"Decorative" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... matters little whether we were on one side or the other in a fight in which all the figures are antiquated; Bonaparte and Blucher are both in old cocked hats; French kings and French regicides are both not only dead men but dead foreigners; the whole is a tapestry as decorative and as arbitrary as the Wars of the Roses. It was not so: we fought for something real when we fought for the old world against the new. If we want to know painfully and precisely what it was, we must open an old and sealed and very awful door, on a scene which was called ...
— The Crimes of England • G.K. Chesterton
... radiating unevenly from one annular space, in all directions, and with no apparent design. The furniture was rattan and plush, upholstered and plain, and was crowded together with a few writing tables scattered here and there. It was a discordant orgie of decorative effects and the result was ...
— On the Fringe of the Great Fight • George G. Nasmith
... cloisters of Monreale near Palermo, those of St Paul outside Rome, and many churches in Germany. Its earliest appearance was in the tomb of Agamemnon at Mycenae, where the shafts flanking the entrance doorway have nine decorative chevron bands; in this case there is no doubt it was derived from the metal casing of the early ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various
... than at any subsequent period before the 6th century. The manufacture, modelling and painting of faience objects, and the making of inlays in many materials were also familiar to Aegean craftsmen, who show in all their best work a strong sense of natural form and an appreciation of ideal balance and decorative effect, such as are seen in the best products of later Hellenic art. Architectural ornament was also highly developed. The richness of the Aegean capitals and columns may be judged by those from the "Treasury of Atreus'' now set up in the British ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... Romans, portrait, decorative, and scene painting engrossed the art, much to the regret of such critics as Pliny and Vitruvius. Nothing could be in more execrable taste than a colossal painting of Nero, one hundred and twenty feet high. From the time of ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... The stone axe, or celt, was first made for a distinct service, but, in order to perfect its usefulness, its lines became more perfect and its surface more highly polished. So we might say for the spear-head, the knife, or the olla. Artistic lines and decorative beauty always followed the purpose of use. This could be applied to all of the products of man's invention to transform parts of nature to his use. On account of the durability of form, the attempt to trace the course of civilization by means of the development of the fine arts has met with ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... though the venerable mass of St Ga-tien's seemed in momentary peril, and the noise was enough to waken the dead, let alone the Bursar of Oriel. But Maitland was a non-resident Fellow, known only to the undergraduates, where he was known at all, as a "Radical," with any number of decorative epithets, according to the taste and fancy of the speaker. He did not think he could identify any of the rioters, and he was not certain that they would not carry him to his room, and there screw him up, according to precedent. Maitland ...
— The Mark Of Cain • Andrew Lang
... relative to the character and industries of the cities and countries through which they pass. A description is given of the native sports of boys in each of the foreign countries through which they travel. The books are illustrated by decorative head and end pieces for each chapter, there being 36 original drawings in each book, all by the author, ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: Adventures on Strange Islands • Roger Thompson Finlay
... mystified by the cloverleaf-like symbol that appears on the feature key. Its oldest name is 'cross of St. Hannes', but it occurs in pre-Christian Viking art as a decorative motif. Throughout Scandinavia today the road agencies use it to mark sites of historical interest. Many of these are old churches; hence, the Swedish idiom for the symbol is 'kyrka', cognate to English ...
— THE JARGON FILE, VERSION 2.9.10
... his own personality, and producing his own individual work. At first none came to him. That did not matter. Then the few came to him. That did not change him. The many have come now. He is still the same. He is an incomparable novelist. With the decorative arts it is not different. The public clung with really pathetic tenacity to what I believe were the direct traditions of the Great Exhibition of international vulgarity, traditions that were so appalling that the houses in which people lived were only fit for blind people ...
— The Soul of Man • Oscar Wilde
... in those of the bride. The bridegroom places the rice on the bride's head and she lays the juari at his feet. A dish full of water with a golden ring in it is put between them, and they lay their hands on the ring together under the water and walk five times round a decorative little marriage-shed erected inside the real one. A feast is given, and the bridal couple sit on a little dais and eat out of the same dish. The remarriage of widows is permitted, but the widow may not marry a man belonging to the section either of her first husband or of her father. ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume II • R. V. Russell
... a moment picture in our mind's eye the stage and person of the European or American conjuror. A few small tables with spindle legs (upon them a steel frame or so, transparent and decorative) are exposed to our view. The performer appears with rolled up sleeves in close fitting clothes and by the end of his performance has filled the stage with several large flags, a bouquet of flowers and, may be, a beautiful lady, all, possibly produced from a top ...
— Indian Conjuring • L. H. Branson
... silent, waiting in mute expectancy. The servants had left us, and only the fruits and dainties of dessert remained to tempt us in baskets and dishes of exquisitely coloured Venetian glass, contrasting with the graceful clusters of lovely roses and lilies which added their soft charm to the decorative effect of the table, and Santoris passed the wine, a choice Chateau-Yquem, round to us all before beginning to speak again. And when he did speak, it was in a singularly quiet, musical voice which exercised a kind of ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... peculiarly fashionable trick of shifting identical chords up and down the scale—the clothes'-peg conception of harmony, so to speak—is a mere throw-back still farther, to Hucbald and the diaphony of a thousand years ago. And the insistence, now so common, on the decorative side of music, the conscious preference of the sensuous to the intellectual or emotional elements, brings us back to our own infancy, with its unreflecting delight in things that sparkle prettily or are soft to the touch or sweet to the ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... at Winnebago City, Minnesota. Lived in New York City since early childhood. Privately educated. Chief interests: decorative art, gardening, people. First published story: "Burned Hands," Harper's Bazar, Nov., 1918. Lives in ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... French school of decorative and discriminating prose before it ever existed in France. He rivalled Gautier, Flaubert and de Maupassant before they were born. He clothed his tales in a barbaric splendor and persuasive unreality never ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather
... friend in the buggy was by no means limited to potatoes for his conversation. He was learned in the geography of the valley and told us how once the Cohocton River, now merely a decorative stream among willows, was once a serviceable waterway, how it was once busy with mills, and how men used to raft down it ...
— October Vagabonds • Richard Le Gallienne
... "That must be decorative! How would it be to make them leave their wrappings at the entrance to-night, or put them under their own chairs, and to arrange a broad band of holly round the room so as to hide the pegs from view? It ...
— A College Girl • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... house of Vavasour, for instance, supplied stone; that of Percy gave wood to be used in building the great metropolitical church. If the money cost was enormous, the completed building, for design, engineering, and decorative work—in stone, wood, cloth, stained ...
— Life in a Medival City - Illustrated by York in the XVth Century • Edwin Benson
... middle ages, and of the time of the Renaissance, and even down to the last century, in Italy, France, and Germany showed, in the crudest examples, the principal virtues of all true decorative art. The reason is not far to seek. The difficulties in the way of working the material with ease imposed certain limitations in design and execution which could not well be disregarded. The lack of machinery (which is responsible for much of the uninteresting character ...
— The Brochure Series of Architectural Illustration, Vol. 1, No. 7, - July, 1895 • Various
... aptitude for architectural setting is also illustrated by the choristers' galleries in the Cathedral and San Lorenzo. The former must be dealt with in detail when considering Donatello's treatment of childhood. As an architectural work it shows how the sculptor employed decorative adjuncts such as mosaic and majolica[81] to set off the white marble; he also added deep maroon slabs of porphyry and bronze heads, thus combining various arts and materials. Having no sculpture, the ...
— Donatello • David Lindsay, Earl of Crawford
... satisfied strength and confident ascendancy—speaking, not like the dulcet appeal of a mellow flute, but like the trumpet stop of some powerful party organ. The cornea was perhaps a shade sallow or so, even verging on the Widow's favourite Yellow—(for the Widow, like some modern decorative artists, was sweet upon all tawny tints, from the most delicate buff to the most flamboyant Orange)—but as to any touch, tint, or tone of her chromatic ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, April 22, 1893 • Various
... should be held who patronized local industries, in his thick German-English, grinned, and shambled back, his fat hips shaking like a woman's, to his hot-houses, and pottered around his geraniums and decorative palms. ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... freshened in the reproduction even as "words" by music. His egotism had never taken the crude form of desiring a dull wife; this lady's intelligence was to be a silver plate, not an earthen one—a plate that he might heap up with ripe fruits, to which it would give a decorative value, so that talk might become for him a sort of served dessert. He found the silver quality in this perfection in Isabel; he could tap her imagination with his knuckle and make it ring. He knew perfectly, though he had not been told, ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 2 (of 2) • Henry James
... over and decide which to take and which to leave. The things were mostly trunks that they had stored the fall before; there were some tables and Colonial bureaus inherited from his mother, and some mirrors and decorative odds and ends, which they would not want in the furnished house they had taken for the summer. There were some canvases which Forsyth said he would paint out and use for other subjects, but which, when he came to look at again, he found really not so bad. The rest, literally, was nothing ...
— The Daughter of the Storage - And Other Things in Prose and Verse • William Dean Howells
... may be served with the formal luncheon and rarely with dinner. Thus we find tiny but ter dishes added at the left of each luncheon cover. These plates are usually decorative, and sometimes are made large enough to contain both the bread and butter, instead of just the butter alone, Another difference, though slight.-cut-glass platters for nuts and bonbons take the place of the silver platters ...
— Book of Etiquette • Lillian Eichler
... those of the Southern magnolia. The creeping Jenney could be entwined with the laurel-leaves in such a way as to form long festoons. The boys and girls spent the mornings and recesses for several days in gathering Jenney, and in twining the vines with the laurel and making decorative festoons. ...
— In The Boyhood of Lincoln - A Tale of the Tunker Schoolmaster and the Times of Black Hawk • Hezekiah Butterworth
... and he then among some tribes ceases to exist socially.... The dances taught to boys at initiation are frequently if not always ARMED dances. These are not necessarily warlike. The accoutrement of spear and shield was in part decorative, in part a provision for making the necessary hubbub." (Here Miss Harrison reproduces a photograph of an Initiation dance among the Akikuyu of British East Africa.) The Initiation-dances blend insensibly and naturally with the Mystery ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... was not over when I reached town, and in the western residential quarters the sun shone brightly upon many-coloured awnings and beautiful decorative plants and flowers. The annual rents paid by people who lived behind these flowers and awnings frequently ran into thousands of pounds, with ten shillings in each pound additional by way of rates and taxes. To live at ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson
... towards the end of the seventeenth century, his invention of plate glass, which finally drove Venetian mirrors out of the markets of the world. The Venetian mirrors, charming as they are from the aesthetic point of view of decorative art, are simply blown glass rolled flat, cut, polished, and tinned. The art of making them came, like other arts, to Venice from the East, and in the sixteenth century the Venetian mirror was the true ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... grounds and local conditions in regard to soil and climate will determine to a large extent the kind of shrubs to be used. Many beautiful shrubs which have been introduced from foreign countries do well in Ontario, but our native shrubs serve all decorative purposes. For damp ground there is no better shrub than the red osier dogwood. This shrub will do well on almost any kind of soil. The swamp bush honeysuckle grows quickly and is suitable for clay land; so are the black elderberry and several species of viburnum. The hazel which may be obtained ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Household Science in Rural Schools • Ministry of Education Ontario
... was built of light-brown stone and decorated with much ornate molding. It was fourteen stories high, and was supplied with ornamental fire-escapes. It was "no slouch of a building." Everything decorative which could be done for it had been done. The entrance was almost imposing, and a generous lavishness in the way of cement mosaic flooring and new and thick red carpet struck the eye at once. The grill-work of the elevator was of fresh, bright ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... alike in our own, and the French, central Gothic, the ball-flower is lavished on every line—and in your St. Mary's spire, and the Salisbury spire, and the towers of Notre Dame of Paris, the rich pleasantness of decoration,—indeed, their so-called 'decorative style,'—consists only in being daintily beset with stone balls. It is true the balls are modified into dim likeness of flowers; but do you trace the resemblance to the rose in their distant, which is ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... and the Curtall Fryer. The Text written in Early English Style with decorative Initials, Head and Tail-Pieces and Borders and numerous full-page Drawings illustrating the moving incidents in the Old Ballad. Illustrated and described by M. Hinscliff, Esq. ...
— A History of Giggleswick School - From its Foundation 1499 to 1912 • Edward Allen Bell
... careful of that bamboo and the wrappings," she warned Old Chris. "I'll make something decorative-like out of them." ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... thyme, and decorated with millions of wild flowers, are, on the faith of a pedestrian, perfect. In New Pavilionstone we are a little too much addicted to small windows with more bricks in them than glass, and we are not over-fanciful in the way of decorative architecture, and we get unexpected sea-views through cracks in the street doors; on the whole, however, we are very snug and comfortable, and well accommodated. But the Home Secretary (if there be such an officer) cannot ...
— Reprinted Pieces • Charles Dickens
... enlightened amateur—"see, how that charlatan of a Fossati has taken care not to increase the number of trinkets now that we are in the reception-rooms. These armchairs seem to await invited guests. They are known. They have been illustrated in a magazine of decorative art in Paris. And that dining-room through that door, with all the silver on the table, would you not think a fete ...
— Cosmopolis, Complete • Paul Bourget
... labour whatever. In a little while the mere absence of occupation for so great a multitude of people everywhere became an evident social danger, and the government was obliged to resort to such devices as simple decorative work in wood and stone, the manufacture of hand-woven textiles, fruit-growing, flower-growing, and landscape gardening on a grand scale to keep the less adaptable out of mischief, and of paying wages to the younger adults for attendance at schools that would equip them to use ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells
... be said that in pictorial and other arts there are some designs that are purely decorative and apparently have no living and inner ideal to express. But this cannot be true. These decorations carry the emotional motive of the artist, which says: "I find joy in my creation; it is good." All the language of joy is beauty. It is necessary ...
— Creative Unity • Rabindranath Tagore
... detail, filled with plenishings which fitted naturally into his scheme. His own taste developed as he went on, but he was usually extremely successful, and cabinetmakers are still reproducing his most effective designs. In his furniture he made lavish use of his favourite decorative motives—-wreaths and paterae, the honeysuckle, and that fan ornament which he used so constantly. Thus an Adam house is a unique product of English art. From facade to fire-irons, from the chimneys ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... came, and the sun drew another blaze from the free-bosomed earth. Whereupon a neighbour's little girl, at the behest of her mother, duly craved and received permission from Bess to gather a few poppies for decorative purposes. But of this I was uninformed, and when I descried her in the midst of the field I waved my arms like ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... understand by fancy will presently appear, not that I contend for nomenclature, but only for distinction between two mental faculties, by whatever name they be called, one the source of all that is great in the poetic arts; the other merely decorative and entertaining, but which are often confounded together, and which have so much in common as to render strict ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin
... east of the Karigatta temple overlooking Seringapatam. The porphyry, which is of warm brown or chocolate colour, includes many crystals of lighter coloured felspar, and dark crystals of hornblende. The stone would take a very high polish, and for decorative purposes of high class, such as vases, panels and bases for busts and tazzas, etc., it is unequalled in South India, and deserving of all attention. If well polished it fully equals many of the highly prized antique porphyries. The dyke is of great thickness ...
— Gold, Sport, And Coffee Planting In Mysore • Robert H. Elliot
... grieve to lose it, as I should grieve to lose the pantomime or the comic opera, or many other graceful things that amuse the passing hour, and help us to live agreeably in a world where men actually sin, suffer, and die. But it belongs to the decorative arts, and though it has a high place among them, it cannot be ranked with the works of the imagination—the works that represent and body forth human experience. Its ingenuity, can always afford a refined pleasure, ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... him, what light and refreshment irradiated and cheered his darkened, harried soul—all these are things which better may be suggested here than written out in full. For these things are so real, so sacred, and so beautiful with a heavenly beauty, that they may not lightly be used for decorative purposes in mere romance. ...
— A Romance Of Tompkins Square - 1891 • Thomas A. Janvier
... her—the stately room with its stucco ceiling, its tall windows, its Prussian-blue wall-paper behind the old cabinets and faded pictures, and the chair covers in Turkey-red twill against the blue, which still remained to bear witness at once to the domestic economies and the decorative ideas of old Robert Boyce—conscious also of the figures on either side of her, and of her own quick-beating youth betwixt them. She was sore and unhappy; yet, on the whole, what she was thinking most about was Aldous Raeburn. What had he ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... "The decorative figures, called Athletes, that you see seated on the apparently projecting cornice, at each of the four corners of the smaller great divisions of the ceiling, are a wholly unique creation of the artist, and serve as a necessary separation of picture from ...
— Barbara's Heritage - Young Americans Among the Old Italian Masters • Deristhe L. Hoyt
... with muddy boots, it is to be presumed, were sent round to the back. A riding-cloak, the relic apparently of a highwayman, hangs behind the door. It is the sort of cloak you would expect to find there—a decorative cloak. An umbrella or a waterproof cape would be fatal to ...
— They and I • Jerome K. Jerome
... sacred event in which they had been instructed. They differ from every archaic school of former design in this evident correspondence with an imagined reality. All previous archaic art whatsoever is symbolic and decorative—not realistic. The contest of Herakles with the Hydra on a Greek vase is a mere sign that such a contest took place, not a picture of it, and in drawing that sign the potter is always thinking of the effect of the engraved lines on the curves of his pot, and taking care to keep out of the way of ...
— The Pleasures of England - Lectures given in Oxford • John Ruskin
... to which it would be subjected when the ship should be submerged to great depths in the ocean. The frames of these ports consisted of foliated wreaths of polished aethereum, presenting the appearance of burnished silver, and were exceedingly decorative in effect. A light rod of aethereum above each port carried a number of burnished rings from which drooped handsome lace curtains, that could either be looped back or allowed to veil the window, according ...
— With Airship and Submarine - A Tale of Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... Lowell. With decorative cover, frontispiece, title page in color, and ornamental head and tail pieces. Cloth. 12mo; ...
— An Eagle Flight - A Filipino Novel Adapted from Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... two large dormers on the side next the court (fig. 80). These works, by which light was so largely increased, prove how gloomy the library must have been before they were undertaken. Next, after important repairs to the walls and floor, and the construction of the decorative plaster-work at the east end, the old bookcases were sold, and Benet the joiner supplied twenty new cases and one half-case. The only old case remaining is, by tradition, the half-case against the screen on the north side as one ...
— The Care of Books • John Willis Clark
... and the allegorical design enjoyed perhaps his equal favour. He believed in both with an energy of faith that was capable of moving mountains. And we have to remark in him, not the parts where inspiration fails and is supplied by cold and merely decorative invention, but the parts where faith has grown to be credulity, and his characters become so real to him that he forgets the end of their creation. We can follow him step by step into the trap which he lays for himself by his own entire good faith and triumphant literality ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... foliage and general aspect, is nevertheless a most desirable one for the park or pleasure ground, on account of the gorgeous tint assumed by the decaying leaves in autumn. Emerson, in his "Trees and Shrubs of Massachusetts," pays a just tribute to this tree from a decorative standpoint. He says: "The crimson, scarlet, and orange of its autumnal colors, mingling into a rich purplish red, as seen at a distance, make it rank in splendor almost with the tupelo and the scarlet oak. It is easily cultivated, and should ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 421, January 26, 1884 • Various
... schoolchildren, strewing roses and singing paeans. At Brighton there was an immense sacrifice of the then fashionable and costly flower, the dahlia, no fewer than twenty thousand being used for decorative purposes. But a sadder because a vain sacrifice on this occasion, was of flowers of rhetoric. An address, the result of much classical research and throes of poetic labor, and marked by the most effusive ...
— Queen Victoria, her girlhood and womanhood • Grace Greenwood
... the luxuries of the court, and compares it with another of the same period which portrays a Puritan in his somber-hued, severe suit, stiff linen collar and cuffs, broad-brimmed, plain hat and not a single jewel or ornament used for mere decorative or esthetic value, realizes the vast difference in the types and character of the two men. He is furnished with an appropriate mental atmosphere in which to follow their history and in which to comprehend the inevitable clash that came between the Cavaliers and the Roundheads. He will ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... more than a mere stylist. The art of writers who are too consciously that is a sort of decorative representation of life, a formal composition, not a plastic composition. One element particularly characteristic of Jacobsen is his accuracy of observation and minuteness of detail welded with a deep and intimate understanding of the human ...
— Mogens and Other Stories - Mogens; The Plague At Bergamo; There Should Have Been Roses; Mrs. Fonss • Jens Peter Jacobsen
... to the illustration of the engine, in chapter two, the non-human thing is a personality, even if it is not beautiful. When it takes on the ritual of decorative design, this new vitality is made seductive, and when it is an object of nature, this seductive ritual becomes a new pantheism. The armies upon the mountains they are defending are rooted in the soil like trees. They resist invasion with the same elementary ...
— The Art Of The Moving Picture • Vachel Lindsay
... to the Holy Trinity, and the Jesuit brother who designed it, two or three centuries ago, indulged a devotional fancy in the triangular form of the structure and the decorative details. Everything is three-cornered; the whole chapel, to begin with, and then the ark of the high altar in the middle of it, and each of the three side-altars. The clumsy baroque taste of the architecture is a German version of the impulse that was making ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... up in a style not distinguishable from the original, as one may easily see by calling on our worthy next neighbor, Briggs, who holds the opposite corner to our 'Atlantic Monthly.' No porcelain, it is true, is yet made in America, these decorative arts being exercised on articles imported from Europe. Our tables must, therefore, perforce, be largely indebted to foreign lands for years to come. Exclusive of this item, however, I believe it would require very little self-denial to paper, carpet, and ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... estuary, which, as far as his description went, resembled in being archaically decorated the churinga nanja discovered by Messrs. Spencer and Gillen in Central Australia. I wrote an article on the subject of the archaic decorative designs, as found all over the world, for the Contemporary Review. {24} I had then seen only pen and ink sketches of the objects, sent to me by Mr. Donnelly, and a few casts, which I passed on to an eminent authority. One of the casts ...
— The Clyde Mystery - a Study in Forgeries and Folklore • Andrew Lang
... holding something back, and I said, sharply, 'Well?' and they both guiltily faltered out: 'The bird, you know, papa,' and I remembered that they belonged to the society of Bird Defenders, who in that day were pledged against the decorative use of dead birds or killing them for anything but food. 'Why, confound it,' I said, 'the bird is the very thing that makes it an Easter-egg chick!' but I saw that their honest little hearts were troubled, and I said again: 'Confound it! ...
— Between The Dark And The Daylight • William Dean Howells
... get as far as possible from his ears and, at the same time, remain perched on his head. The yellow shoes looked as though each had half a billiard ball in the toe, and the entire tops were perforated with many diverging lines in an attempt for the decorative. Those were the days of sore feet and corns! Hart Schaffner and Marx had not yet become rural America's tailor. Sartorial magicians in Chicago had not yet won over the young men of the great corn belt, with their snappy lines ...
— Dust • Mr. and Mrs. Haldeman-Julius
... accomplishments, but he is vain of the personal pronoun itself, utterly regardless of what it covers and includes. Reason, conscience, understanding, have no impersonality to him. When he uses the words, he uses them as synonymes of his determinations, or as decorative terms into which it pleases him to translate the rough vernacular of his wilfulness and caprices. The "Constitution," also, a word constantly profaned by his lips, is not so much, as he uses it, the Constitution of the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... Froment [the artist who paints such beautiful decorative works for Sevres]; ce matin j'ai dejeune chez Froment, ce soir j'y dine, et ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... in the more tender scenes she was exquisitely pathetic, and displayed great depth of feeling. "Com' e bello" was rendered with thrilling tenderness, and the allegro which followed it created a furore; it was one of the most brilliant morceaux of florid decorative vocalism heard for years, the upper C in the cadenza being quite electrical. At the end of the first and second acts, the heartrending accents of a mother's agony, wrung from the depths of her soul, and the scornful courage tempered with malignant passion, were contrasted with consummate power. ...
— Great Singers, Second Series - Malibran To Titiens • George T. Ferris
... painting and French decorative art was already in those days unfolding in Mrs. Pattison. Her drawing-room was French, sparely furnished with a few old girandoles and mirrors on its white paneled walls, and a Persian carpet with a black center, on which both the French furniture and the living inmates of the room looked their ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... that a memorial chapel be erected, beneath which his remains and those of other benefactors of the university might rest, and that it should be made beautiful. This was done. The stone vaulting, the tracery, and other decorative work, planned by our professor of architecture, and carried out as a labor of love by Richardson, were all that I could desire. The trustees, entering heartily into the plan, authorized me to make an arrangement with Story, the American sculptor at Rome, to execute ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... which, for refinement of colouring and beauty of ornament, cannot easily be surpassed. The equipments of the last named, especially, are of a very high order. He began as a landscapist on wood; he now chiefly devotes himself to the figure; and he seems to have the decorative art at his fingers' ends as a natural gift. Such work as "King Luckieboy's Party" was a revelation in the way of toy books, while the "Baby's Opera" and "Baby's Bouquet" are petits chefs d'oeuvre, of which the sagacious collector will do well to secure ...
— The Library • Andrew Lang
... but waited until she had looked about the larger room facing the south and west, where the case of minerals, the great deer, and other western treasures and trophies were displayed, and had sauntered about the cosy and tasteful parlours, looking at the pictures and bits of decorative work; and when she had re-entered the big sunny south room again, and after a little more loitering among the exhibits went to one of the windows and stood looking down into the street, I, who had been standing near an opposite window, was about to cross the room and accost her, when a ...
— Against Odds - A Detective Story • Lawrence L. Lynch
... the factories, on the other hand, did so to earn money to help pay their expenses at home until they married, or in order to buy gay and expensive clothes, unconsciously, perhaps, for advertising as well as decorative purposes. ...
— Women As Sex Vendors - or, Why Women Are Conservative (Being a View of the Economic - Status of Woman) • R. B. Tobias
... pagan goddess of spring. Here his fancy may have free play. A beautiful maiden with decorative hair and the proper number of toes will fill the bill. Miss Clarice St. Vavasour, the well-known model, will pose for it in the "Lethergogallagher," or whatever it was that Trilby ...
— Strictly Business • O. Henry
... for a big bird happens to be synchronous with the shriek of some bird of prey. I combine the two and am convinced that I have seen that bird of prey. This may increase, so much so that we may have series of sense-illusions. I cite the example of the decorative theatrical artist, who can make the most beautiful images with a few, but very characteristic blots. He does it by emphazising what seems to us characteristic, e. g., of a rose arbor, in such a way that at the distance ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... shall hope to be able to publish a detailed report on several of the novel features of my Bornean collections, especially as regards decorative art, the protective wooden carvings called kapatongs, the ...
— Through Central Borneo: - An Account of Two Years' Travel in the Land of Head-Hunters - Between the Years 1913 and 1917 • Carl Lumholtz
... ardour of her femininity she entered into the purchasing of the yellow opera cloak. They paid for that decorative garment the sum of two thousand five hundred francs. It seemed it was embroidered, and the lining ...
— Lifted Masks - Stories • Susan Glaspell
... for all human institutions have their ridiculous sides, which astonish and amuse us when pointed out, but from viewing which we suddenly become aware of relative values before misunderstood. But just as poetry may degenerate into a musical collection of words and painting into a decorative association of colors, so humor may degenerate into the merely comic or amusing. The laugh which true humor arouses is not far removed from tears. Humor indeed is not always associated with kindliness, for we have the sardonic humor of Carlyle and the savage humor ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... he burst out of the office and began pacing the big chamber. Finally, even that was too confining. He left the building and started stalking through the campus. He walked past a dozen buildings, turned and strode as far as the decorative fence that marked the end of the main campus, ignoring ...
— The Dueling Machine • Benjamin William Bova
... architecture, the altar, the figure of Mercury, the wreath-bound heads, the sacrificial act itself, were all such as he could imagine from ancient Greece. Indeed, the whole picture is like a copy of an antique bas-relief; and in the original cartoon there is, below the picture, a decorative border studied from antique sculpture, and below that still an ornamental edge which was very ...
— Raphael - A Collection Of Fifteen Pictures And A Portrait Of The - Painter With Introduction And Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll
... moment of her life, every advantage—it made her beautifully soft, very nearly generous; so she didn't distinguish the little protuberant eyes of smaller social insects, often endowed with such a range, from the other decorative spots on their bodies and wings. Maggie had liked, in London, and in the world at large, so many more people than she had thought it right to fear, right even to so much as judge, that it positively quickened her ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James
... Brooke died at the old mansion opposite the Roman town of Reculver in Kent. The house is still known as Brooke-farm; and the original gateway of decorative brickwork still exists. He was buried in Reculver Church, now destroyed, where a mural monument was erected to his memory, having a rhyming inscription, which ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... exaggeration of that color by dancing and chanting only makes the story clearer. The writer would like to see some one try Dryden's Alexander's Feast, or Swinburne's Atalanta in Calydon. Certainly in those poems the decorative rhythm and the ...
— Chinese Nightingale • Vachel Lindsay
... is the breath of life in the book, and life always evades us, no matter how keen and exhaustive our search may be. Most of us are so entirely out of touch with the spirit of art in this busy new world that we are not quite convinced of its reality. We know that it is decorative, and that a certain pleasure flows from it; but we are sceptical of its significance in the life of the race, of its deep necessity in the development of that life, and of its supreme educational value. And our scepticism, it must ...
— Books and Culture • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... itself in such a way that it made a wide avenue from the common at one end to the Meeting-house on the gorse- grown upland at the other. With a demure resistance to the will of its makers the village had made itself decorative. The people were unconscious of any attractiveness in themselves or in their village. There were, however, a few who felt the beauty stirring around them. These few, for their knowledge and for ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... room, lined with the huge, splendidly decorative posters, signed Cheret and Mucha, which were then just being collected by those who admired that type of flamboyant art. In this apartment Peggy, as Vanderlyn was well aware, never put her feet, for it was there that her husband received his trainer ...
— The Uttermost Farthing • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... our friend much better. He held that a gentleman should be painted but once in his life—that it was eager and fatuous to be hung up all over the place. That was good for women, who made a pretty wall-pattern; but the male face didn't lend itself to decorative repetition. The proper time for the likeness was at the last, when the whole man was there—you got the totality of his experience. Lyon could not reply that that period was not a real compendium—you had to allow so for leakage; for there had been no crack in Sir David's crystallisation. He spoke ...
— A London Life; The Patagonia; The Liar; Mrs. Temperly • Henry James
... seventeenth-century swords. They were fastidious about them. They had a whole armoury of these weapons brought out and rolled clattering about the counter, until they found two of precisely the same length. Presumably they desired the exact symmetry for some decorative trophy. Even then they felt the points, poised the swords for balance and bent them in a circle to see that they sprang straight again; which, for decorative purposes, ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... the behavior of the children with puppies and English lessons and items of information which all of them seemed to know when one knew. The children were not telepathic. They could not read each other's minds. But some one or all of the decorative squares and circles on their belts enabled them to share each other's sense-impressions. They were both broadcasters and receivers of sensory impressions. And therefore it was because Soames had Mal's ...
— Long Ago, Far Away • William Fitzgerald Jenkins AKA Murray Leinster
... embracing the period from 3000 B.C. to 1900 A.D.—nearly 7,000 years. Of all the millions of chairs made during the centuries, each one can be classified under one or more of the 40 general styles shown in the chart. This chart was compiled by the editor of Decorative Furniture. The Colonial does not appear on the chart because it classifies under the Jacobean and other styles. A condensed key to the ...
— Mission Furniture - How to Make It, Part I • H. H. Windsor
... very similar character, but somewhat coarser in texture, and heavier. See Plate III., b to g, and Plate IV., f Both these groups include variations in the decorative designs, as may be seen in the ...
— Unknown Mexico, Volume 1 (of 2) • Carl Lumholtz
... published volumes of it were printed. The library forms part of the Museum, which occupies a ground-floor wing of the castle. The first room is an armoury, in which all kinds of arms are arranged, in a decorative way, covering the ceiling and the walls with strange patterns. The second room contains pottery, collected by Casanova's Waldstein on his Eastern travels. The third room is full of curious mechanical ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... purely decorative luxuries. Above the wine casks at the back of the "shop" the whitewashed timbers screamed aloud with cheap high colored chromos that reduced Tona's neck-wear to silence, quite. The fishermen drinking outside under the shelter would look up over the counter and feast their eyes on "The Lion Hunt," ...
— Mayflower (Flor de mayo) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... country where it never rains," said the host, "where it is eternal spring, walls to a house are conventions on which to stack books and hang pictures. Mary has chosen nature for her decorative effect—cheaper, even, than mine. In the distance is Galeria; in the foreground, what was desert ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... as he spoke, but there was no hint of irony in either words or smile. It was a smile rather of tolerance, and almost of regret—the smile of a man who was well accustomed to seeing the flowers and decorative things of life wither over-quickly, and yet was still alert and not indifferent to the change. His work for the moment was done. He leaned back thoughtfully in his chair. He no longer looked at Linforth. His one quick glance had ...
— The Broken Road • A. E. W. Mason
... on time and excellent; Nellie, decorative and chatty, was promptly in her place. Dinner over, they went to the sitting-room for their coffee. The apartment was very high up, the windows looking over the tree-tops of the Drive, across the Hudson tot he Jersey shore. It was March, and the shore lights wavered ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... these breast plumes parts slightly into two, as you see in the peacock's, and many other such decorative ones. The transition from the entirely leaf-like shape of the active plume, with its oblique point, to the more or less symmetrical dualism of the decorative plume, corresponds with the change from the pointed green leaf to the dual, or heart-shaped, ...
— Love's Meinie - Three Lectures on Greek and English Birds • John Ruskin
... disfavour upon changes. Their legal tender is silver, cut into little squares of different weights; gold is the baser coin, and is about of the same value as our silver. It is, however, much prized for its beauty, and largely used for ornaments and decorative purposes. Most of the trade, however, is carried on by means of sale and barter, payment being made in kind. Agriculture is the great business of the country, and is really well understood and carried out, most of the available ...
— Allan Quatermain • by H. Rider Haggard
... oxidized silver lamps of Roman design, and there are frequent illuminated texts from the Bible and from Mrs. Eddy's "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" impanelled. A sunburst in the centre of the ceiling takes the place of chandeliers. There is a disc of cut glass in decorative designs, covering one hundred and forty-four electric lights in the form of a star, which is twenty-one inches from point to point, the centre being of pure white light, and each ray under prisms which reflect the rainbow tints. The galleries are richly panelled ...
— Pulpit and Press • Mary Baker Eddy
... lie close to human emotion; are indeed interpenetrated with emotion; whereas 'Autumn' makes but an objective appeal, chiefly to the visual sense. It is, as I have said, a decorative picture; and even so it hardly beats the pictures in stanza 4 of ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... this improvement may indeed take effect: so that we may no more humour momentary fashions by ugly results of chance instead of design; and may produce both good tissues, of harmonious colours, and good forms and substance of pottery and glass. But we shall never excel in decorative design. Such design is usually produced by people of great natural powers of mind, who have no variety of subjects to employ themselves on, no oppressive anxieties, and are in circumstances either of natural scenery or of daily ...
— Lectures on Art - Delivered before the University of Oxford in Hilary term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... conclusively exposed ... none of them were ever finished. Then had come a phase of preaching. His mother read the Christian Herald every week, and John would get a table cloth, and wrap it round himself to represent a surplice ... for the Church of Ireland was more decorative than the Presbyterian Church ... and deliver the sermons of Dr. Talmage and Mr. Spurgeon in a loud sing-song voice that greatly delighted Mrs. MacDermott. That, too, had passed, very swiftly indeed, because of the alarming discovery that he was an atheist! He would never ...
— The Foolish Lovers • St. John G. Ervine
... had sprung up round Lake Wendouree had well-stocked spreading grounds; but Ocock's outdid the rest. The groom opening a pair of decorative iron gates which were the showpiece of the neighbourhood, Mahony turned in and drove past exotic firs, Moreton Bay fig-trees and araucarias; past cherished English hollies growing side by side with giant cacti. In one corner ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... of "Cinderella," "Beauty and the Beast," "Red Riding Hood," etc., etc. Popular tales that are ever in demand, sumptuously illustrated with exquisitely decorative and highly original designs. Printed on rough art paper. 12 full-page colour plates. 144 ...
— My Book of Favorite Fairy Tales • Edric Vredenburg
... reinvigorated by the spirit of newer times. Being in the beginning of his career, as is generally believed, only an illuminator, he continued, with subtle delicacy and accurate, almost timid design, to illuminate in larger proportions on his panels, those figures which are often only parts of a decorative whole. But in his later works while still preserving the simplicity of handling, and the innate character of his style, he displays a new tendency, and learns to give life to his figures, not only by the expression of purity and sweet ecstasy, but ...
— Fra Angelico • J. B. Supino
... that that would have been a pity. Besides, with that prevision given to an author, I am strongly of opinion that something will happen before long. And if the worst comes to the worst, there is always that story of my First Love wherewith to fill the time. Meanwhile I am approaching a decorative old Surrey town, little more than a cluster of ripe old inns, to one of which I have much pleasure in inviting the reader ...
— The Quest of the Golden Girl • Richard le Gallienne
... judges of men and things. And the George Sand preserves the private philosophy which a passionate woman slowly distilled as she made her stormy pilgrimage through life. Each of these volumes, which contain illustrations in line and colour, is a slender casket of jewels. In decorative wrapper, 6d. net. Bound in Velvet Persian Yapp, 1/- net; also in Japon ...
— Law and Laughter • George Alexander Morton
... ornate but quite successful building dating from the sixteenth century: first the residence of the Chancellors, recently a prison, and now the Record Office of Friesland. Not until the Middelburg stadhuis shall we see anything more cheerfully gay and decorative. The little Weigh House is in its own way very charming. But for gravity one must go to the Oldehof, a sombre tower on the ramparts of the city. Once the sea ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas
... "The latter are more decorative. But, as you are going on a two days' journey to drive some cattle, I'll tell you how to ...
— Ranching for Sylvia • Harold Bindloss
... were alike in social origin and academic antecedents. They started from the same point of view as to the great organs of national life, the monarchy, the territorial peerage and the commons, the church, the universities. They showed the same clear knowledge that it was not by its decorative parts, or what Burke styled 'solemn plausibilities,' that the community derived its strength; but that it rested for its real foundations on its manufactures, its commerce, and its credit. Even in the lesser things, in reading Sir Robert ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... science to superior recognition in all cases where there is the slightest apparent conflict between the two. Certainly no man ever did more to popularize the genuine truths of science in this country than Professor Agassiz, or worked more successfully to that end. He was willing to place the decorative wreath on the starry forehead of science, but refused to pluck from the soul "the starry eyes of faith and hope," that man might be dwarfed down to the "nearest of ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright
... or four weeks is one of the most decorative; no matter whether in partial shade or full sunshine, it not only flowers well, but adorns its situation most richly; the flowers, in a cut state, are amongst the most useful and effective of hardy kinds—indeed, they vie ...
— Hardy Perennials and Old Fashioned Flowers - Describing the Most Desirable Plants, for Borders, - Rockeries, and Shrubberies. • John Wood
... Morris, whatever they were, were not the limitations of common decoration. It is true that all his work, even his literary work, was in some sense decorative, had in some degree the qualities of a splendid wall-paper. His characters, his stories, his religious and political views, had, in the most emphatic sense, length and breadth without thickness. He seemed really to believe that men could enjoy a perfectly ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton
... the summits of the mountains, and to a point halfway up these slopes—the last timber-line—clumps of spruce and balsam trees were scattered over the green as if set there by the hands of men. Some of these timber-patches were no larger than the decorative clumps in a city park, and others covered acres and tens of acres; and at the foot of the slopes on either side, like decorative fringes, were thin and unbroken lines of forest. Between these two lines of ...
— The Grizzly King • James Oliver Curwood
... systematic rules determine which of these lines should be thick and which thin; but closer investigation will discover that the alternate widths of line were evolved quite methodically, and that they exactly fulfil the functions of making the letters both more legible and more decorative. Arbitrary rearrangements of these thick and thin lines, differing from the arrangement of them in the classic examples, have, [2] indeed, been often attempted; but such rearrangements have never resulted ...
— Letters and Lettering - A Treatise With 200 Examples • Frank Chouteau Brown
... proper by a liveried servant, and from the handsome oak-panelled vestibule we passed into a lofty apartment hung with pictures and filled with miscellaneous objects of art. All, without exception, were execrable—miserable daubs of painting, criminal essays in plastic and decorative work, and a collection of statuary that could be adequately matched only by the horrors in Central Park. "Our art gallery, gentlemen," ...
— The Gates of Chance • Van Tassel Sutphen
... length, "it is rather idle to cry over the sins of your neighbors. According to your creed each of us has enough of his own derelictions to answer for, without going abroad for things to repent. As for religion, I suppose girls who do Kensington work will use it for decorative purposes for some time to come, but thinking people long ago outgrew such folly. In regard to my friends, it is all a question of standards, as I've said no end of times. From my point of view they are very sensible people, and ...
— The Pagans • Arlo Bates
... skins off one ox. Excuse me, I speak disconnectedly, but that doesn't matter. You don't look upon the simple people as human beings. And even the princes, counts, and bishops who used to come and see you, you looked upon simply as decorative figures, not as living beings. But the worst of all, the thing that most revolts me, is having a fortune of over a million and doing nothing for ...
— The Duel and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... this second conquering race, tall and handsome, we have abundant traces, gathered from many lands where they dwelt; bodies preserved by art or nature, in caverns or sepulchres of stone; ornaments, pottery, works decorative and useful, and covering several thousand years in succession. But better than this, we have present, through nearly every land where we know of them in the past, a living remnant of this ancient race, ...
— Ireland, Historic and Picturesque • Charles Johnston
... arrangements the theatre is in keeping with its external magnificence. Entering through a sumptuous vestibule, the visitor passes into the magnificent auditorium, which is, in itself, a rare specimen of decorative art. The seats are admirably arranged, each one commanding a view of the stage. They are luxuriously upholstered, and harmonize with the rich carpets which cover the floor. Three elegant light galleries rise above the parquet. The walls and ceiling are exquisitely ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... be compared to the petal of a flower. To Janssen, in 1871, the eclipsing moon seemed like the dark heart of a gigantic dahlia, painted in light on the sky; and the similitude to the ornament on a compass-card, used by Airy in 1851, well conveys the decorative effect of the beamy, radiated kind of aureola, never, it would appear, absent when solar activity is at a tolerably high pitch. In his splendid volume on eclipses,[537] with which the systematic study of coronal structure ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... probably at the order of Nero, for one of the baths of the imperial villa at Antium, in whose ruins it was found in the fifteenth century. From the time of the Romans, the white marble of the Montes Lunenses has been used for decorative purposes in many of the churches and public buildings of Italy. It formed the material out of which Michael Angelo, Canova, and Thorwaldsen chiselled their immortal works. Its quality and composition, ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... some twenty feet deep, and covered with a stone vaulted roof supported on piers outside. Begun toward 1215 under Philip Augustus, the architectural part was finished toward 1225 under Louis VIII; and after his death in 1226, the decorative work and statuary were carried on under the regency of his widow, Blanche of Castile, and through the reign of her son, Saint Louis (1235-70), until about 1275, when the work was completed by Philip the Hardy. A gift ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... President. A beautiful work of wood carving was shown on an easel, which had a frame of hard wood, the whole, easel and frame, with elaborately wrought ornamentation, cut out of one tree. It was at once strong and graceful, simple and decorative. The picture was a gold medallion, raised on a plate of silver, an excellent likeness of his grace. It was evident that the refinements of art were known to "these barbarians of the Philippines," ...
— The Story of the Philippines and Our New Possessions, • Murat Halstead
... and their warm, prosperity-laden atmosphere. The recognition acted powerfully upon her. It was the creation in her mind of a standard of physical comfort, as the visit to Madame Gala had created a standard of decorative colour. She was frowning at the new perception as she left the house, and was half-absorbed in her ...
— Coquette • Frank Swinnerton
... languid wont for many a year. Shadows of the gray un-painted head-boards lay on the withered grass, brown and crisp, with never a cicada left to break the deathlike silence. A tuft of red leaves, vagrant in the wind, had been caught on one of the primitive monuments, and swayed there with a decorative effect. The enclosure seemed, to unaccustomed eyes, of small compass, and few the denizens who had found shelter here and a resting-place, but it numbered all the dead of the country-side for many ...
— The Phantoms Of The Foot-Bridge - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... and capitalization Decorative features of final letters, especially -ll printed with connecting line Font changes such as boldface instead of small capitals Prices are printed inline ...
— Animaduersions uppon the annotacions and corrections of some imperfections of impressiones of Chaucer's workes - 1865 edition • Francis Thynne
... her arms in a most beautiful attitude, above the door of the opera of that building. In this picture some angels which are holding up a standard in the air, are flying and looking down on saints below them, who are surrounding Our Lady, forming a very beautiful and decorative composition. That done, Simone was invited to Florence by the general of St Augustine and did the chapter-house in S. Spirito, showing remarkable invention and judgment in the figures and horses, ...
— The Lives of the Painters, Sculptors & Architects, Volume 1 (of 8) • Giorgio Vasari
... imbricated-with-red-flag coalition rose whose deep globular head with ornate decorative calyx retains its perfect exhibition-cross-question- hostile-amendment symmetry of form without blueing or burning in the hottest Westminster sun. Its smiling peach and cerise endearments terminating in black scarlet shell-shaped waxy Berlin ultimata ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, August 4th, 1920 • Various
... has a happy household. A master decorative workman, only lacking a touch of genius to be a sculptor, his pride is in his artistic handiwork. His happiness in his good wife Josephine. His heart centres in his ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... the hand, a stud is left in the hard wood shaft, about two-thirds of the way from the head, the shaft itself being protected by a steel sheathing half way down; the remainder being ornamented with decorative brass plates and strips, and the end shod in a ferrule of silver. The top of the ax is not straight, but curved, both edge and point taking, as it were, their origin in this curve; the edge is formed by a double chamfer, the ax-blade being of uniform thickness. All together, this weapon is perhaps ...
— The Head Hunters of Northern Luzon From Ifugao to Kalinga • Cornelis De Witt Willcox
... architecture, and Saracenic tracery, Etruscan gold-work stands absolutely alone,—the result of an artistic instinct deeper than any rules or any instruction, and therefore not to be improved or repeated. It is characterized by the most subtile and lovely use of decorative masses and lines,—not for representation or imitation, which are not motives to enter into pure ornament, but for the highest effect of beautiful form and rich color, without giving the eye or mind any associative or intellectual suggestion. The vice of all modern ornamentation is, that it insists ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various
... black cloth used for covering the floor of, and the roof over, amounted to more than 10,000 yards. I understand that, after the interment, it becomes the perquisite of the clergy of the chapel, as do, also, many of the decorative ornaments placed on, and suspended over, the coffin. You will, perhaps, recollect what some people would willingly have you forget—I mean the squabbling which occurred respecting the velvet cushion upon which the coronet of the late Princess Charlotte rested ...
— Gossip in the First Decade of Victoria's Reign • John Ashton
... some extent shelter the rest of the grounds; the peaches where they will not be coddled; the pears, which may be had upon quince stock, where they will not shade the vegetable garden; the cherries, which are the most ornamental, where they may lend a decorative effect. ...
— Home Vegetable Gardening • F. F. Rockwell
... with the mind. Among mental, as among bodily acquisitions, the ornamental comes before the useful. Alike in the Greek schools as in our own, this is the case. Men dress their children's minds as they do their bodies in the prevailing fashion; and in the treatment of both mind and body, the decorative element has continued to predominate in an even greater degree among women than among men. The births, deaths, and marriages of kings, and other like historic trivialities are committed to memory, not because of any direct benefit that can possibly ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... place. "Don't! It makes me want to get out there again. What colour that was! Opal and umber and amber and claret and brick-red and sulphur—cockatoo-crest-sulphur—against brown, with a nigger-black rock sticking up in the middle of it all, and a decorative frieze of camels festooning in front of a pure pale turquoise sky." He began to walk up and down. "And yet, you know, if you try to give these people the thing as God gave it, keyed down to their comprehension and according to the powers He ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... agriculture—raising corn, rice, camotes, and several vegetables—in fields and little gardens at the edge of the forests. Their garments are of home-grown hemp; and their artistic interests centre largely around the decorative designs produced in ...
— Philippine Folk-Tales • Clara Kern Bayliss, Berton L. Maxfield, W. H. Millington,
... commonplace, it would seem to him like no other in the world; but here there was really something distinctive. The letters were almost microscopically small, and crowded into the centre of the page with the effect of a decorative panel. He carried the epistle about with him all day, and observed the weather with solicitous attention, but no change occurred. The turquoise sky remained without a cloud. Fires from burning leaves sent up sluggish pillars of smoke, that spread out ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... the huge columns were decorative or symbolical figures wearing the pschent, armed with the tau, following each other in procession, and whose eyes, showing full upon a side face, seemed to look inquisitively into the hall. Lines of perpendicular ...
— The Works of Theophile Gautier, Volume 5 - The Romance of a Mummy and Egypt • Theophile Gautier
... perfectly sweet for anything! I wonder why they don't trim hats with butterflies? Do you know all their names, you awfully clever man? Do they know their names, too, Mr. Flint? Butterflies must be so very interesting! And so decorative, particularly on china and house linen! How you have the heart to kill them, I can't imagine. Just think of taking the poor mother-butterflies away from the dear little baby-ones!' ...—and me having to stand ...
— Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man • Marie Conway Oemler
... some time later that the actual story got written. And in the meantime the plot of "The Bowmen" occurred to me. Now it has been murmured and hinted and suggested and whispered in all sorts of quarters that before I wrote the tale I had heard something. The most decorative of these legends is also the most precise: "I know for a fact that the whole thing was given him in typescript by a lady-in-waiting." This was not the case; and all vaguer reports to the effect that I had heard some rumours or hints of rumours are ...
— The Angels of Mons • Arthur Machen
... huge stiff envelope, but far more beautiful to see, for it was painted all over with many bright colors. These firmly tied bags of dried meat were laid upon the rocks in the walls of the dwelling. In this way they were both useful and decorative. ...
— Old Indian Legends • Zitkala-Sa
... Decorative brick-work, as we find it used in English architecture, is not simply the outgrowth of the Dutch school, introduced at the accession of William of Orange. For centuries it had been employed with success, particularly ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various
... contribute to the maintenance of the present Republic. In the first place, of the conflicting factions none is strong enough to crush the rest. In the second place, the head of the State being purely decorative, and possessing no power, it is impossible to attribute to him the evils from which the country may suffer, and to feel sure that matters would be different were he overthrown. Finally, as the supreme power is distributed among thousands of ...
— The Psychology of Revolution • Gustave le Bon
... found no such decorative uses for herself, and that they took it for granted that, with a suitor to engage her attention, she would be quite satisfied to remain outside, even if above, the gayer circle. She could not deny that her acceptance of Franklin's devotion before Helen's arrival, their air of happy withdrawal—a ...
— Franklin Kane • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... as soon as it was day, he hastened to come into the city and to make every preparation for the funeral. He likewise deputed messengers to proceed ahead to the Temple of the Iron Fence to give, that very night, additional decorative touches to the place where the coffin was to be deposited, and to get ready tea and all the other necessaries, for the use of the persons who would be present at ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... only looked at Nature with sympathy, but was a master in description of scenery. His lengthy descriptions of spring are mostly only decorative work, but here and there we find a really poetic ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... it is not with work of this kind that Olympus is stormed; art must be brought closer into relation with life, these airy and delightful freaks of fancy must be subdued to a serious scheme if they are to serve as credentials for a seat among the immortals. The decorative painter, whose pencil runs so freely in limning these half- human processions of outlined fauns and wood-nymphs, is asked at last to paint an ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • Walter Raleigh
... and other trees now covering the Atholl estates, would sell for 10,000,000 pounds if brought to the hammer. But he was not only the greatest arboriculturist in the world, but the founder of tree-farming as a productive industry as well as a decorative art. Already it has transformed the Highlands of Scotland and trebled their value, as well as clothed them with a new and beautiful scenery. What we call the Scotch larch was not originally a native of that country. Close ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... salon. Other decorations further proved her as belonging to both worlds. The chintzes gay with garlands of roses, with which walls, beds, and chairs were covered, revealed the mundane element, the woman of decorative tastes, possessed of a hidden passion for effective backgrounds. Two or three wooden crucifixes, a prie-dieu, and a couple of saints in plaster, went far to prove that this excellent bourgeoise had thriftily made her peace with Heaven. It ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... a painting by F. W. Read, and six black and white illustrations by John Goss, decorative jacket, net $1.25; ...
— The House in the Water - A Book of Animal Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts
... up the modern floor, remains of the original tesselated pavement were discovered. When the whitewash and plaster were removed from the ceiling it was found in a dangerous condition. There were also found there remains of ancient decorative paintings and rich ornaments worked in gold and silver; but they were too fragmentary to give an idea of the general pattern. Under these circumstances it was resolved to redecorate the ceiling in a style corresponding with the ancient decorative paintings observable ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... vary in height from about one foot four inches to four and a half feet, and are of highly specialized shape, the only cognate type being bells used in China during the Chou dynasty (1122-225 B.C.) for the purpose of giving military signals. A Chinese origin is still more clearly indicated by the decorative designs, which show a combination of the circle, the triangle, and the spiral, obviously identical with the decorative motive* on Chinese drums of the Han dynasty (202 B.C.-A.D. 220). The circle and the triangle occur also in the ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... antiquarian relics, chiefly in the decorative branch of art, preserved in the Northern Counties, pourtrayed by a very competent hand. Many of the objects possess considerable interest; such as the chair of the Venerable Bede. Cromwell's sword and watch, and the grace cup of Thomas-a-Becket. ...
— Notes And Queries,(Series 1, Vol. 2, Issue 1), - Saturday, November 3, 1849. • Various
... riding breeches, or the trim sport clothes, or the walking suit. The dress of men, though ugly, is useful, convenient and modest, and there is no doubt that a generation of free women, determined to become human in appearance, could evolve a modest and yet decorative costume. All of the present-day extravagance in female attire, with its ever-changing fashion, is a medley of commercial intrigues, female competition and sex excitement. Though the modesty restrictions are absurd, the motive that obscurely prompts it is not, and the transgressors either seek notice ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... wondrous thing it is to be women, to be delicate, pretty things, infinitely sensitive and infinitely varied, living works of art, matter for kisses, the realised stuff of dreams! When you look at them like that, solely in the decorative sense, you are ready to condemn those who work, who think and who concentrate upon an aim of some sort, for these superfine creatures carry the reason for their existence within themselves, so great is the perfection ...
— The Choice of Life • Georgette Leblanc
... of decorative design. Building material of typography paper, types, ink, decorations and illustrations. Handling of shapes. Design of complete book, treating each part. Design of commercial forms and single units. Illustrations; ...
— Division of Words • Frederick W. Hamilton
... flooring all the way round; a few stained chairs and a pembroke table. A pink shell was displayed on each of the little sideboards, which, with the addition of a tea-tray and caddy, a few more shells on the mantelpiece, and three peacock's feathers tastefully arranged above them, completed the decorative furniture ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... had cut off its gas and put away its eagle—when the two paviours, whom I take to form the entire paving population of the town, were ramming down the stones which had been pulled up for the erection of decorative poles—when the jailer had slammed his gate, and sulkily locked himself in with his charges. But then, as I paced the ring which marked the track of the departed hobby-horses on the market-place, pondering in my mind how long some ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... as are the structures and collections of the satin bower-bird, the species of the allied genus Chlamydera display still greater architectural abilities, and more extensive, collective, and decorative powers. ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... said the Harvester. "I only see and recognize studies; I can't materialize them, and until they are drawn, no one can profit by them. In this partnership we revolutionize decorative art. There are actually birds besides fat robins and nondescript swallows. The crane and heron do not monopolize the water. Wild rose and golden-rod are not the only flowers. The other day I was gathering lobelia. The ...
— The Harvester • Gene Stratton Porter |
