"Tracery" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... plate melted. The beautiful stone screen, which separated the Lady's Chapel from the altar, has not suffered so materially as was at first imagined. This elegant specimen of ancient sculpture is divided into eight pointed arches, and elaborately ornamented with tracery work: the lights were filled with plate glass, through which a fine view of the great eastern window was obtained; some pieces of which ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 13, No. 356, Saturday, February 14, 1829 • Various
... no one observed him, he studied this face and mused upon it. The white candle-light on the shining wall beyond threw everything into a soft, uniform shadow, this side of the thread of dark tracery which outlined forehead and nose and lips and chin. It seemed to him that the eyes were closed, as in reverie; he could not ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... that we owe those fair fronts of variegated mosaic, charged with wild fancies and dark hosts of imagery, thicker and quainter than ever filled the depths of midsummer dream; those vaulted gates, trellised with close leaves; those window-labyrinths of twisted tracery and starry light; those misty masses of multitudinous pinnacle and diademed tower; the only witnesses, perhaps, that remain to us of the faith and fear of nations." So it is also with these sentences from De Quincey's "The English Mail-Coach":—"The sea, the ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton
... whirling his rotundity like a Mussulman dervish inflated by the spirit to agitate the shanks, until pangs of a commercial crisis awaken him to perceive an infructuous past and an unsown future, without one bit of tracery on its black breast other than that which his apprehensions project. As for a present hour, it swims, it vanishes, thinner than the phantom banquets of recollection. What has he done for the growth of his globe of brains?—the lesser, but in our ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... reappeared in the sepulchral architecture of our own times, and the light and graceful orders of Greece and Italy would not as now have been the models of our villas and our dwellings, nor would the simple and lofty arch and the delicate tracery of Gothic design have been as it now is, everywhere consecrated to the service ...
— Autographs for Freedom, Volume 2 (of 2) (1854) • Various
... and laid it on my lap without a word. Evidently she thought that here was something that could speak for itself. It was two layers of snowy cotton cloth thinly lined with cotton, and elaborately quilted into a perfect imitation of a Marseilles counterpane. The pattern was a tracery of roses, buds, and leaves, very much conventionalized, but still recognizable for the things they were. The stitches were fairylike, and altogether it might have covered the bed ...
— Aunt Jane of Kentucky • Eliza Calvert Hall
... Sea, as the Pacific was then called. So deep-rooted was this belief that the French colonists in Canada, long after they had begun to be formidable to their English and Hollandish neighbors, in spite of many disappointments, followed the tracery of the Ohio and Mississippi in the full confidence that this mighty current could end only in the Western Sea. They could not realize that nature in America had always acted on a grander scale than they were used to, and would have laughed, ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 6 June 1848 • Various
... impression was of overwhelming architecture. The place into which he looked was an aisle of Titanic buildings, curving spaciously in either direction. Overhead mighty cantilevers sprang together across the huge width of the place, and a tracery of translucent material shut out the sky. Gigantic globes of cool white light shamed the pale sunbeams that filtered down through the girders and wires. Here and there a gossamer suspension bridge dotted with foot passengers flung across ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells
... of poetry which is continually flowing is slang. Every day a nameless poet weaves some fairy tracery of popular language. It may be said that the fashionable world talks slang as much as the democratic; this is true, and it strongly supports the view under consideration. Nothing is more startling than the contrast between the ...
— The Defendant • G.K. Chesterton
... a pleasure in the medieval forms. His talk was fragmentary, he was only half articulate. But listening to him, as he spoke of church after church, of nave and chancel and transept, of rood-screen and font, of hatchet-carving and moulding and tracery, speaking always with close passion of particular things, particular places, there gathered in her heart a pregnant hush of churches, a mystery, a ponderous significance of bowed stone, a dim-coloured light through which something ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... work in all essentials was designed as a great whole; it did not grow up bit by bit. There are of course many evidences of alterations and rebuilding at later times; the buildings in the middle ward, on the south side, seem to be later additions; the hall appears to have been enlarged, and the tracery of the windows suggests the fourteenth century; the state-rooms to the west of the hall have been much altered; but such alterations as appear are confined to the habitable part of the castle, and do not ...
— Mediaeval Wales - Chiefly in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries: Six Popular Lectures • A. G. Little
... again in the quiet woods. It began to grow both damp and dusk under the beeches: and as the day declined the colour faded out of the foliage: and shadow, without form and void, took the place of all the fine tracery of leaves and delicate gradations of living green that had before accompanied my walk. I had been sorry to leave "Peacock Farm," but I was not sorry to find myself once more in the open road, under a pale and somewhat troubled-looking evening sky, and put my best foot ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... would have gone inside the Castle three times over—were the only country houses in the Reverend James Stafford's parish. The village of Chilmark—a stone bridge, crossroads, a church with Norman tower and frondlike Renaissance tracery, and an irregular line of school, shops, and cottages strung out between the stream and chalky beech-crested hillside occupied one of those long, winding, sheltered crannies that mark the beds of watercourses along the folds ...
— Nightfall • Anthony Pryde
... graceful Fern" (filices) with its exquisite tracery must not be overlooked. It recalls many noble home-scenes to British eyes. Pliny says that "of ferns there are two kinds, and they bear neither flowers nor seed." And this erroneous notion of the fern bearing no seed was common amongst the English even so late as the time of Addison who ridicules ...
— Flowers and Flower-Gardens • David Lester Richardson
... branching as in our trees of to-day. The trunks are often flattened, as though they had been under great pressure, often the very bark seemed to be on them (though it was petrified bark), and on some we saw marks of insect tracery like those made by the borers of to-day. Some of the trunks were more than one hundred and fifty feet long, and five to seven feet in diameter, prostrate but intact, looking as though uprooted where they ...
— Our Friend John Burroughs • Clara Barrus
... Pierre drove the flock of goats down the steep mountain trail which led from the plateau where the pasture lay she glanced across the valley. Against the blue sky a tracery of delicate ...
— The Story of Silk • Sara Ware Bassett
... of the windows, to the level of the picture-moulding, is covered with green silk, overlaid with an applique of the same in a design somewhat like the frieze, so that it seems to carry the frieze across the space of light in a green tracery of shadow. The same green extends from curtain-rods at the height of the picture-moulding into long under-curtains of silk, while the over-curtains are of indigo coloured silk-canvas which ...
— Principles of Home Decoration - With Practical Examples • Candace Wheeler
... Andrew's Chapel, supported and probably founded by the Smiths' Company. The first notice of its existence occurs in 1449, but as this part was not built until 1500 it was perhaps originally in the adjoining aisle. The window tracery is modern. The panelling within the internal arches and between the windows should be noted. The floor near the wall is partly paved ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Churches of Coventry - A Short History of the City and Its Medieval Remains • Frederic W. Woodhouse
... measure left the branches, the suggestion of a cathedral nave was still presented to the mind. The equidistant trunks were, as formerly, the supporting pillars, but the vista had suffered a mournful change, as if the roof had suddenly been blown away, leaving the springing ribs a black tracery against the autumnal sky. This ruinous work of the frost was strangely offset by the soft witchery of the breeze, which seemed either a reminiscence of the spring that was past, or a promise of the spring to come. Leigh's thoughts took a turn in harmony with this influence. He ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... to the purest period of Moroccan art. The tracery of the broken arches is all carved in stone or in glazed turquoise tiling, and the fragments of wall and vaulting have the firm elegance of a classic ruin. But what would even their beauty be without the leafy setting of the place? The "unimaginable touch of Time" gives Chella its peculiar ...
— In Morocco • Edith Wharton
... great grey or white clouds, and what was above or below in those blue vastnesses! And whence came all those strange things that the water spread at his feet the long, brown, wet streamers, or the delicate red tracery that could be seen in the clear pools, where were sometimes those lumps like raw flesh when closed, but which opened into flowers? Or the things like the snails on the heath, yet not snails, and all the strange creatures that hopped ...
— The Herd Boy and His Hermit • Charlotte M. Yonge
... by way of no more than a parenthetical flick of notice that his eastern front, conspicuous from the rear as he bends forward over his machine, shows a patched and jointed mullionry that is not unlike the tracery of some cathedral's rounded apse. But I go too far in imagery. Plain speech is best. I'll ...
— Journeys to Bagdad • Charles S. Brooks
... with me and from a carven arch filled with marble tracery rained radiance that revealed and hid. Pillars stood about me, wonderful with horses ramping forward as in the Siva Temple at Vellore. They appeared to spring from the pillars into the gloom urged by invisible riders, the effect barbarously rich and strange—motion arrested, struck dumb in a violent ...
— The Ninth Vibration And Other Stories • L. Adams Beck
... were inflamed with a positive hatred of the beautiful in art. If this had been confined to the destruction of images to which idolatrous worship was offered, it would be explicable and justifiable, but it extended to the most innocuous objects. Delicate tracery such as adorns the west front of the church of Vendome, a lace-work of beautiful sculpture representing trailing roses and vines, birds and reptiles, was ruthlessly hacked. Churches, cathedrals, ...
— Castles and Cave Dwellings of Europe • Sabine Baring-Gould
... practical knowledge and recollection had returned. As is common with seamen, whose minds contain vivid pictures of the intricate tracery of their vessel's rigging in the darkest nights, his thoughts had flashed athwart all the probable circumstances, and presented a just ...
— The Two Admirals • J. Fenimore Cooper
... will greet our eyes. The rocky ceiling will be ornamented everywhere with the most delicate tracery, faultless representations of the delicate fronds ...
— The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It, Vol. 1, No. 31, June 10, 1897 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... again whose ends were decayed, and which were shortened by cutting off the unsound parts. The result of this was that the Norman triforium arches on the north side were thrown open to the sky; these he filled with Perpendicular tracery, converting them into windows. The tracery still remains, although the new roof has the same slope as the original one, and the triforium is now again inclosed beneath it. He also pulled down the wooden ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Saint Albans - With an Account of the Fabric & a Short History of the Abbey • Thomas Perkins
... screen of the most gorgeous and florid architecture and executed in solid stone, separates the nave from the service choir. The beautiful workmanship of this makes it appear so perfect, as almost to produce the belief that it is tracery work of wood. We ascended the rough stone steps through a winding stair to the turrets, where we had such a view of the surrounding country, as can be obtained from no other place. On the top of the centre and highest turret, ...
— Three Years in Europe - Places I Have Seen and People I Have Met • William Wells Brown
... out on the halyards. I was looking up from the galley door, and I could see him trembling, as if with ague, in every limb. He proceeded very slowly and cautiously, an inch at a time. Outlined against the clear blue of the sky, he had the appearance of an enormous spider crawling along the tracery ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... forest vegetation grows an intricate tracery of lianas and climbing sipos, some running round and round the trees, and holding them in a close embrace; others hanging from branch to branch in rich festoons, covered with starlike flowers, or dropping in long lines to the ground,—often to take root ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... of the branched tracery with a serpentine flexure—altogether different from the springing lines of Gothic ornament. It would be almost impossible to draw this better; it is much more like the real thing than a ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... beautiful as the birds, if we only look at them in the right way. A microscope will reveal beauties in some of the commonest insects, which will positively astonish those who have never before studied bugs as they ought to be studied. The most brilliant colors, the most delicate tracery and lace-work over the wings and bodies; often the most graceful forms and beautifully-contrived limbs and bodies and wing-cases and antennae, are to be seen in many bugs when they are placed beneath the glasses of ...
— Round-about Rambles in Lands of Fact and Fancy • Frank Richard Stockton
... all, the forcible abduction and threatened espousal of that unhappy woman by the formidable being who seemed to have identified himself with the evils with which they stood menaced,—all rushed with rapid tracery on the mind, and excited the imagination, until each, filled with a sentiment not unallied to superstitious awe, feared to whisper forth his thoughts, lest in so doing he should invoke the presence of those who had principally figured in the ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... tracery of sky was blotted out; the forest became dark as night; the tree tops heaved and thrashed about in the wind that rushed down the mountain side. On the heels of the wind came a drenching rain, and Marion took what refuge was offered close ...
— The Heart of Thunder Mountain • Edfrid A. Bingham
... silence, before all the voices, gathering into one harmony, sent the last versicle ringing through the arches of the choir, and the springing tracery of the feretory, and of ...
— The Case of Richard Meynell • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... most brilliant incarnation of the Empire. One sees from a distance, not the solid or insecure base of the building, but the gilded and delicate spire, embellished, carved into hollow tracery, added for the satisfaction of the age. Mora was what was seen in France and throughout Europe of the Empire. If he fell, the monument would find itself bereft of all its elegance, split as by some long and irreparable ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... and dates, yet so united as to present to the eye a certain general effect of uniformity of front. The doors and windows were ornamented with projections exhibiting rude specimens of sculpture and tracery, partly entire and partly broken down, partly covered by ivy and trailing plants, which grew luxuriantly among the ruins. That end of the court which faced the entrance had also been formerly closed by a range ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... would not have been visible at all by that light, but for the circumstance that she had no back-ground to swallow up her outlines. Drawn against clouds, above which the rays of the moon were shed, her tracery was to be discerned, however, and, minute by minute, it was getting to be more and more distinct, until it was now so plainly to be seen as to admonish the mate of the necessity of preparation in the ...
— Jack Tier or The Florida Reef • James Fenimore Cooper
... the Louvre, with its marvelous carving, seemed more wonderful to me than the vast open hearth of the salon d'Esgrignon when I saw it for the first time. It was covered like a melon with a network of tracery. Over it stood an equestrian portrait of Henri III., under whom the ancient duchy of appanage reverted to the crown; it was a great picture executed in low relief, and set in a carved and gilded frame. The ceiling spaces between the chestnut cross-beams in the fine old roof were decorated ...
— The Jealousies of a Country Town • Honore de Balzac
... roofing to the buttresses at the western ends of the aisles and these also add colour to this picturesque building. The great double flight of stone steps which lead to the imposing western door have balustrades filled with flamboyant tracery, but although the church is built up in this way, the floor in the interior is not level, for it slopes gently up towards the east. The building was commenced during the reign of Louis XII. and not finished until ...
— Normandy, Complete - The Scenery & Romance Of Its Ancient Towns • Gordon Home
... life up to the moment when Ursula Drew made her appearance on the scene. But now a new element was introduced; for Maude's third home was a stately palace, filled with beautiful carvings, and delicate tracery, and exquisite colours, all which, lowest of the low as she was, she enjoyed with an intensity till then unknown to herself, and certainly not shared by any other in her sphere. That sense of the beautiful, which, trained in ...
— The White Rose of Langley - A Story of the Olden Time • Emily Sarah Holt
... interest is awakened by what is beautiful, grand, and harmonious in nature or art. The first glance at great overhanging masses of rock, oppresses us with a feeling of awe. The wings of an insect, with their delicate tracery and bright hues, are attractive, and stir us with pleasure. The graceful ferns beside the brooks and moss-stained rocks ...
— The Elements of General Method - Based on the Principles of Herbart • Charles A. McMurry
... the lower mouldings and damper recesses, especially amid the tombs and in the aisles, to a decomposing mildew, which eats into it in fantastic map-like lines of mingled black and gray, so resembling Runic fret-work, that I had some difficulty in convincing myself that the tracery which it forms,—singularly appropriate to the architecture,—was not the effect of design. The choir and chancel of the edifice, which at the time of my visit were still employed as the parish church of Kirkwall, and had become a "world too wide" ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... sufficient dread, to prevent him from mingling, like the rest, among the people. The few who remained along with them advanced; and notwithstanding their innocence, when the Donagh was presented and the figure of Christ and the Twelve Apostles displayed in the solemn tracery of its carving, they exhibited symptoms of fear. With trembling hands they touched the Donagh, and with trembling lips kissed the crucifix, in attestation of their guiltlessness of the charge with which they had ...
— The Hedge School; The Midnight Mass; The Donagh • William Carleton
... Paul is large, with a nave and a south aisle, divided by early English piers and arches. A stone pulpit, ornamented with gilt tracery, on a blue ground, has been removed in favour of an oak one, with the chancel. The church of St. Peter has an old Norman door, a fine antique front, and some curious stained glass in ...
— Rides on Railways • Samuel Sidney
... morning I set the quarrymen to work, with pick and basket, at the north-western angle of the old fort. The latter shows above ground only the normal skeleton-tracery of coralline rock, crowning the gentle sand-swell, which defines the lip and jaw of the Wady; and defending the townlet built on the northern slope and plain. The dimensions of the work are fifty-five mtres each way. The curtains, except the western, ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... a portion of a blanket from the Hopi Indians is shown, that the delicate design may be better seen. A number of Hopi patterns have this fine white line of tracery upon the dark background and it is this play of the fine line pattern on the fabric which is one of the chief beauties of Hopi weavings. The sparkle of white is even more brilliant in Figure 11, another smaller weaving from the same people. They make constant ...
— Aboriginal American Weaving • Mary Lois Kissell
... the extreme angles, two of which are united with the staircase turrets, the others with the ends of the old porch. The upper story, containing an apartment, is sustained on a vaulted and groined roof, and has three large windows, with elaborate tracery. ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Hereford, A Description - Of Its Fabric And A Brief History Of The Episcopal See • A. Hugh Fisher
... wind through the rigging, and the dash of the water against the bows, audible forward though not aft. The seamen, not romantically inclined, for the most part heeded neither moon nor sky nor canvas. The vivid, delicate tracery of the shrouds and ruining gear, the broader image of the sails, shadowed on the moonlit deck, appealed not to them. Recognizing only that we had a steady wind, no more bracing to-night, and that the most that could ...
— From Sail to Steam, Recollections of Naval Life • Captain A. T. Mahan
... of equestrian silhouettes. It was half glimpse, half conjecture,—the tough little ponies trotting stubbornly, a rider who leaned across laughing, and a woman who gayly cried at him: "You really do understand me, don't you?" The two jogging shadows melted in the bamboo tracery, like things blown down the wind. But for years Rudolph had known the words, the laugh, the beguiling cadence, and could have told what poise of the head went with them, what dangerous glancing light. Suddenly, without reason, he felt a gust of rage. ...
— Dragon's blood • Henry Milner Rideout
... the one in front spirt forward as though each was straining for the lead. They drew level, then flashed apart, then again drew level, and so passing and repassing raced into the myriad lights upon the opposite bank. That bank was visible to him through a tracery of leafless twigs, for a tree grew in front of his window on the farther edge of the gardens, and he could see the lights upon its roadway dancing, twirling, clashing in the clear night, just as they clashed and twirled and danced in the roadway ...
— The Philanderers • A.E.W. Mason
... by which we may be again identified. It may be by a pug nose, a hare lip, red hair, no hair or squint eyes. They never ask one's name, for they can neither pronounce nor write it when it is given. The ticket is an unintelligible tracery of lines, curves, dots and dashes, made by a brush dipped in India ink on a shred of flimsy Chinese paper. It may teem with abuse and ridicule, but you must pocket all that, and produce it on calling again, or your shirts and collars go into the Chinese Circumlocution ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, No. 23, February, 1873, Vol. XI. • Various
... creatures,—the stately regular prints of the partridge; the series of pairs made by the squirrel; those of the weasel and mink, just like the squirrels' except that the prints were not quite side by side, and that between every other pair stretched the mark of the animal's long, slender body; the delicate tracery of the deer mouse; the fan of the rabbit; the print of a baby's hand that the raccoon left; the broad pad of a lynx; the dog-like trail of wolves;—these, and a dozen others, all equally unknown, gave Thorpe the impression of a great ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... leaned upon the saddles of the horses and watched the wreaths of the mist bank gradually dissolving. To the eastward there jutted out a promontory with a considerable elevation, behind which the sun began to show his florid countenance. Presently the indistinct outline of a graceful tracery of spars and cordage greeted the eye through the misty gauze, growing steadily more and more distinct and gradually descending towards the sea level, until at last there lay before us in full view, with a look of treacherous tranquillity, the dark, ...
— Due South or Cuba Past and Present • Maturin M. Ballou
... geometric designs upon both sides, the patterns on the two sides differing. [PLATE V. Fig. 4.] These designs, though unlike in many respects the arabesques of the Mohammedans, yet seemed on the whole to be their precursors, the "geometric curves and tracery" appearing to "shadow forth the beauty and richness of a style which afterwards followed the tide of Mohammedan conquest to the remotest ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 6. (of 7): Parthia • George Rawlinson
... there I saw the great-grandfather of all the cactuses, a hoary, solemn plant, declared to be a thousand years old, disdaining to say if it is not really much, older; in yet another, the most exquisitely minute plants, delicate as the tracery of frostwork, too delicate for the bowers of fairies, such at least as visit the gross brains of ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... which is a cream-coloured rosette (fig. 237). Some of these rosettes are framed in geometrical designs (fig. 238) or spider-web patterns; some represent open flowers. The central boss is in relief; the petals and tracery are encrusted in the mass. These roundels, which are of various diameters ranging from three- eighths of an inch to four inches, were fixed to the walls by means of a very fine cement. They were used to form many different designs, ...
— Manual Of Egyptian Archaeology And Guide To The Study Of Antiquities In Egypt • Gaston Camille Charles Maspero
... not an indifferent, callous spectator of the scenes which he himself pourtrays, but without seeming to feel them. There is no look of patch-work and plagiarism, the beggarly copiousness of borrowed wealth; no tracery-work from worm-eaten manuscripts, from forgotten chronicles, nor piecing out of vague traditions with fragments and snatches of old ballads, so that the result resembles a gaudy, staring transparency, in which you cannot ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... on for some time, gradually entering a denser part of the forest than we had yet reached. Sipos hung down from every bough, forming a curious tracery of living cordage above our heads, and more completely uniting the tall trees than even the masts of a ship are by the rigging, so that an active midshipman, or a still more agile monkey—I hope the former will pardon me ...
— On the Banks of the Amazon • W.H.G. Kingston
... administered with the aid of a modern calorifere, and the walls of the palace are perforated with regurgitating tubes. Behind and above the gallery that surmounts the three fireplaces are high Gothic windows, the tracery of which masks, in some sort, the chimneys; and in each angle of this and of the room to the right and left of the trio of chimneys is an open-work spiral staircase, ascending to—I forget where; perhaps to the ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... intervene between the floor and the vaulted roof of the nave and choir, and the pillars are 79 feet high. The great western window, and the end windows of the N. and S. transepts, contain superb glass set in light flamboyant tracery. Adjoining is the Prfecture, formerly the Episcopal Palace, built in the 13th cent. Near the Cathedral is the hospital and the church of St. Germain, with a curious crypt of the 9th cent., but restored in the 17th. Apply to the concierge at the gate beside the now isolated ...
— The South of France—East Half • Charles Bertram Black
... terminated with the Gothic arch of a gateway in the far distance. The bow-window was open, and Sir Christopher, stepping in, found the group he sought, examining the progress of the unfinished ceiling. It was in the same style of florid pointed Gothic as the dining-room, but more elaborate in its tracery, which was like petrified lace-work picked out with delicate and varied colouring. About a fourth of its still remained uncoloured, and under this part were scaffolding, ladders, and tools; otherwise the spacious saloon ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... about ten feet high to the lower edge of the cornice. The walls, of unpainted aethereum, were broken up into panels by fluted pilasters with richly-moulded capitals, each panel having a frosted border covered with delicate tracery, whilst the central portion of the panel was left plain and polished, serving the purpose of a mirror, in which the room and its multiplied reflections on the opposite wall was again reflected in a long perspective. ...
— The Log of the Flying Fish - A Story of Aerial and Submarine Peril and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... Frenchiness of Victor Hugo chokes me from appreciating him: just as we were going away yesterday Mr. Ruskin called out, "There is something I MUST show Aunt Judy," and fetched two photos. One, an old court with bits of old gothic tracery mixed in with a modern tumbledown building—peaceful old doorway, wild vine twisting up the lintel, modern shrine, dilapidated waterbutt, sunshine straggling in—as far as the beauty of contrast and suggestiveness and form and (one could fancy) colour could go, perfect ...
— Juliana Horatia Ewing And Her Books • Horatia K. F. Eden
... symphony or quartet of Beethoven." Campbell: "Certainly, Bateman, you must tolerate Pagan architecture, or you must in consistency exclude Pagan or Jewish Gregorians, you must tolerate figured music, or reprobate tracery windows." Bateman: "And which are you for, Gothic with Handel, or Roman with Gregorian?" Campbell: "For both in their place. I exceedingly prefer Gothic architecture to classical. I think it is the one true child and development of Christianity; but I won't ...
— Cardinal Newman as a Musician • Edward Bellasis
... by the haunted fount, Through the dim grotto's tracery of spars, 'Mid the pine temples, on the moonlit mount, Where silence sits to listen to the stars; In the deep glade where dwells the brooding dove, The painted valley, and the scented air, She heard far echoes of the voice of Love, And found ...
— TITLE • AUTHOR
... greens, produced a magnificent harmony of melancholy tones. At the farther end of the valley a sheet of sparkling water ruffled by the breeze brought out the brown stretch of roofs in the suburb of Saint-Etienne. The steeples and roofs of Saint-Martial, bathed in light, showed through the tracery of the grape-vine arbor. The soft murmur of the provincial town, half hidden by the bend of the river, the sweetness of the balmy air, all contributed to plunge the prelate into the condition of quietude ...
— The Village Rector • Honore de Balzac
... girl obeyed and edged up beside him with face bent down. He put his hand upon hers, and for a few seconds looked at the delicate tracery of tattooing that, on the back, ran in thin blue lines from the ...
— By Reef and Palm • Louis Becke
... costliest gifts Purchased, a banquet of such glad event Made fit memorial; and with pomp the Queen Displayed her luxuries, as yet unknown To Roman fashions. First uprose the hall Like to a fane which this corrupted age Could scarcely rear: the lofty ceiling shone With richest tracery, the beams were bound In golden coverings; no scant veneer Lay on its walls, but built in solid blocks Of marble, gleamed the palace. Agate stood In sturdy columns, bearing up the roof; Onyx and porphyry on the spacious floor Were trodden 'neath the foot; the mighty gates Of Maroe's throughout ...
— Pharsalia; Dramatic Episodes of the Civil Wars • Lucan
... moon had risen, painting the water with silver; barge lights and the lights of tugs and police boats shewed points of orange and dribbles of ruffled gold, whilst away down stream to the right, the airy fairy tracery of the Houses ...
— The Man Who Lost Himself • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... after peace was restored, but I lay awake for hours watching the tracery of palm shadows on the wall opposite, thrown there by the light of the square. At midnight the lamp was put out, the room grew black, without a ray of light, and after a time ...
— Five Nights • Victoria Cross
... turned away, and re-entered the church. Helen and Dora had reached the north door, and were leaving the church, when they missed Elizabeth, and looking round, saw her sitting in one of the low pews, in the centre aisle, her face raised towards the flamboyant tracery of the east window. Dora, who seemed to have a sort of perception that her presence was a restraint upon her sisters, whispered, 'I am going to feed the doves,' and hastened across the quadrangle, while Helen came back to Elizabeth's side. Her sister rose, and with her own bright smile, ...
— Abbeychurch - or, Self-Control and Self-Conceit • Charlotte M. Yonge
... on the drooping shoulders of the hill and across the expanse of plain. They covered their eyes, for the sun was in their faces. The glory of its going down was somewhat pale. Through the confused tracery of many thousands of naked poplars, the smoke of so many houses, and the evening steam ascending from the fields, the sails of a windmill on a gentle eminence moved very conspicuously, like a donkey's ears. And hard by, like ...
— Prince Otto • Robert Louis Stevenson
... nymphs: so bright Their sunlit colouring, so airy light, It floats like drowsing down. Loved I a dream? My doubts, born of oblivious darkness, seem A subtle tracery of branches grown The tree's true self—proving that I have known No triumph, but the shadow of a rose. But think. These nymphs, their loveliness ... suppose They bodied forth your senses' fabulous thirst? ...
— The Defeat of Youth and Other Poems • Aldous Huxley
... still covered over at the other. And it was in this portion, full of picturesque half-lights and fascinating dark corners, that the children had laid out their repast. The west window was more than fifty feet distant. It was nearly closed in with an exquisite tracery of ivy; but as plenty of light poured into the ruin from the open sky overhead, this mattered very little, and but added to the general effect. The whole little party were very busy, and no one worked harder than Polly, and no one's laugh was more merry. Now and then, it is true, ...
— Polly - A New-Fashioned Girl • L. T. Meade
... to think that our way was much the same as that which Felix took in search of his "Lily of the Valley." The Loire lay before us just as he described it,—"a long watery ribbon which glistens in the sun between two green banks, the rows of poplars which deck this vale of love with moving tracery, the oak woods reaching forward between the vineyards on the hillsides which are rounded by the river into constant variety, the soft outlines crossing each other ...
— In Chteau Land • Anne Hollingsworth Wharton
... was not repeated, but he intently watched the edge of the forest on all sides except the west. After a while he saw the faint figure of a man, scarcely a tracery, appear in the north, and then come skipping like a swift shadow across the flat. His heart did not rise merely, but took a sudden jump upward. It was the shiftless one returning to their lair, ...
— The Keepers of the Trail - A Story of the Great Woods • Joseph A. Altsheler
... and to recover his equilibrium by leaning the contrary way aloft from what he did below. Poor fellow! he had been but badly conducted in his youth, and was nobly endeavouring to correct his ways in a mossy and dilapidated old age. The tracery of much of the wood-work carvings, and particularly of the windows, varies greatly, and in some places is so minute that it requires close inspection to find out the design. Of these the Zenana windows ...
— Diary of a Pedestrian in Cashmere and Thibet • by William Henry Knight
... if the fluid idea had sprung out of that fountain, and grown solid in what we see. The pavement is elaborately ornamented; the ceiling is to be brilliantly gilded and painted, as it was of yore, and the tracery and sculptures around the walls are to be faithfully renewed from what remains ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Northland lying silent under its mantle of white, and the comings and goings of the fur-bearers recorded in patterns of curious tracery, Wabishke would again fare forth ...
— The Promise - A Tale of the Great Northwest • James B. Hendryx
... out we came into a wide bottomland country with oaks. The distant blue hills had grown, and had become slate-gray. At noon we discerned ahead of us a low bluff, and a fork in the river; and among the oak trees the gleam of tents, and before them a tracery of masts where the boats and small ships lay moored to the trees. This was the embarcadero of Sutter's Fort beyond; or the new city of Sacramento, whichever you pleased. Here our ...
— Gold • Stewart White
... surface, that I succeeded in locating the vessel sought. Even then the Namur appeared only as a mere shadow, without so much as a light showing aboard, yet apparently anchored in the same position as when we had swept past the previous afternoon. The slightly brighter sky above served to reveal the tracery of bare poles, while the hull was no more than a blot in the gloom, utterly shapeless, and appearing to be much farther away than it was in reality. Indeed, as the sky gradually darkened the entire vision vanished, as ...
— Wolves of the Sea • Randall Parrish
... tracery on the walls; So stony still the house From cellar to attic rings the shrill Squeak of ...
— Collected Poems 1901-1918 in Two Volumes - Volume II. • Walter de la Mare
... frothed and fretted at the central pier below. Above the bridge the stream broadened into a cress-bespangled pool, over which the sapphire dragon-flies hovered, and its earlier course was hidden by the big oak trees that bent towards each other from either bank. Through their speckled tracery of green one saw the hazy blue depths of the further forest. I was watching the proceedings of some quick-moving brown bird amid the rushes and marsh marigolds of the ...
— Select Conversations with an Uncle • H. G. Wells
... behind you. She says it is beautiful and has a vague sense of enjoyment, and will carry away with her little more than this. Point out to her that the trees above are some of them deciduous poplars, or maples, and others sombre groups of pines and silky tamarack with a wonder of delicate tracery. Show her that the sun against the sloped yellow bank has covered the water with a shining changeful orange light, through which gleam the mottled stones below, and that the concave curve of every wave which faces ...
— Doctor and Patient • S. Weir Mitchell
... when we had been introduced through the little north chancel door into a black-curtained, black-cushioned, black-lined pew, well carpeted, with a table in the midst, and a stove, whose pipe made its exit through the floriated tracery of the window overhead. The chancel arch was to the west of us, blocked up by a wooden parcel-gilt erection, and to the east a decorated window that would have been very handsome if two side-lights had not been obscured by the two Tables of the Law, with the royal arms on the top of the ...
— Chantry House • Charlotte M. Yonge
... faces of men as carved tablets on which we read the records of their lives? The face of childhood is smoothly beautiful, like a white page on which neither with ink of red or black has any pen drawn character. But, as the years go on, the pen begins to move and the fatal tracery to grow,—that tracery which means and tells so much. And the face of this man,—this waif, so to speak,—this waif that had come to us from the stretch of the prairie, whose southern line is the southern gulf; this stranger, ...
— The Busted Ex-Texan and Other Stories • W. H. H. Murray
... even the Breton fisherman, looking lovingly from his boat as he makes for the harbor of Morlaix, hardly can say where the crags end, and where the church begins. The teeth of the winds of the sea have devoured, bit by bit, the fine sculpture of the doorway and the thin cusps of the window tracery; gray moss creeps caressingly over the worn walls in ineffectual protection; gentle vines, turned crabbed by the harsh beating of the fierce winds, clutch the crumbling buttresses, climb up over the sinking roof, reach in even at the louvres of the belfry, holding the little ...
— Black Spirits and White - A Book of Ghost Stories • Ralph Adams Cram
... of thigh-bones and skulls; the whole material of the structure appears to be of a similar kind; and the knobs and embossed ornaments of this strange architecture are represented by the joints of the spine, and the more delicate tracery by the Smaller bones of the human frame. The summits of the arches are adorned with entire skeletons, looking as if they were wrought most skilfully in bas-relief. There is no possibility of describing how ugly and grotesque is the effect, combined with a certain ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume I. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... those best suited for this style of decoration. [Altogether I cannot help fancying that the Italians had more to do with the design of this building than was at all desirable, and they are to blame for its want of grace.[a]] But, on the other hand, the beautiful tracery of the pierced marble slabs of its Windows, which resemble those of Salim Chishti's tomb at Fatehpur Sikri, the beauty of its white marble walls, and the rich colour of its decorations, make up so beautiful a whole, that it is only on comparing it with the works of Shah Jahan that we are ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... irregularity must be owing to something in the remains or foundations of the earlier building. They are crowned, however, not by a triforium and clerestory of their own style, but a single clerestory of coupled lancets of enormous height, with the faintest approach to tracery in the head. The effect is striking, but certainly somewhat incongruous. The choir is one of the most beautiful productions of the thirteenth-century style of the country, always approaching nearer to English ...
— Sketches of Travel in Normandy and Maine • Edward A. Freeman
... outward to the angle of the lower jaw. This is all that is required by custom, but some of the belles do not stop here. Their hands, arms, legs, feet, and in fact their whole bodies are covered with blue tracery that would throw Captain Constantinus completely in the shade. Ionic columns, Corinthian capitals, together with Gothic structures of every kind, are erected wherever there is an opportunity to place them; but I never saw any attempt at figure or ...
— Schwatka's Search • William H. Gilder
... straight ahead, his eyes on the ground, and his hands in his pockets, until he emerged upon one of the old forest roads where the grass had begun to burst through the stony interstices; and there, in the distance, under the light tracery of weaving branches, a delicate female silhouette was outlined on the dark background. A young woman, dressed in a petticoat of gray woolen material, and a jacket of the same, close-fitting at the waist, her arms bare to the elbows and supporting on her head ...
— A Woodland Queen, Complete • Andre Theuriet
... tirewomen and maidens of every degree. Then darting into the chamber, she bore away from a stage where lay the articles of the toilette, a little silver-backed and handled Venetian mirror, with beautiful tracery in silvered glass diminishing the very small oval left for personal reflection and inspection. That, however, was quite enough and too much for poor Grisell when Lady Margaret had thrown it to her on her bed, and rushed down the stair so as to come in the ...
— Grisly Grisell • Charlotte M. Yonge
... would be absolute folly to note down what I saw or thought of this most remarkable monastic structure. Every album possesses it, in all the beauty of its fairy architecture; its tabernacles, its niches and canopies, and statues, pinnacles, pediments, spires, and the tracery of its vaultings. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 583 - Volume 20, Number 583, Saturday, December 29, 1832 • Various
... most magnificent; the powerful light which threw all below into strong relief, reached but high enough to touch the pendent helmets and banners into faint colouring, and the roof was a vision of tarnished gleams and tissues among the Gothic tracery. The vault was still open, and the Royal coffin lay below, with the crowns of England and Hanover on cushions of purple and the broken wand crossing it. At the altar four Royal banners covered with golden emblems ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... left the shipping lay clustered about the wharfs, sending its tracery of masts into the clear sky; and all around glowed the beauty of a shallow harbor, coral-fringed. From the sapphire of the water in our immediate vicinity, the sea ranged to azure and apple green, touched by a ray of sunlight into a flashing mirror here, heaping into snow wreaths ...
— A Woman's Impression of the Philippines • Mary Helen Fee
... had risen and was staring with flushed cheeks and shining eyes. A few minutes later we had reached the lodge-gates, a maze of fantastic tracery in wrought iron, with weather-bitten pillars on either side, blotched with lichens, and surmounted by the boars' heads of the Baskervilles. The lodge was a ruin of black granite and bared ribs of rafters, but facing it was a new building, ...
— Hound of the Baskervilles • Authur Conan Doyle
... a most delicately carved screen, and leaves, sprays, and grapes are conspicuous amongst the details of its graceful design. The groined cornice is decorated by exquisite fan-tracery, and various saints and 'doctors of the church' are painted on the panels of the lower part. In the high carved stone pulpit are tabernacled recesses, once enclosing figures, but now containing 'royal badges and devices'; ...
— Devon, Its Moorlands, Streams and Coasts • Rosalind Northcote
... It was the sloop, sure enough. A little to the southward of east, with its dingy sails furled and their bulging shapes turned to great lumps of gold, with the mast standing out in dark tracery against the red ...
— Frank Merriwell's Reward • Burt L. Standish
... towers there was a room whose ceiling was painted a royal blue over-strewn with exquisite gold tracery and blazonry. In no place have I realized feudalism so well as in that tower. There alone, in the silence as of a city of the dead, I would lean out of the little window cut in the thick wall and contemplate the green verdure lying ...
— The Story of a Child • Pierre Loti
... simply in producing a green blur, so that the whole character of the thought-form is lost. It is only by means of the machine before mentioned that it is at all possible to represent the grace and the delicacy of the lines. As before, a single line produces all the wonderful tracery of Fig. 44, and the effect of the four radiating lines making a sort of cross of light is merely due to the fact that the curves are not really concentric, although at first sight ...
— Thought-Forms • Annie Besant
... to me," she said. "It was her mother's. It has no special significance beyond the fact that the workmanship is very fine and that the tracery ...
— The Enchanted Canyon • Honore Willsie Morrow
... arches shot up in long rows upon either side of them, straight and slim as beautiful trees, until they curved off far up near the clerestory and joined their sister curves to form the lightest, most delicate tracery of stone. In front of them a great rose-window of stained glass, splendid with rich purples and crimsons, shone through a subdued and reverent gloom. Here and there in the aisles a few spectators moved among the shadows, but all round along the walls two ...
— A Duet • A. Conan Doyle
... from the ramparts of this fortress is one of striking picturesqueness and beauty. Below lies the city with its ancient walls and lofty towers, its gardens and squares, its palaces and its mosques, with their delicately-carved domes and minarets covered with fantastic tracery, the port of Bulak, the gardens and palace of Shubra, the broad river studded with islands, the valley of the Nile dotted with groups of trees, with the pyramids on the north horizon, and on the east the barren cliffs, backed by a waste of sand. Since the middle of the 19th century ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... that she ceased to read the Family Paper except at long intervals. She served up quite good dinners, and by the end of the fortnight few people would have known The Dales. For not only was the house clean and sweet—the drawing-room quite a charming old room, with its long Gothic windows, its tracery of ivy outside, and its peep into the distant rose-garden; the hall bright with great pots of flowers standing about—but the girls themselves were no longer in rags. The furniture dealer's was not the only shop which Miss Tredgold had visited at Southampton. ...
— Girls of the Forest • L. T. Meade
... walked he glanced curiously up at the ladder-like door-steps which may well suggest to the future archaeologist that all the streets of New York were once canals; at the spectral tracery of the trees about St. Luke's, the fretted mass of the Cathedral, and the mean vista of the long side-streets. The knowledge that he was perhaps looking at it all for the last time caused every detail to start out like a challenge ...
— The Greater Inclination • Edith Wharton
... excellent preservation. The Moslem peasantry would not touch them, and the Christian rayahs are afraid to do so. There are, of course, no figures of men, or even of animals, but the charmingly correct arches and doorways, and the delicate tracery above them intermingled with Arabic characters, give a lightness to the portals which is hardly to be found anywhere east of the Alhambra ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. July, 1878. • Various
... lights, and are rather acutely jointed and deeply set for such late work, and their arches are well moulded, a broad hollow running up the sides. As is often the case in late work, there are no sub-arches in the tracery, and the mullions are carried up through the head. The easternmost of these windows is of two lights, and has a transom in the tracery, and the westernmost is shortened to allow of a doorway of four-centred form beneath. ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Ripon - A Short History of the Church and a Description of Its Fabric • Cecil Walter Charles Hallett
... not only exposed to the hazards of the sea; he must often ford his way by land to remote and scarce accessible places, beyond reach of the mail or the post-chaise, beyond even the tracery of the bridle-path, and guided by natives across bog and heather. Up to 1807 my grand-father seems to have travelled much on horseback; but he then gave up the idea—'such,' he writes with characteristic emphasis and capital letters, 'is the Plague ...
— Records of a Family of Engineers • Robert Louis Stevenson
... resolu de renouveler a Cherbourg les merveilles de l'Egypte." In the Library is a curiously sculptured chimney-piece of the fifteenth century, coloured and gilt, removed from a room of the abbey. The principal church, La Trinite, is a strange jumble of architecture. There is some beautiful tracery in the windows, and a fine boss (clef pendante) in the south porch, now restored. On a board in the church is an inscription, setting forth it was built in consequence of a "voeu solennel des habitans de Cherbourg ...
— Brittany & Its Byways • Fanny Bury Palliser
... forth one arm. Eternal powers! It touched no soul nor body, but the wall, On which the moonbeams fell in silvery showers Checkered with all the tracery of the hall. He shuddered, as no doubt the bravest cowers When he can't tell what 'tis that doth appal. How odd, a single hobgoblin's nonentity Should cause more fear than a whole ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... Much of it was purchased by the Marquess of Salisbury for Hatfield House, and the remainder Mr. Baylis bought. More of the oak panelling in the room, especially the elaborately-wrought specimens and the rich tracery work, have been obtained from Canterbury Cathedral, York Minster, St. Mary's Coventry, ...
— A Walk from London to Fulham • Thomas Crofton Croker
... commitments. There was a stealthy and skulking manner in everything that he did. He went to church on Sundays, but it was no longer by the grand iron gate opposite to his house, that stood generally with a large spider's web woven over the lock, and several others in different corners of the fine iron tracery, bearing evidence of the long period since it had been opened. How different to the time when the Sir Roger and the Lady of Rockville had had these gates thrown wide on a Sunday morning, and with ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... gables of a roof to give strength to the same and to mask or hide the horizontal timbers of the roof to which they were attached. Bargeboards are sometimes moulded only or carved, but as a rule the lower edges were cusped and had tracery in the spandrels besides being otherwise elaborated. The richest example is one at Ockwells in Berkshire, England, which is moulded and carved as if it were intended ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... the drowsy afternoon, When the very wind on the breast of June Lies settled, and hot white tracery Of the shattered sunlight filters free Through the unstinted leaves to the pied cool sward; On a dead tree branch sings the saddest bard Of the birds that be; 'Tis the lone Pewee. Its note is a sob, and its note is ...
— Rolling Stones • O. Henry
... tinge to the soft and wax-like surface of her skin, while the red upon her cheeks and lips presented an admixture of purple. Her hair, too, was black; and a dark shading along the upper lip—a moustache, in fact—soft and silky as the tracery of a crayon, contrasted with the dazzling whiteness of her teeth. Her eyes were black, large, and almond-shaped, with that expression which looks over one; and her whole appearance formed a type of that beauty which we associate ...
— The Rifle Rangers • Captain Mayne Reid
... made his nightly pilgrimage through the house, opening bedroom shutters, fastening curtains back. He drew up the piazza-blinds, and like a stage-scene, framed in post and balustrade, and bordered with a tracery of rose-vines, the valley burst upon the view. Its cool twilight colors, its river-bed of mist, added to the depth of distance. Against it the white roses looked whiter, and the pink ones caught fire from the ...
— A Touch Of Sun And Other Stories • Mary Hallock Foote
... clear and dazzling, directly across the head of Maria's bed, which had been moved out to the middle of the room. The faded blue-figured pillow case, and the feather puff of the same color shimmered white, overlaid with a faint, shadowy tracery, as if made expressly to throw into relief the noble beauty of Maria's head. As Stephen Fausch entered, he cast a timid glance at his dead wife: It was wonderful to see her lying on the bed as if a halo shone ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... garden was a slate-quarry; the phillireas now clipped into well-proportioned dragons, grew just as nature shaped them; and the hall he had neatly plaistered and white-washed was then disfigured with painted saints, and carved tracery. He hinted with a smile, that he had turned the times to a pretty good account, and was grown warm. Royalists were soon alarmed, and bled freely. Besides the per centage, when compounding for their estates, there was generally a little private oiling the hands of ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West
... Byron slept, flanks and conceals the west end of the north cloisters and library; but, with this exception, it is a screen, and nothing more. In the centre is the "mighty window" (stanza lxii. line 1), shorn of glass and tracery; above are six lancet windows (which Byron seems to have regarded as niches), and, above again, in a "higher niche" (stanza lxi. line 1), is the crowned Virgin with the Babe in her arms, which escaped, as by a miracle, the "fiery darts"—the shot and ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... tracery of the yews, under the suffused, mild light, it sent her, from its open windows and hospitably smoking chimneys, the look of some warm human presence, of a mind slowly ripened on a sunny wall of experience. She had never before had so deep a sense of her ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... letter C which was worked among the elaborate tracery of the handle, and he became ...
— A Queen's Error • Henry Curties
... point to point by enormous beams. The great nave and its two small lateral galleries are lighted solely by the rose-window of stained glass, which pierces with miraculous art the wall above the great portal, whose fortunate exposure permits a wealth of tracery and dentellated stone-work belonging to that order ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... for Paradise Valley, but his parting rays were still volleying in level lines against the great gray cliffs at the top of Lebanon, silvering the bare sandstone, blackening the cedars and pines by contrast, and making a fine-lined tracery, blue on gray, of the twigs and leafless branches of the deciduous trees. Off to the left a touch of sepia on the sky-line marked the chimneys of Crestcliffe Inn, and farther around, and happily almost hidden ...
— The Quickening • Francis Lynde
... in design and construction. In the earlier and middle styles of Gothic there are various difficulties of execution and some faults of composition: such as the slender detached shafts, the richly carved capitals, the flowing and varied tracery of windows, and that profuse variety in detail which frequently causes all the windows, capitals, buttresses and pinnacles of the same buildings to differ from one another. But the later style has more uniformity in corresponding ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... the boys some exquisite Berlin castings, which he had purchased in Antwerp. They were IRON JEWELRY, and very delicate—beautiful medallions designed from rare paintings, bordered with fine tracery and open work—worthy, he said, of being worn by the fairest lady of the land. Consequently the necklace was handed with a bow and a smile to the blushing ...
— Hans Brinker - or The Silver Skates • Mary Mapes Dodge
... therefore when Happy Dick found himself the backbone of the line party, he also found himself the possessor of a cheque-book. At first he was inclined to look upon it as a poor substitute for hard cash; but after the foreman had explained its mysteries, and taught him to sign his name in magic tracery, he became more than reconciled to it and drew cheques blithely, until one for five pounds was returned to a creditor: no funds—and in due course ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn
... wonderful city on the Guadalquivir,—with its palaces, its gardens, and fountains,—its 50,000 houses of the aristocracy,—its 700 mosques,—and 900 public baths,—all adorned with color and carvings and tracery beautiful as a dream of Paradise. One hears with amazement of the great mosque, with its 19 arcades, its pavings of silver and rich mosaics, its 1293 clustered columns, inlaid with gold and lapis-lazuli, the clusters reaching up to the slender arches which supported the roof; the whole of this ...
— A Short History of Spain • Mary Platt Parmele
... scenery! It is almost impossible to paint the glory of those winter forests. Every tree, laden with the purest snow, resembles a Gothic fountain of bronze, covered with frozen spray, through which only suggestive glimpses of its delicate tracery can be obtained. From every rise we looked over thousands of such mimic fountains, shooting, low or high, from their pavements of ivory and alabaster. It was an enchanted wilderness—white, silent, gleaming, and ...
— Northern Travel - Summer and Winter Pictures of Sweden, Denmark and Lapland • Bayard Taylor
... Pointed arches. Pillars with detached shafts. Moulded or carved capitals. Narrow and high pointed windows. Later period—Geometrical trefoil and circular tracery in windows. ...
— Seaward Sussex - The South Downs from End to End • Edric Holmes
... woods of Briantes, and had made my way down to the spring of Fougeres. It was as warm, you remember, as in the middle of summer; and our beautiful plants, in their autumn red, seemed more beautiful than ever as they stretched their delicate tracery over the stream. The trees have very little foliage left; but the carpet of dried leaves one walks upon gives forth a sound which to me is full of charm. The satiny trunks of the birches and young oaks are covered with moss and creepers ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... period are long and narrow, with acutely pointed heads, the exterior angle being merely chamfered and the interior widely splayed. Somewhat later the introduction of tracery gave a highly beautiful appearance to the windows and from the character of this feature the date of the window can be fairly accurately determined. Where the tracery is formed by ornamental apertures pierced through a plate ...
— Our Homeland Churches and How to Study Them • Sidney Heath
... quantity of withered leaves, laid them in a corner, and threw myself upon them. A red sunset filled the hall, the night was warm, and my couch restful; I lay gazing up at the live ceiling, with its tracery of branches and twigs, its clouds of foliage, and peeping patches of loftier roof. My eyes went wading about as if tangled in it, until the sun was down, and the sky beginning to grow dark. Then the red roses turned black, and soon the yellow and white alone were visible. When they vanished, ...
— Lilith • George MacDonald
... same front in which they lived, lay roofless, open to every wind that blew, its paved floor now and then in winter covered with snow—an ancient hall, whose massy south wall was pierced by three lovely windows, narrow and lofty, with simple, gracious tracery in their pointed heads. This hall connected the habitable portion of the house with another part, less ruinous than itself, but containing only a few rooms in occasional use for household purposes, or, upon necessity, for quite inferior ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... preparing themselves to paint the walls and ceilings of the new Houses of Parliament in fresco. The pinnacles and turrets of that vast and magnificent structure, built of a cream-colored stone, and florid with Gothic tracery, copied from the ancient chapel of St. Stephen, the greater part of which was not long ago destroyed by fire, are rising from day to day above the city roofs. We walked through its broad and long passages and ...
— Letters of a Traveller - Notes of Things Seen in Europe and America • William Cullen Bryant
... meaning of the whole cathedral, he will not think it needless to explain the principles on which it is constructed, or even how those principles are carried out in actual process. Neither yet will the tracery of its windows, the foliage of its crockets, or the fretting of its mouldings be forgotten. Every beauty will have its word, only all beauties will be subordinated to the final beauty—that is, the unity ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald
... architecture had its birthplace among a people who had lived and worshipped for ages amidst the dense forests of the north, and was no doubt an imitation of the interlacing of the overshadowing trees. The clustered shaft, and lancet arch, and flowing tracery, reflect the impression which the surrounding scenery had woven into the texture of the ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... which make one long for the more varied circumstances of confessed winter, when the deep blue shadows in the crisp snow suggest the glory of southern skies, and the sparkle of the sun on the delicate tracery of the frosted branches has a mimicry of life, such as we imagine strange elves ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... bluff, undecked sea-boat, lying aside in its furrow of beach sand. The sum of Navigation is in that. You may magnify it or decorate as you will: you do not add to the wonder of it. Lengthen it into hatchet-like edge of iron,—strengthen it with complex tracery of ribs of oak,—carve it and gild it till a column of light moves beneath it on the sea,—you have made no more of it than it was at first. That rude simplicity of bent plank, that can breast its way through the death that is in the deep sea, has in it the soul of shipping. Beyond this, ...
— The Harbours of England • John Ruskin
... the Queen of Sheba, the Spanish Arabs, Columbus first learned of a world beyond the Pillars of Hercules. Architecture rose to its height in the beautiful Alhambra, with its exquisite interlaced tracery in geometric design; medicine had its profound schools at various points; poetry numbered women among its most famous composers; the ballad originated there; and the modern literature of Europe was born from a woman's pen upon ...
— The Woman's Bible. • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... as the morning. He saw how the long, pointed olive leaves stood with sharp edges against pale light; how the silver screen was, if one looked into it, a thing of magic details of delight, of manifold shapes and sharp little shadowings and delicate tracery; how gnarled stems were light-touched and shadow-touched and silver and black; how the night was delicate, marvellous, a radiant wonder of clear loveliness, illustrated by a large white moon. Peter saw it and smiled. He did not see Rodney's world, ...
— The Lee Shore • Rose Macaulay
... chapels from the choir are extraordinarily beautiful, as are the restored sedilia and piscina with their gables and pinnacles and lovely diaper work. The windows, too, are very noble and fine, and rich in their tracery, which might seem to be ...
— England of My Heart—Spring • Edward Hutton
... and "a prayer for Colman, who made this cross for St. Flan," referring to the ninth century monarch of Meath, and to Colman, Abbot, early in the tenth century, of Clonmacnoise. The cross is fifteen feet high, and its panels were sculptured with Scriptural scenes, interlined with Celtic tracery. ...
— The Sunny Side of Ireland - How to see it by the Great Southern and Western Railway • John O'Mahony and R. Lloyd Praeger
... the number, and name of the manufacturer, and described the interior tracery, not omitting the quantity of jewels. Mr. Campbell turned to the proprietor (the same gentleman with whom Electra had conversed), and briefly recapitulated the circumstances which had occurred in connection with the watch. Mr. Brown listened attentively, then requested ...
— Macaria • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... could not give. Pure counterpoint could not give us such a charming effect as Chopin obtains in the first study of Opus 10; nor could the plainer and more free harmonic style give us such delicate bits of tracery as Bach has ...
— Music Talks with Children • Thomas Tapper
... where it topped a rise, before descending a long slope to the highway, Zeke came to a standstill. The girl paused obediently beside him. He fumbled in a pocket awkwardly, and drew forth a tiny square of coffee-colored stone, roughly lined, which he held out toward his companion. The tracery of the crystal formed a Maltese cross. The girl expressed no surprise. She accepted the token with a grave nod as he dropped it into her palm, and she remained gazing down at it with eyes hidden under the heavy white lids and long, curving lashes ...
— Heart of the Blue Ridge • Waldron Baily
... of the Puritans.—Historical Illustrations of the Reign of Henry VII. from the Municipal Archives of York.—Original Letter of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu.—Biography of William Penn.—The Archaeology of Scotland (with several Engravings).—Origin and Development of Window Tracery in England, &c. &c. With Notes of the Month, Review of New Publications, Reports of Antiquarian and other Societies, Historical Chronicle; and OBITUARY, including Memoirs of the Earl of Harrington, the Earl of Meath, Lord Dacre, Lord de l'Isle and Dudley, Lord Moncrieff, Sir Alexander Hood, Alderman ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 79, May 3, 1851 • Various
... brambles had grown to such vast dimensions as almost to form a dell. Brambles, though churlish when handled, are kindly shelter in early winter, being the latest of the deciduous bushes to lose their leaves. The roof and chimney of Venn's caravan showed behind the tracery and tangles of ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... were filled with quaint ornaments, sometimes of high merit, admirably painted in vivid colors. Grotesque initials, which, with their flourishes, often spanned the full height of the page, or broad bands of floriated tracery that occupied its entire width, were the only indications of changes of chapter or subject. In printer's phrase the composition was "close-up and solid" to the extreme degree of compactness. The ...
— Bibliomania in the Middle Ages • Frederick Somner Merryweather
... early days (long before he made his will) he had planned a complete renovation and this room had been meant for the drawing-room. Furniture had been made for it specially, upholstered in beautiful ribbed stuff, made to order, of dull gold colour with a pale blue tracery of arabesques and oval medallions enclosing Rita's monogram, repeated on the backs of chairs and sofas, and on the heavy curtains reaching from ceiling to floor. To the same time belonged the ebony and bronze doors, the silver ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... nature. Great, pale blue bird-foot violets were blooming on favoured slopes, and in protected hollows patches of eyebright made fairy forests on the moss, while under tatters of dead leaves by the brookside arbutus blushed. Above their heads the tracery of branches was a lace-work overlaid with fanlike budding green leaves, except where the maples showed scarlet tassels, or the Judas tree flaunted its bold, lying, purple-pink promise of fruitage never to ...
— Judith of the Cumberlands • Alice MacGowan
... at Ravenna, across the Adriatic—the interiors of many of them adorned, like that of St. Mark's in Venice, with superb mosaics of gold and semi-precious stones; the carved lions' heads, bocca del leone, for receiving secret missives; the delicate tracery above the doors and windows of the palazzos, and all those other architectural features so characteristic of the City of the Doges. There is no questioning what these Istrian coast-towns were or are. They are as Italian to-day as when, a thousand years ago, they ...
— The New Frontiers of Freedom from the Alps to the AEgean • Edward Alexander Powell
... climbing on her nightly course and flooding the alkali with a soft radiance almost as bright as subdued electric light. Against the glow the weird, ragged peaks stood out as blackly as if cut out of cardboard. One could see the tracery of every bit of brush and rock outlined as plainly as if they had been silhouetted by ...
— The Girl Aviators on Golden Wings • Margaret Burnham
... Window-tracery, small and slight, Woven of the willow white, Lent a dimly checkered light; And the night-stars glimmered down, Where the lodge-fire's heavy smoke, Slowly through an opening broke, In the low roof, ribbed with ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... in length, with a beautifully carved roof resembling that of Westminster-hall and windows adorned with all the elegance of gothic tracery, is still in being, and admirably serves the purposes of a barn ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... remained, only a few of the cloister arches, and the stumps of broken columns to mark the form of the chapel; but the arch of the west window was complete, and the wreaths of ivy hid its want of tracery, while a red Virginian creeper mantled the wall. All was calm and still, the greensward smooth and carefully mown, not a nettle or thistle visible, but the floriated crosses on the old stone coffin lids showing ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... hardened soil a dust white as salt. She was glad to wander freely among unknown things. She liked to see the stony landscape which the clearness of the air made distinct; to walk quickly and firmly on the quay where the trees displayed the black tracery of their branches on the horizon reddened by the smoke of the city; to look at the Seine. In the sky ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet |
