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More "Beholder" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the club had caricatured themselves, their associates, and their aims. There was a slick French audacity about the workmanship of these men of toil unbending that went straight to the heart of the beholder. And yet it was not altogether French. A dry grimness of treatment, almost Dutch, marked the difference. The men painted as they spoke—with certainty. The club indulges in revelries which it calls ...
— American Notes • Rudyard Kipling
... impregnable fortress of privilege he had once thought it. Yet, in reality, the towers of the college had never looked more formidable. Rising magnificently at the crest of a bleak expanse of snow, the embrasured battlements, silhouetted against the sunset sky, might well have suggested to a beholder grim thoughts of mediaeval strongholds and robber barons. The red orb of the sun, hovering just above the rim of the western hills, flashed successively through the windows of the long, low hall, like a running trail of fire. Emmet was directly ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... the half-dirty attire—the unshaven beard of the men, and the unkempt locks of the women—produce further revolting sensations. It is not till past mid-day that the noise of labour ceases, and that the toilette is put into a complete state for the captivation of the beholder. By four or five o'clock the streets become half thinned. On a Sunday, every body rushes into the country. The tradesman has his little villa, and the gentleman and man of fortune his more capacious rural domain; and those, who aspire neither to the one or the other, ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Two • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... the island it seems to grow upon the sight, until at length its broad reflection darkens the surrounding waters. I can imagine nothing better calculated than an appearance of this kind to satisfy a beholder of the spherical figure of the earth, and it would seem almost incredible that early navigators should have failed to find conviction in the unvarying testimonies of their own experience, which an approach to every ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 1. • J Lort Stokes
... alone could have painted this terrible picture the most terrible perhaps which Raemaekers has ever done and yet the simplest. That he should have dared to leave almost everything to the imagination of the beholder is evidence of the wonderful power which he exercises over the mind of the people. Each of us knows what is in that goods-van and we shudder at its hideous hidden freight, fearing lest it may be disclosed before our eyes. ...
— Raemaekers' Cartoons - With Accompanying Notes by Well-known English Writers • Louis Raemaekers
... Liberty party, blind as she is, has light enough to see that "Consistency is the jewel, the everything of such a cause as ours." The position of a non-voter, in a land where the ballot is so much idolized, kindles in every beholder's bosom something of the warm sympathy which waits on the persecuted, carries with it all the weight of a disinterested testimony to truth, and pricks each voter's conscience with an uneasy doubt, whether after all ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... the second, and the third. They then came to a high hill, at which they looked, and, lo, upon it was a horseman of brass, on the top of whose spear was a wide and glistening head that almost deprived the beholder of sight, and on ...
— The Arabian Nights - Their Best-known Tales • Unknown
... representation of it; but its real size is so very diminutive, as to allow of its being held by a child in his mouth while yet unborn, that were it to have been drawn in its exact proportions, the characters would, it is feared, have been so insignificant in size, that the beholder would have had to waste much of his eyesight, and it would besides ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... have been observed fighting all day long; male stag-beetles sometimes bear wounds from the mandibles of other males; the males of certain other insects have been frequently seen fighting for a particular female who sits by, an apparently unconcerned beholder of the struggle, and then retires with the conqueror. The war is, perhaps, severest between the males of the polygamous animals, and these seem oftenest provided with special weapons. The males of carnivorous animals are already well armed, ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... our schools, in a term or two, perhaps at the rate of an hour's practice a week, is not drawing at all. It is only the performance of a few dexterous (not always even that) evolutions on paper with a black-lead pencil; profitless alike to performer and beholder, unless as a matter of vanity, and that the smallest possible vanity. If any young person, after being taught what is, in polite circles, called "drawing," will try to copy the commonest piece of real work—suppose ...
— The Elements of Drawing - In Three Letters to Beginners • John Ruskin
... its walls could resist any of the ordinary appliances of war before the invention of artillery, and even the tombs of its rulers are monuments of skill and patience that awaken the admiration of every beholder. Throughout China Pekin is reverentially regarded, and in many localities the man who has visited it is regarded as a hero. Though the capital, it is the most northern city of large population ...
— Overland through Asia; Pictures of Siberian, Chinese, and Tartar - Life • Thomas Wallace Knox
... sends a tropical ray. Reverend old tars, one and all; some of them might have been grandsires, with grandchildren in every port round the world. They ought to have commanded the veneration of the most frivolous or magisterial beholder. Even Captain Claret they ought to have humiliated into deference. But a Scythian is touched with no reverential promptings; and, as the Roman student well knows, the august Senators themselves, seated in the Senate-house, on the majestic hill of the Capitol, had their holy beards ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... formidable as when seen at a distance. The huge bulk of her, the pronouncedly masculine dress and manner, the loud voice, the red face with its dark mustache line on the upper lip, all of which at a distance were calculated to overawe if not to strike terror to the heart of the beholder, were very considerably softened by the shrewd, kindly twinkle of the keen grey eyes which a nearer view revealed. Her welcome of Iola was bluff and hearty, but she was much too busy ordering her forces and disposing of her impedimenta, for she was her own commodore, to pay particular ...
— The Doctor - A Tale Of The Rockies • Ralph Connor
... done to elevate their thirsty souls! An inroad into the laboratory would be looked upon as an intrusion; but before the triumphs of Art, the expounder is at his ease, and points out the doctrine that Raphael's results are within the reach of any beholder, provided he enrol himself with Ruskin or hearken to Colvin in the provinces. The people are to be educated upon the broad basis of "Taste," forsooth, and it matters but little what "gentleman and scholar" undertake ...
— The Gentle Art of Making Enemies • James McNeill Whistler
... equal parts. A small open space, (which however has been miserably encroached upon by petty shops) called the Flower-garden, is before this western front; so that it has some little breathing room in which to expand its beauties to the wondering eyes of the beholder. In my poor judgment, this western front has very few elevations comparable with it[37]—including even those of Lincoln and York. The ornaments, especially upon the three porches, between the two towers, are numerous, rich, and for the greater part entire:—in spite ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume One • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... Blessed Sacrament, exercising the solemn functions which had been allotted to them. This infantine band, clad in white surplices girded with different colors, resembled angels and presented a spectacle at once beautiful and edifying to the beholder. The Protestants who were present appeared to be ...
— Memoir • Fr. Vincent de Paul
... road, and Almira reentered the room with the expression of one who had penetrated the inscrutable and solved the riddle of the Sphinx. She had been vouch-safed one of those gleams of light in darkness which almost dazzle the beholder. ...
— The Village Watch-Tower • (AKA Kate Douglas Riggs) Kate Douglas Wiggin
... day with timber to the water's edge, islands of all sizes and of all forms, gently rising out of the limpid rippling stream, or boldly standing forth from the deep blue water, presenting a rugged, rocky moss-clad front to the wonderstruck beholder. On the 20th of July, some cruisers from Sackett's Harbour, succeeded in surprising and capturing, at daybreak, a brigade of batteaux laden with provisions, under convoy of a gun-boat. They made off with their prize to Goose Creek, which is not far from Gananoque. At Kingston the loss of the supplies ...
— The Rise of Canada, from Barbarism to Wealth and Civilisation - Volume 1 • Charles Roger
... I was a married woman once, mind. An' I tell you 'beauty doth lie in the eye o' the beholder', my dear, an' the two eyes as is a-goin' t' behold you this night is goin' t' behold so much beauty as they won't ...
— The Definite Object - A Romance of New York • Jeffery Farnol
... rose broad and bright in a firmament of that most brilliant and transparent blue, which I have witnessed in no other country than America, so pure, so cloudless, so immeasurably distant as it seems from the beholder's eye! There was not a speck of cloud from east to west, from zenith to horizon; not a fleece of vapor on the mountain sides; not a breath of air to ruffle the calm basin of the ...
— Warwick Woodlands - Things as they Were There Twenty Years Ago • Henry William Herbert (AKA Frank Forester)
... beautiful Elbe River rises in romantic chasms, terrible to the picturesque beholder, at the roots of the Riesengebirge; overlooked by the Hohe-Kamms, and highest summits of that chain. "Out of eleven wells," says gentle Dulness, "EILF or ELF QUELLEN, whence its name, Elbe for ELF." Sure enough, it starts out of various wells; [Description, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... observations have been added to our knowledge of this most complicated structure. But figures drawn from images seen in the field of the microscope have too often been known to borrow a good deal from the imagination of the beholder. Some objects are so complex that they defy the most cunning hand to render them with all their features. When the enlarged image is suffered to delineate itself, as in Dr. Dean's views of the medulla oblongata, there is no room to question the exactness of the portraiture, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... incumbent floor or roof, For corbel is a figure sometimes seen, That crumples up its knees unto its breast, With the feign'd posture stirring ruth unfeign'd In the beholder's fancy; so I saw These fashion'd, when I ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... were so many, in the grass; and yet another is of a high, grassy, sunny field with a little stream running far down below. It was not really far and there was nothing particularly beautiful in the place to grown-up eyes, but the beholder was very small and loved it dearly. To his Art and Blue Heaven Stevenson might have added Sun and Green Grass. For he knew what grassy places are to the child, and that "happy play in grassy places" might well be Heaven to ...
— The Child Under Eight • E.R. Murray and Henrietta Brown Smith
... gone after what he wanted in a kind of slow, indifferent way that begot confidence in himself and in the beholder; and (in the case of Miss Blythe) a kind of panic in the object sought. She liked him because she was used to him, and because he could and would talk sense upon subjects which interested her. But she was afraid of him because she knew that ...
— IT and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... ten Paternosters, if I let thee tempt me so to do. For whispering it in thine ear, I should but say one; for having remarked it, none at all. Facts are facts; and, even in the case of so weighty a fact, the responsibility rests not upon the beholder." ...
— The White Ladies of Worcester - A Romance of the Twelfth Century • Florence L. Barclay
... gently shines to make romantic a lover's smile! But the reality of the Lunar night is cold beyond human rationality. Cold and darkly silent. Grim desolation. Awesome. Majestic. A frowning majesty that even to the most intrepid human beholder is inconceivably forbidding. ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science April 1930 • Various
... stands to examine it more curiously, I discovered that there were two projections from the top, resembling eye-pieces, as though inviting the beholder to gaze into the inside of the stand. Then I thought I heard a faint metallic click above my head. Raising my eyes swiftly, I read a few words written, as it were, against the dark velvet of the heavy curtains in dots of flame that flowed one into the other and melted away in a moment. ...
— Tales of Fantasy and Fact • Brander Matthews
... the young prince in the legend or the comedy who loses his heart to the miniature of the out-land princess. Until I knew him better this puzzled me much—the link was so missing between his sensibility and his type. He was of course bewildered by my sketches, which implied in the beholder some sense of intention and quality; but for one of them, a comparative failure, he ended by conceiving a preference so arbitrary and so lively that, taking no second look at the others, he expressed the wish to possess it and fell into the extremity ...
— Embarrassments • Henry James
... considerably older than Timothy, draws up the old horses before the door with a careful manner that impresses the beholder with the belief that he thinks they would run away in a minute if he relaxed a muscle on the reins; and a small boy who acts as footman and looks decidedly depressed, ...
— Rossmoyne • Unknown
... upon the tumultuous conflicts of war I will not decide; but I can assure the reader, so far as my experience goes, that these parts of the work are not the most difficult to write. They are scenes that exhibit those vigorous traits of human character which strike the beholder most forcibly and leave the deepest impression. They delight in violent attitudes; and, painting themselves in the strongest colors on the poet's fancy, they are easy at any time to recal. He varies them at pleasure, he adorns them readily ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow
... ever to be just what the situation required him to be. He possessed, in a degree never equalled by any human being I ever saw, the strongest, most ever-present sense of propriety. It never forsook him, and deeply and involuntarily impressed itself upon every beholder. His address was of moderate length. The topics I have, of course, forgotten; indeed, I was not of an age to appreciate them: but the air, the manner, the tones, have never left my mental vision, and even now seem ...
— Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3. • Benson J. Lossing
... his flank he tied (For so Rogero's trenchant sword was hight), And took the wondrous buckler, which, espied, Not only dazzled the beholder's sight, But seemed, when its silk veil was drawn aside, As from the body if exhaled the sprite: In its close cover of red sendal hung, This at his neck the youthful ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto
... the size alone formed a point of correspondence. But, then, the radicalness of these differences, which was excessive; the dirt; the soiled and torn condition of the paper, so inconsistent with the true methodical habits of D——, and so consistent of a design to delude the beholder into an idea of the worthlessness of the document—these things, together with the hyperobtrusive situation of this document, full in the view of every visitor, and thus exactly in accordance with the conclusions to which I had previously arrived—these things, I ...
— The Great English Short-Story Writers, Vol. 1 • Various
... her great gray eyes were faint violet shadows which gave her a look of almost poignant wistfulness. If there is a less hackneyed way to describe her head on its slender throat than to say it was like a lovely flower on its stalk, you are free to use it. Her slow, sweet smile gave the beholder an actual physical pang. Only her family knew she was lazy as a behemoth, untidy about her person, and as sentimental as a hungry shark. The strange and cruel part of it was that, in some grotesque, exaggerated ...
— Half Portions • Edna Ferber
... whiteness of her skin; for eyes, the blue sky seen through treetops; the silk in cocoons for her hair; her voice, the murmur of the evening June wind in the leaves; her mouth, the berries of the wintergreen; fingers as light as ferns; her toe as small as a deer track. General impression upon the dazed beholder—you could not see the forest ...
— Waifs and Strays - Part 1 • O. Henry
... eyebrows in a manner which might be expressive of either sympathy or astonishment—just as the beholder was pleased ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens
... magnificent banquet hall—the most beautiful room in the palace—was in existence, and its size made it worthy of a great monarch. The lack of decorations on the walls and of marble casings to the doors, like those in the castle of Urbino, which fill the beholder with wonder, show how limited were the means of the ruling dynasty of Pesaro. The rich ceiling of the salon, made of gilded and painted woodwork, dates from the reign of Duke Guidobaldo. All mementos of the time when ...
— Lucretia Borgia - According to Original Documents and Correspondence of Her Day • Ferdinand Gregorovius
... opulence of ornament being introduced, and only the due. Genuine sculptors, genuine painters, artists have been busy; and in fact all the suitable fine arts, and all the necessary solid ones, have worked together, with a noticeable fidelity, comfortable to the very beholder to this day. General height is about forty feet; two stories of ample proportions: the Towers overlooking them are sixty feet in height. Extent of outer frontage, if you go all round, and omit the Colonnade, will be five hundred ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. X. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—At Reinsberg—1736-1740 • Thomas Carlyle
... of the arches were stopped with rombyes of cleare glasse in forme of a tryangle, and the pypes beautified all ouer with an Encaustick painting, verie gratious to the sight of the beholder. ...
— Hypnerotomachia - The Strife of Loue in a Dreame • Francesco Colonna
... backward stepp'd, above the shield He smote him on the breast, below the throat. With whirling motion, circling as it flew, The mass he hurl'd. As by the bolt of Heav'n Uprooted, prostrate lies some forest oak; The sulph'rous vapour taints the air; appall'd, Bereft of strength, the near beholder stands, And awestruck hears the thunder-peal of Jove; So in the dust the might of Hector lay: Dropp'd from his hand the spear; the shield and helm Fell with him; loud his polished armour rang. On rush'd, with joyous shout, the sons of Greece, In hope to seize the spoil; thick flew the spears: Yet ...
— The Iliad • Homer
... were two or three Catholics, peasants of the neighbourhood, come to look on and listen. The simple, intelligible service, the quiet fervour of the assembly, might well impress a sceptical beholder. Even more impressive is the inscription over the door. A tablet records how the first Protestant church was pulled down by order of the king after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and rebuilt on the declaration of religious liberty ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... adder. It was a little portrait in an oval frame, a man's face, highly idealised by the artist, and yet strikingly true to life. Evidently the hand of love had depicted those lineaments. The eyes were bright, the lips wore a proud smile, the whole expression was one to charm the beholder. It was Benjamin Vajdar's likeness, and no ghost could have given Blanka a greater start. It was as if her most hated foe had pursued her into paradise itself, to ...
— Manasseh - A Romance of Transylvania • Maurus Jokai
... arms, came to procure some water from a small stream beside the road. Her dress, though clean and neat, bespoke extreme poverty; and her countenance had a wan, sad expression upon it which would have touched the most indifferent beholder, and left an impression deeper even than that produced by her extreme ...
— A Lady's Visit to the Gold Diggings of Australia in 1852-53. • Mrs. Charles (Ellen) Clacey
... interest. To the apiarian the prospect of an increase of stocks is sufficient to create some interest, even when the phenomenon of swarming would fail to awaken it. But to the naturalist this season has charms that the indifferent beholder ...
— Mysteries of Bee-keeping Explained • M. Quinby
... the Rhine. The Cathedral of Cologne is the most splendid structure of the kind in Europe, and Jerome and Clotelle viewed with interest the beautiful arches and columns of this stupendous building, which strikes with awe the beholder, as he gazes at its unequalled splendor, surrounded, as it is, by villas, cottages, and palace-like mansions, with the enchanting Rhine ...
— Clotelle - The Colored Heroine • William Wells Brown
... actuated by a sort of sham musculature of the disks in an elastic sheath; these disks become polarised and drawn closely and powerfully together when traversed by a current of electricity. In this way the curious parallelism to animal motions, which was so striking and disturbing to the human beholder, was attained. Such quasi-muscles abounded in the crablike handling-machine which, on my first peeping out of the slit, I watched unpacking the cylinder. It seemed infinitely more alive than the actual Martians lying beyond it in the sunset light, panting, stirring ineffectual tentacles, ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells
... themselves, and farther advanced in the arts of civilization. The several Indian tribes in America have been compared to the fragments of a vast ruin. And though these vestiges of a remote period in the past may not awaken the same grand associations in the mind of the beholder as the majestic ruins of Greece and Rome, yet they cannot fail to excite feelings of veneration for the memory of a numerous people, whose lingering signs of greatness are widely visible from ...
— Sketches of Western North Carolina, Historical and Biographical • C. L. Hunter
... god of nuptial rites, And crowns with honour Love and his delights, Of Athens was a youth, so sweet of face, That many thought him of the female race; Such quickening brightness did his clear eyes dart, Warm went their beams to his beholder's heart, In such pure leagues his beauties were combin'd, That there your nuptial contracts first were signed; For as proportion, white and crimson, meet In beauty's mixture, all right clear and sweet, 100 The eye responsible, the golden hair, And none is held, ...
— The Works of Christopher Marlowe, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Christopher Marlowe
... devoid of beauty of form nor of color, but which make neither the pulse quiver nor the eye wet; and then such a sweeping judgment is arrested by a work like the 'St. Jerome' in the Vatican, from which a spirit comes forth so strong and so exalted, that the beholder, however trained to examine, and compare, and collect, finds himself raised above all recollections of manner by the sudden ascent of talent into the higher world of genius. Essentially a second-rate composer,* Donizetti struck out some first-rate things in a ...
— Great Italian and French Composers • George T. Ferris
... call the love of novelty, of contrast and of harmony. The effect of sublimity is connected with the manifestation of superior power in its highest degrees, which manifestation excites a sympathetic elation in the beholder. The ludicrous, again, is defined by Bain, improving on Aristotle and Hobbes, as the degradation of something possessing dignity in circumstances that excite ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... be endured, Her teaching is not so obscured By errors and perversities, That no truth shines athwart the lies: And he, whose eye detects a spark Even where, to man's the whole seems dark, May well see flame where each beholder Acknowledges the embers smoulder. But I, a mere man, fear to quit The clue God gave me as most fit To guide my footsteps through life's maze, Because himself discerns all ways Open to reach him: I, a man Able to ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... am unfortunate in having no particular accomplishments. I cannot sing either the old songs or the new; neither am I a performer on divers instruments. I can paint a little, but my paintings do not seem to rouse any enthusiasm in the beholder, nor do they add an inspiring strain to conversation. I can, indeed, make gingerbread and six different kinds of pudding, but I hesitate to mention it, because the cook is far in advance of me in all these particulars, ...
— The Wit of Women - Fourth Edition • Kate Sanborn
... building. Flash, sparkle— glistening streams of golden light, dancing like golden water upon the gorgeous walls, gilding even those who entered, so that face and garments were bathed and dyed in the glorious radiance, till the eye of the beholder ached, and the darkened intellects of the simple Peruvians might well believe that they were in the ...
— The Golden Magnet • George Manville Fenn
... girl was making a toilet of vast and artful simplicity wherewith to enrapture the eye of the beholder. The first profound effect thereof was wrought upon Reginald Currier, alias "Bim," some fifteen minutes later, at the outer portals of the ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... girdle. In all the treatment Fra Angelico maintains his assertion of the authority of abstract imagination, which, depriving his subject of all material or actual being, contemplates it as retaining qualities eternal only—adorned by incorporeal splendor. The eyes of the beholder are supernaturally unsealed: and to this miraculous vision whatever is of the earth vanishes, and all things are seen endowed with an harmonious glory—the garments falling with strange, visionary grace, glowing with indefinite ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... my entry into Antwerp—without molestation, thanks to the benign Spirit of Peace—towards the evening of a fine day in July; and while the impression of novelty was still fresh, enjoyed a rich treat in viewing its noble Cathedral. The interior is grand, but simple—striking the beholder more by its loftiness and spaciousness, than by any profusion of glittering ornament, so common in Catholic churches—although the forest of pillars, the altar-piece, the statues, and above all the splendid pictures which grace the walls, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 396, Saturday, October 31, 1829. • Various
... perhaps in the balcony of the stage." Such is the fate of criticism without knowledge! And now, to close our Masques, let me apply the forcible style of Ben Jonson himself: "The glory of all these solemnities had perished like a blaze, and gone out in the beholder's eyes; so short-lived are the bodies of all things ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... every act of the body. He must have what is called a "presence;" not that he must be great in size, beautiful, or strong; but he must be expressive and impressive—his outward man must communicate to the beholder at once and without fail, something of indwelling power, and he must be and act as one. You may in your mind analyze him into his several parts; but practically he acts in everything with his whole soul and his whole self; whatsoever his hand finds to ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... Tacks made of rubber, matches that explode or refuse to light, exploding cigars or cigarettes, fountain-pens that smear ink over the fingers immediately they are put to use, "electric" bells with pins secreted in their push buttons, and boutonnieres that squirt water into the face of the beholder, are a few ...
— Writing for Vaudeville • Brett Page
... water," says he, tritely. There was the illusion of noise—of the thud and swish of breaking water and of the gallop of the wind. So complete was the illusion, and so did the spirit of the scene transport the beholder, that Cobden once lifted his voice above the pictured tumult. Terry Lute's art was ...
— Harbor Tales Down North - With an Appreciation by Wilfred T. Grenfell, M.D. • Norman Duncan
... she walked up from the field holding tightly to her father's poor, worn hand, and her heart was in a tumult. To behold any convulsion of nature is no light experience, and when it is a storm of the spirit in one beloved the beholder is swept along with it in greater or less measure. Ellen trembled as she walked. Her father kept looking at her anxiously and remorsefully. Once he reached around his other hand and chucked her playfully under the chin. "Scared ...
— The Portion of Labor • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... most colossal scale of grandeur and magnificence. Outside of these, on either border, along the entire range, lofty peaks rose at intervals, seemingly vying with each other in the varied splendors they presented to the beholder. The scene was full of majesty. The valley at the base of this range was dotted with small lakes. Lakes abound everywhere—in the valleys, on the mountains and farther down on their slopes, at all elevations. The appearance ...
— The Discovery of Yellowstone Park • Nathaniel Pitt Langford
... we love, might hear His Very Self without these (as we two now strained ourselves, and in swift thought touched on that Eternal Wisdom which abideth over all); -could this be continued on, and other visions of kind far unlike be withdrawn, and this one ravish, and absorb, and wrap up its beholder amid these inward joys, so that life might be for ever like that one moment of understanding which now we sighed after; were not this, Enter into thy Master's joy? And when shall that be? When we shall all rise again, though we shall ...
— The Confessions of Saint Augustine • Saint Augustine
... the sea, and was very sensitive to its associations with the toils and triumphs of mankind. Born beside the Thames, he grew up among boats and fraternized with sailors all his life. It was impossible for him to be the beholder of such a scene as the Temeraire's approach to her last moorings, save as a poet-painter; and stirred to the putting forth of all his powers, this Fighting Temeraire is ...
— The Book of Art for Young People • Agnes Conway
... cows, having first prayed, he blessed them and restored them all even to their former health. And the cow, being released from the evil spirit, well knowing her deliverer, approached with bended head, licking the feet and the hands of the boy, and turned every beholder to the praise of God and ...
— The Most Ancient Lives of Saint Patrick - Including the Life by Jocelin, Hitherto Unpublished in America, and His Extant Writings • Various
... particular color, of little elegance in flight or movement, with a disagreeable flirt of the tail, always quarreling with their neighbors and with one another, no birds are so little calculated to excite pleasurable emotions in the beholder, or to become objects of human interest and affection. The kingbird is the best dressed member of the family, but he is a braggart; and, though always snubbing his neighbors, is an arrant coward, and shows the white feather at the slightest ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... created from his mouth a terrible Being whose very sight could make one's hair stand on its end. The blazing flames that emanated from his body rendered him exceedingly awful to behold. His arms were many in number and in each was a weapon that struck the beholder with fear. That Being, thus created, stood before the great god, with joined hands, and said, "What commands shall I have to accomplish?" Maheswara answered him, saying, "Go and destroy the Sacrifice of Daksha." Thus ordered, that Being of leonine ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... ardent was my devotion to her none knows better than you. But Olive had, I will not say a fault, though I suffer from it, but a quality, or rather two qualities, which have completed my misery. Lightly as she floats on the stream of society, the most casual observer, and even the enamoured beholder, can see that Olive Dunne has great pride, and no sense of humour. Her dignity is her idol. What makes her, even for a moment, the possible theme of ridicule is in her eyes an unpardonable sin. This sin, I must with penitence confess, I did indeed commit. Another woman might ...
— Angling Sketches • Andrew Lang
... there watch at your leisure the studied deliberateness of her movements. The enchanting deceiver plays off all the little political artifices of her sex so naturally as to exclude all idea of art or premeditation. If she has a royally beautiful hand, the most perspicacious beholder will believe that it is absolutely necessary that she should twist, or refix, or push aside the ringlet or curl she plays with. If she has some dignity of profile, you will be persuaded that she ...
— Another Study of Woman • Honore de Balzac
... And being gloriously adorned, after she had called upon God, who is the beholder and saviour of all things, she took two ...
— Deuteronomical Books of the Bible - Apocrypha • Anonymous
... down upon the shore and by the surf among the turmoil of the blinding wind, the flying stones and sand, "the tremendous sea itself," that came rolling in with an awful noise absolutely confounding to the beholder! In all fiction there is no grander description than that of one of the sublimest spectacles in nature. The merest fragments of it conjured up the entire scene—aided as those fragments were by the look, the tones, the whole manner of the Reader. The listener was there with him ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... into the walls, reflected the waxed floors, the rich Oriental carpets, and the sumptuous paintings that hung against the ivory-tinted paneling, so that in appearance the beauties of the apartment were continued in bewildering vistas upon every side toward which the beholder directed his gaze. ...
— The Ruby of Kishmoor • Howard Pyle
... design, when I went abroad, was to divert myself by seeing the wondrous variety of prospects, beasts, birds, fishes, insects, and vegetables, with which God has been pleased to enrich the several parts of this globe; a variety which, as it must give great pleasure to a contemplative beholder, so doth it admirably display the power, and wisdom, and goodness of the Creator. Indeed, to say the truth, there is but one work in his whole creation that doth him any dishonour, and with that I have long since ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... terrible sight, and one likely to haunt the beholder for many a long day; but that was what was intended. I carefully watched the sepoys' faces to see how it affected them. They were evidently startled at the swift retribution which had overtaken their guilty comrades, ...
— Forty-one years in India - From Subaltern To Commander-In-Chief • Frederick Sleigh Roberts
... notice. He was stout, bandy-legged, broad-shouldered, and bull-headed, ugly, and villanous of look; yet with an impudent, swaggering, joyous self-esteem traced in every feature and expressed in every action of body, that rather disposed the beholder to laugh than to be displeased at his appearance. An old blanket-coat, or wrap-rascal, once white, but now of the same muddy brown hue that stained his visage—and once also of sufficient length to defend his legs, though the skirts had ...
— Nick of the Woods • Robert M. Bird
... sweetness of the smile which was one of her greatest charms,—but now, despite his pains, that smile seemed to lose itself in the sorrow and pathos of an unspoken reproach, which, though enthralling and appealing to the beholder as the look of the famous "Mona Lisa," had fastened itself as it were on the canvas without the painter's act or consent. He was annoyed at this, yet dared not touch it in any attempt to alter what asserted itself as convincingly ...
— Innocent - Her Fancy and His Fact • Marie Corelli
... to weaklings, Striker of children; destroyer of women; corrupter Of innocent dreamers, and laugher at beauty; I, Too easily brought to tears and weakness by music, Baffled and broken by love, the helpless beholder Of the war in my heart of desire with desire, the struggle Of hatred with love, terror with hunger; I Who laughed without knowing the cause of my laughter, who grew Without wishing to grow, a servant to my own body; Loved without ...
— American Poetry, 1922 - A Miscellany • Edna St. Vincent Millay
... walked down Moorthorne-road towards the town they certainly made a couple piquant enough, by reason of the excessive violence of the contrast between them, to amuse the eye of the beholder. A young and pretty woman who spends seventy pounds a year on her ornamentations, walking by the side of a little old man (she had the better of him by an inch) who had probably not spent seventy pounds on clothes in sixty years—such a spectacle ...
— Helen with the High Hand (2nd ed.) • Arnold Bennett
... so composedly, Now, in my bed, That any beholder Might fancy me dead— Might start at beholding ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... until the blue ribbons on her straw hat fluttered in the wind, and blushed until her soft eyes were like forget-me-nots set in rose leaves. She possessed a serene, luminous beauty, which became intensified beneath the gaze of the beholder. ...
— The Voice of the People • Ellen Glasgow
... my feet lay the great and profound valley of the Ratong, a dark gulf of vegetation. Looking northward, the eye followed that river to the summit of Kinchinjunga (distant eighteen miles), which fronts the beholder as Mont Blanc does when seen from the mountains on the opposite side of the valley of Chamouni. To the east are the immense precipices and glaciers of Pundim, and on the west those of Kubra, forming ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... which is divine, which is the abstract of beauty absolute, gives to the beholder a shock of astonishment and delight,—not unmixed with melancholy. Very few works of art give this, because very few approach perfection. But there are marbles and gems which give it, and certain fine studies ...
— Kokoro - Japanese Inner Life Hints • Lafcadio Hearn
... understanding, or do they possess reality apart from the knowing subject? This question has given rise to much debate. According to Hegel and Ed. Erdmann the attributes are something external to substance, something brought into it by the understanding, forms of knowledge present in the beholder alone; substance itself is neither extended nor cogitative, but merely appears to the understanding under these determinations, without which the latter would be unable to cognize it. This "formalistic" interpretation, which, ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... Christian churches, to commemorate a person or an event, became in time objects of worship to the vulgar, so, in Egypt, the esoteric or spiritual meaning of the emblems was lost in the gross materialism of the beholder. This esoteric and allegorical meaning was, however, preserved by the priests, and communicated in the mysteries alone to the initiated, while the uninstructed retained only the grosser conception."—GLIDDON, Otia Aegyptiaca, ...
— The Symbolism of Freemasonry • Albert G. Mackey
... her own devices, the average female has a tendency to "put on her things," and to contrive the same, in a manner that is not conducive to patience in the male beholder. Her besetting iniquity in this particular is a fondness for angles, and she is unwavering in her determination to achieve them ...
— The Fiend's Delight • Dod Grile
... blossoms, and nothing soon remains but the bare twigs, while the dark forest, on which no art or care was ever bestowed, and which towered up towards heaven long before human remembrance, bears every blast unshaken, and fills the solitary beholder with religious awe. ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... a priest carrying a Bon Dieu in a silver vase every one called out, "Aux genoux!" and then the beholder had to kneel, even if the mud were ankle deep. So on a wet day one's knees were apt to be as ...
— In the Days of Poor Richard • Irving Bacheller
... and shapeless, that it seemed as if he did it on purpose and to be irritating. His fat head was big enough to make a dwarf of, hunchback and all. His mottled cheeks were vast and pendulous to that degree that they inspired the imaginative beholder with terror, as reminding him of avalanches and landslides which might slip their hold at the slightest shock and plunge downward in a path of destruction. One puffy eyelid drooped in a sinister way; obviously ...
— Stories by American Authors (Volume 4) • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... none but the seven colours juxtaposed [Claude Monet has added black and white] and leave the individual rays of each of these colours to blend at a certain distance, so as to act like sunlight upon the eye of the beholder." This is called dissociation of tones; and here is a new convention; why banish all save the spectrum? We paint ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... their appearance—the stinted and sparse crops, the intervening deserts of sand, the waste of desolation, spreading away far as the eye can reach—the streams contemptible in comparison, and the squalid, degraded, thriftless people along their banks, make it painful to the beholder, who is borne on his way in some dirty little craft, contrasting so strangely with the Mississippi steamer. Yet, in admirable keeping with everything else, all these present a grand contrast to the valley of the Mississippi, and only prove the latter has no equal in all that pertains ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... the place is called salubrious; The neighborhood of Vesuvius lends it An odor volcanic, that rather mends it, And the buildings have an aspect lugubrious, That inspires a feeling of awe and terror Into the heart of the beholder, And befits such an ancient homestead of error, Where the old falsehoods moulder and smoulder, And yearly by many hundred hands Are carried away, in the zeal of youth, And sown like tares in the field of truth, To blossom and ripen in other lands. What have we here, affixed ...
— The Golden Legend • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... now, a thin delicately-coloured woman not far from forty, with a nervous mouth and anxious blue eyes. Possibly she had been quite pretty in youth, if ever peace and the quiet mind had been hers. But the unrest and worry of her look left rather a disturbed impression on the beholder. ...
— In the Mist of the Mountains • Ethel Turner
... supply her friends. These friends were in the game that of playing with the disparity between her aspect and her character. Her character was attested by the second movement of her face, which convinced the beholder that her vision of the humours of the world was not supine, not passive. She enjoyed, she needed the warm air of friendship, but the eyes of the American city looked out, somehow, for the opportunity of it, from under the lids of Jerusalem. With her false ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James
... buries it, and, battered though it has been by Mohammed Ali's artillery, the expression of its face, as it gazes across the fertile plain towards the sunrise, is one of calm inscrutability, difficult to describe, but which fascinates the beholder. ...
— Peeps at Many Lands: Egypt • R. Talbot Kelly
... questionable; but by the united and zealous exertions of the clergy, attended by the blessings of her great Founder, she has been preserved in safety through every storm, and now presents herself with astonishment to every beholder, not as a grain of mustard seed, but as a beautiful tree, spreading its salubrious branches over our whole country. The Church, by a strict adherence to its ancient landmarks, its priesthood, its liturgy, and its government, has been preserved from those schisms which ...
— Report Of Commemorative Services With The Sermons And Addresses At The Seabury Centenary, 1883-1885. • Diocese Of Connecticut
... moral paradise full of charming flowers, shining in every variety of color, under the blue dome of the skies, drinking in the refreshing dews of heaven and the warming beams of the sun, sending its sweet fragrance around, and filling the beholder ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No. 6, December 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... clumps of which sparkle the impeded mountain waters, and the barren hill-sides whose blue summits seem blended with the skies giving to the scene such an air of calm serenity and soft repose as to leave the beholder almost without a wish ...
— The Felon's Track • Michael Doheny
... those self-denying workers in the Lord's vineyard. But the hardships of his life had not quenched his jovial spirits, which were, indeed, irrepressible. A laughing greeting for every one he met, Mexican or Indian, was his habit, one that might have begotten a measure of contempt in the beholder, had the Father not possessed a sternness, latent for the most part, it is true, but which could, on occasion, be evoked to prop up the apparently tottering respect due him. Father Uria was fond, too, of company, not only for its ...
— Old Mission Stories of California • Charles Franklin Carter
... as they appear, however, they are the least uninviting feature in the landscape, which is prosaic and squalid beyond description. Rickety, tumble-down tenements of dilapidated lath and plaster stare the beholder in the face at every turn. During the greater part of the day the solitude of the neighbourhood remains unbroken save by the tread of some chance wayfarer like myself, and a general atmosphere of the abomination of desolation ...
— The Gerrard Street Mystery and Other Weird Tales • John Charles Dent
... advice. He admitted on the voyage to St. Helena that "he had not exactly reconnoitred Wellington's position."[506] And, indeed, there seemed to be nothing much to reconnoitre. The Mont St. Jean, or Waterloo, position does not impress the beholder with any sense of strength. The so-called valley, separating the two arrays, is a very shallow depression, nowhere more than fifty feet below the top of the northern slope. It is divided about halfway across ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... velvet—gorgeous, glowing, wonderful colour, as trying to the ordinary complexion as colour can well be. But as the gown fell into place, and Georgiana, backing up to her father, was fastened somewhat tentatively into it, it would have been plain to any beholder that if the rich girl could not wear the queenly, daring robe the poor ...
— Under the Country Sky • Grace S. Richmond
... opinion of the efficacy of attempting to teach sewing, so very few ever practice it after leaving school, though I have found it convenient to sew on a button or repair a rent on occasion. Sewing by the blind, though it may surprise the beholder for the skill acquired under difficulties, will seldom claim their admiration ...
— The World As I Have Found It - Sequel to Incidents in the Life of a Blind Girl • Mary L. Day Arms
... bestrided her forehead midway, appearing more for ornament than use. Never did Nature provide a more convenient resting-place for twin-glasses, than the ridge of Miss Thusa's nose, which rose with a sudden, majestic elevation, suggesting the idea of unexpectedness in the mind of the beholder. Every thing was harsh about her face, except the eyes, which had a soft, solemn, misty look, a look of prophecy, mingled with kindness and compassion, as if she pitied the evils her far-reaching vision beheld, but which she had not the power ...
— Helen and Arthur - or, Miss Thusa's Spinning Wheel • Caroline Lee Hentz
... moment. I myself felt a kind of thrill go through me, for her wild beauty was almost tragical. Her madness was not grotesque, but solemn and dramatic. There was something terribly deliberate in her strangeness; it was full of awe to the beholder, more searching and painfully pitiful ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... whereas the other phenomena, even if made of "dream-stuff," were rated at their true value. Hence it seems to me that if such things have any outward independent reality, to see them is no more an hallucination than to see a rainbow. Even if they are projected from the beholder's brain, there is no hallucination if they are known for such; but only when they are confounded with reality, as it were, in a waking-dream. As we are here using the word, an experience is "real" which fits in with, and does not contradict the totality of our ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... vanity, and comes so near being an ornithological coxcomb. The red-bird, the yellowbird, the indigo-bird, the oriole, the cardinal grosbeak, and others, all birds of brilliant plumage and musical ability, seem quite unconscious of self, and neither by tone nor act challenge the admiration of the beholder. ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... time). Here in this world Like may behold its Opposite: Bad may behold Good and, because of being able to behold it, may go over and join its will to Good: it is able to do this, because the evidence of Good remains fixed whether the beholder or thinker is ...
— The Prodigal Returns • Lilian Staveley
... ideal, and give it that breadth which could not be otherwise obtainable—and that thus the value of the ideal was indefinitely enhanced, and DESIGNEDLY ENHANCED, alike by the waste of time and by its incrustations; that all ideals gain by a certain amount of vagueness, which allows the beholder to fill in the details according to his own spiritual needs, and that no ideal can be truly universal and permanents unless it have an elasticity which will allow of this process in the minds of those who contemplate it; ...
— The Fair Haven • Samuel Butler
... then as it is to-day. But the prospect which delighted the eyes of the two friends—or of Stukely rather, for Dick Chichester somehow seemed almost entirely to lack the keen sense of beauty with which his friend was so bountifully endowed— was very different from that which greets the eye of the beholder to-day. Devonport and Stonehouse were mere villages; Mount Wise was farm land; where the citadel now stands was a trumpery fort which a modern gunboat would utterly destroy in half an hour; Drake's island was fortified, it is true, but with ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... degree of elegance and gracefulness to a poem as a well-ordered and artificial fiction doth. But as in pictures the colors are more delightful to the eye than the lines because those give them a nearer resemblance to the persons they were made for, and render them the more apt to deceive the beholder; so in poems we are more apt to be smitten and fall in love with a probable fiction than with the greatest accuracy that can be observed in measures and phrases, where there is nothing fabulous or fictitious joined with it. Wherefore Socrates, ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... been eagerly looking at Philip. There appeared to be something in his appearance which riveted the attention of the beholder. Was it the voice of nature which spoke from the ...
— The Errand Boy • Horatio Alger
... prepared for every turn of the competition, and surpassed all in power, speed, and general serviceability. To its makers the prize was unhesitatingly awarded, whereupon the hardy engineer amazed every beholder by letting out the last link and dashing past the grandstand at the rate of more than thirty miles an hour. The forced draft, which had made the Killingworth freight engines so successful, coupled with the tubular boiler, formed a combination which won the battle for the locomotive once for ...
— Ten Englishmen of the Nineteenth Century • James Richard Joy
... chief feature of the display consists of Canadian landscapes, illustrating the agricultural, lumbering, mining, and shipping interests of British North America. The scenes are set to produce a remarkable perspective. The beholder seems to stand on rising ground, looking away over miles of country. In each view the foreground is enlivened with real water and either living or moving things. There is a panorama of the great wheat fields bordering on Lake Superior. Trains move ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... which seemed near him, though it rose afar off from the bosom of the Lauterbrunner Thal. There it stood, holy and high and pure, the bride of heaven, all veiled and clothed in white, and lifted the thoughts of the beholder heavenward. O, he little thought then, as he gazed at it with longing and delight, how soon a form was to arise in his own soul, as holy, and high, and pure as this, and like this ...
— Hyperion • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... loveliness and majesty. The sides of the mountains were occasionally bare and rugged, but for the most part they were clothed with forests of fir; while above, pointed summits and fantastic crags everywhere met the eye, and filled the beholder with admiration ...
— Scenes in Switzerland • American Tract Society
... of the Jesus-child, I feel an impulse I can scarcely explain—a longing to tear it from the canvas as if it were a breathing form, and clasp it to my heart in a glow of passionate love. What a sublime inspiration Raphael must have felt when he painted it! Judging from its effect on the beholder, I can conceive of no higher mental excitement than that required ...
— Views a-foot • J. Bayard Taylor
... is portrayed in the countenance of Laocoon, and not in the countenance alone, under the most violent suffering; the pain discovers itself in every muscle and sinew of his body, and the beholder, while looking at the agonized contraction of the abdomen, without viewing the face and the other parts, believes that he almost feels the pain himself. This pain expresses itself, however, without any violence, both in the features and in the whole posture. He raises no ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VIII (of X) - Continental Europe II. • Various
... mother's. Two rather striking blemishes on the older woman's beauty, a wandering eye and a scar on the soft cheek, she took her own peculiar method of ignoring, thus completely and effectively discounting any unfavorable opinion in the mind of the beholder. Consequently, she frequently referred to them, never as blemishes, but as slight but significant evidences of ...
— The Silver Butterfly • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... to the inhaling apparatus of his unclassical features,—by the filthy splendor of his linen, which a low-buttoning waistcoat, gorgeous and dirty likewise, unbosoms disadvantageously to the gaze of the beholder,—by the invariable "diamond" pin, of gift-book style, with which the juncture of the first-mentioned integument is effected, if not adorned,—and, above all, by the massive guards and guy-chains with which his watch is hitched on to the belaying arrangements ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 40, February, 1861 • Various
... we said, which move us as soon us as soon as we perceive them, joys and sorrows with which we sympathise, passions and vices which call forth painful astonishment, terror or pity, in the beholder; in short, sentiments that are prolonged in sentimental overtones from mind to mind. All this concerns the essentials of life. All this is serious, at times even tragic. Comedy can only begin at the point where our neighbour's personality ceases to affect us. It begins, ...
— Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic • Henri Bergson
... the side, and separates them from the fine old Castle of Clisson, whose high and decaying towers and battlements give the beholder a noble idea of its ancient grandeur. The evening was a very fine one,—one of those delightful soft, clear skies usual at this season, the latter end of July. I sat myself down in the grotto of Heloise,—a spot of the deepest seclusion, formed, by the hand of ...
— A Visit to the Monastery of La Trappe in 1817 • W.D. Fellowes
... were no longer cloven branches nor rents to be seen; its former aspect of bitter defiance and sullen grief had disappeared; there were only the young leaves, full of sap that had pierced through the centenarian bark, making the beholder question with surprise if this patriarch had really given birth to them. 'Yes, it is he, indeed!' cried Prince Andre, and he felt his heart suffused by the intense joy which the springtime and this new life gave him . . . 'No, my life cannot end at thirty-one! . . . ...
— The Forged Coupon and Other Stories • Leo Tolstoy
... Vatican to the Milvian bridge. The Goth cut off the fourteen aqueducts which supplied Rome with water. Those greatest monuments of imperial magnificence from that time have stretched their broken arches across the Campagna, the admiration and sorrow of every beholder in so many generations. What five hundred years of empire had done, the Goth, in his fury to recover the land which he had usurped, was able to ruin. The besiegers went on wasting the Campagna, and preventing the entrance of provisions ...
— The Formation of Christendom, Volume VI - The Holy See and the Wandering of the Nations, from St. Leo I to St. Gregory I • Thomas W. (Thomas William) Allies
... black was the opposite of the traditional flaxen. Even in the feeble street-lamplight, she appeared, with her finely chiseled features of an Oriental type, handsome enough to melt an anchorite, and in the beholder a flood of passion gushed up and expanded his heart—devoid of such a mastering emotion before. He believed this was love! Perhaps it was love—real, true, indubitable love—but there is a mock-love with so much to advance in its favor that it has won many ...
— The Son of Clemenceau • Alexandre (fils) Dumas
... When he is falling with his wound, the features are at the same time very terrible and languishing; and there is such a stern faintness diffused through his look, as is apt to move a kind of horror, as well as pity, in the beholder. This, I say, is an effect wrought by mere lights and shades; consider also a representation made by words only, as in an account given by a good writer: Catiline in Sallust makes just such a figure as Porus by Le Brun. It is said of him, 'Catilina vero longe a suis ...
— The Tatler, Volume 1, 1899 • George A. Aitken
... St. Peter, they always have in every town a bonfire, late in the evenings, and carry about bundles of reeds fast tied and fired; these being dry, will last long, and flame better than a torch, and be a pleasing divertive prospect to the distant beholder; a stranger would go near to imagine the whole country was on fire."[515] Another writer says of the South of Ireland: "On Midsummer's Eve, every eminence, near which is a habitation, blazes with bonfires; and round these they carry numerous torches, shouting and dancing, which ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... hearts; that can compose his forehead to sadness and gravity, while he bids his heart be wanton and careless within, and in the meantime laughs within himself to think how smoothly he hath cozened the beholder. In whose silent face are written the characters of religion, which his tongue and gestures pronounce but his hands recant. That hath a clean face and garment with a foul soul, whose mouth belies his heart, and his fingers belie his mouth. Walking early up into the city, he turns ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various
... been the lords of those they met; but as it was they were simply the representatives of one of the suppressed races which, if they joined hands, could girdle the globe under British rule. Somehow they brought the sense of this home to the beholder, as none of the monuments or memorials of England's imperial glory had done, and then, having fulfilled their office, ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... its true state in which it is one with the highest Lord and distinguished by freedom from sin and similar attributes. The whole process is similar to that by which an imagined snake passes over into a rope as soon as the mind of the beholder has freed ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Sankaracarya - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 1 • George Thibaut
... size, but admirably proportioned, whether for feats of agility and strength, or for the lighter graces of society. But it was his face more especially, and the magnificent expression of his features, that first struck the beholder—the broad imaginative brow, the keen large lustrous eye, pervading, clear, undazzled as the eagle's, the bold Roman nose, the resolute curve of the clean-cut mouth, full of indomitable pride and matchless energy—all these bespoke at once the versatile and various genius ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 1 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... his fame, shall have mouldered into dust, and been forgotten for ever. If visible objects are thought necessary to suggest the mention of his name oftener that it would otherwise occur to the mind, they should be such as to improve the taste, as well as awaken the patriotism of the beholder. As an American, there is nothing to which you have a right to object, but as a critic, I admit that there is much that you cannot approve in the ...
— The Attache - or, Sam Slick in England, Complete • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... of Thebes he had a splendid edifice constructed-which to this day delights the beholder by the symmetry of its proportions in memory of the hour when he escaped death as by a miracle; on its pylon he caused the battle of Kadesh to be represented in beautiful pictures in relief, and there, as ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... their Eyes. There was speech in their dumbnesse, Language in their very gesture: they look'd as they had heard of a World ransom'd, or one destroyed: a notable passion of Wonder appeared in them: but the wisest beholder, that knew no more but seeing, could not say, if th' importance were Ioy, or Sorrow; but in the extremitie of the one, it must needs be. ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... including Raphael and Michael Angelo. The plan was changed repeatedly, but in its final form the building is a Latin cross surmounted by a great dome, one hundred and thirty-eight feet in diameter. The dimensions and proportions of this greatest of all churches never fail to impress the beholder with ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson
... to Zephon, and Michael and Abdiel are set apart in their prowess; there is not one he names that does not breathe of Heaven, that is not encompassed with the glory of the Infinite. And why the reader is not overwhelmed in their supposed presence is because he is a beholder through Adam,—through him also a listener; but whenever he is made, by the poet's spell, to forget Adam, and to see, as it were in his ...
— Lectures on Art • Washington Allston
... Gifted weavers rose to the task, became almost inspired in the use of their medium, and produced such works of their art as have never been equalled in any age. These are the tapestries that grip the heart, that cause a frisson of joy to the beholder. And these are the tapestries we buy, if kind chance allows. If they cannot be ours to live with, then away to the museum in all haste and often, to ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... the same as those of which the annals of imaginative and excited religious feeling have in every age been full. Swoons and strange convulsive agitations, however impressive and even awe-inspiring to an uninformed beholder, were undistinguishable from those, for example, which had given their name to English Quakers[615] and French Convulsionists,[616] which were to be read of in the Lives of Guyon and St. Theresa,[617] and which were a matter of continual occurrence when Tauler preached in Germany.[618] It is no ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... taken the name of each founder, are in point. Alas! every man is such a victim. The imbecility of men is always inviting the impudence of power. It is the delight of vulgar talent to dazzle and to bind the beholder. But true genius seeks to defend us from itself. True genius will not impoverish, but will liberate, and add new senses. If a wise man should appear in our village, he would create, in those who conversed ...
— Representative Men • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... inward upon themselves, upward to something not themselves, and to see whether they could not understand a little of the true purport of that mystery which we call life upon earth." It was perfectly natural, as well as perfectly right, that as the beholder caught a glance of the Infinite Beyond, the image impressed itself upon his sensorium, as would be the case from looking at the sun, and he would as a result perceive that Infinite in all that he looked upon. Thus to ...
— India: What can it teach us? - A Course of Lectures Delivered before the University Of Cambridge • F. Max Mueller
... desperate run on fire, and king, and palace, that further stakes on the numbers attached to those words in the Golden Book were forbidden. Every accident or event, is supposed, by the ignorant populace, to be a revelation to the beholder, or party concerned, in connection with the lottery. Certain people who have a talent for dreaming fortunately, are much sought after; and there are some priests who are constantly favoured with visions of the ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... seeming but the more deadly because everything about it is daintily neat, from the stopper covered with white kid to the label and the thread. His peremptory manner, the eruption on his blotched countenance, the green eyes, and a malignant something about him,—all these things struck the beholder with the same sense of surprise as storm-clouds in a blue sky. If in his private office, as he showed himself to La Cibot, he was the common knife that a murderer catches up for his crime,—now, at the Presidente's door, he was the daintily-wrought ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... Chalcedony, Heliotrope, Agate,— Some toiler of old Japan, the Artist fantastic, Has polished to likeness of ice, Ruining form to reveal it Fleche d'Amour That the marvelous, delicate, hairlike inclosures Of crystallizations foreign might please the beholder. Herein worked the Infinite well, And, let us say, too, the artisan patient, To ...
— Mastery of Self • Frank Channing Haddock
... insensibly attracted those whom chance threw in his way. His face was not strikingly handsome, but it was noble; and when he smiled, or was much animated, it invariably communicated a spark of his own enthusiasm to the beholder. His figure was faultless; his air and manner, if less easy than those of Colonel Egerton, were more sincere and ingenuous; his breeding was clearly higher; his respect for others rather bordering on the old school. But in his voice there existed a ...
— Precaution • James Fenimore Cooper
... Shapes were fine set off with a graceful and easy Carriage; the Majesty and Softness of her Face, at once wrought Love and Veneration; the Language of her Eyes sufficiently paid the Loss of her Tongue, and there was something so Commanding in her Look, that it struck every Beholder as dumb as herself; she was a great Proficient in Painting, which puts me in mind of a notable Story I can't omit; her Father had sent for the most Famous Painter in Italy to draw her Picture, she accordingly sat for it; he had drawn some ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume V • Aphra Behn
... material. Although he was armed with a long knife and heavy rifle, and the expression of his brow and chin indicated an unusual degree of firmness and determination, yet there was an openness and blandness in the expression of his features which won the confidence of the beholder, and instantly dispelled every apprehension of violence. All of the emigrants had either seen or heard of him before, for his name was not only repeated by every tongue in the territory, but was familiar in every ...
— Wild Western Scenes • John Beauchamp Jones
... both inspiring and chastening; with the scenic grandeurs to give the exalted uplift, and the still, gray-green face of the vast mountainous desert to shrink the beholder to microscopic littleness in the face of its stupendous heights and depths, its immeasurable bulks and interspaces. Miss Alicia said something like this to Ford, in broken exclamations, when she had taken her first quailing eye-plunge ...
— Empire Builders • Francis Lynde
... the smooth, tanned skin. Ardent suns had likewise tanned his face till it was swarthy as a Spaniard's. The yellow mustache appeared incongruous in the midst of such swarthiness, while the clear blue of the eyes produced a feeling of shock on the beholder. It was difficult to realize that the skin of this man had once ...
— A Son Of The Sun • Jack London
... gaze On those fayre eyes, my loves immortall light, The whiles my stonisht hart stood in amaze, Through sweet illusion of her lookes delight, I mote perceive how, in her glauncing sight, Legions of Loves with little wings did fly, Darting their deadly arrows, fyry bright, At every rash beholder passing by. One of those archers closely I did spy, Ayming his arrow at my very hart: When suddenly, with twincle of her eye, The damzell broke his misintended dart. Had she not so doon, sure I had bene slayne; Yet as it was, I hardly ...
— The Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser, Volume 5 • Edmund Spenser
... were to abstain from further abuse, and hear what I have to say of the merits of Pantomime; of the manner in which it combines profit with amusement; instructing, informing, perfecting the intelligence of the beholder; training his eyes to lovely sights, filling his ears with noble sounds, revealing a beauty in which body and soul alike have their share. For that music and dancing are employed to produce these results is no disparagement of the art; ...
— Works, V2 • Lucian of Samosata
... to view me was to comprehend the power and kindliness of their Creator. Very beautiful was Iseult, and the face of Luned sparkled like a moving gem; Morgaine and Enid and Viviane and shrewd Nimue were lovely, too; and the comeliness of Ettarde exalted the beholder like a proud music: these, going statelily about Arthur's hall, seemed Heaven's finest craftsmanship until the Queen came to her dais, as the moon among glowing stars: men then affirmed that God in making Guenevere had used both hands. And it is I that am leaving ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell
... the town meeting was Mr. S., a very handsome old gentleman, of venerable and powerful appearance. He had snowy hair and a long white beard, but from under shaggy eyebrows there blazed out great black eyes which warned the beholder that the snow was an ornament and not a sign of decrepitude. The eve of my baptism at length drew near; it was fixed for October 12, almost exactly three weeks after my tenth birthday. I was dressed ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... and they had poured out their poisons upon him; they had tortured him hideously, they had burned him up as with vitriol. As a public force he was no longer a human being at all—he was a deformity, a spectre conjured up to bring fright to the beholder. And through it all he was utterly helpless—as much at their mercy as an infant in the hands of savages. And what had he done? Why had the torture been visited ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... that they stood on an undulating rocky base, with a background at a little distance. Niobe is the central figure, in any case, and the children were fleeing toward her from either side; she is the only one represented in such a way as to present the full face to the beholder (Fig. 43). But we shall better understand our subject if I recount as concisely as possible the story of Niobe, which, as you know, is a Grecian myth. Niobe was the daughter of Tantalus, and was born on Mount Sipylus. When a child Niobe played with Lato, or Latona, who afterward married ...
— A History of Art for Beginners and Students - Painting, Sculpture, Architecture • Clara Erskine Clement
... hue with which its noble banks are covered, but chiefly from the resemblance it bears in many places to the scenery of England, recalling to mind the grassy lawns and verdant banks of Britain's streams, and transporting the beholder from the wild scenes of the western world to his native home. The trees along its banks were larger and more varied than any we had hitherto seen—ash, poplar, cedar, red and white pines, oak, and birch being abundant, whilst flowers ...
— Hudson Bay • R.M. Ballantyne
... clumps of sagebrush. It had rained a few days before—the last rain of many, it chanced—and there were damp spots in the road in places and the grass and the sage were fresh in color. Meadow-larks were trilling, and the whole scene was one of peace—provided the beholder could blot out the memory of the tenantless ...
— Mystery Ranch • Arthur Chapman
... fitted her like a garment. Her heavy dark hair, coiled high on her shapely head, was just slightly silvered with gray and seemed to be a fitting foil to her large melancholy black eyes—eyes that from their slumbering depths seemed to impress the beholder with suggestions of some mysterious power, gleaming messages, like beacon flashes, from her inner life. With her becoming dress of rich, dark cloth, gloves and parasol to match, she looked ...
— Solaris Farm - A Story of the Twentieth Century • Milan C. Edson
... makes a strong curve along the ground to the right. The whole figure is tense and compact with restrained and waiting power; the expression is stealthy, pitiless, and terrible; it at once fascinates and astounds the beholder. While Mr. Kemeys was modelling this animal, an incident occurred which he has told me in something like the following words. The artist does not encourage the intrusion of idle persons while he is at ...
— Confessions and Criticisms • Julian Hawthorne
... asunder, and in eleven rows, to contain sweet water. Infinite cost in channels and cisterns, from Nilus to Alexandria, hath been formerly bestowed, to the admiration of these times; [2913]their cisterns so curiously cemented and composed, that a beholder would take them to be all of one stone: when the foundation is laid, and cistern made, their house is half built. That Segovian aqueduct in Spain, is much wondered at in these days, [2914]upon three rows of pillars, one above another, conveying sweet ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... in terms of natural causation, this must be furnished at the hands of the psychologist. It may be possible for him to show, more satisfactorily than hitherto, that all beauty, whenever and wherever it occurs, is literally "in the eyes of the beholder"; or that objectively considered, there is no such thing as beauty. It may be—and in my opinion it probably is—purely an affair of the percipient mind itself, depending on the association of ideas with pleasure-giving objects. This association may well lead to ...
— Darwin, and After Darwin (Vol. 1 and 3, of 3) • George John Romanes
... bedroom next door, and arrayed himself in his summer Hightums; a fresh (almost pearly) suit of white duck, a mauve tie with an amethyst pin in it, socks, tightly braced up, of precisely the same colour as the tie, so that an imaginative beholder might have conjectured that on this warm day the end of his tie had melted and run down his legs; buckskin shoes with tall slim heels and a straw hat completed this pretty Hightum. He had meant to wear it for the first time ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson
... that!" snapped Jen. "Do I no see my favourite check pattern on his trousers!" said Jen, which, indeed, being plain to the eye of every beholder, admitted of no denial—except perhaps, owing to point of view, by the unconscious wearer himself. He had sat down on these mystic criss-crossings and whorls dear to the Galloway housewife for her floor ornaments, while the ...
— The Dew of Their Youth • S. R. Crockett
... its luxury of sight and sound, its hours of golden youth, and the interminable revolution of ages hurrying after ages, and one generation treading upon the flying footsteps of another; whilst all the while the overruling music attempers the mind to the spectacle, the subject to the object, the beholder to the vision. And, although this is known to be but one phasis of life,—of life culminating and in ascent,—yet the other (and repulsive) phasis is concealed upon the hidden or averted side of the golden arras, known but not felt; or is seen but dimly ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... peacemaking a thing it is to be silent concerning others, and not carelessly to believe all reports, nor to hand them on further; how good also to lay one's self open to few, to seek ever to have Thee as the beholder of the heart; not to be carried about with every wind of words, but to desire that all things inward and outward be done according to the good pleasure of Thy will! How safe for the preserving of heavenly grace to fly from human ...
— The Imitation of Christ • Thomas a Kempis
... neighborhood there would not be seen, at the first settlement of the country, a single article of dress of foreign growth or manufacture. Half the year, in many families, shoes were not worn. Boots, a fur hat, and a coat with buttons on each side, attracted the gaze of the beholder, and sometimes received censure and rebuke. A stranger from the old States chose to doff his ruffles, his broadcloth, and his queue, rather than endure the scoff and ...
— Life & Times of Col. Daniel Boone • Cecil B. Harley
... the difficulty of imitative resemblance so greatly, that, with only average skill or materials, we must surrender all hope of it, and be content with an imperfect representation, true as far as it reaches, and such as to excite the imagination of a wise beholder to complete it; though falling very far short of what either he or we should otherwise have desired. For instance, here is a suggestion, by Sir Joshua Reynolds, of the general appearance of a British Judge—requiring the imagination of a very wise beholder ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... tribunes, Knights of the Round Table, Scandinavian Vikings and Peruvian Incas jostled one another against the rich velvet and tapestry which hung from ceiling to floor. Truly, a motley assemblage, and one well calculated to impress the beholder with the transitoriness of mortal fame. In this miscellaneous concourse the occupants of the picture frames of all the public and private galleries of Europe seemed to have been restored to life, and personally brought into contact for ...
— Canadian Notabilities, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... divert the violent passions and perturbations of the greatest and the busiest men. And both these effects are of equal use to human life; for the mind of man is like the sea, which is neither agreeable to the beholder nor the voyager, in a calm or in a storm, but is so to both when a little agitated by gentle gales; and so the mind, when moved by soft and easy passions or affections. I know very well that many who pretend to be wise by the forms of being grave, are apt to despise ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... to look, to see beauty that is worth seeing," he safely generalised. But then—he had put his foot in the stirrup—his hobby bolted with him. "It takes two to make a beautiful object. The eye of the beholder is every bit as indispensable as the hand of the artist. The artist does his work—the beholder must do his. They are collaborators. Each must be the other's equal; and they must also be like each other—with ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... though it is so wide that at a superficial glance the beholder has only a sense of standing on a breezy down, the solitude is rendered yet more solitary by the knowledge that between the benighted sojourner herein and all kindred humanity are those three concentric walls of earth which no being would think of scaling on such a ...
— A Changed Man and Other Tales • Thomas Hardy
... of beauty of form nor of color, but which make neither the pulse quiver nor the eye wet; and then such a sweeping judgment is arrested by a work like the 'St. Jerome' in the Vatican, from which a spirit comes forth so strong and so exalted, that the beholder, however trained to examine, and compare, and collect, finds himself raised above all recollections of manner by the sudden ascent of talent into the higher world of genius. Essentially a second-rate composer,* Donizetti struck out some first-rate things ...
— Great Italian and French Composers • George T. Ferris
... on a bright day and take note of the art that has made Nature herself a part of the color plan. From a central position in the court, where one can look down the broad approach leading from the bay, Nature spreads before the beholder two expanses of color, the deep blue of salt water sparkling in the sun, and the not less deep, but more ethereal, blue of the California sky. With this are the browns and greens of the hills beyond the bay, and, nearer at hand, the vivid ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... once that very day, when the young wanderer had started off to visit his friend, the farmer. But this cap very vividly and very pathetically suggested its owner. The holes in it were of every shape and size. The buttons besought the beholder to vote for suffrage, to buy liberty bonds, to join the Red Cross, to eat at Jim's Lunch Room, to use only Tyler's fresh cocoanut bars, to give a thought to Ireland. There was a Camp-fire ...
— Tom Slade's Double Dare • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... whaleman. The French are the lads for painting action. Go and gaze upon all the paintings of Europe, and where will you find such a gallery of living and breathing commotion on canvas, as in that triumphal hall at Versailles; where the beholder fights his way, pell-mell, through the consecutive great battles of France; where every sword seems a flash of the Northern Lights, and the successive armed kings and Emperors dash by, like a charge of ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... from the wild and wonderful in Nature. Its romantic luxuriance must win the attention of the artist, and the admiration of the less wistful beholder; while the philosophic mind, unaccustomed to vulgar wonder, may seek in its formation the cause of some of the most important changes of the earth's surface. Our esteemed friend and correspondent Vyvyan, is probably familiar with the locality of Lydford: his fancy might ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 574 - Vol. XX, No. 574. Saturday, November 3, 1832 • Various
... resting among the castle-like crags of the high summits; and whether quietly feeding, or scaling the wild cliffs, their noble forms and the power and beauty of their movements never fail to strike the beholder with lively admiration. ...
— The Mountains of California • John Muir
... uncommon fault among our less experienced operators to give a front view of the face of nearly every individual, regardless of any particular form, and this is often insisted upon by the sitter,* who seems to think the truth of the picture exists principally in the eyes staring the beholder full in ...
— American Handbook of the Daguerrotype • Samuel D. Humphrey
... air of the place is called salubrious; The neighborhood of Vesuvius lends it An odor volcanic, that rather mends it, And the buildings have an aspect lugubrious, That inspires a feeling of awe and terror Into the heart of the beholder, And befits such an ancient homestead of error, Where the old falsehoods moulder and smoulder, And yearly by many hundred hands Are carried away, in the zeal of youth, And sown like tares in the field of truth, To blossom and ripen in other lands. What have we here, affixed to the ...
— The Golden Legend • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... glass marbles in his pocket and he showed her how to play with them, and gave her two of the prettiest. He could shoot them over the ground in a way to thrill the beholder. He could hop on one leg as far as he liked. He could ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... no Divine truth can truly dwell in any heart, without an external testimony in manner, bearing, and appearance, that must reach the witness within the heart of the beholder, and bear an unmistakable, though silent, evidence to the eternal ...
— Daily Strength for Daily Needs • Mary W. Tileston
... one of these stands to examine it more curiously, I discovered that there were two projections from the top, resembling eye-pieces, as though inviting the beholder to gaze into the inside of the stand. Then I thought I heard a faint metallic click above my head. Raising my eyes swiftly, I read a few words written, as it were, against the dark velvet of the heavy curtains in dots of flame that flowed one into the other and ...
— Tales of Fantasy and Fact • Brander Matthews
... advanced in the arts of civilization. The several Indian tribes in America have been compared to the fragments of a vast ruin. And though these vestiges of a remote period in the past may not awaken the same grand associations in the mind of the beholder as the majestic ruins of Greece and Rome, yet they cannot fail to excite feelings of veneration for the memory of a numerous people, whose lingering signs of greatness are widely visible from the western borders of North ...
— Sketches of Western North Carolina, Historical and Biographical • C. L. Hunter
... heart to the miniature of the out-land princess. Until I knew him better this puzzled me much—the link was so missing between his sensibility and his type. He was of course bewildered by my sketches, which implied in the beholder some sense of intention and quality; but for one of them, a comparative failure, he ended by conceiving a preference so arbitrary and so lively that, taking no second look at the others, he expressed the wish to possess it and fell into the extremity of confusion ...
— Embarrassments • Henry James
... arm he carried jacket and trousers; in the other hand he bore a pair of shoes and of socks. That the clothing was patched and the shoes looked fit only for a tramp's use did not disguise the meaning of the scene from any beholder, for the news of that Saturday afternoon had traveled through the ...
— The Grammar School Boys in Summer Athletics • H. Irving Hancock
... Africa and Egypt; the inner meaning of this old ritual could not be revived, and we must own that all this restoration of the old caerimonia must have appealed rather to the eye than the mind of the beholder. It was necessary to put some new element into it to give it life. Here we come upon a most important fact in the work of Augustus, which will become apparent if we take a rapid glance at the work and history of the Fratres, and then go on to find further illustration ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler
... portrait in an oval frame, a man's face, highly idealised by the artist, and yet strikingly true to life. Evidently the hand of love had depicted those lineaments. The eyes were bright, the lips wore a proud smile, the whole expression was one to charm the beholder. It was Benjamin Vajdar's likeness, and no ghost could have given Blanka a greater start. It was as if her most hated foe had pursued her into paradise itself, to spoil her ...
— Manasseh - A Romance of Transylvania • Maurus Jokai
... mandibles of other males; the males of certain hymenopterous insects have been frequently seen by that inimitable observer M. Fabre, fighting for a particular female who sits by, an apparently unconcerned beholder of the struggle, and then retires with the conqueror. The war is, perhaps, severest between the males of polygamous animals, and these seem oftenest provided with special weapons. The males of carnivorous animals are already well armed; though ...
— On the Origin of Species - 6th Edition • Charles Darwin
... Cheapside, and so, in spite of its memories of Richard Whittington and Robert Herrick, he hurried out of it. He turned into St. Paul's Churchyard, eager to see the Cathedral, but as he did so, his heart fell. The Eastern end of the Cathedral does not impress the beholder. John ought to have seen St. Paul's first from Ludgate Hill, but, coming on it from Cheapside, he could not get a proper view of it. He had expected to turn a corner and see before him, immense and wonderful, the great church, rich in tradition and dignity, ...
— The Foolish Lovers • St. John G. Ervine
... face she try'd to turn away; "She could not turn it; and by small degrees "The stony hardness of her breast was spread "O'er all her limbs. Believe not that I feign, "For Salamis the figure of the nymph "Still keeps; and there a temple is high rear'd "Where Venus, the beholder, they adore. "Mindful of this, O dearest nymph! lay by "That cold disdain, and join thee to a spouse. "So may no vernal frosts thy budding fruits "Destroy, nor sweeping storms despoil thy flowers." ...
— The Metamorphoses of Publius Ovidus Naso in English blank verse Vols. I & II • Ovid
... and diamonds which threw out all the beautiful tints of the rainbow. She was white, perhaps too much so, and whenever she raised her downcast eyes there shone forth a spotless soul. When she smiled so as to show her small white teeth the beholder realized that the rose is only a flower and ivory but the elephant's tusk. From out the filmy pina draperies around her white and shapely neck there blinked, as the Tagalogs say, the bright eyes of a collar of diamonds. One man only in all the crowd ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... memory of Francis Scott Key. This, aside from its significance, is one of the finest statues our country affords. The grace and beauty of that figure, as if still pointing toward his country's glorious emblem, causes the heart of the beholder to swell with emotion. We seemed to catch from those lips the grave question: "O! Say, does the Star Spangled Banner yet wave, o'er the land of the free, and the home of the brave?" Something in this ...
— See America First • Orville O. Hiestand
... features seemed to breathe vitality and spirit, and the firmer grew the conviction that this was an exceptional being—a rare and strange phenomenon. Once accustomed to his apparent pale and sickly homeliness, the beholder soon saw it transformed into a fascinating beauty such as we admire on the antique Roman cameos and old imperial coins. His classical and regular profile seemed to be modelled after these antique coins; his forehead, framed in on both sides with fine chestnut hair, was high and statuesque. ...
— LOUISA OF PRUSSIA AND HER TIMES • Louise Muhlbach
... he walks confidingly near our feet. Not till the dream-circle, of which ourselves are the centre, dissolves or subsides, do the fairest sights and sweetest sounds in nature lose their relationship to us the beholder and hearer, and relapse into the common property of all our kind. To self appertains the whole sensuous as well as the whole spiritual world. Egoism is the creator of all beauty and all bliss, of all hope and of all faith. ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... view long lines of stern faces, ascending far on high in successive rows, formed a spectacle which has never elsewhere been equaled, and which was calculated beyond all others to awe the soul of the beholder. More than one hundred thousand people were gathered here, animated by one common feeling, and incited by one single passion. It was the thirst for blood which drew them hither, and nowhere can we find a sadder commentary on the ...
— The Martyr of the Catacombs - A Tale of Ancient Rome • Anonymous
... somewhat bedew; ye drinking are Forever from the fount whence comes his thought." [9] Thus Beatrice; and those enraptured spirits Made themselves spheres around their steadfast poles, Flaming intensely in the guise of comets. And as the wheels in works of horologes Revolve so that the first to the beholder Motionless seems, and the last one to fly, So in like manner did those carols, dancing [16] In different measure, by their affluence Make me esteem them either swift or slow. From that one which I noted of most beauty Beheld I issue forth a fire ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... mentioned in an old inventory as being of "gould wire worke, sett with slight stones, and two little bells." A diadem is described by William of Malmsbury, "so precious with jewels, that the splendour... threw sparks of light so strongly on the beholder, that the more steadfastly any person endeavoured to gaze, so much the more he was dazzled, and compelled to avert the eyes!" In 1382 a circlet crown was purchased for Queen Anne of Bohemia, being set with ...
— Arts and Crafts in the Middle Ages • Julia De Wolf Addison
... glorious winter day. Denver, standing on her high plateau under a thrilling green-blue sky, is masked in snow and glittering with sunlight. The Capitol building is actually in armor, and throws off the shafts of the sun until the beholder is dazzled and the outlines of the building are lost in a blaze of reflected light. The stone terrace is a white field over which fiery reflections dance, and the trees and bushes are faithfully repeated in snow—on every black twig a soft, ...
— Song of the Lark • Willa Cather
... went abroad, was to divert myself by seeing the wondrous variety of prospects, beasts, birds, fishes, insects, and vegetables, with which God has been pleased to enrich the several parts of this globe; a variety which, as it must give great pleasure to a contemplative beholder, so doth it admirably display the power, and wisdom, and goodness of the Creator. Indeed, to say the truth, there is but one work in his whole creation that doth him any dishonour, and with that I have long since ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... new, they are, unless strictly on their guard, so occupied with their own preconceived opinions that they perceive something quite different from the plain facts seen or heard, especially if such facts surpass the comprehension of the beholder or hearer, and, most of all, if he is interested in their happening in a ...
— The Philosophy of Spinoza • Baruch de Spinoza
... end Kenset's eyes were deep and troubled, but Tharon's were beginning to glow with the old fire that all the Holding knew, the leaping flame that rose and died and rose again, exciting to the beholder, promising, threatening, unfathomable. ...
— Tharon of Lost Valley • Vingie E. Roe
... light from the bushes and the securing clothesline. The rippling water flickered with a gentle and undulating glow and inverted paper lanterns could be seen reflected beneath the surface, as if indeed the beholder could look down and see romantic and picturesque Japan on the opposite ...
— Pee-Wee Harris Adrift • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... not far from forty, with a nervous mouth and anxious blue eyes. Possibly she had been quite pretty in youth, if ever peace and the quiet mind had been hers. But the unrest and worry of her look left rather a disturbed impression on the beholder. ...
— In the Mist of the Mountains • Ethel Turner
... from the populace the revenue which was required. Large remains of that palace continue to the present day. It is the most interesting memorial of the past which can now be found in France. The magnificence of its proportions still strike the beholder with awe. "Behold," says a writer, who trod its marble floors nearly a thousand years ago: "Behold the Palace of the Kings, whose turrets pierce the skies, and whose foundations penetrate even to the empire of the dead." Julius Caesar gazed proudly upon those turrets; and here the ...
— Napoleon Bonaparte • John S. C. Abbott
... importance is the position assumed habitually by the body while standing and walking. Carelessness in this respect is not only unpleasant to the beholder, but its consequences are far-reaching in their effects upon health and the ...
— Nature Cure • Henry Lindlahr
... sticks into my shoulder, Places needles in my chair, And, when I begin to scold her, Tosses back her combed hair, With so saucy-vexed an air, That the pitying beholder Cannot brook that I should scold her: Then again she comes, and bolder, Blacks anew this face of mine, Artful ...
— The Bon Gaultier Ballads • William Edmonstoune Aytoun
... courage? When he is falling with his wound, the features are at the same time very terrible and languishing; and there is such a stern faintness diffused through his look, as is apt to move a kind of horror, as well as pity, in the beholder. This, I say, is an effect wrought by mere lights and shades; consider also a representation made by words only, as in an account given by a good writer: Catiline in Sallust makes just such a figure as ...
— The Tatler, Volume 1, 1899 • George A. Aitken
... nothing in his entire costume, or aspect, that revealed the priest, except, perhaps, the entire absence of beard, the more remarkable upon so manly a countenance. His chin, newly shaved, rested on a large and elevated black cravat, tied with a military ostentation which reminded the beholder, that this abbe-marquis this celebrated preacher—now one of the most active and influential chiefs of his order, had commanded a regiment of hussars upon the Restoration, and had fought in aid ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... Amy's face was a study when she saw her sister skim into the next drawing room, kiss all the young ladies with effusion, beam graciously upon the young gentlemen, and join in the chat with a spirit which amazed the beholder. Amy was taken possession of by Mrs. Lamb, with whom she was a favorite, and forced to hear a long account of Lucretia's last attack, while three delightful young gentlemen hovered near, waiting for a pause when they might rush in and rescue her. So situated, she ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott
... appearance indicated suffering, age, and disease; he who did not look at his countenance could not but believe that he was in the presence of a sick and decrepit old man; but when his face turned to the beholder, with its large, fiery blue eyes, high and scarcely-furrowed brow, Roman nose, and florid complexion, he thought he saw the head of a man of about fifty years. It is true, the hair which covered his temples in a few thin tufts was snow-white, and so was the mustache which shaded ...
— NAPOLEON AND BLUCHER • L. Muhlbach
... Memnon's statue magic strings inspire With vocal sounds, that emulate the lyre; And Thebes, such, Fate, are thy disastrous turns! Now prostrate o'er her pompous ruins mourns; A monkey-god, prodigious to be told! Strikes the beholder's eye with burnish'd gold: To godship here blue Triton's scaly herd, The river-progeny is there preferr'd: Through towns Diana's power neglected lies, Where to her dogs aspiring temples rise: And should you leeks or onions eat, no time Would expiate the sacrilegious ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... they are inserted into the sclerotic coat, four of them near its junction with the cornea, by broad, thin tendons, which give to the white of the eye its pearly appearance. These muscles are so arranged by the matchless skill of the Architect as to enable the beholder to direct the eye to any object he chooses, and to hold it there for any length of time that is compatible with the laws by which muscular exercise should be regulated. By the slight or intense action of four of these, called the ...
— Popular Education - For the use of Parents and Teachers, and for Young Persons of Both Sexes • Ira Mayhew
... in his best clothes, as for his temporary honeymoon with the grass widow, and on the way to the rendezvous an hour ahead of time. And here came Nell, also dressed, every garment so contrived that a single glance would tell the beholder that their owner was moving in the highest circles, and regardless of expense. Nell glanced over her shoulder now and then as she talked, and explained that Ted Crothers, the man with the bulldog face, was a terror, and it was hard to get ...
— 100%: The Story of a Patriot • Upton Sinclair
... Carlyle, "and the memory of what he was, will arise afar off, like a towering landmark in the solitude of the past, when distance shall have dwarfed into invisibility many lesser people that once encompassed him, and hid them forever from the near beholder." ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... whether she chooses to paint the sumptuous yellow of the 'Marechal Niel,' the blush of the 'Katherine Mermet,' or the crimson glory of the 'Queen of Autumn.' She seems not only to give the richness of color and fulness of contour of the flowers, but to capture for the delight of the beholder the very spiritual essence of them." To the London Academy, 1903, she sent a picture called "York ...
— Women in the fine arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D. • Clara Erskine Clement
... line and its equipment that the first cursory glance at these pictures of it will certainly cause the beholder to imagine that he is looking at presentments of some portions of the London and North-Western Railway or of some other well-known, full-grown railway. But his eye, on gazing a little longer at these views, will take note of the curious circumstance that the ...
— The Harmsworth Magazine, v. 1, 1898-1899, No. 2 • Various
... was engaged in these acts of courtesy, his graceful manner, expressive features, and dignity of deportment, made a singular contrast with the coarseness and meanness of his dress. Montrose possessed that sort of form and face, in which the beholder, at the first glance, sees nothing extraordinary, but of which the interest becomes more impressive the longer we gaze upon them. His stature was very little above the middle size, but in person he was uncommonly well-built, and capable both of exerting great force, and enduring ...
— A Legend of Montrose • Sir Walter Scott
... all those things, over and above mere subsistence, which astonish the beholder, when he reflects that this colony has been planted little ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 14, - Issue 401, November 28, 1829 • Various
... as if the awful nature of the place presses down upon the soul and hushes the beholder into noiseless reverence. We feel that we are surrounded by the congregated bones of the great men of past times, who have filled history with their deeds and the earth with ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... virtue in a woman (that might otherwise be very disagreeable to one) so exquisitely delicate, that it excites in any beholder, of a generous and manly disposition, almost all the passions that he would be apt to conceive for the mistress of his ...
— The Young Gentleman and Lady's Monitor, and English Teacher's Assistant • John Hamilton Moore
... living heard no more of him. I examined some of the earth found in the pit below this trap; it was a compost of common earth, rottenness, ashes, and human hair, fetid to the smell, and horrible to the sight and to the thought of the beholder. ...
— Life in the Grey Nunnery at Montreal • Sarah J Richardson
... sort of mystic meaning no doubt, although I did not understand it; but what I did understand was that the whole arrangement was designed to produce a sort of mesmerism in the beholder. ...
— Caves of Terror • Talbot Mundy
... the old chap, told us, at least; but, although the sight of this celestial city is asserted by the Chinese to "strike awe" into the beholder on first sighting it, we should not have known we were gazing on such an imposing object as the ...
— Crown and Anchor - Under the Pen'ant • John Conroy Hutcheson
... sky became covered with a warm mist, that oozed from the soil; the brownish vapor scarcely allowed the beholder to distinguish objects, and so, fearing collision with some unexpected mountain-peak, the doctor, about five o'clock, ...
— Five Weeks in a Balloon • Jules Verne
... vista of the glory of service that opens before the mind musing on the power for good within our grip is sublime. To each the image rises. An army, a host of faces keen with knowledge, calm with contentment, eager with honest ambition looks up. Men, women, boys, girls—humanity gazes at the beholder. The eye does not glimpse the last face, far out beyond the faint horizon of the panorama. . . . The ...
— Catholic Problems in Western Canada • George Thomas Daly
... fire in looks and glances! Now the dark head bends, grown bolder. Ringlets mingle—silence—broken (All unconscious of beholder) By a kiss! ...
— Verses • Susan Coolidge
... of a nobler face, and certain immemorial achievements of man also flashed out in the side-light of the new convictions; as objects, themselves inconsiderable, will suddenly develop unsuspected splendors from change of standpoint in the beholder. The magic of that Christianity, which Joan now received directly from her Bible, wrought and embroidered a new significance into many things. And it worked upon none as upon the old crosses, some perfect still, ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... big-headed, short-legged, of no particular color, of little elegance in flight or movement, with a disagreeable flirt of the tail, always quarreling with their neighbors and with one another, no birds are so little calculated to excite pleasurable emotions in the beholder, or to become objects of human interest and affection. The kingbird is the best dressed member of the family, but he is a braggart; and, though always snubbing his neighbors, is an arrant coward, and shows the white feather at the slightest display of pluck ...
— In the Catskills • John Burroughs
... almost too red, resembling that love-sick nymph's own pair of bimba lips, mirrored[17] in the clear black water, and dying to be kissed by others like themselves. But wonderful! the Creator had put into his face some ingredient of recollection, so that without knowing why, every beholder found himself plunged, as it were, into the agitation of dreamy reminiscence, and said within himself: Ha! now, somewhere or other, in this birth or another, I have seen that miracle of a face before. And each went ...
— Bubbles of the Foam • Unknown
... reclining in a man's arms does go far towards washing white the lovely blackamoor. Lady Linlithgow, upon whom Lizzie's beauty could have no effect of that kind, had nevertheless declared her to be very beautiful. And this loveliness was of a nature that was altogether pleasing, if once the beholder of it could get over the idea of falseness which certainly Lizzie's eye was apt to convey to the beholder. There was no unclean horse's tail. There was no get-up of flounces, and padding, and paint, and hair, with a dorsal ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... devotions when I try to pray. To whom is it given to read the soul of man? And is not Sirona's form and face the loveliest image of the Most High? So to represent it, that the whole charm that her presence exercises over me might also be felt by every beholder, is a task that I have set myself ever since her arrival in our house. I had to go back to the capital, and the work I longed to achieve took a clearer form; at every hour I discovered something to change and to improve in the pose of the head, the glance of the eye or the expression of ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... n. spec'imen, a sample); spec'tacle (Lat. n. spectac'ulum, anything presented to view); specta'tor (Lat. n. specta'tor, a beholder); spec'ter (Lat. n. spec'trum, an image); spec'tral; spec'trum (pl. spec'tra), an image; spec'troscope (Gr. v. skopein, to view), an instrument for analysing light; spec'ulate (Lat. n. spec'ula, a lookout), to contemplate, to traffic ...
— New Word-Analysis - Or, School Etymology of English Derivative Words • William Swinton
... description, the next matter for consideration is the arrangement. In order that the parts of a description may be coherent, hold together, they should be arranged in the order in which they would naturally be perceived. What strikes the eye of the beholder as most important, often the general characteristic of the whole, should be mentioned first; and the details should follow as they are seen. In a building, the usual way of observing and describing is from foundation to turret stone. A landscape may be described by beginning with what is near ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... Charite: the scenery continued the same, except that the surface became more level. On both sides of the Loire, however, there was that appearance of plenty and of happiness, of the bounty of Nature and of the cheerful labour of man, which inspirits the heart of the beholder. The painters have very justly adopted it as a maxim, that no landscape is perfect, in which there are not the appendages of life and motion. The truth is, that man, as a being formed for society, is never so much interested as by man, and it is hence ...
— Travels through the South of France and the Interior of Provinces of Provence and Languedoc in the Years 1807 and 1808 • Lt-Col. Pinkney
... casual shape is not the true form; it is only a step farther to the perception that all shape is casual,—the reality seen, not in it, but through it. The ideal is then no longer perfect shape, but transparency to the sentiment; the image is not sought to be placed before the beholder's eyes, but painted as it were in his mind. Henceforth, suggestion only is aimed at, not representation; the cooeperation of the spectator is relied upon as the indispensable complement of the design. The Zeus of Phidias seemed to the Greeks, Plotinus says, Zeus himself, as he would be, if ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... mighty marvel, which oft e'en now we spy, That when the blood-stain'd murderer comes to the murder'd nigh, The wounds break out a-bleeding; then too the same befell, And thus could each beholder the guilt of Hagen tell." ...
— Legends of the Middle Ages - Narrated with Special Reference to Literature and Art • H.A. Guerber
... gentlemen in England to act as waiters. Their manners would do credit to any potentate in Europe: there is that calm self-possession about them, that serious dignity of deportment, sustained by a secure sense of the mighty importance of their mission to the world which strikes a beholder with awe. I was made to feel very inferior in their presence. We dined at a private table, and these ministers of state waited upon us. They brought us the morning paper on a silver salver; they presented it as if it had been a mission from a king to a king. Whenever we went out or came ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... upon the shore and by the surf among the turmoil of the blinding wind, the flying stones and sand, "the tremendous sea itself," that came rolling in with an awful noise absolutely confounding to the beholder! In all fiction there is no grander description than that of one of the sublimest spectacles in nature. The merest fragments of it conjured up the entire scene—aided as those fragments were by the look, the tones, the whole manner of the Reader. The listener was there ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... last quarter of a century. Unattractive as they appear, however, they are the least uninviting feature in the landscape, which is prosaic and squalid beyond description. Rickety, tumble-down tenements of dilapidated lath and plaster stare the beholder in the face at every turn. During the greater part of the day the solitude of the neighbourhood remains unbroken save by the tread of some chance wayfarer like myself, and a general atmosphere of the abomination of desolation reigns supreme. ...
— The Gerrard Street Mystery and Other Weird Tales • John Charles Dent
... if the people of Freiburg had not taxed themselves to the utmost, and made great sacrifices to insure its completion. The spire is of beautiful fret-work, nearly four hundred feet high. The interior is grand, and something about it gives the beholder a peculiar feeling of solemnity—perhaps the thought that men have worshipped there for six hundred years. It contains some choice paintings, which are carefully cherished as the productions of the old masters. ...
— Down the Rhine - Young America in Germany • Oliver Optic
... stands just before God in the justice of his Son, upon whom God looks, and for whose sake he accepts him. May not a scabbed, mangy man, a man all over-run with blains and blotches, be yet made beautiful to the view of a beholder, through the silken, silver, golden garment that may be put upon him, and may cover all his flesh? Why, the righteousness of Christ is not only unto but upon all them that believe (Rom 3:22). And whoso considers the parable of ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... far wider view than the wise ones have may be his at that recalcitrant time, and his reduction to common measure be nothing less than a tragic event. The operation called lunging, in which a haltered colt is made to trot round and round a horsebreaker who holds the rope, till the beholder grows dizzy in looking at them, is a very unhappy one for the animal concerned. During its progress the colt springs upward, across the circle, stops, flies over the turf with the velocity of a bird, and indulges in all sorts of graceful antics; but ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... studded with pearls, velvet robes lined with costly furs and covered with lace at a fabulous price and texture, coronets of jewels, necklaces, bracelets, and beautiful trinkets, made the suggestion to a beholder that Heaven had showered down her radiation of delight by bestowing upon these jewels a reflection scarce less than that of her own upon the scene above. Among the throng none were more eagerly sought than Lady Rosamond; ...
— Lady Rosamond's Secret - A Romance of Fredericton • Rebecca Agatha Armour
... that the dispute was transferred to the newspapers, and narrowly escaped degenerating from a war of "cards" to a conflict with pistols. But the Speaker triumphed; the House and the country sustained him. On occasions of ceremony the Speaker enchanted every beholder by the superb dignity of his bearing, the fitness of his words, and the tranquil depth of his tones. What could be more eloquent, more appropriate, than the Speaker's address of welcome to Lafayette, ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... leaping madly from top to top, and sending thousands of forked tongues a hundred feet or more athwart the midnight darkness, lighting up with lurid gloom and glare the surrounding scenery of lake and mountains, fills the beholder with mingled feelings of awe and astonishment. I never before saw anything so terribly beautiful. It was marvelous to witness the flash-like rapidity with which the flames would mount the loftiest trees. The roaring, cracking, crashing, and snapping of falling limbs and ...
— Thirty-Seven Days of Peril - from Scribner's Monthly Vol III Nov. 1871 • Truman Everts
... in itself, it only possesses, possibly, the capability of being spiritualized and refined into beauty in the eye of the spectator. Only in so far is it a work of art as Nature has furnished the raw material for such, while each beholder first fashions it artistically and endows it with a soul in the mirror of his eye. Nature is made beautiful only by the self-deception ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... charm. This fascination was something quite different from ordinary beauty. Its seat was in her eyes, which many thought not at all beautiful, for they were like those gems called aquamarine, of a puzzling tint varying from blue to green, lustrous and lapping the beholder with their gentle lambency, except when passion moved her, when I have seen them glow with a menacing light as though they might shoot forth green flames. But now she was all loveliness. The vicissitudes of ...
— Romance of Roman Villas - (The Renaissance) • Elizabeth W. (Elizbeth Williams) Champney
... never assume bodies, but that all that we read in Scripture of apparitions of angels happened in prophetic vision—that is, according to imagination. But this is contrary to the intent of Scripture; for whatever is beheld in imaginary vision is only in the beholder's imagination, and consequently is not seen by everybody. Yet Divine Scripture from time to time introduces angels so apparent as to be seen commonly by all; just as the angels who appeared to Abraham were seen by him and by his whole family, by Lot, and by the citizens ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... death. There is also a classic representation of death as a winged boy with a pensive brow and an inverted torch, a butterfly at his feet. This beautiful image, with its affecting accompaniments, conveys to the beholder not the verity, nor an interpretation, of death, but the sentiments of the survivors in view of their bereavement. The sad brow denotes the grief of the mourner, the winged insect the disembodied psyche, the reversed torch the descent of the soul to the under world; but the ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... in a term or two, perhaps at the rate of an hour's practice a week, is not drawing at all. It is only the performance of a few dexterous (not always even that) evolutions on paper with a black-lead pencil; profitless alike to performer and beholder, unless as a matter of vanity, and that the smallest possible vanity. If any young person, after being taught what is, in polite circles, called "drawing," will try to copy the commonest piece of real work—suppose a lithograph on the ...
— The Elements of Drawing - In Three Letters to Beginners • John Ruskin
... ghastly image of a Christ in a tomb, the figure of the natural size, and of the livid color of death; gaping red wounds on the body and round the brows: the whole piece enough to turn one sick, and fit only to brutalize the beholder of it. The Virgin is commonly represented with a dozen swords stuck in her heart; bleeding throats of headless John Baptists are perpetually thrust before your eyes. At the Cathedral gate was a papier-mache church-ornament shop—most of the carvings and reliefs of the ...
— Little Travels and Roadside Sketches • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Balisarda to his flank he tied (For so Rogero's trenchant sword was hight), And took the wondrous buckler, which, espied, Not only dazzled the beholder's sight, But seemed, when its silk veil was drawn aside, As from the body if exhaled the sprite: In its close cover of red sendal hung, This at his neck ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto
... garden-vegetables. Besides the summer-squashes, we have the crook-necked winter-squash, which I always delight to look at, when it turns up its big rotundity to ripen in the autumn sun. Except a pumpkin, there is no vegetable production that imparts such an idea of warmth and comfort to the beholder. Our own crop, however, does not promise to be very abundant; for the leaves formed such a superfluous shade over the young blossoms, that most of them dropped off without producing the germ of fruit. Yesterday and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866 • Various
... look at the north where he had been accustomed to see stars that no longer appeared, and beheld, at his side, an old man, who struck his beholder with a veneration like that of a son for his father. He had grey hairs, and a long beard which parted in two down his bosom; and the four southern stars beamed on his face with such lustre, that his aspect was as radiant as if he had stood in ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt
... so great, it would have taken five hundred years to cover a distance equal to it, and from the crown of his head to the soles of his feet he was studded with glaring eyes, at the sight of which the beholder fell prostrate in awe. "This one," said Metatron, addressing Moses, "is Samael, who takes the soul away from man." "Whither goes he now?" asked Moses, and Metatron replied, "To fetch the soul of Job the pious." Thereupon Moses prayed to ...
— The Legends of the Jews Volume 1 • Louis Ginzberg
... rats, lived in the barn, and certainly throve wonderfully, if numbers mean prosperity. The biggest rabbit was called Goliath, and it was David's delight to hold him up by the ears, in spite of his very powerful kicks, and exhibit his splendid condition to any admiring beholder. But though Goliath was handsome, and the white rats numerous, their owner was not quite satisfied, for his fondest wish for some time past had been to possess a pig. A nice little round black pig, with a very curly tail; he would ...
— The Hawthorns - A Story about Children • Amy Walton
... then, no sentimentalist, no devotee of the god Wish, have we here; but an imperturbable beholder, whose dauntless and relentless eyeballs, telescopic and microscopic by turns, can and will see what the fact is. If the universe be bad, as some dream, he will see how bad; if good, he will perceive and respect ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... is right; and due reflection on his teachings, instead of diminishing our reverence and our wonder, adds all the force of intellectual sublimity to the mere aesthetic intuition of the uninstructed beholder. ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... has passed through successive stages. It began at zero. An unexpected event in the heavens was accounted portentous, because it was unexpected, and it was interpreted in a good or bad sense according to the state of mind of the beholder. There can have been at first no system, no order, no linking up of one specific kind of prediction with one kind of astronomical event. It can have been originally nothing but a crude jumble of omens, just on a level ...
— The Astronomy of the Bible - An Elementary Commentary on the Astronomical References - of Holy Scripture • E. Walter Maunder
... extent or leave it as vague as the shadow on a wall in diffused light, or he may make it precise and particular as ever Jan Van Eyck did; so only that its distortion or elaboration is so proportioned to the other objects and intentions of his work as to promote its success in the eyes of the beholder. ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore
... the city is estimated to be at least six millions of dollars, although it did not contain a larger population than 30,000 souls. Deserted streets, heaps of ruins, and tottering houses, threatening to crush the beholder, give but a faint idea of this desolate picture. General Soublette and General Bolivar were both present at the last fatal earthquake in Caraccas, and they both assert that this, of which I have now given a description, was at least as powerful, although the suffering in ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 322, July 12, 1828 • Various
... late to telephone him, she had overruled her longing to see him and had decided that at what she hoped was his "critical stage" it would be wiser not to show herself to him thus even in her most becoming tea-gown, which compelled the eyes of the beholder to a fascinating game of hide and seek with her neck and arms and ...
— The Cost • David Graham Phillips
... would have remembered long. The haven of Troezene, noblest in Peloponnesus, girt by its two mountain promontories, Methana and the holy hill Calauria, opened its bright blue into the deeper blue of the Saronic bay. Under the eye of the beholder AEgina and the coasts of Attica stood forth, a fit frame to the far horizon. Sun, sea, hills, and shore wrought together to make one glorious harmony, endless variety, yet ordered and fashioned into a divine whole. "Euopis," "The Fair-Faced," the ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... Rhine. The Cathedral of Cologne is the most splendid structure of the kind in Europe, and Jerome and Clotelle viewed with interest the beautiful arches and columns of this stupendous building, which strikes with awe the beholder, as he gazes at its unequalled splendor, surrounded, as it is, by villas, cottages, and palace-like mansions, with the enchanting Rhine winding through ...
— Clotelle - The Colored Heroine • William Wells Brown
... ample back towards every beholder, With the fascinations of youth and the equal fascinations of age, Sits she whom I too love like the rest, sits undisturb'd, Holding up in her hand what has the character of a mirror, while her eyes glance back from it, Glance as she sits, inviting none, ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... her inspection, grinning from ear to ear. She gazed in astonishment at the white and silver ornamented tops, such as were affected by only the most fastidious dandies of the day and were so rarely seen in this raw, new land that the beholder could ...
— Viola Gwyn • George Barr McCutcheon
... absurd ideas. As the pictures and effigies suspended in early Christian churches, to commemorate a person or an event, became in time objects of worship to the vulgar, so, in Egypt, the esoteric or spiritual meaning of the emblems was lost in the gross materialism of the beholder. This esoteric and allegorical meaning was, however, preserved by the priests, and communicated in the mysteries alone to the initiated, while the uninstructed retained only the grosser conception."—GLIDDON, ...
— The Symbolism of Freemasonry • Albert G. Mackey
... leafy bank on the right throwing cool shadows over his head, and a stream on the left making music at his feet, he sees an old red housetop lifted lonely above the trees. The homes in which men have lived now and again lend themselves to the beholder's subjective impression; they seemed to be brooding in forlorn isolation like some life-wearied gray-beard over ancient and sorrow-stricken memories. At Les Charmettes a pitiful melancholy penetrates you. The supreme loveliness of the scene, the sweet-smelling ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... was furnished, as it appeared to me, with more 5regard to economy than to the comfort of its inmate. At one end stood a small four-post bedstead, which, owing to some mysterious cause, chose to hold its near fore-leg up in the air, and slightly advanced, thereby impressing the beholder with the idea that it was about to trot into the middle of the room. On an unpainted deal table stood a looking-glass, which, from a habit it had of altering and embellishing the face of any one who consulted it, ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... spoke of was the strange delicacy of the physical nature and composition of Beatrice. Never, he declared, in all his long experience as a physician, had he met with any case like to hers. Although she seemed to the beholder to carry the colors of health in her cheeks and the form of health on her body, he asserted that she was of so ethereal a creation that the vital essence was barely housed by its tenement of flesh, and could, as he fancied, set itself free from its trammels with well-nigh unearthly ...
— The God of Love • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... form, on which, though youth seemed withered and even pride broken, the unconquerable soul left somewhat of grace and of glory, that sustained the beholder's remembrance of better days; a child in its first infancy knelt on the nearer side of the bed with clasped hands, and vacant eyes that turned towards the intruder with a listless and lacklustre gaze. But ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... useful in defending the Holy Land. Even more important were the Templars, so called because their headquarters in Jerusalem lay near the site of Solomon's Temple. Both orders built many castles in Syria, the remains of which still impress the beholder. They established numerous branches in Europe and, by presents and legacies, acquired vast wealth. The Templars were disbanded in the fourteenth century, but the Hospitalers continued to fight valiantly against the Turks long after the close ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... gleaming arms she flung the cerise velvet—gorgeous, glowing, wonderful colour, as trying to the ordinary complexion as colour can well be. But as the gown fell into place, and Georgiana, backing up to her father, was fastened somewhat tentatively into it, it would have been plain to any beholder that if the rich girl could not wear the queenly, daring robe the poor girl ...
— Under the Country Sky • Grace S. Richmond
... flat in the new and wealthy quarter, the hilly portions, where the poorer classes live, are covered with brick or wooden huts of gaudy tints that astonish rather than charm the beholder. ...
— Ticket No. "9672" • Jules Verne
... Pennsylvania, that is an alleged relic of the Silurian age. It was last seen in September, 1887, when it unrolled thirty feet of itself before the eyes of an alarmed spectator—again a fisherman. The beholder struck him with a pole, and in revenge the serpent capsized his boat; but he forbore to eat his enemy, and, diving to the bottom, disappeared. The creature had a black body, about six inches thick, ringed with dingy-yellow bands, and a mottled-green ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... books, and had they done so the art of deciphering hieroglyphics or even phonetic or demotic writing is not yet assured enough to allow of absolute trust being put in it. Happily the Egyptians performed a work of such mightiness that it amazes the beholder. By the side of the hieroglyphic inscriptions they carved on the walls of palaces and temples, on the sides of pylons, the faces of the corridors and the bays of funeral chambers, on the faces of the sarcophagi and on the stelae, on the covers and the interior cartonnages of the mummies,—in short, ...
— The Works of Theophile Gautier, Volume 5 - The Romance of a Mummy and Egypt • Theophile Gautier
... prospect is unrolled before them. They know desire; but as their passion was hopeless in this world, their steps were mercifully set upon a new path, whereby the bodily semblance of the beloved became the symbol of spiritual comeliness, alluring the beholder into the peace of a serene and unworldly mood. A thin and rarefied ideal, you say, a mirage which no wayfarer can approach: experience rejects these subtleties, and to these creations of a dream human affection was never ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith
... doth. But as in pictures the colors are more delightful to the eye than the lines because those give them a nearer resemblance to the persons they were made for, and render them the more apt to deceive the beholder; so in poems we are more apt to be smitten and fall in love with a probable fiction than with the greatest accuracy that can be observed in measures and phrases, where there is nothing fabulous or fictitious joined with it. Wherefore Socrates, ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... distinguished people in Amsterdam were invited to it. The ball and supper were of the most splendid description, and Esther, who was a blaze of diamonds, danced all the quadrilles with me, and charmed every beholder by her grace ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... broad and bright in a firmament of that most brilliant and transparent blue, which I have witnessed in no other country than America, so pure, so cloudless, so immeasurably distant as it seems from the beholder's eye! There was not a speck of cloud from east to west, from zenith to horizon; not a fleece of vapor on the mountain sides; not a breath of air to ruffle the calm basin of ...
— Warwick Woodlands - Things as they Were There Twenty Years Ago • Henry William Herbert (AKA Frank Forester)
... of a dull red colour on the horizon; all nature seemed melancholy; profound silence prevailed, not so much as the song of a bird was heard. And yet there was something indescribably imposing in the sight of a large town rising up in the midst of the sandy desert, and the beholder cannot but admire the indomitable energy of its founders. I fancy the river formerly passed nearer the town of Timbuctoo; it is now eight miles north of ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part III. The Great Explorers of the Nineteenth Century • Jules Verne
... her like a garment. Her heavy dark hair, coiled high on her shapely head, was just slightly silvered with gray and seemed to be a fitting foil to her large melancholy black eyes—eyes that from their slumbering depths seemed to impress the beholder with suggestions of some mysterious power, gleaming messages, like beacon flashes, from her inner life. With her becoming dress of rich, dark cloth, gloves and parasol to match, she looked the cultured ...
— Solaris Farm - A Story of the Twentieth Century • Milan C. Edson
... intricate, elaborate design ceased to be a design, and became a procession, a saturnalia; became a sinister comedy, which, when first visualized, shocked Soames immoderately. The horrors presented by these devices of evil cunning, crowding the walls, appalled the narrow mind of the beholder, revolted him in an even greater degree than they must have revolted a man of broader and cleaner mind. He became conscious of a quality of evil which pervaded the room; the entire place seemed to lie beneath a spell, beneath the spell of an invisible, ...
— The Yellow Claw • Sax Rohmer
... figure (though her nose is rather salient, considering that it is half as long as her entire body), present a beauty and grace of form and movement quite unsurpassed by her dipterous allies. She draws near and softly alights upon the hand of the charmed beholder, subdues her trumpeting notes, folds her wings noiselessly upon her back, daintily sets down one foot after the other, and with an eagerness chastened by the most refined delicacy for the feelings of her victim, and with the air of Velpeau redivivus, ...
— Our Common Insects - A Popular Account of the Insects of Our Fields, Forests, - Gardens and Houses • Alpheus Spring Packard
... present itself to the eye more pleasing than a religious youth. By this I do not mean a gloomy, downcast, sorrowful young man, or young woman, whose countenance is overcast with shadows, and whose presence chills every beholder. It is a darkened superstition, a cold, cheerless asceticism, and not the Christian religion, which gives this unnatural and forbidding appearance. A religious youth is one who is cheerful and happy—whose countenance is pervaded with an expression of benevolence, a smile of contentment—who ...
— Golden Steps to Respectability, Usefulness and Happiness • John Mather Austin
... hatches it, and a Basilisk is produced. It is so hideous a monster, that whoever looks on it can no longer live, but melts away. It is also said that the Basilisk inhabits wells, and that it is dangerous to look down a well, as to encounter the gaze of a Basilisk would be to turn the beholder to stone. There is also another variation of the legend. The egg when laid by the cock must be hatched by a toad; but when the Basilisk is hatched, if it be first seen by a human being, it at once dies, but if the ...
— A Danish Parsonage • John Fulford Vicary
... branch of psychology. Aesthetic facts are mental facts. A work of art, no matter how material it may at first seem to be, exists only as perceived and enjoyed. The marble statue is beautiful only when it enters into and becomes alive in the experience of the beholder. Keys and strings and vibrations of the air are but stimuli for the auditory experience which is the real nocturne or etude. Ether vibrations and the retina upon which they impinge are nothing more than instruments for the production of the colors which, together with the ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... a gang of desperate robbers. But it seldom happens that robbers in the vicinity of a rich and populous city are to be found in a state of such utter destitution; and if such were really the case, it might puzzle the beholder to discover what possible inducement they could have to continue ...
— Gomez Arias - The Moors of the Alpujarras, A Spanish Historical Romance. • Joaquin Telesforo de Trueba y Cosio
... Messina. A person standing on the shore sees the images of men, houses, ships, and other objects, sometimes in the air, sometimes in the water, the originals frequently magnified, passing like a panorama before the beholder. The vapory masses above the strait may cause the pictures to be surrounded by a colored line. When the peasants see ...
— Asiatic Breezes - Students on The Wing • Oliver Optic
... hardiness and vigour. A handsome old boy he was, ruddy, hale, with the zest of a juicy old apple, slightly withered but still sappy. It should be mentioned that he had a dimple in his cheek which flashed unexpectedly when he smiled. It gave him a roguish—almost boyish—effect most appealing to the beholder. Especially the feminine beholder. Much of his spoiling at the hands of Ma Minick had doubtless been due to this mere ...
— Gigolo • Edna Ferber
... many human characteristics, but they were exaggerated and monstrous in scale and in detail. His head was of enormous size, and his huge projecting eyes gleamed with a strange fire of intelligence. His face was like a caricature, but not one to make the beholder laugh. Drawing himself up, he towered to a height of ...
— Edison's Conquest of Mars • Garrett Putnam Serviss
... the arches were stopped with rombyes of cleare glasse in forme of a tryangle, and the pypes beautified all ouer with an Encaustick painting, verie gratious to the sight of the beholder. ...
— Hypnerotomachia - The Strife of Loue in a Dreame • Francesco Colonna
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