was a very truth-telling and honorable soldier: and as for heroic rank and statuesque dignity, I would wager a dozen of '20 port against a bottle of pure and sound Bordeaux, at 18s. per dozen (bottles included), that he never would think of claiming any such absurd distinction. They have got a statue of Thomas Moore at Dublin, I hear. Is he on horseback? Some men should have, ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... had meant to economize this summer; but now she made a sudden start for Newport. Irene certainly was peerless in her half-mourning, with her statuesque figure. But there was not an eligible at Newport, so they turned their steps Saratoga-ward. And here they found an old admirer of Mrs. Minor's, Gordon Barringer, a widower for the second time, the owner of a silver-mine ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas
... Paris. Its frontispiece is marvellous, the rez-de-chaussee less gracious than the rest perhaps, but with the first story blooming forth as a gem of magnificent proportions and setting. Between the four windows of this first story are posed statuesque effigies of Charles VII, Jeanne d'Arc, Saint Remy and Louis IX. In the centre, in a niche, is an equestrian statue of Louis XII, who reigned when this monument was being built. A balustrade a jour finishes off this story, ...
— Royal Palaces and Parks of France • Milburg Francisco Mansfield
... weapons—preoccupied with the worries so much dampness had wrought for their powder and bow strings. Suddenly one of them raised his head, deerlike, to listen. As wild things they all responded, and the group of men was statuesque as it listened to the beat of horses' hoofs. As a flock of blackbirds leaves a bush—with one motion—the statuary dissolved into a kaleidoscopic twinkle of movement as the warriors grabbed and ran and gathered. They sought their ponies' lariats, but before they could mount a ...
— The Way of an Indian • Frederic Remington |
